were making out for hours.”
“I need to see this,” she muttered, rolling out of bed. “I’ll call you back in a bit.”
Without waiting for him to answer, she hung up and opened Wally Hood’s site on her phone. As Jesse had promised, the headline was front and center.
The Em-Girl Goes For Another Rocker
There was a photo of her and Jesse below the headline, taken when they’d been outside of her apartment building just hours before. From the picture, it really did look like they were enjoying a romantic moment that involved a goodnight kiss. Her stomach lurched.
For a full minute she could only stare, her eyes glued to the image on her screen. From what she remembered, his lips had barely brushed her cheek, and they certainly hadn’t touched her mouth. She wouldn’t have classified that as anything resembling intimate, but by looking at the photo, anyone could think that’s exactly what it had been. The way Jesse’s head bent over hers, her own face mostly obscured, the photo made it appear as though they’d been smooching it up at her gate.
She tore her gaze away from the photo and began reading the article below it.
It’s after midnight, C-Samp. Do you know where your girlfriend is? If not, Wally Hood can help you. It seems she had a date in Santa Monica with another rocker, who, sorry to tell you, has much better hair.
Little Ms. Emily Watts was spotted dining at Louise’s Trattoria with Jesse Cinder, the guitar player for Ashes of Brooklyn, a band we hadn’t heard of before now. After getting rather friendly-looking over dinner, the two wandered around the beach for a while and headed to the Santa Monica pier. There, they ate cotton candy and rode the ferris wheel. Aw, how cute, you guys. Almost as cute as ending the night with a sweet goodnight kiss.
One thing’s for sure—Jesse lives up to his last name. The Flameboy is smokin’ hot, and we’re assuming the Em-Girl has also noticed while up close and personal. Has Little Miss Em been playing on both coasts until now? Did she get sick of C-Samp’s undying love for Cady Sugarman and ditch him? Or is Emily’s suspected more-than-friendship with Jesse what drove C-Samp to start hanging out with his ex again? We’re dying to know!
Emily closed her eyes, feeling blood rush to her temples. While she’d known the tabloid media was interested in her relationship with Cory, she had assumed their interest stopped there. She had also assumed that any time she’d been caught on film with Cory, it was because of their interest in him. She’d never stopped to consider that she might now attract the same level of attention, even without him at her side. Or that the media would be this interested in why he wasn’t at her side.
What bothered her more than that, though, was how anyone had gotten photos of her and Jesse in the first place. Not to mention how they’d had such perfect timing as to photograph what was not a goodnight kiss in a way that made it look like one. More curious still was how Wally Hood had even been able to identify Jesse. Ashes of Brooklyn had never been on the tabloid media’s radar as far as she knew, and he’d just moved to town.
She walked over to her window and opened the blinds, looking down over the street in front of her building. Scanning each side of it, she observed the parked cars, trying to figure out where someone could have been so easily hidden from her and Jesse while taking photos of them saying goodnight.
She closed the blinds again and took a few steps back from the window. If someone in the shadows could turn something completely innocent into much more than it really was, what else could they do? And if she’d been tailed during a night out with a friend, with Cory nowhere in sight, she had to wonder where else she was being followed.
Chapter Fifteen
Emily looked up from the article she was writing to stare at her television with a combination of disbelief and horror. What had started as background noise while catching up on her column had turned into a private Blistering Twilight concert in her living room when the news program that was on came back from commercial break. The strains of the one song she knew by them blared from her TV speakers, until it faded into the background when the news anchor