“You look stunning,” a woman with a headset andclipboard gushes. “So excited for your performance, Noah.”
I give her the practiced smile and athank youthat sounds airy and alive. Bradley watches it land like a director satisfied with a take. His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist once in a move that could read as soothing.
We reach the last turn before the wings. The crowd swells louder, a storm beyond a thin wall. The air here is colder, conditioned to keep a thousand bodies from sweating through silk. I’m suddenly aware of how the choker presses when I swallow. I think about home. I think about leaving. I think about Rhett.
Bradley steers me into the shadows beside a velvet curtain. The announcer’s voice booms the name of a presenter, and the applause sticks to my skin like static.
“Look at me.” His eyes cut through the lights, all silver and calculation. “You’re going to walk out there when you’re called. You’re going to shine exactly how I taught you to. You’re going to prove I was right about you.” His breath grazes my cheek, a parody of intimacy. “And you’re going to stop thinking about some dead little life in a dead little town. You understand?”
The worddeadbuckles my knees inside my boots. Ironic that that’s exactly how I currently feel.
He inches closer until there’s no room for air between us. His smile widens for the benefit of a cameraoperator crossing behind my shoulder. His voice is a thread only I can hear. “If your mask slips, you’ll regret it. If you defy me, I will leak your infidelity to the press. If you embarrass me, I will ruin you.”
I blink, slowly, because if I don’t, I’ll cry. My mouth finds the shape it needs.
“You’re up, Miss Lane.” My cue arrives, bright and professional, an arrow of sound.
Bradley takes my hand like he’s a magician and I’m an object he needs for his next trick. Our fingers thread together. To anyone watching, we are in love. He stops at the wing of the stage, dropping his hand to my lower back. “Don’t fuck this up.”
The crowd’s cheer beyond the curtain intensifies, then distorts and turns aquatic. The lights at the mouth of the stage flare too white to be real. I hear my name being called by the presenter.
Bradley’s grip loosens, and I walk forward alone. From behind, he plays the part of my loving fiancé. “Atta girl. Knock them dead.”
I walk into the light like it’s a path to the gallows, smiling the way he taught me to, my heart pounding to the applause of the crowd.
I chance a quick look over my shoulder and spot Bradley’s assistant sidling up to him, her manicured fingers trailing down the breast of his suit jacket. Something inside me snaps and anger breathes life back intothe dormant showpiece he molded me into. It’s not jealousy but defiance.Fuck this prick.
I am sick of being a prized pony he parades around. I draw in a deep breath, shoulders straightening with every step. He thinks he can lay claim to Noah Lane? Well, he’s about to realize his mistake. Bradley may have given me the stage, but these fans, this award, my talent—it’s mine.
Showtime.
RHETT
15
Feelingsorry for myself is getting old real damn fast. Yet here I am, another night sinking into this worn leather couch with a well-deserved glass of bourbon burning a path down my throat.
My body aches in that bone-deep way from hours spent busy with work. It’s the kind of exhaustion you don’t sleep off so much as surrender to. If I’m not at Black River, I’m picking up the slack at Lilac Meadows, or answering some damn call-out for a neighbor who needs a calf pulled. I keep saying yes, keep showing up, stay moving until the muscles in my back threaten mutiny and my eyes feel full of grit.
Honestly, I don’t know how long I can keep running myself into the ground like this, all so I don’t have to sit still long enough to feel the full weight of reality settle on my chest.
Exhausted is my permanent state these days, because tired is the only way I can function without completely losing my goddamn mind. In the span of a few fucking days, my life and everything I thought I knew blew up in my face, and now I’m wandering around in the fallout, pretending the ash in my lungs is just dust from a long day on the ranch.
Drowning my problems with a glass of amber liquid probably isn’t the most brilliant move a man can make, but after the week I’ve had, it feels less like a choice and more like triage.
I raise the glass to my lips, letting the bourbon sit heavy on my tongue for a second before I swallow. It slides down slow, burning through the hurt clogged in my throat, a small mercy in a night that doesn’t have much kindness to spare.
Fucking Noah.
I should’ve walked away the second I saw her again. Should’ve taken one look at that face and turned in the opposite direction, locked every memory of her behind a door I refuse to open. But no. Apparently, I’m a sucker for punishment, because I let her walk right back into my world, and now everything inside me is raw and exposed, same as it was the day she left.
I thought I was getting over her. Thought time and distance and a whole lot of stubborn self-preservation meant something. But then she stepped back into BlackRiver, stood in front of me with those eyes and that voice and the ghost of what we were hanging between us, and the wound I thought had scarred over ripped clean open.
The breath I drag in feels thick, like I’m breathing through cotton, but it eases some of the tension in my shoulders. Doesn’t make it vanish, doesn’t fix a damn thing, it only keeps my hands from shaking. But what I can’t shake is the silence. That uneasy, humming kind of quiet that makes a man feel like a house is alive and listening, waiting to see what he does next.
Needing a distraction, any distraction, I reach for the television remote in hopes the background noise will drown out the loneliness crawling through my bloodstream. Maybe some late-night rerun, some game highlight, some infomercial for shit I don’t need. Something mindless.
Several minutes of channel hopping later, I find myself half watching, half listening to static and strangers, until a familiar voice cuts through the noise, clear and bright and sharp enough to stop my pulse.
