Crown Jewels (Off-Limits Romance #1)(28)

It doesn’t matter how many times I hit the fucking thing. I can’t get her wide eyes out of my mind. In the picture where her friend is pulling her down the sidewalk. In the photo where she’s talking to the woman with the lipstick and the weird earrings. In the passenger’s seat of her car, from the window of a car I assume had pulled in front of hers.

She looked haunted. Afraid.

Because of me.

If I hadn’t kicked that fucker’s ass, he wouldn’t have sued her for breach of contract, wrongfully assuming she’d told me what happened. If he hadn’t sued her… I’m not sure. I don’t know who leaked those fucking pictures of her.

Why would anyone do something like that?

I rub my eyes, my shoulders heaving with my heavy breaths. I can’t think of the photos right now. Just can’t.

I go at the bag a while longer before sitting on a boulder near the old castle wall and dialing Heath. He’s in Germany right now, practicing polo with our country’s team. A team I was on until a few months back, when I let everyone assume a shoulder injury sidelined me.

On the third ring, my cousin answers.

“Aye-aye, cap’n!”

I rub my pounding forehead as the background roars around him. “Are you in a pub?”

“What do you think?” He chuckles.

“Later, Heath.”

I make a call to TMZ. A call I should have made hours ago. It’s just my fury kept me from seeing straight.

Twenty-six minutes later, I’m off the phone—and two hundred thousand pounds lighter in the coffers. I navigate to that cesspool on my iPhone. Click the link.

The story is still there, but the images are gone.

I go back to the punching bag. I should feel better, but I don’t.





*





Lucy





I must be a superficial idiot. Because the thing I can’t stop thinking of, more than anything else, as I lie in bed after eating ice cream with Amelia, is…everyone knows now—how normal I am.

When you put your whole life on display, like I did for a while, you start to feel as if you need a shield—from prying eyes, from judgments. From those jerks who said your boobs looked weird and pointy in that bathing suit in season two.

And so the easiest thing for you to tell yourself, when tabloids are posting pictures of you in your designer gown, when you’re on the cover of Vogue and Cosmo with your air-brushed face, is that you’re shielded…by your own mystique.

I guess even when you quit the show and move to Colorado, you still lean on that a little. Or I did. If someone recognized me, well, I’m Lucy Rhodes. And who are you?

It’s not how I really feel. It’s a defensive stance, one designed to ward off that awful feeling of nakedness, when it seems like the whole damn universe is peering in on you in your little box, and you can’t get away.

And I can’t get away now.

From the judgments. From the pity. I close my eyes and try to go to sleep, but all I can think about is that woman with the awful pink lipstick. The pity on her face. I pity her lipstick shade. But she doesn’t know that. That lady sees me as a “battered woman” now.

Everyone will think I’m damaged. That I’m weak. Some people will even think that this is my fault: those same pricks who can’t come to terms with the reality that sometimes bad shit happens to not-bad people. So they create a narrative that makes it feel more fair. “He probably hit her because she’s such a snobby bitch.”

How many producers’ meetings did I sit in on, and listen to them talk about the audience?

“It’s 5:1. The audience wants five parts designer makeup bags and chemical peels and the personal assistant re-stocking the toilet paper shelf in the master bath, and then that one shot where Lucy and Amelia drive to Taco Bell at 1 a.m.”

Nobody wants to watch normal on TV.

We build all that mystique for them. Because they want it. That’s the entertainment business: entertaining.

And now I’ve stepped back into it again. Those pictures of me…I think maybe they’re the Taco Bell snippet.

“Look at Lucy Rhodes. She’s just like us.”

But I don’t want to be like them. Or different from them, for that matter. I don’t want anything to do with them! That’s why I left the show. Maybe even more so than the aftermath of what happened to me, I left the show because being a living symbol exhausted me. It’s hellish to know everyone you walk by on the sidewalk knows your name and has opinions of you. It’s like living in a cage.

I’ve talked to real stars like Rihanna in that bathroom at the Grammy’s that one time, and I can tell that everybody feels the same way. But see, for them—for actors and musicians—I think it’s worth it. Because they’re performing. They feel compelled to share their work, their art.

For me, it wasn’t like that. I am not an artist. Nothing moved me to put myself out there. I did it for a while because my family did, and then I realized that I really didn’t like it.

I turn on my side in bed and rack my brain again for who leaked the damn pictures. Someone from the police department?

I’ve spoken to my lawyers’ office several times. It wasn’t them. We didn’t need the pictures leaked to stand up to Bryce in a lawsuit. He has no hard evidence that I violated the NDA, and whether he likes it or not, there were other people there that night. People knew what happened. Our whole circle knows what happened.