Page 51
“I love you.” He said it against my mouth, over and over again until I believed it in my bones.
23
JULIAN
The week after our boat outing was boring in the very best way. No clients with fires I needed to put out. Celia and I were together every night, but we kept to ourselves instead of going on any more dates. Ellie was back to ignoring me, but so was Courtney, which was a plus.
I made it all the way to Friday afternoon until things went sideways. I was thumbing through resumes for a new junior associate when Stewart buzzed me.
“The publicist from the Rivera matter is on the line, Lucy Blake. She says it’s urgent.”
I closed the file. “Put her through.”
She was in crisis mode. “Someone is shopping a video. They claim it’s Celia Gardner. Explicit. They’re asking for five figures, and they’re not being careful about who they’re calling. How I ended up on their list is a mystery, but I got the pitch twenty minutes ago. I told them I needed to see a sample before I could take it to a client, but several of mine have used her as a private chef.”
I’d gotten calls like these before, where I was the lawyer who helped someone buy a video so it was never released. But Celia still blushed sometimes when I talked dirty. She met her ex when she was young, and she’d already been proving herself in a career that didn’t offer much downtime.
Agreeing to a sex tape didn’t sound like a decision she’d make lightly. So either someone she had trusted—presumably the piece of shit married to my daughter—had not kept the video private or it wasn’t her. Both options meant she’d been betrayed.
“You have the sample,” I managed.
“Thirty seconds,” she confirmed. “Female subject’s face is clear. The rest is not subtle. I haven’t opened it past the first frame. I thought you should decide since Serena Watts mentioned you’re dating.”
Thank fuck Serena liked to brag about her matchmaking skills, or I might not have found out about this before it was too late. “Send it.”
“Sent, the whole email so you’re in the loop on everything I have.”
“Thank you, Lucy. I owe you a favor.”
She paused for a moment, considering my offer. “As much as it pains me to say this, I’m not going to claim a marker for this. I wouldn’t feel right about it.”
Her answer earned me a lot of respect. “Okay, please let me know if you hear anything else while I’m taking care of this.”
“Will do.”
I locked the door before I opened the email. Stewart did not need to walk in on this.
The file was labeled with a date and a seemingly random string of numbers. It had been sent to Lucy from a Gmail account that sounded generic. The ask was exactly what she described—fifty thousand dollars to buy the exclusive rights. The firm kept a slush fund for cases like this, so I could easily purchase the video.
First, I needed to open it to know what we were dealing with.
The first frame was her face. Same mouth I kissed that morning. The green eyes I knew in every light. My stomach twisted, and I was about to close the video because I didn’t want to invade her privacy by watching a sex tape she might’ve filmed.
Except her hair was the same length as it was now. Her face looked around the same age. She hadn’t been with anyone but me since the divorce, and that wasn’t me in that bed.
Then she moved.
I knew how Celia moved in a bed. The way her back arched when I got the angle right. How her hips rolled instead of jerked. The small hitch in her breath before she came. The dip in her waist under my hand.
None of that matched.
I stopped playing at twelve seconds because I did not need to see the rest. Then I closed the laptop and sat with my hands flat on the desk until the urge to throw it against the wall passed.
Someone had taken the woman I loved and made a deepfake sex tape that they were trying to sell. No way in hell was I going to allow that to happen.
They were about to find out the hard way that they’d fucked with the wrong woman.
I did not call Celia yet. She’d have questions I needed answers to.
