CHAPTER THREE
Jaxon
I’m not a voyeur, but I love people watching.
Ducking lower behind a bush, I hold my breath as a family walks by. They’re arguing about how much farther to go before they turn around. The parents want to keep going, to enjoy nature, to see the views from the summit.
The kids, who appear to be around thirteen and ten, just want to go home so they can skateboard with their friends.
The parents are so determined to have this experience whether or not the kids want it and are clearly getting frustrated.
I listen in like a damn creeper, and I am fascinated.
I’m beyond fascinated.
I never experienced this as a kid. I started working when I was eight, singing in a commercial for breakfast cereal and starring in a kids’ show that was more singing than acting.
I wanted to perform more than anything in the world and my parents worked their asses off to help me get to where I am.
No matter how I feel about them now. I can’t deny they supported me in the beginning.
But I never had a family day out for a hike. And I have no idea if my brothers and my sister did. I never even had the luxury of whining to go home, because every audition and every day of work was my choice.
My parents sacrificed so much for me. Back then, I suspected if they got any hint I wasn’t having fun, they’d pull the plug on the whole thing. I got really good at pretending to be happy. So good, I convinced myself most of the time.
It was my Aunt Lorraine who saw through all my pretenses and insisted I spend summers, or whatever time off I could manage, in Catalpa Creek with her. She’s the reason I’m here now, playing Bigfoot. The general store she owns is finally back in the black thanks to all the Bigfoot souvenirs she’s selling.
The family passes me, and I get up and move on, searching for Bigfoot hunters. I have to give them the occasional sighting or they might get bored. And if they stop looking for me, they’ll stop shopping at my aunt’s store.
Thunder rumbles in the distance, and I head back to the house. Barley hates thunder and I’m not going to leave him to suffer alone if I can help it.
I pick up my pace. After wandering the woods in this costume for months, I’ve gotten good at moving in it and I know the trails well enough not to run into any trees. It feels good to run, even if it is too hot inside this costume.
I rush out of the forest onto my driveway and realize way too late there’s a person standing there. Nothing is stopping my momentum and I barrel right into Honey. She starts to fall back and I’m so off balance, there’s no way I’ll catch her without also falling on top of her.
Thinking fast, I grab her and twist, so I hit the ground on my back and she lands on top of me.
She makes an adorable squeak, and the air leaves me in a loud “oof” as I slam onto the gravel.
It takes me a moment to catch my breath, not just because it was knocked out of me when I fell, but also at the shock of holding this woman in my arms.
In a life where reality has never lived up to the fairy tale, she feels better than I could have imagined. I wish I was touching her skin-to-skin.
“You make a comfy pillow,” she says conversationally.
I let go of her and press my arms against the gravelly ground until I feel the pinch of the stones through my furry sleeves. She is off limits for so many reasons, but chief among them is that the things in life that have always felt the most perfect and real have always burned me the worst.
She lifts her head, confusion clouding her eyes for only a moment before she smiles the fakest smile I’ve ever seen and rolls off me. Her nose ring glints in the sunlight and I notice a small bird tattooed on her right wrist when she lifts her hand to push her hair behind an ear studded with four different piercings.
She hops to her feet, still wearing that insincere smile, and offers me a hand.
I don’t take it, but roll up to a stand in one swift move learned from years of dance classes.
Her fake smile should warn me away, but it only makes me want to step closer and find out what’s underneath. What’s she really feeling right now?
I’m a connoisseur of pretending, but genuine emotion is elusive.
“The costume is even more impressive up close.” Her voice is so syrupy sweet I feel dizzy from the sugar high. She’s up to something. Probably back for another attempt to convince me to help her.
I’m not going to give in. Three more songs, and my album is complete. I can’t let my muse become real or I’ll lose the thread, that creative spirit and flow I couldn’t find in LA after everything went bad.
I need to get back to the only thing that’s ever really made any sense to me. The only thing that’s ever felt like safety.
“Give me five minutes to get out of this monkey suit?”
She giggles like I’m funny, but I’ve never been funny. I hate this fake plastic version of her. The only reason I’m not asking her to leave is that I need to find out what she’s really up to.
At least, that’s what I tell myself. It has nothing to do with the loneliness wrapped around me like a dark hole. Nothing to do with my desperation to escape myself and my own thoughts.
“Sure,” she says. “I’ll go say hi to Barley.”
I nod once, spin, and hurry into the house, as desperate to get away from her as I am for her to stay.
There’s no getting out of the Bigfoot costume quickly, and I try not to think about how good Honey felt in my arms or how smooth and toned her legs looked under her black pleated skirt as I remove the head and place it on its stand.
I try not to wonder if she put on eyeliner and lipstick just for me as I peel the suit from my sweaty body.
I try not to wonder how her red lips will taste or how easily I could slide my hands under her skirt and grab her ass as I pull her tight against me.
I fail on all counts. I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this woman already to figure out how to stop now.
It was five months ago that I saw her for the first time, walking the fields next to her house in the moonlight, her pale skin glowing, her dark hair a veil. I watched her for a while, trying to figure out what she was doing, if she needed help.
Turns out, she was just enjoying a moonlit stroll. By the time I figured it out, it was too late for me.
I was gone for the woman I’d never met and doubted I ever would. I groan aloud at the memory of how I imagined holding her even then, long before I had a right to.
I still don’t have a right to.
But she crept into my brain, the most perfect woman I could imagine, kind and wild and sexy as hell. So far removed from the mess of my life that I could forget about it myself when I watched her, when I imagined us together.
That fairy tale vision of us woke up the creative part of me that had been sleeping, and I wrote music again for the first time in nearly a year.
It’s unnecessary, but I raise my arm and sniff my pit, already knowing it’ll be bad. She won’t mind if I take a quick shower. It’s better than her smelling me.
And if she does mind, maybe she’ll get bored and leave. Best-case scenario.
No artist wants their muse to become a real woman.
I shower quickly, ignoring my aching cock. There’s no time for that and it feels like a violation to get off to fantasies of Honey when she’s just outside, close enough to hear my moans.
My phone rings from my nightstand as I’m pulling on a pair of jeans. I grab it, hoping for good news, relief coursing through me when I see my agent’s name on the screen.
“Rafaella. Please tell me I can come home.”
She clears her throat. “Jaxon, you know I always want to tell you what you want to hear.”
My heart sinks, and I tug at my hair. “What happened?”
“I love the latest song you sent over. It’s a firecracker. Your fans are going to eat it up.”
Rafaella is thirty-five years older than me and prefers alternative rock, but she’s never been wrong about what the fans want yet. “What’s the bad news?”
“Vivian posted photos of the two of you and implied they were taken while you were with Lucia. It was one thing when the world thought you’d cheated on her with Roxy. Your true fans could believe you were in love with both of them. Add in a third woman and people are out for blood.”
I groan. “Why did I ever let you talk me into this shit plan?”
“I fucked up.” Rafaella sounds truly remorseful and she should, damn it. “I thought a bit of bad boy would increase your appeal. I underestimated how beloved Lucia is.”
I want to be angry with her, but that wouldn’t be fair. “It’s not your fault. Lucia set this whole thing in motion when she publicly accused me of cheating on her and left us with no good choices.” The image flashes in my mind of her on her back, Theo’s bare ass flexing as he pumped into her. I didn’t love her, but I was on my way to it. Maybe. It’s not just losing her that hurts, it’s feeling like an idiot for trusting her. “She has that angelic image to protect. I just didn’t expect it to detonate my career this way.” Once the story was out, Rafaella and I felt we had no choice but to go along with it and make sure no innocents got caught in the crosshairs. Roxie was immediately on board to help us out.
“Your career isn’t detonated. We just need another story to overshadow this one. People have short memories.”
“Any chance we can get Vivian to admit the pics are from two years ago?”
“Don’t you think I’ve already tried that? Her last movie tanked, and she lost a role she was up for later this year. She’s desperate to become relevant.”
“I will never understand why anyone would choose this hell.” Roxie didn’t have a problem with it either when the plan was explained to her. Unlike Vivian, her solo career after years of working as a child actor was just taking off, and she wanted the world to see her as a sexy adult instead of a little kid. She did the talk show circuit crying about how much she loved me and how she made a mistake. I had to go into hiding.
I should have learned my lesson long ago. There’s no way to predict how the world will react to anything. “I’ve got to go. I’ll send you another song in a few days.”
“About that,” she says slowly. “Keep sending the songs, but you understand we can’t put out your new album until this shit dies down, right?”
I want to punch myself in the face for not seeing this coming. “Yeah, I know.”
I drop my phone on the bed, because there’s no one else I want to talk to who might be calling.
I pull on a t-shirt and head back outside.
Honey’s leaning against the fence around Barley’s cage, watching him climb on his play structures. He’s showing off for her.
“What do you do for a living?” she asks, without looking back at me.
I’m barefoot, and I have no idea how she heard me coming. The idea that she’s as attuned to me as I am to her and senses me creeps into my thoughts. That’s just more of the fairytale. It can’t be real.
Her black hair hangs straight and thick and nearly to her waist, where her skirt curves over her shapely ass and just covers the top of her thighs.
I look away and focus on the question.
She has to be fucking with me. Even if she hasn’t talked to Clover about me, she must recognize me from magazines at the checkout line, if nowhere else.
But the idea that she doesn’t know who I am… Well, that turns me the fuck on.
“I mean, it’s clear you have money,” she continues. “But based on the times of the Bigfoot sightings, you’re not going to a nine-to-five every day.” She spins and faces me. “Do you work from home?”
Tempting and somewhat close to the truth, but if she spends any time here, she’ll twig to the fact I have no work-from-home space set up. “I’m on sabbatical.”
She screws up her face, confused. It looks like actual emotion. I’m probably getting it all wrong, but I feel like I can read her. “Sabbatical from what? Are you some sort of high-paid priest?”
I snort. “I’m a college professor.” I only know they take sabbaticals because I have a distant cousin in the profession “I teach music.” As soon as they’re out of my mouth, I regret the words. It’s too close to what I actually do.
Her brows rise and her mouth quirks. “I had no idea that sort of gig paid so well.”
Since I have no clue what she’s basing her estimation of my wealth on and I have no idea what a professor’s salary is, I sink deeper into the lie. “I inherited the house from my grandmother.”
She nods but doesn’t look convinced. “About the treasure hunt—”
“Still not interested.”
She presses her lips together hard, her eyes flaring with some hot emotion. I brace for impact.
I’m fully expecting to like it.
She looks away and, when she looks back, that stupid fake smile is in place. “I did hear you say that, but I have an offer to sweeten the deal.”
“There’s nothing you have that I want.” Nothing worth spending more time with her and discovering she can’t match up to the muse of my fantasies. Nothing worth getting closer to a woman I’m already dangerously obsessed with and risking a betrayal like Lucia’s.
She taps her chin. “But there might be something Barley wants.”
I stare at her, flummoxed. “Pretty sure Barley has everything he could ever want or need.”
She looks around at Barley’s top-notch playground and her lips curve up in the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her, a smile that crows triumph.
I’m leaning toward her, my body lit with desire, before she says the first word.
“He doesn’t have a wife.”
I swear, Barley lets out a tiny grunt of longing and it’s an emotion I totally relate to at the moment. “I’m sure I can find Barley a wife myself.”
Her eyes sparkle. “She won’t be as good as who I’ve found for Barley. Trust me, I’m a true matchmaker when it comes to animals.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Really?”
She snorts. “No, but I promise, Barley is going to love the lady goat I have in mind.”
Barley ma-aaas in a tone that sounds like a plea. “I’ll think about it.”
She grins. “Great. I’ll be back tomorrow to start treasure hunting.” She spins on her heel toward the front of the house.
“I didn’t say yes. I’m probably not going to say yes.”
She doesn’t even look back, just waves over her shoulder as she leaves. “See you soon.”
I groan. “I have a terrible feeling about this, Barley. What do you think? Should I forbid her from ever stepping foot on my property again or help her?”
Unfortunately, Barley chooses to keep his opinions to himself.