I chuckle. “No, Mom. This has nothing to do with Paul. I have a big order coming up and needed a few days’ break before I start on it.”

She makes a noncommittal sound that says she doubts me. “Okay, but how are you going to pay bills if you aren’t open?”

She doesn’t know that Paul drained our accounts. That would have resulted in a lecture about how I put my future in the hands of a man. She’d then want to come and save the day when she doesn’t have the money to save the day with in the first place.

And she doesn’t know I’m being paid to now be Mrs. Jase Gizmodo. That would open a whole other round of questions about what services I’m being paid for exactly and . . . now, I comprehend why Nathaniel required that no one else know.

It makes it easier and harder at the same time.

“I’m good. I promise. This order is huge and I inflated the prices so I covered the days off.”

“You sure about that or are you just giving me lip service?”

“I am. I promise.”

“And here I was all worked up because Nosy Natalia—you know my friend who lives across the street and obsesses over her gossip sites all day—swears there was a picture of you in one of them.”

My heart jumps in my chest.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I said the same thing, but honey, she showed me the pictures and I can see why she thought that. They were taken at a distance but I’m telling you, that girl is your doppelgänger.”

If my mom thinks it . . . someone must have taken a picture from our night out in Vegas. Truth be told, I’m surprised one hasn’t been posted or bought by tabloids sooner.

“Right down to the bikini she was wearing,” she continues as I pause mid-motion. “It was almost identical to the one you wore on our girls’ trip a few years back. Such a unique pattern it was. I knew it wasn’t you though. What in the world would you be doing in the backyard of a mansion in Los Angeles?”

Each sentence of this conversation is getting ostensibly worse.

Bikini? Backyard of a mansion?

My hands begin to tremble, but she speaks and answers the question before I can even put words to it. “Some musician’s house no less. You don’t even like tattoos and you could see he had plenty of them as he bent over and kissed her.”

My body flushes with a heat I’ve never experienced before.

It’s happening. I knew this was coming, that people would know, but . . . in my bikini? In my most vulnerable state?

“Mom, I have to go,” I say, trying to keep my voice as even as possible.