Courting Trouble (Reality Romance Book 5) (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

The injunction went through that night—which was a good news/bad news situation. The good news was Dermott couldn’t release the tape without going to jail. The bad news was it was all anyone seemed to be talking about on the morning talk shows.

Day Two of Tapegate, as Elena had started calling it in her head, dawned with an almost insultingly gorgeous blue sky. No smog today. Just crystal blue water and enough of a breeze to invite everyone out into the Californian paradise.

Everyone except Elena, who was hiding out at Adam’s house and watching her personal drama play out on television.

After a short argument that morning, she’d managed to convince Adam that he would only annoy her by hovering over her all day and he needed to get his ass back to work. He’d gone, under protest, leaving her alone with the blank television screen staring ominously at her. She’d told herself she wasn’t going to watch the coverage—but that promise lasted about two seconds after the door shut behind Adam.

She felt strangely at peace with the whole mess this morning. She’d slept off and on for a few hours at a time the night before—certainly not well—but she felt more awake, and more human, than she had all of yesterday. And then she found herself wondering if it was normal to feel better or if there was something wrong with her because she was actually okay.

Of course, the morning talk show hosts had plenty to say on the question of whether there was something wrong with her or not. After the third rehashing of the MMP Jacuzzi incident—as if getting topless with one man in the controlled environment of reality television had given all of America permission to tape her having sex without her knowledge—she turned off the television.

Then she’d made the mistake of looking up how much the lawyers charged. They weren’t so gauche as to post it right on their website, but when she looked up what the kind of legal action she was involved in could cost, she nearly had a heart attack.

Miranda had brought them in to solve the problem, but there had been no discussion of how Elena was supposed to be able to pay them. She didn’t have the kind of money to throw around that their usual clients did.

To take her mind off her financial panic, she decided to check in with the dissection of her life on the midday discussion shows.

The narrative was largely more of the same—with the occasional dissenting voice added to the mix, arguing that she wasn’t Satan’s helper. She was about to turn off the television again, figuring she’d gotten the gist of it, when she saw a teaser for the upcoming episode of TMZ.

A teaser that featured Daniel’s reaction to her sex tape.

Her blood went cold.

She froze on the couch, biting her nails until the top of the hour rolled around and TMZ came on. The Daniel clip was toward the end of the second segment.

A camera crew had cornered him coming out of a restaurant—and the good folks at TMZ had helpfully captioned the shouted questions of the cameraman, in case anyone missed them.

“
Daniel! Daniel! What do you think of the Slutty Suitorette Sex Tape? They say it’s gonna go for over a million. As someone who knows, is one night with Elena really worth that much?”

Elena groaned, pleading with the television, “Take the high road, Daniel. Walk away.”

He kept walking, but glanced over his shoulder. “No comment.” And he winked.

The asshole
winked
.

And the charmers at TMZ replayed it over and over and over and over again. In slow motion, pausing and rewinding, gleefully commentating.

She stabbed the power button.

So.

Daniel was a dickhead. Nothing new there. Daniel had been a dickhead ever since the day he’d stood across from her on a Tahitian beach, holding her hands,
smiling
, and telling her that she was every man’s fantasy, but reality was different and in reality he wanted to marry someone else. When only the night before—and for
months
before—he had been taking every opportunity he had to talk about their incredible chemistry, their incredible connection, the way she made him
feel
.

Lust. It had been lust. But she’d wanted to believe it was more. Wanted it so badly she hadn’t even cared what her own emotions were. If he could really love her, that was all she needed.

But he hadn’t. She’d just been a shiny toy.

And it wasn’t just Daniel. It was
all of them
. All the men who treated her like her cup-size automatically made her a bimbo. All the people who needed her to fit into a nice neat box labeled SLUT and couldn’t get their tiny brains around the idea that she could be impulsive and sexy and still a freaking
human being
who deserved to be treated with a shred of respect every now and then.

Her cell rang and she was tempted to ignore it—since in her current mood she was likely to screech at whoever was on the other end of the line—but so few people had that number she checked the caller ID, and then immediately hit the button to accept the call.

“Sam.”

“I want to kill him,” Samantha said without preamble. “Who is he? Some guy from before the show?”

“Right after, actually. Just a fling to try to get Daniel out of my system.”

Sam cursed—the vulgarity of it surprising for the girl who had been portrayed as a sweet Midwestern girl with wholesome family values through the entire show. Her box, in its own way, just as restrictive as Elena’s.

“If you need to get away from it, you can come here,” Sam said staunchly. “You know that, right? White Falls would rally around you.”

“I appreciate the invitation, but I’m going to stick it out here for a few more days. There may be legal proceedings and they’re easier to handle if I’m not in hiding in Upper Peninsula Michigan.”

“Well, the offer stands. What’s happening to you… It makes me want to scream when I think about it. If there’s anything I can do, I’ll do it. I could get a Twitter account! Some of the girls are already tweeting their support.”

“Don’t get a Twitter account. Just steer clear. We have an injunction to stop him selling the tape and with any luck things will die down when they realize we’ve stopped the release of the full version.”

“You’re so much calmer than I would be.”

Elena almost laughed. Calm was not how she would have described her emotional state, but if she could pass for it, she’d take it. “Doesn’t do me any good to panic,” she said—as if she wasn’t freaking out every second of the day.

“How’s the new guy handling things?”

Adam. Feeding her. Holding her hand. Hugging her tight on the deck last night, his arms so warm and comforting and right around her even as everything else in her life felt wrong.

“He’s a prince.” And any second he was going to figure out what a trainwreck she was and throw her out.

“Thank God,” Sam breathed, relief thick in her voice. “You need someone with you right now who is good to you.”

“He’s good to me,” she reassured Sam. He was better than she deserved.

Now if only he could want her after all this.

Twenty minutes after she got off the phone with Sam, Sidney called. Elena hesitated before picking up the call. She and Sidney had never really been close. They shared the show and they shared friendships with Caitlyn and Samantha, but the two of them had never really bonded. Now that Caitlyn’s wedding was over, she couldn’t think of a single reason why Sidney would call her—unless it had to do with Max and Adam. Maybe she was warning Elena to keep her scandal to herself and not drag Elite Protection into it. That made sense.

“Hello?” she answered, evicting any trace of tentativeness from her voice. Never let them see you tremble.

“Elena? Oh my God, how are you? We’ve been so worried.”

“You have?”

“Of course we have. Josh just showed me that awful clip of Daniel winking. Can I kill him for you? Because I would love to kill him for you. Though I’m not sure how much that would help.” Elena heard a voice in the background. “Josh says he’ll make a statement of support. I will too. Whatever we can do to help.”

“Thanks,” Elena said, though she was pretty sure the only people who could help right now had legal degrees. Though a statement of support from the host of the show couldn’t hurt. “So you and Josh, huh? I thought that wasn’t anything.”

“He persuaded me.” Elena could hear the blush in her voice. “I’m going to have to get a bigger apartment because he’s practically moved in since the wedding.”

They chatted about Sidney’s glowing happy life for a few minutes—like the friends they might actually become—and Sidney even insisted they had to go out for coffee sometime, since she lived less than an hour north of LA.

“I’d love to, but I have no idea how long it will be before I can go for coffee and not have it be a zoo.” And with Sidney she knew the other former-Suitorette wasn’t trying to use that media zoo for her own publicity.

“Have you thought of leaving LA until it dies down?” Sidney asked, echoing Samantha’s offer to escape to White Falls.

Elena repeated what she’d told Sam, adding, “I tried disappearing to Albuquerque a few months back, just for a few days when the show was airing and the hashtag stuff first happened, and I realized the show is popular
everywhere
.”

Things had been going badly with her parents and she’d hoped to patch things up with them, to explain, to hide, but they’d refused to even see her, and if anything the attention had been worse in New Mexico. At least in LA, half the population pretended they were too cool to be interested in celebrity lives. In New Mexico everyone who recognized her seemed to feel like they had the right to touch her.

“Besides,” she said to Sidney, “running away lets them win and that isn’t okay. None of this is okay.”

Not just that it had happened to her, but that it happened. Her injustice button had been pushed and if she skulked off with her tail between her legs, wasn’t she admitting that they were right to shun her and treat her like shit? No. It was
not okay
.

“Do you think I’m crazy to stick it out? Crazy to think I can still make a living as an actress after all this?”

“A little crazy never hurt anyone,” Sidney said. “But that isn’t the important question.”

“No? Then what is?”

“Is it still what you want?”

“Yes.” Her answer was immediate and absolute.

She’d never wanted anything the way she wanted to make it as an actress. Not to be one of the glamorous people with their glamorous lives, but because when she disappeared into a role it was like something clicked into place inside her and she
knew
down to the pit of her soul that this was what she was meant to do. She had a calling and that wasn’t something you just walked away from. Even when it felt impossible.

She’d had an acting teacher in college who told her the business was hard.
“If you can give up acting, do it
,” he’d said, “
because this business isn’t worth the pain.”
She’d thought he was being melodramatic at the time, but now she understood his words in a way she never had before. She
couldn’t
give it up. Not and still feel like herself, anyway. It had become too much a piece of who she was.

So she would stick it out.

This was still the beginning of her story. She would look back on this with Barbara Walters some day and laugh, damn it.

After the call from Sidney, she dared the television again.

The networks had a rare window where none of the shows were talk shows or entertainment gossip, so she flipped over to the twenty-four hour news channels. The first few were talking about politics and the stock market. Her name didn’t even appear in the ticker scrolling across the bottom. Maybe that was it. Maybe the worst was over.

She clicked to the last news channel—and her tiny flicker of hope coughed and died. The pretty blonde pundit spoke forcefully into the camera, emphasizing her words with a pen she pointed at the home audience. “
Ashamed—
” Point. “—of herself. I normally try to take the female side, but women like this set the fight for true gender equality back
fifty years
.” Point. “Stay tuned. After the break we’ll speak to Dale Reese, a spokesperson for Dermott Kellerman, the man selling the tape.”

Elena’s heart thudded hard.
No
. It had to be a mistake. Dale Reese wasn’t a spokesperson for Dermott. He was
her agent
. Or he had been before she fired him yesterday morning. She’d trusted him. He wouldn’t just turn around and work for the enemy, would he?

He would. She knew he would.

Her agent had the ethics of a rabid mongoose, of course he’d jumped camps. Former agent. She was lucky to be rid of him.

Oh yeah. Her life was all about the luck these days. And she couldn’t even call in to the show he was on and scream at him for betraying her—though,
God,
that would feel good—because it would be replayed on every news show for the next week, feeding the flames with her harpy tirade.