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“Nothing specific. We’ve got you here, so we might as well get a few.”

It sounded like bullshit, but Drew let it go. The woman pulled the tape loose, and he handed the ball, the jersey, and the T-shirt to the student manager.

She grabbed a bottle of baby oil, poured some into her hands, and went straight for his chest. The first pass was all business, across his pecs and out over his shoulders. By the time she got to his arms, she’d slowed way down.

She worked the oil down one arm and then the other before coming back to his chest. From there, she took her time going down his stomach and over his abs, and stopped just above his waistband. Drew knew what the oil was for. He was pretty sure she wasn’t thinking about the camera. There wasn’t a dry spot left, but she gave his abs one more pass anyway.

By then, her cheeks had gone pink. “It’s for the lights,” she said. “The oil, I mean. It keeps them from washing out all the . . .” Her eyes dropped to his stomach again. “Definition.”

Drew nodded once and looked toward the photographer.

The woman asked him to turn around, then started on his back. When she got to the scratches, her hands came right off him. “I’ll just . . . work around these.”

She finished his back without going near the scratches again. After that, she traded the bottle for a little makeup sponge and took the shine off his forehead, nose, and cheekbones. Drew stood there and let her do her thing until she headed back toward the lights. A month ago, he would’ve started flirting while her fingers were still in his hair. Before she ever got to his chest, he would’ve had her name and known what time she got off. She was pretty, but he couldn’t make himself give a damn.

Was this what being pussy-whipped felt like? Maybe. Sex with Nicole had been fucking spectacular—the best he’d ever had. Of course he had to meet her his last year on campus. Perfect fucking girl. Wrong fucking time.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Nicole started with yellow, because why not. She loaded her widest brush and dragged it across the upper half of the canvas. The paint went on thick, leaving a bright, uneven streak. She added cream beside it, then a slash of blue near the bottom, working without a sketch or any real idea where she was going.

Earlier that Monday, she’d set the painting of the woman in the saffron sari against the studio wall. Tonight, she wanted a fresh canvas and no plan.

Something near the center had started to look like a woman leaning forward, and the black curves above it might become hair. Or she might cover the whole thing tomorrow and find something completely different underneath. She worked pale green into the wet yellow, and it caught along the ridges in the paint. It was messy and a little strange, and she liked it that way.

Her eyes kept going to the cordless phone at the edge of her worktable. Still nothing.

She turned back to the canvas and pulled the brush through the dark brown at its center. When the phone rang, she set the brush down and answered before the second ring, hoping it was Drew.

“Hello?”

“Somebody leaked it.”

No greeting, no easing into it. That was Tiffany for you. Her big sister had been looking out for the rest of them for as long as Nicole could remember. Sometimes that meant protecting them, and sometimes it meant bossing everybody around like she’d been born with a clipboard in her hand. Either way, when it came to the people she loved, Tiffany didn’t play.

“Leaked what?”

“Gina. The pregnancy. It’s on the cover of one of those tabloids.”

“What?”

“Somebody gave them everything—her name, her age, the pregnancy. They put her picture right beside Daddy’s with some big headline about Melvin Wright’s secret love child.”

“No. That was supposed to stay private until the paternity test.”

“Well, it isn’t private anymore.”

Until that moment, Gina’s accusation had belonged to their family and the handful of people close enough to know what was happening. It was ugly, but at least it was theirs. Now complete strangers could stand in line with a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread while reading about the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

“Do we know who leaked the story?”

“No. At first I thought it was Gina, but that doesn’t make any sense.”

Nicole bit her bottom lip. “No, it doesn’t. Daddy paid her more to keep quiet until the paternity test than any tabloid would’ve paid her to talk. It had to be somebody else close to this.”

“I know,” Tiffany said, her voice suddenly quieter.

Their father hadn’t paid Gina because he thought the baby was his. He’d paid her to protect them.