“Yes,” I whispered, partially because I was embarrassed at the admission, partially because it felt like he was stealing the air from my lungs with his intensity. My knees felt like jello. His hand came up to cup my cheek, his eyes running all over my face. I wish I could see what he was thinking.

Then he stepped away, and my palms hit the wall behind me like it could hold me up. He went back to the couch. “Tell us your plan, Rigby. I know you have one.”

Rigby raised an eyebrow at him as he walked over to me, herding me toward an armchair. He looked over at River. “Sit down, man. You’re making me nauseous just looking at you.”

I sat down like a good girl, and River sat beside Devan. Rigby stood in the middle of the room, his eyes bouncing between us all.

“So, the reporter from ASPN grilled me about my girlfriend during question time.” He looked at me. “It took me a while to realize they were talking about you, because unless they had a camera in the house, or were pulling old images off the ‘Gram, to the world I was single as fuck.” I winced, because I had a feeling I knew where this was going. “When I worked out she meant you and the fact I called attention to you last week, I just said you were a new friend.”

River rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but did you say it like that, with that I-just-got-fucked smirk on your face?”

Rigby shrugged. “I didn’t know that Andrea was trying to get a gotcha moment. I didn’t see your message until after the press shit was over. So maybe.” I groaned and swiped a hand down my face.

“Do you think she’s going to spin a story?” Devan asked, his brows pulled down into a worried line.

“Given that River fucked and forgot her last season, I’d say she’s definitely going to run a story that makes him look like an asshole, Nova like a harlot, and me like a cuck.”

I flopped back into the cushions of the couch and covered my face with my hands. This was a disaster. I hadn’t even been here two weeks, and it had become a shitshow. “What do we do?”

The last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to myself and Huey. I wanted to stay as far from the limelight as possible.

“That depends on you, Nova. It depends on what you want—from me, from River, from Dev. It’s all in your hands.”

Well, no pressure then.

Chapter Twenty-Two

DEVAN

I was harder than I’d been in a long time. Women had always been a peripheral thing; first was my family, then the business, and somewhere like fifteenth or sixteenth on the list, was sex.