Country Love (A Billionaire BWWM Romance) (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Monique

The whole, silent,
ride back to the main house, I wrestled with myself. This was the right thing,
right? I was doing the right thing. Never mind that my body was screaming at me
to press against him again, his chest crushing into my breasts, my skin alive
under his touch. My lips were begging to kiss him again, rough and hot then
slow and sweet. He seemed like the kind of guy who would kiss me for hours,
just the way I liked it. Was I fucking crazy here?

In desperation, I
took out my camera again. Behind the lens, I was safe. I let the distance
between us grow. Clouds were sweeping in from the west, and high, boiling
thunderheads began to fill the sky. I caught a shot of Tanner Brock,
disappearing into the horizon on horseback, his back straight and defiant, and
knew that was the picture I had come here to take.

But the cost to
get it in the first place...was it worth it?

When the car
pulled up to get me, I waited for him to say goodbye. I stood in his drive and
stared at the huge, rambling house that now was forever entwined with his
kisses in my brain. The sun had dipped below the black clouds on the horizon
and the wind was picking up.

His silhouette
moved past the kitchen window. I couldn't tell if he was watching me, until he
raised his hand in silent farewell. Then walked away.

"Dammit,"
I whispered into the wind.

I slid into the
back seat of the car and slumped down as low as I felt. I clutched my upper
arms tightly, feeling the places where his touch still seared me. Never in my
life had I felt such an intense, and instant desire for a man. It would figure
he would be someone I could never have.

As if I didn't
feel worse enough, the rain began to batter the roof of the car the minute we
passed the sign heralding our entrance into Holcum. I recognized the road of
course, and slumped even lower in my seat. But there was still no way to avoid
seeing it.

The house was
empty. No one lived there, that was clear from the over grown grass. Someone
had systematically broken all of the windows...bored teenagers most likely. It
looked like it had been standing there, unloved and uncared for, since the
night we left.

I swallowed back
the bile that rose in my throat, then clapped my hand over my mouth. A few deep
breaths settled my stomach, and I felt even better once the light changed and
we rolled out of sight of my old home.

I hated Holcum. I
had erased it from my life, just one more place we lived and left with no marks
made on us. Except the mark was there, a scar on my heart as black as the night
we piled into the station wagon and just drove - silently - away.

I never saw my
father again.

He was somewhere
in Indiana, last I heard. Put away for a very, very long time. Turns out
running from your crimes only makes things worse in the end.
 

My family all
dealt with it in our own way. My mother moved in with her sister and seemed
content to forget she ever was a wife...or mother. My younger sister still
insisted on his innocence and joined the world of activism. Me, I became a journalist
with the intent of finding out the truth of what happened but ended up running
from my sadness into the shallow world of celebrities. But I honored my father
by moving, always moving, still pathologically unable to put down roots.
Perpetually the outside, no matter where I was.

We all cope in
different ways. I erased Holcum from my personal narrative, but it was still
here. At least the hotel was far enough away from the family place that I could
pretend I wasn't here.

 
But when I got out of the car and saw LeeAnne
Colfax talking to the woman at reception, my heart dropped all the way down to
my muddy cowboy boots.

"Change of
plans again," I rapped on the driver's window.
 
LeeAnne hadn't spotted me yet, but I knew
it was her. She still wore her trademark braid pulled back tight from her
round, pale face. She looked exhausted and I thought I saw tears in her eyes,
and a stain down the front of her shirt. The woman behind reception had the
same round face - her sister? Her mother? I hadn't stayed long enough in Holcum
to know for sure.

That strange
longing snuck back into my brain. I stared at LeeAnne, swinging wildly between
the desire to run away and the desperate desire to know if the best friend I
could claim in Holcum would be happy to see me.

I shook my head.
She seemed preoccupied with her own shit. She'd probably forgotten about me
already.
 
"Take me to the
airport," I told the driver. "I'm going home."

Chapter Fourteen

Tanner

No amount of
black coffee was enough to prepare me for Jimmy Hales bouncing around at six in
the goddamned morning.

As I stepped onto
the tour bus, I sniffed, grateful that the seeped in smells of booze and old
feet were drowned out in a hail of disinfectant. Then I promptly sneezed on
Jimmy as he maneuvered his big body in to give me a hug.

"Back in the
saddle, right Tanner?" My big goofball of a bassist punctuated his
greeting with a hearty back slap that misfired and knocked my elbow instead,
sloshing my open coffee cup onto the just-cleaned floors of the bus. "Whoops,
lemme get that," he said, whirling around and knocking over a few more
things in his quest for the paper towels.

I pinched the
bridge of my nose and caught the eye of Fitch as he slumped smirking in the
corner. He silently raised his coffee in salute, and I raised mine in reply. My
drummer was an old tour-dog, who'd backed countless other heavy weights over
the span of his career. I could never quite shake the feeling that he still
considered me a newcomer, even as we packed stadium after stadium. He remained
relentlessly unimpressed by pretty much everything, treating world tours like
another day at the office. It got under my skin some of the time, but today I
appreciated his low-key approach, because I was feeling the same way.
Punch my timecard, I'm back from vacation.

"I got it,
Jimmy," I told my bassist. "You're taking up the whole aisle." I
winked over his shoulder to Blake, who had just stepped onto the bus to find
Jimmy's big body blocking his way.

"Oops, sorry
Blake," Jimmy scrambled with all the coordination of a Great Dane puppy
and we all instinctively ducked. Life in close quarter gives you a sixth sense
about these things.

"Jimmy
knocked something over. I'm home again," Blake smiled, spreading his arms.
I went in for the proffered hug. "How you doin' brother?" I asked my
best friend and rhythm guitarist.

"LeeAnne's a
mess," Blake sighed. "Baby won't stop nursing. She's like, attached
to the boob all day long."

"Sounds
fun," Fitch piped up to Jimmy's ribald approval.

Blake shot him a
look. "Ain't fun at all. My poor wife's about ready to drop from
exhaustion. Whole time I was home, she was either cryin' or on the phone with
her sister." He heaved a sigh. "It was kind of a shit
show..."
 

"And you had
to leave," I finished for him.

"And I had
to leave," Blake echoed, his face showing the strain of new fatherhood.

"Ah shit,
I'm real sorry, man." I wasn't sure what else to say. It was a big
surprise to me when Blake up and married LeeAnne, a girl we'd grown up teasing
mercilessly. Innocent stuff though, just yanking her pigtails and showing her
gross bugs to make her squeal. LeeAnne was too nice to torture too badly. And I
guess I could see Blake falling for her, I mean, she was pretty, in her own
way, but she was always just...around. Like a little sister.
 
When Blake showed me the ring he'd picked
out, I nearly fell off my horse. And then she went and got knocked up on their
honeymoon...it was all moving fast. My best friend seemed to be moving in the
direction of family man, souring on touring more and more.

"Wanna see
her?" Blake smiled, brandishing his phone with a flourish.

I obligingly
looked down as he swiped through about fifty photos of a squishy newborn that
looked exactly the same. But the last one, taken of the three of them on their
back porch stopped me in my tracks. "Aw hell man, that's a beautiful thing
right there," I said as I stared at the picture of his little family,
pride written in every line of his body. "Congratulations."

"Thanks
brother," Blake said with all sincerity. "I'm hoping I can bring
LeeAnne and Maddie along for a spell in a few months."

"Sure, of
course."

"What are we
looking at?" Carter nosed his way over Blake's shoulder.

"Shit, where
did you come from?"

"Been here
the last five minutes, but no one noticed me because you were all cooing over
baby pictures like a bunch of women," Carter grinned evilly and ducked out
of the way of Blake's punch.

"Hey fuck
you man, that's my daughter."

"Oh yeah?
Poor thing. I hope she doesn't get your eyebrows." Carter laughed as he
ducked again,

"Everyone
here, Mr. Brock?" Gus, the driver, poked his bearded face into the
doorway.

I took a look at
my merry band of misfits. "Yeah, we're here."

Blake looked up
from where he had Carter pinned on the floor. "Weird," he observed,
while simultaneously directing punches at Carter's exposed ribs. "Feels
different this time."

"Yeah?"

"I dunno,
bigger. Like we're missing some people."

I looked out the
window. Monique had left exactly two weeks and five days ago. In that time, I
fixed every fence rail over fifty linear miles. I cleared brush, made some
orders, and arranged for a tenant to keep up the place while I was away. And
the whole time I did that, I was rehearsing angry confrontations with her, coming
up with convoluted ways I could see her again. Never had a woman gotten so
under my skin. I wanted to throttle her, kiss her, fuck her, and shake her right
before I did it all over again. But there was no way I could make that happen…

"I know what
you mean," I said, with more sadness than I intended.

"Ever notice
this about starting a tour?" Jimmy piped up. "How weird it is?"

"What do you
mean?" Blake said, apparently done with pummeling Carter. He stood up and
hauled the keyboardist to his feet and both grabbed their coffee like nothing
had happened.

"It's like,
I dunno, have you ever gone skydiving? It's like that moment right before you
jump. Anything could happen in that moment. You could decide not to do it and
turn around. You could jump and your chute doesn't open and you're totally dead.
Or you could jump and have the best damn thirty seconds of your life. The
moment just hangs there as long as you do."

Everyone was
silent for a moment. "Jimmy Hale, I had no idea you were capable of such
deep thoughts," Fitch deadpanned.

Jimmy eagerly
turned to Fitch, knocking his bottled water over in the process. "That's
more like it," Carter nodded. "Now the world makes sense again."

"But you
guys know what I mean, right?" Jimmy pleaded as he mopped up his water.
"I wish there was a way of feeling this anticipation...."

"Preserving
it," I finished, and everyone looked at me. "Yeah Jimmy, I get it.
And you just gave me an idea...."

Chapter Fifteen

Monique

Dayna said his
name was Dennis. But in my mind I had already christened him "Finance
Guy."

"A little
trick I've learned, working in finance," he told me, in the tone of
someone imparting great, rarefied wisdom on someone of much lesser
intelligence, like an adult teaching a clumsy child how to tie a shoe, "is
that you've got to jump on these type of deals when they come up, you know what
I'm saying?"

Finance Guy
didn't wait to see if I would actually answer his question, which was honestly
a sort of relief. "The finance world moves fast, and when you're
completely immersed in it, 24/7 like I am, you start to see these ins and outs
that people who don't work in it wouldn't be able to discern...."

I smiled at him
and nodded, while wondering if faking a seizure would be enough to get me out
of this disastrous blind date. Would Finance Guy even notice? Or would he sit
next to me in the ambulance and tell me about how his job in finance made him
qualified to administer my meds?

I decided against
it in favor of murdering Dayna at the next opportunity.

"See, they
don't see things the way I do, you know what I mean, Monique?"

I snapped back to
attention when Finance Guy said my name, but of course he didn't actually mean
for me to contribute to the conversation.
 
"I have the kind of mind that can break these things down, you understand...."

Picking at my appetizer,
I mentally counted down the minutes I had to endure this until I could
gracefully make an exit. Should I stay for the entree I had ordered in a fit of
"he can't be this bad" optimism?

"...I told
them, I said, you leave this kind of thinking to me, but they didn't. Idiots
think they understand finance, like it's something you can just pick up, like
riding a bike. It's not; it requires a different set of tools, ones that
require years of honing in the trenches. Like my time at Finklestein and Toth,
now that was a real crash course in the world of finance, you might have heard
of them, they're real titans in the industry...."

Forty minutes
into the date and Finance Guy hadn't stopped to take a breath once. He also
hadn't asked me a single question about myself.

Usually that
would be appreciated. But ever since I arrived back from Brock Ranch, I had
this vague, unsatisfied desire to...
talk.

"You sound
different," Chanel had told me when I called her to say I was on the
ground at the airport.

"How
so?" I asked as I fetched my bag from the overhead compartment. I
certainly felt different...and it wasn't a good kind of different.

"Sad?"
Chanel ventured. "No wait, that isn't right," she added as I heaved a
sigh. "No, wistful. Wistful is the word I'd use. Why are you wistful,
Mo?"

I was being
jostled left and right. There is a right time to talk about feelings and
disembarking an airplane is not that time. But I couldn't help myself.

"He
was...," I started...

But I was
immediately drowned out by Chanel's hooting. "Oh girl, oh shit, I
recognize that tone. Girl, you've got it bad for him, don't you? Shit, are you
wearing overalls right now?"

"Shut
up," I seethed, cheeks flaming. "He's not like that."

"Defending
him too, huh? Oh man! This is too good."

I sighed again,
and Chanel's evil glee died away instantly. "Well shit girl, I'm sorry.
You sound actually upset about this."

"I'm
not," I snapped.

And I wasn't, I
still insisted to myself. But the longer I sat here, chafing to get the hell
away from Finance Guy, the more I had to admit that I had never, in all my
years of dating, felt the kind of connection I felt to Tanner Brock. One day
with him seemed to be enough to completely rearrange me right down at the
cellular level. I couldn't even pretend to care about Finance Guy long enough
to get my entree.

"Dennis, I'm
going to have to stop you there," I said, standing up and throwing my
napkin down on the table.

For the first
time, he paused his avalanche of words. It was almost gratifying to see him
staring, a wad of chewed up food visible in his open mouth. But I was too far
gone to laugh.

 
"You're a busy and important guy, I
get that. Your time is valuable, which is why I'm not going to waste one more
minute of it. It was nice to meet you, but this isn't going to work out."

Dennis closed his
mouth with a snap and swallowed. His eyes glittered. Oh my god, were those
tears? "Really?" He sputtered. "I thought we had a real
connection going on here."

"The only
connection I saw was the one between your mouth and your ego," I snapped,
throwing down a twenty. "That should cover my part of the bill, have a
good night."

Leaving Dennis
utterly flabbergasted, I strode from the table, phone in hand, ready to light
into Dayna the minute I cleared the door.

Instead my phone
buzzed in my hand and startled me so badly I almost dropped it.

"Gil? Is
everything okay?" My editor never called me this late. The man was out the
door at 5pm on the dot, all of the work he hadn't delegated yet left to fester
in piles on his desk until the next day.

"Monique,
where are you?" If his normal voice was high, right now it was nearly
ranges only dogs could hear.

"Um, I just
finished having dinner," I said warily.

"Good, I
need you to come in the office, right now. We got something big here, really,
really big."

"You need me
in the office to tell me?"

"Yes, no
wait, no," his voice was cracking like an eight grade boy. My heart rate
soared, what could he want? Was there something wrong with my pictures of
Tanner?

He didn't leave
me in suspense long. "Fine I guess I'll just tell you, but you're not
allowed to say no."

"That
doesn't inspire confidence, Gil," I laughed nervously. People were
streaming past me on the sidewalk. There was no place private to hear whatever
bad news he was about to give me.

"This is a
massive scoop for Auteur, Exclusive access he's never granted before. You'll
need to pack for three weeks, minimum..."

"Wait, Gil,
you're going too fast. You want me to what?"

But he was off and
running. "Backstage access, intimate shots, band life, Mo, it's
unprecedented. He's so careful with his image, that wholesome aw-shucks-ma'am
thing he has going on. You can blow the lid open on that. The wild scene
backstage...I can't believe he asked for this, this is massive..."

"Gil, slow
down. Who asked for what?"

Gil took a deep,
frustrated breath. "Tanner Brock!" he squeaked indignantly.

I stood frozen in
the middle of the sidewalk. "Tanner asked for...."

"For you,
Monique. He is granting unlimited backstage access to you and you alone. You
will tour with the band for three weeks, getting shots of life on the road.
He's never given this before, to anyone. Are you on board? And remember, you're
not allowed to say no."

Tanner asked for
me. Me, personally. My heart was hammering in my throat for a different reason
entirely. "He wants me?"

"You, Mo. I
sent him previews of the shots you took back on the ranch and that apparently
impressed him, because he wanted more. He said he would only grant this story
if you were the photographer."

Bang bang bang
went my heart. Impressed him. Impressed
him because I told him no, that was the real reason. Men like Tanner weren't
used to being denied. He was using his influence to get at me again, pulling
the celebrity angle to get his way. I should have been offended. I should have
gotten angry. I should have told Gil that I wasn't a prize, and Tanner Brock
shouldn't be allowed to rig the game.

But all I could
think of was Tanner's lips on mine. My lips were betraying me, with their
greedy need to feel his kisses again. And that was why they answered,
"Yes, I'll do it."