“Oh,” Teagan says. She takes a long swallow of her bourbon, coughing as it goes down.

“I never set out to sleep with him, and when it happened, I blamed it on the wine, too little sleep, and maybe general loneliness.” I roll my glass between my hands. “I didn’t think it would happen again, but it did. Then after the third time, it just became something we did. I’d go to his apartment for dinner after meetings, and we’d talk and end up in bed. When we went to the conference in Florida in February, I had my own room but barely spent any time in it.”

“Wow. And now you think he’s going to propose?”

I can see it in her face, the Already? The Are you really that serious? Or maybe those are my thoughts and I’m projecting. “George is great.” I swallow. “And I care about him, but because of our weird situation, we’ve never had a chance to be a normal couple. I’m afraid that if he finds out how much that ring freaked me out, I’m really going to hurt him.”

“Oh, honey.” She puts her glass down and squeezes my free hand. “If you’re not ready, you have to tell him.”

“Can I tell you something terrible?”

“What?”

“I don’t think I would’ve ever slept with George if I hadn’t known Easton was moving to town.”

It was almost four months ago that I found out Easton was looking for a house in Jackson Harbor. At the time, I didn’t understand why he suddenly wanted to move back here. He hasn’t lived here since high school. Why now?

But that’s what I get for swearing off celebrity gossip. Apparently, his ex, the diva popstar Scarlett Lashenta, got drunk on her reality TV show and confessed on camera that her daughter isn’t biologically Easton’s. The news blew up because the real daddy is some now-famous rapper Scarlett thought was going nowhere when she found out she was pregnant.

Easton has always managed to stay out of the celebrity drama and keep his daughter out of it too, despite Scarlett’s penchant for staying in the middle of it, but the cameras were all over him after the news hit. And then they realized he’d known that Abigail wasn’t his for years and he’d stuck around anyway. Cue the mass swoon.