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Credit: Faye’s Vision/Cover Images, Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock

In an excerpt from her new book, Scheana Shay revealed how her affair with Eddie Cibrian began, why she didn’t believe he was married, and what he told her when she questioned him on it.

In 2013, the first scene of Vanderpump Rules showed Eddie’s now-ex-wife, Brandi Glanville, confronting Scheana over the affair. When the romance began, Scheana was 21 and out of the spotlight.

In her memoir, My Good Side, Scheana revealed how the romance began.

“Conveniently, one of my college friends, Farrah, who was my first roommate in LA, had a friend who worked at a private member’s cigar lounge and restaurant. Every A-list celebrity, director, writer, and actor hung out there, and it was the hottest place to work in Beverly Hills,” she said, via Entertainment Weekly. “I felt really lucky to get the job. I figured I might meet the right people there, which would lead to being discovered. So, I moved to Hollywood, never anticipating just how drastically this decision would change my life forever.”

“I first laid eyes on Eddie Cibrian a few months later, when he stepped off the elevator at the cigar lounge, where he played poker on Tuesday nights. If you were to ask me when I was growing up what my exact type was, to a tee it was Eddie—tall, dark, and handsome, with dimples. The second we made eye contact, he smiled at me with those dimples, and I melted. How could I not? He’s undeniably a gorgeous human. Our relationship wasn’t romantic from the jump, though the writing was on the wall from day one.”

Scheana said he was the “sweetest” gentleman she ever met, and he made her feel like she was “the only girl in the room.”

“Of course, I’ve been asked a zillion times how I didn’t realize he was married,” she said. “Why would I have thought he was? He never wore a wedding ring, so I assumed he was single. At some point, I did look at his IMDB, as my roommate was also dating an actor, and I wanted to see what movies he’d been in. The only one I’d seen was Say It Isn’t So starring Heather Graham, and I vaguely remembered thinking his character was hot, even though I had no idea who he was at that time. This was pre–social media, so it wasn’t like he was posting pics of his family in matching pajamas in front of a Christmas tree.”

“To be clear, Eddie wasn’t my boyfriend (at least not exclusively). But we did start a physical relationship at the end of 2006, which was a weekly booty call. After his Tuesday night poker games, and when my shift ended, we would go out together with our friends to get drinks, and then he would come back to my house, where we would hook up,” she said. “Eddie would then go home, and I’d go back to my life for the rest of the week. In hindsight, it was pretty brazen of him to be fully out in public with a bunch of single women while his wife and child were at home … The frightening thing is that I totally thought I could end up with Eddie; he looked how I’d always imagined my future husband would, and he treated me well.”

According to Scheana, their romance took a pause when she started dating Jesse Metcalfe, who played the “sexy gardener” on Desperate Housewives.

“But eventually [Jesse and I] grew apart, and when things faded out later that summer, I fell right back into regularly hanging with Eddie—at which point it became more serious than our weekly poker-night hookup. So much so that when I was moving apartments, Eddie came to help me and met most of my friends and even my mother. His best friend also joined us with his son, who was a toddler at the time. We were literally intertwining our families and the people closest to us.”

“Did I think it was weird that I never went to his house? No! He lived in Calabasas, supposedly. And I certainly wasn’t making the trek to Calabasas in 2007, when Ubers didn’t exist, and I had less than $1,000 to my name. It was so much easier and more fun to hang out in Beverly Hills or Hollywood, and my place was closer and more convenient. I didn’t see a single red flag, especially since we weren’t exclusive,” she said. “The first crack in Eddie’s perfectly constructed façade appeared one night at the cigar lounge, when one of the members approached me. He said, ‘Listen, Eddie is coming in tonight. And I just want to let you know—before you do something you might regret—that I heard he’s married.’ He must have seen that we were getting more serious and didn’t want me to get in too deep. I didn’t believe it (or maybe I didn’t want to believe it) because I was wild about Eddie.”

Scheana said she then asked Eddie if he was married.

“And his answer was ‘No, that’s insane. Why would you ask me that?’” she recalled. “It was gaslighting in its most basic form. Yet, I trusted him, so we continued hanging out.”