Page 20 of Claim to Fame

“It’s not, though, Hannah. Either you were someone else’s girlfriend when you asked me to meet you in Boston last weekend or you weren’t.”

“Technically—”

“Don’t do that shit. There is no gray area here. Did you use me to cheat on him, or didn’t you?”

“No.” She took a step forward, willing her voice not to shake. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Ethan, you and I—”

“But that’s why you’re here. Not to seeme—” He broke off, pressing his lips together. “You’re here because there’s some scandal with yourboyfriendand you need to hide from the press.” She swallowed. Nodded. “Jesus, I almost feel bad for the fucker. He’s getting dragged through the mud and you did the same thing.”

“Ididn’t. Jackson and I—”

Ethan growled, a low rumbling sound of disapproval that did very inconvenient things to the parts of her struggling to remember it wasn’t a sexy growl.

“We were never really together,” she blurted. Ethan’s brow furrowed deeper, his eyes narrowing to slits. “It was all a show for the media.”

“Explain,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Jackson was my co-star in a Broadway show, a musical adaptation of the Bridget Jones movies.” A moment of surprise flickered across his face before he locked it back down, shuttering any emotion. “The show was filmed for a theatrical release. It’s going to be the start of his big comeback moment, but he needed to clean up his image. He didn’t want people to think of him as the ‘heartbreaker’ of Midnight Storm anymore. And the fans of the show were already speculating about us… So, we made an agreement that until the film released, we’d pretend to be a couple.”

“Why would you do that?”

She hesitated. “Because he’s a friend and he needed me.”

Ethan seemed to consider this as he studied her face. “But you still called me last weekend. Why?”

She didn’t have a good answer to his question. She’d been asking herself the same thing ever since she’d left him. It had been a stupid, risky move, but the idea of being in Boston—intheircity—and not seeing Ethan had been untenable. “I wanted to see you.”

“Weren’t you afraid someone would see us together?”

“Hardly anyone ever recognizes me outside of the theatre district. At least, they didn’t before yesterday.”

“And yourboyfrienddidn’t care you were fucking another man?”

She closed her eyes against the harshness of his tone, the bitterness dripping from each consonant and the cold look in his eyes. She’d never seen him like this and it made her want to rewind, go back and do this whole thing over, never get out of the car in the first place and keep driving until…What? You have nowhere else to go.

“He’s not my boyfriend. He never was.”

“He got closer to a relationship with you than I ever did.”

“That’s not true. I never slept with him.”

“But you didn’t hide him in a hotel room out of town either.”

“I’m not the only one who was hiding,” she shot back, anger seeping through her veins where her anxiety had been only moments before. “We both agreed. It was just supposed to be sex.”

“I remember what we agreed,” he seethed. “My mistake for thinking that after three fucking years it was time to admit—”

Her stupid heart fluttered in her chest, hope warring with her rapidly cooling anger. She didn’t want to fight with him. She didn’t want to push him away. “Admit what?”

“This is…a lot.” A thousand emotions flashed over his face that she couldn’t read, except the one coming through loud and clear: disappointment.

Her stomach twisted. “It’s still me. I’m still the same person you’ve known for the last three years.”

“That’s the thing, though, isn’t it, Han? We don’t really know each other at all.”

∞∞∞

Jamie:Ethan, what’s the deal with you and Daemon’s friend?

---