Another beat of silence. She sighed. “Oh, Winter.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Gavi?” he said quietly.
She hesitated at the look on his face. “It was just for the week, all right?” she murmured, keeping her voice low. “And I didn’t give him anything.”
Him.Something in her tone brought on a lurch of nausea. “Give who?” he asked. “My father?”
One look at the expression that flashed across her face told himeverything he needed to know. He started shaking his head. “My dad reached out to you? When? How? When he heard that I’d invited you along to this?” he said.
Gavi’s stare went to the rest of the party, then back to him. Across the fire, Dameon glanced over at them, his smile wavering at the stricken look on Winter’s face.
“No,” she whispered. Another pause. “In Honolulu.”
So that was the real reason why Gavi had showed up at his hotel that night. Why she had left her date at the movie premiere. Hadn’t Dameon warned him about this? After all this time, he should have known that Gavi always had a good reason for her actions—a selfish reason—and yet, each time, he still found himself in this position. Caught off guard.
“This is for the book, isn’t it?” he asked tightly.
Gavi’s eyes were downcast now. Even she, it seemed, could feel shame. “He just asked me to pass along anything interesting that happened,” she said, “that he could insert into the book. He also wanted me to soften you up to the idea of the publication, maybe pull back your lawyers a bit.”
The nausea was making him light-headed. Winter looked around, the party’s sounds suddenly dull and menacing, the fire crackling nearby suddenly too overwhelmingly hot.
Gavi put a hand on his arm. He barely felt it. “I didn’t tell him anything too bad,” she said.
“Whatdidyou tell him?”
She swallowed. “Just where you were staying, what your schedule was.”
“That’s not all, is it? What else?”
She hesitated. “Okay, a couple of stories from when we were together. I told him about the time you were stabbed. How you kept it a secret.”
The time when he’d been stabbed outside a party, how he’d fallen across Claire’s lap, bleeding, and how he’d insisted they not go to a hospital because of the stories that would follow. Gavi had figured it out on herown because he’d had to cancel a date with her that week, and because she’d found the scar when he’d slept over at her place a month later. And now she’d told his father, and his father had put it in his book. No wonder it’d been one of the headlines on the tabloids when they’d left for Singapore.
“What else?” he pressed quietly.
“I told him you like your bodyguard.”
Sydney.
“You’re feeding him straight rumors, then,” Winter snapped, fear rising in his throat.
Her eyes flashed. “I just tell him what I see. It’s not my responsibility to confirm or deny things.”
He threw his hands up. “No. It’s just common decency. Why, Gavi? Why would you do this? How much did he pay you? Did he promise you a piece of the book’s profits?”
She didn’t say anything, confirming his guess. He winced and looked at the fire. Even a small fraction of those profits could be worth millions.
“So that’s it, then?” he snapped. “Just sold me out for the money?”
“Your father scares me, Winter,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide, her brows furrowed. “He told me that if I helped him, he’d make sure not to put anything scandalous in the book about me.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I thought you didn’t care what others thought of you as long as you got the attention.”
She scowled back at him, and in that, he saw at last that she did care. That maybe she really was afraid of what his father might have published about her.
Winter stood up, the nausea even more powerful standing. Sydney looked at him, eyes searching his, but he just shook his head. “I’m going to head back early,” he said, nodding to Dameon across the firepit.
Dameon turned away from his date to give Winter—then Gavi—a questioning look. “Already?” he said.
