Page 126 of Cherry Beats

“Oh no,” I whispered, the words catching in the back of my throat. “Please. No.”

Chapter Forty

“Should we even bother asking what you were doing up there?” Rhett asked from his position on the sofa of the main suite, a cigarette hanging limply from the corner of his mouth as he stared up at me.

“Playing Cluedo,” I answered with a roll of my eyes.

“Save yourself some time. It was Mr West, in the pool, with his weapon of mass destruction.”

A cushion was hurled through the air by Presley, hitting Rhett in the head and knocking the cigarette out of his mouth into his lap. Rhett jumped up, hurling the smoke to the floor before he stood on it with his thick, black boot. “Jesus, man. That could have put a hole in my best jeans.”

“I can put a hole in your face if you’d prefer,” Presley growled. He was still wearing his swim shorts, sitting on the sofa opposite Rhett while I paced back and forth, and Julia spoke to someone on her phone in the corner of the room.

Rhett’s eyes widened. “Clearly, you didn’t get to the blowjob stage of the evening.” Presley looked up at Rhett in warning, a single, stern glare enough to get Rhett to hold his hands up in surrender and sit back down. “Consider me told.”

I blew out a breath and turned to look at Julia, who was pinching the bridge of her nose with her free hand as she hung up.

“Still no idea who it was?” I asked.

“No.” She shook her head, dropping her hand and turning to me. “The office hasn’t had any calls, so if it’s someone like Janey Dominic, we’re going to have to wait for her to do what she does best.”

“What’s that?”

“She makes her exclusives go viral before we can blink, and after that, it’s all about damage control.”

“It might not be JD,” Presley offered. “It could just be a kid, pissing about with his new toy.”

“Did it look like a toy to you?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. I haven’t a fucking clue about these things, Julia.”

Julia rolled her eyes and chose to look at me as Presley stood and began pacing, too, clearly as agitated as me.

“I don’t get it. Why is Janey Dominic so damn determined to get something on you?” I asked him—any of them.

“Because she’s a raging bitch,” Presley answered.

“And that’s it? No other reason?”

Presley only frowned harder as he stared at the carpet, not answering my question.

I sighed and turned to Julia. “What are our options here?”

“We don’t have any. We have to wait for them to strike first and hope it’s not as bad as you think it is.”

“Can’t we pre-empt it somehow? Take the shock value away from it all? Control the narrative?”

“How do you want to do that? You want to take a picture of you and Presley at it and post it to the band’s web page just so we can sayYou saw it here first.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Rhett chimed in.

“Shut up, Rhett!” all three of us shouted back at him, forcing his hands in the air again and his eyes to widen.

“I’m just saying,” he squeaked in a very un-Rhett like way. “We’re rock stars, folks. This isn’t a pleasant romance you two are playing out. It’s wild, and it’s in front of the world. If you’re looking for a quiet life, you ain’t gonna get it. I’m not sure why that would even be a surprise to you. The world is watching, waiting, begging for you to show them a glimpse ofmore.Especially after that declaration of love on the stage in Paris. What did you expect? For them to just coo and move on? Not a chance. We’re slap bang in the middle of the most invasive generation to ever exist. Either learn how to handle that or walk away now. It’s never going to get easier than this.”

Julia, Presley, and I all turned to look at one another, our shoulders sagging, and our eyes saying everything we didn’t want to speak.

Rhett was right.

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