Jessica Simpson says she was stung when ex-husband Nick Lachey jumped back into dating after their high-profile breakup. "Oh, it hurt me," the 26-year-old singer-actress says in an interview in the March issue of Elle magazine, on newsstands Feb. 13. "Two or three weeks later? Yeah, I'd say it kind of hurt me."

Simpson and Lachey, 33, starred in the MTV reality show, "Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica." She filed for divorce in December 2005, after three years of marriage. She made that decision, she says, after watching the 2004 romance "The Notebook" on a plane ride home to Texas. "I just figured out the statement," she says of the movie, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams as star-crossed lovers. "It was about that moment of desperation. I needed to breathe."

Does she still keep in touch with the singer, who is dating MTV's Vanessa Minnillo? "Mm-hmmm," she tells the magazine. "He's so much a part of my life, how could I not be? Any guy that's going to be with me from this day forward has to understand that. You want to help me find a guy?"

(It appears that's not necessary. Simpson has been photographed recently with singer-songwriter John Mayer, and in her profile in Elle, the writer noted that he spotted e-mails from Mayer on her computer.) She says she "is so happy right now," but declined to discuss her love life. "I want to tell you everything, but I have to sew my lips together," she says. Asked whether she's in love, a grinning Simpson plays coy: "I didn't say yes."

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Jessica Simpson Livens Up the 4th of July

ABC decided to go with a sure thing last night and aired for the second time Nick and Jessica's Tour of Duty, which we somehow missed the first time around. Nick and Jess went to Germany to cheer up the troops, Jessica learned to shoot a rifle (nearly killing everyone present, then amazingly hitting the bulls-eye), Nick got to wear a giant padded suit and be attacked by a German Shepard, then Jimmy Kimmel asked why we still had troops in Germany: hadn't we already beaten them? But the highlight of the evening had to be an inebriated-looking Willie Nelson accompanying Jess in a fringed mini-dress and cowboots as she shimmied her way through a steamin' hot rendition of These Boots Are Made For Walkin'". It was the sexiest number Willie Nelson has ever been involved with in his entire career.

And in other breaking Jessica Simpson news, she poses on the cover of GQ magazine, which posits the theory that behind the blond facade there is a girl with an IQ of 160.

Simpson—who says if she weren't a star she'd be a therapist, like her minister/therapist-turned-Svengali father—does show distinct signs of an actual interior life. In her bags today, she carries In the Company of Soldiers by Rick Atkinson; The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey; The Book of Positive Quotations; a rhyming dictionary; The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style; a paraphrased New Testament; "and then of course Nicholas Sparks," she says, holding up True Believer. These—along with a forty-gig iPod and Atkins-approved chocolate-mint cookies—are some of the tools Simpson is using to craft the next stage of her career.

It's a theory, anyway.

Posted on July 5, 2005
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