Page 34 of Royally Tempted

“She’s a reporter,” I repeated, my voice like gravel.

“And she made atape?”

It hurt to even hear it, even if I was the one who’d just said it to them moments before.

I nodded, and Landon swore.

“Motherfucker.”

“What can you hear?” Malcolm growled from the corner of the room, tapping his fingertips together with a dark look on his face.

“Well, this other chick just calledus, on my private fucking cell, which means you can hear names and you can probably hear me giving Emma my number the other day.”

Malcolm growled under his breath.

The reporter who called had been brief, but she’d told us everything. Emma Wright wasn’t aneditor, and not at a publishing house like we’d been stupid enough to assume. She was an investigative journalist.That’swhy she’d been there that night, for a fuckingstory.

…And we’d fallen for the whole fucking thing like suckers.

The truth hit hard, and cut deep. We’d fallen for the last girl we were expecting. We’d taken her in, we’d shown her who we were — who wereallywere. We’d told her we loved her.

She’d fucked us, and then she’d fucked us over.

Chapter 12

Emma

Istaggeredout of the building in a daze, my whole world spinning as I tried to find balance.

I couldn’t breathe, and it felt like everything around me was crashing to the ground at once. Tears stung my eyes as I somehow made it across the street to the small park outside thePostbuilding, and it was there that I sank onto a bench, dropping my face into my hands, and cried.

I cried harder than I had for averylong time

Because it wasn’t just Simone’s betrayal, or that my name was about to get dragged into the mud. Truth be told, in that moment, I didn’t even give a crap about any of that. I cried, and my heart broke though, because I’d hurtthem. I’d wounded the three men I’d fallen completely in love with.

I’d gone into this whole thing looking for a story, with my only angle being my own career climb and swallowing back the bitterness of who I’d have to stab along the way to get there. But that’d been before I met the men of my damned dreams.

All three of them.

Somehow, in the most unlikely of places with the most unlikely people, I’d found something I’d never managed to actually find before:love.

And that’s the reason the tears burned down my cheeks. Not because of my shitty co-worker, or my own shame, or even my career. I cried because I knew I’d lost the love I’d just found, and that hurt the worst.

I curled into a ball on that couch, sobbing as the pain cut through me. Eventually, of course, that sadness turned to anger, and fury at being sousedand fucked over by Simone. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, shaking my head and trying to swallow back the pure rage I felt at being stabbed in the back like that. My hand flew to my neck, and I screamed as I yanked the stupid fucking fake diamond necklace from my neck. I was about to hurl it across the park or toss it into a sewer drain, when suddenly, something stopped me.

“Microphones are so small these days.”

I froze, and slowly, I brought my pulled-back throwing arm down to my lap and opened my palm. My eyes glared at the little pendant, and again I felt like throwing it as far from me as I could, but again, I held back.

“Holy shit,” I gasped quietly to myself as the adrenaline rushed through me. I stood, my pulse hammering in my veins as my eyes darted around the park. I started running when I spotted what I was looking for, and I’m sure the poor hot-dog vendor thought I was insane, screaming for a hot dog with tear-stains on my face and this crazed look in my eyes. He probably thought I was a lunatic when I grabbed the foil-wrapped snack from his hands, unwrapped it, threw the actual food away, and then wrapped the foil around the gorgeous necklace in my hands.

My phone was out of my pocket and to my ear as I started running again.

He answered on the third ring.

“You’ve gotsome fucking nervecalling me,” Ryker growled into the phone.

“Before you hang up—”

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