Free These Damn Suspicions by Amy Valenti Page A

he’d been anything but efficient and eager to help.
    “We’ll be clocking off in about an hour. Think you can hold it together until then?”
    He straightened in his chair, taking it as a challenge. I’d worried that because I was fifteen years younger than him yet higher up the production ladder, he’d be difficult to work with. So far, he hadn’t been. He didn’t even seem to aspire to work on his own set design projects one day, but was perfectly happy to help with mine.
    While I was working, it was easy to put my worries about Alex’s phone call aside. I loved my job in general—some projects more than others, and this one was a little difficult in terms of the producer’s vision versus the budget I had to play with. Still, things were coming together—just about.
    I left at around four in the afternoon. I’d been there since six in the morning, and filming hadn’t actually started yet so they didn’t need me to stick around. It was only as I stepped out into the warm, humid afternoon that I remembered the tabloid stuff.
    A quick check of my phone revealed no new messages. Callum was on a pretty heavy filming schedule right now, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. Still, I wondered if Alex had told him about the tabloid story. I wanted to see it for myself before talking to him about it.
    There didn’t seem to be a congregation of paparazzi waiting at the studio gate, for which I was thankful. Maybe nobody knew which studio I was currently working at. I wasn’t about to complain about that.
    I had to stop for gas on the way home—it seemed like as good a place as any to pick up a copy of Celebrity Lies Now! or whatever the gossip rag was called. I filled up the car’s tank, then headed into the small store to find the magazine.
    It wasn’t easy to miss. Callum was on the front cover—one of his promo shots from the final season of One Last Look , the cancelled crime show I’d been hooked on long before we’d met—and the headline screamed out in neon pink capitals. ‘ SHOCKER! CALLUM AND ELENA GET INTIMATE ON THE SET OF INTIMACY !’
    Not the most original headline in the world…
    Resisting the urge to find the article right there in the store, I paid for my gas and the magazine and headed back to the car, thanking God that I wasn’t a celebrity myself. People rarely recognised me as Callum’s girlfriend unless I was seen in public with him, so I didn’t have to worry about getting pitying looks from the store clerk or passers-by who thought they knew what was going on in my life. I didn’t know how Callum stood the constant attention.
    There were a few paparazzi clustered outside our home, on the opposite side of the street, as though that would make them less obtrusive. Thankfully, I could pull the car straight into the double garage and wait for the door to close again before getting out of the car. Not that it stopped them from taking pictures of my little red Mini as I turned into the driveway.
    Callum had recently been looking at properties accessed by private roads, to keep the snooping press at bay now that he was a household name. Even though this place was far more luxurious than anywhere I’d ever lived, I had to admit that I’d feel better if a glance out of the window didn’t give me a fifty-fifty chance of seeing a reporter with a camera.
    Once I got into the kitchen, I dropped the magazine on the counter and stared at it while I waited for the coffee to brew. Callum’s frozen image looked back at me, his half-smile doing nothing to calm my nerves, for once.
    Just open it.
    I leafed through the first couple of pages. The ‘story’ was just after the contents page—gotta hold the attention of the attention-deficit masses—and I stopped breathing, hurt radiating through my chest as though he’d punched me.
    Alex hadn’t been exaggerating. These pictures were damning.
    There were two of them—one where he was kissing her forehead wasn’t even the worst one, even though a