All of You (The Rambler Battalion #5)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Whit

T he phone lying face down on the couch caught my eye while my head hung in downward facing dog. I grit my teeth and turned back to my mat.

This wasn’t the time for that.

I pushed through two more reps of the yoga routine for my rest days. But the gritting teeth wouldn’t let up—clearly, the routine was failing to do what my trainer designed it to.

Arms splayed, body loose, I lay in shavasana on the mat, wishing I could stay there and sleep, wishing I could find satisfaction in relaxing into anything anymore. Oh, and seeing him behind my eyelids.

Again.

As usual, of late.

The relaxing thing would have to wait. Flipping to my side, I crawled across the plush gray carpet of my living room floor and grabbed the phone. Some part of me refused to turn it over until I’d given myself a stern talking to.

If he hasn’t responded, you’ll find someone else. You’ll ask Damon. You’ll ask Reese. You’ll do something else besides obsess over this man.

Because I had been. Ever since I’d met Lieutenant Ben Holder at my cousin Reese’s house two weeks ago and then spent a few hours with him on a tour of the military base after my concert, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking of him.

And really, even that was a lie, because I’d been thinking about Ben Holder a lot longer than that. I just hadn’t known his name was Ben.

I could still see the five o’clock shadow on his face as he slumped over the bar, inebriated by whiskey and grief, over a year ago. The first time I saw him… and that night, that conversation, had played itself in my mind a thousand times.

With ten minutes until my set, I sat down at the bar to wait for a water. My second time doing this—dressed in a disguise to come sing to a late-night crowd, and it had been incredibly helpful. Performing in front of an audience without them knowing me proved to be the best kind of feedback.

“It’s just like this, you know? A beautiful woman walks up next to you, and that’s gone, too, you know?”

The voice next to me thrummed low, rough, and slow, almost inaudible, but something about it made me turn to look at the man who’d spoken.

He kept sliding an empty highball a few inches in one direction with his index finger, then sliding it back. He sat slumped on the stool, but when I looked at him, he tilted his head sideways, almost peering upside-down, which it nearly felt like since I was sitting straight and somehow towering over him thanks to his posture.

“You know?” he asked me.

“Do I know what?” Somehow compelled by the misery in his face despite its slackened features, no doubt a byproduct of several rounds of whatever he’d had in the glass, I couldn’t resist asking.

“I just got back. I been back two weeks. And you’re so pretty, sitting there, humoring me, and I can look at you, you know? And he can’t. Jones can’t. He never will.” His head slumped down, and he leaned more heavily on his arms braced against the bar.

My heart ached.

“Why not?” I asked, scared to know, but needing to.

He straightened then, making it obvious just how large he was. He turned and looked me straight in the eyes. His were bloodshot, heavily lidded and ringed in shadow.

“He’s dead. I held him while he died. And now, he’ll never have a stolen moment like this—not any of ’em.”

We’d talked for a few more minutes, and he’d told me of other stolen moments , as he’d called them, that his friend would never have.

He broke my heart that night, and he changed me. I’d sung a short set, then raced home, and “Stolen Moment,” my chart-topping and supposedly Grammy-contender single, had poured out of me in hours in what had to be the most complete song-writing experience I’d ever had. It’d grown out of compassion and grief and sadness for this man, this shell of a human who’d had nowhere to go with his pain.

Then I saw him again, over a year later, at my cousin’s. He’d been standing tall and beautiful and sober and clear-eyed and fairly articulate considering the moment. He’d been fun and charming and so completely different from the man I’d seen that fateful night, and yet, they were the same. I knew they were.

It felt impossible to stop thinking about him. Was he so much better now? Had he put the loss of his friend out of his mind? He definitely hadn’t recognized me—I mean, he had, but as me, Whit Grantham. He’d clearly had no idea we’d talked, and based on what I remembered, he’d likely forgotten the entire night.

But enough about that. On a slow, deep breath, I turned the phone over, entered my password, and clicked the app. 1 new message .

My stomach flipped, and I resisted the urge to break out in a little dance of celebration. Instead, a tap on the little flag brought up my direct messages, and there it sat, at the end of a long thread.

@WhitGranthamOfficial: I have a question for you, but I’d like to ask over the phone. Could I have your number?

@TheRealBenHolder: You want my phone number?

@WhitGranthamOfficial: Yes.

@TheRealBenHolder: Should I be nervous?

@WhitGranthamOfficial: Why would you be nervous for me to call you?

@TheRealBenHolder: People don’t call each other anymore. This sounds serious.

@WhitGranthamOfficial: It’s nothing bad. Or, I don’t think you’ll think it’s bad.

@TheRealBenHolder: You sound uncertain.

@WhitGranthamOfficial: If you don’t want to give me your number, it’s ok. I don’t want you to feel pressured. We’ll just proceed as if I never asked.

And here it was. The newest message, which had popped up in the last twenty minutes as I’d done everything I could think of to avoid obsessively refreshing the app and stalking his username until he answered.

We’d been messaging back and forth for about two weeks. He’d liked one of the photos I’d taken on the tour he’d given me of Fort Campbell military base and had then started following me. I’d messaged him personally once certain it was, in fact, him, and we started chatting. We sent messages every day, and I wasn’t ashamed to admit I enjoyed every interaction we’d had.

So much so, in fact, that I wanted to see him again, and he was easygoing enough that he might be able to handle attending an event with me. He didn’t seem to take himself too seriously, and though he’d been shocked to meet me and had done the most adorable little stuttering, awkward introduction when we’d met at my cousin’s house, he hadn’t been tongue-tied at any point after that.

That was rare.

He’d been a different man than on our first interaction, and I suppose that was his right—it had been over a year, after all. The contrast had proven startling, and fascinating.

Even after two weeks, he hadn’t asked me for anything, nor had he tried to pry into my personal life or flirt with me. Maybe some of our exchanges were flirty , if you really wanted to call them that, but mostly, they were fun.

Very little fun existed in my life anymore.

Not that being a world-famous Country singer wasn’t fun. It is . It’s the dream. It made me abandon my parents’ plan for my life and finally succumb to the call of my passion—I couldn’t ignore it. It’d been my dream since I’d heard Patsy Cline’s Showcase at a friend’s house one afternoon around age eight.

I grew up a veritable musical prodigy, if only because my parents were determined I would be, and I got into Juilliard for college. And left after sixteen months, dropping out just before the end of my second year to audition for SouthernSound , a TV show that looked for the latest Country star. The producers kept my history of privilege and training a secret, partly at my request, and since then, I’d managed to stay separate from my family and my past by freezing out all questions about all that at every turn and requiring iron-clad non-disclosures from anyone I worked with.

Despite the secrecy and their own anonymity from my fame, if I could have done something more appalling to Cynthia and Stuart Grantham, something they would have disapproved of more, I can’t imagine what it would have been.

But my determination to achieve—though it won me a recording contract and had launched me into superstardom with two platinum records in just a little over four years, crazy successful tours, and fame so incessant that I was rarely left alone in a room—kept me reaching, working, striving .

Fun had never been natural to me—part of me suspected the Grantham ancestry had done its best to breed out any tendency toward fun centuries ago.

Ben Holder was fun—my opposite in about every way. He was tall—me? Vertically challenged. He was blond and golden—I had pale skin and dark hair. Seemingly laid back outwardly, I did suspect he still had a lot going on inside. Outwardly, I presented as stoic unless on stage or interviewing, and inside, a raging pile of insecurities and dissatisfaction fomented.

So, you know, fun .

I thought about what to say when I dialed him and wondered if he’d be awkward, or if I would. Like almost every one of my acquaintances other than my publicist, I hated talking on the phone. But for this, it felt necessary.

I tapped his number, and my phone dialed before I could second-guess the choice. One ring, two.

“Hello?”

Ben’s voice made my heart beat faster.

“Uh, hi. Ben?” If I hadn’t gotten nervous, I might have rolled my eyes.

“Yes?”

“Hey, this is Whit. Whit Grantham?” Why do I sound like I’m not sure of my own name?

“I would have known you by your voice, Whit.”

I could hear the smile in his tone.

“Oh, okay. Well… thanks for taking my call.”

“I’m unlikely to ever not take a call from you, even if I have to walk out of church to take it.”

“You were at church? You could have called me back—it’s not urgent.”

“It’s all right. What can I do for you?”

His voice sounded warm and smooth, and I marveled, my stomach plummeting, at his asking what he could do for me . Assistants and staff, even random people, were always asking me that, but in this case, it felt more genuine than any time before now.

I cleared away the surprise, launching into business mode, where I should have started. “I’m wondering if you’re busy two weeks from yesterday.”

Silence.

I pulled the phone back and checked to make sure the call hadn’t dropped—it hadn’t.

Finally, he spoke. “You know, I’m not sure what day that is. Do you know the calendar day?”

Something off tinged his voice, but I couldn’t tell what .

“The fifteenth of October.”

A low voice murmured on the other end, Ben’s response covering it, though it was muffled, like he held the phone against his chest. “I should be free the fifteenth, sure. What am I signing up for?”

“It’s a charity event. A fundraiser for a local music school. It should be relatively low-key, though I’m sure you can guess that doing anything with me isn’t particularly low-key.”

I kept the regret firmly out of my voice. I didn’t need pity for my fame—didn’t want it, either.

“I can imagine. Do I need to know anything before we do this?”

I crawled onto the couch and sank back into the plush pillows. “I don’t think so. Probably just that you should simply nod and smile, and don’t worry about answering questions.”

That covered the basics. I didn’t want to overload him, and the small event should mean there wouldn’t be too much press.

“And your boyfriend? What’s he going to say about you showing up there with me?”

I smiled to myself, enjoying Ben’s casual approach to the subject.

“Since he doesn’t exist, I don’t expect he’ll say much at all.”

“Jamie Morris doesn’t exist?”

A chill ran through me. So he did know a bit about me.

Weeks ago, when we chatted, he’d seemed entirely oblivious to everything surrounding me except my music and a little bit about how I came to fame through the show. Of course, he’d also just found out I was Reese’s cousin. Whether he’d talked to Reese about me, which would have been fruitless since I knew Reese wouldn’t share any personal details, or Ben had searched the Internet, he’d clearly found out about the gossip and a sliver of my dating history.

“Jamie Morris does exist, but he has no bearing on this conversation.”

Another pause. Then, “All right. I’ll be there.”