Chapter XVII
Roman
I couldn’t believe I was traipsing across the resort’s property in the middle of the night. But my god side refused to let me sleep until I fixed things with Demi. She was livid and obviously hated me. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why. And I couldn’t say I exactly blamed her.
But what did she think being on a reality TV show meant?
People tuned in for the drama. And Jazzy was just doing her job.
Sure, I didn’t agree with it or approve of trying to make Demi this season’s antagonist, but given her application and video, even our first interview, it was easy to see why Jazzy would go in that direction.
Ratings had been down since we’d had zero matches in the last few seasons.
Thanks to Demi, I might add. The network had been breathing down our necks.
So, I could understand why Jazzy had done what she’d done today.
Too bad she had no idea who she was up against. Even I had underestimated Demi.
She was going to turn my show into a damn slumber party.
She’d turned today’s photo shoot into what looked like a sorority reunion. The amount of hugging and the number of compliments was almost nauseating.
Truth be told, Demi had impressed me today.
As bad as it was for my show, she stole the spotlight—and looked gorgeous doing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about her in that gown. It didn’t just show off the body the gods had gifted her. It revealed the one she’d earned, crafted and perfected.
I had to quit thinking like this. It was my job to help her find love. Not to be infatuated with her.
But when I landed in front of her cabin, the Cupid in me came out in full force. And did what Cupids sometimes do. Thinking up sonnets to recite. Ballads to sing. Love poems to carve into tree bark.
What in the actual hell?
This had to stop. But there seemed to be no stopping it.
Almost against my will Shakespeare started running through my mind—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
That’s for amateurs, I couldn’t help but think.
Summer paled in comparison to Demi. She deserved something original. Something epic. Something that rhymed.
Absolutely not.
This was not happening. The Titans be damned before I let this go any further. Apparently, my divine half was going rogue. The “Ballad of the Locked-Hearted Goddess” started scripting itself—without my permission.
I fought.
I resisted.
I mentally shouted, Stop!
But the lines came anyway. To the tune of “Scarborough Fair,” no less. Because why not add medieval flair to my slow spiral into insanity?
In twilight’s hush where mortals dream,
She walks with grace, a shadowed gleam.
A heart once crowned in love’s domain,
Now wrapped in silk and silent pain.
Her laughter once could stir the skies,
Now guarded by a thousand ties.
Yet still the stars lean in to hear
The echo of a wish too near.
O goddess forged in flame and frost,
Who counts each heartbeat as a cost—
Let not your walls deny the spark
That waits beyond the veil and dark.
For even gods may kneel and fall,
And even stone may heed love’s call.
So let me sing, though she may flee—
The ballad of what could still be.
I didn’t want to admit it, but that was good.
Too good.
It even rivaled some of the ballads and sonnets my father had penned—or helped others pen. Shakespeare. Irving Berlin. Billy Joel . . . You didn’t think he won over Christie Brinkley on his own, did you? But its being good made it worse.
I shook my head, trying to banish the beautiful words. But then I heard myself think: Sing them. Unleash them. Let her hear.
I ignored the pleas.
Instead, I stared at the darkened cabin. Only the porch light glowed. No movement. No shadows. Clearly, no one was awake. No surprise there considering it was past midnight. Yet there I stood, like an infatuated idiot with a rogue Cupid side composing ballads in my brain.
This had to be Zeus.
Could he tamper with that part of myself?
I’d thought there were immortal laws preventing that sort of thing.
But Zeus was a bastard who thought he was above even his own laws. After all, the guy had sent his own great-granddaughter on a quest. It doesn’t get much lower than that.
Or perhaps this was all stemming from my Cupid’s relentless desire to read Demi’s heart.
The only heart he’d never been able to decipher, though it was clearly full of pain.
Maybe it was a challenge for him that he just needed to get out of his system.
But he had to have known that it was a vain desire.
I didn’t hold the key to unlocking Demi’s heart.
I turned to head back to my cabin, berating myself for even coming. I was putting my show—and my crew—at risk with this asinine behavior.
But my inner self stopped me.
Go to her!
“She’s asleep,” I muttered to no one but myself.
Forget the slow spiral into insanity. I was sprinting toward it in designer loafers. But I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I marched off, convinced I was in control—only to trip over a pile of tiny pebbles that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
You know what to do with these, I heard inside my head.
I was beginning to think my Cupid side was in league with Zeus. And they were scripting a cheesy rom-com.
Except they forgot one thing: I wasn’t the leading man. I was here to find Demi’s costar.
So why did the gods keep pushing us together? What was the purpose? I supposed I’d better find out or I wasn’t getting any sleep tonight. Reluctantly, I gathered the pebbles, hardly believing I was about to toss them at Demi’s window like some wannabe Romeo.
But that’s exactly what I found myself doing—standing outside the window I somehow knew belonged to Demi.
At least I hoped so. I just prayed it wasn’t Cassie’s, or that she wasn’t sharing a bedroom with Demi.
No telling what she would do if I woke her up.
Truth be told, it surprised me I hadn’t been hexed into oblivion as soon as I’d neared the cabin.
I’d seen the murderous look in Cassie’s eyes aimed directly at me during the photo shoot.
If my show and I survived this season, it was going to be a miracle.
I stared at the handful of pebbles I held, hardly believing I was actually doing this.
I’d never done anything even remotely this cheesy—not even when I was dating my ex-wife.
Maybe if I had, things would have turned out differently.
But for whatever reason, the Cupid part of me had never connected with Carmen.
Now I had to hold him back—he was drunk on inspiration, ready to compose a songbook’s worth of ballads for a woman not meant to be mine.
Feeling foolish, tired, and ready to get this humiliation over with, I tossed the first one. Gently. Not enough to break the glass, just enough to clink against it. It gave a soft, deliberate sound. Like knocking on the edge of a dream—or a cabin—I wasn’t supposed to enter.
I waited a moment, and no sign of life appeared, so I tossed a few more. Nothing. I decided one more and I was done. I pulled back my arm and let it fly, only to connect with Demi’s gorgeous head and not the pane. In what was the worst timing ever, Demi had finally thrown open her window.
“Ouch!” She rubbed her head. “What’s wrong with you?” Her sleepy voice was groggy but furious. “Humiliating me and trying to make the entire cast hate me wasn’t enough for you? Now you have to wake me up and throw rocks at my face?”
I rushed forward ready to apologize and make sure she was okay, only to be stopped in my tracks when I noticed the clingy pink nightshirt she was wearing that was slipping off one shoulder, her fiery hair pulled up sexily, a few strands framing her heart-shaped face. She was, in a word, breathtaking.
And I?
I was toast.
“Uh, you’re not wearing black,” I said. Not smoothly or charmingly. Just—tragically. Who had I become? I was a god of love, but I sounded more like a simpering idiot going through puberty.
Demi curled her lip at me as if to say, Congratulations, genius, you’re not colorblind.
I shook my head. “What I meant to say was, I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“I was until some jerk decided to throw rocks at my window and then at me in the middle of the night.”
“They were pebbles,” I teased. Probably not the best time, given she looked two seconds away from asking Cassie to poison me. Again.
“That makes it so much better. What are you doing here? More like, how are you even here? Cassie hexed the crap out of this place to keep you out.”
Figured. But it strengthened my theory that the gods wanted or maybe even needed Demi and me to be friends. Or worse, something impossible. As for the other question? I ran a hand through my hair, wondering the same damn thing. What was I doing here?
When I said nothing, she rolled her eyes and began lowering the window.
“Wait,” I blurted. “I’m sorry about today. Or yesterday. Whatever it is now.”
My apology only seemed to infuriate her more, judging by her curled, pouty lips.
“I can’t believe I let you fool me again. All your talk about wanting to be friends. It was just your way of getting into my head. What were you trying to do? Get some juicy details you could use against me? Ugh, and I told you I loved All My Immortal Children.”
Fool her again? When had I fooled her in the first place? I didn’t have time to unpack that one. I braved taking a few steps toward her.
“Demi,” I said, softer. “I didn’t know Jazzy had planned to make you this season’s antagonist.”
“You mean villain?” Demi spat.
“Fine. Villain,” I conceded.
“Yeah, I’m sure you had no idea,” she snapped. “Mr. Executive Producer and Host.”
“I swear I didn’t,” I said, carefully. “But . . . your audition video, your first interview, your application—” I hesitated. “You have to admit, they kind of gave off . . . villain vibes.”
Her eyes narrowed. Not just narrowed—lasered. Straight through my soul.
Ouch.
One of my jokester half-brothers had accidentally pierced me with an arrow before. This was worse. This was emotional evisceration at its finest.
“Oh,” she sang, syrupy sweet with venom underneath. “So what you’re really saying is—your show isn’t about helping people find love at all.”
She leaned forward, eyes on fire.
“It’s about typecasting them into whatever roles and agendas you need to boost your ratings. Villain. Hero. Comic relief. Anything for the sake of a good promo. And here I thought you said you didn’t cheapen and sell love.”
She gave a mock gasp.
“Hmm. You might want to rethink that position.”
Then she snarled. And I swear, the moon flickered in fear.
I stepped closer.
Close enough to feel the heat rolling off her. To catch the sweet scent of her skin. To see her kaleidoscope eyes swirling like a category 5 hurricane.
“You and I need to get one thing clear,” I said, voice low but steady. “I do not sell or cheapen love. Yes, I have a show to run. Yes, ratings matter. And thanks to you—and the way you ran the Bureau—they’re down.”
Her eyes flared, but I pressed on.
“Regardless, I care about every cast member who walks onto that set. I do my best to help them find love. Real love. Can you say the same, daughter of Eros? Do you truly care if people find it?”
Even in the dark, I saw her cheeks blaze red. It did nothing to diminish her beauty. It amplified it.
“I was only trying to protect people.” Her voice cracked, close to tears.
“From what?”
“From the types of love that hurt.” She paused. “From the kind that hurt me.”
She immediately slapped a hand over her mouth. As if the words had escaped without permission and they betrayed her.
Her admission took her and me off guard.
“I have to go,” she said quickly.
She straightened, arms rising to close the window. She was going to shut me out. That I couldn’t have.
I risked life and limb and gently caught her arm. Her soft and warm skin was too familiar. The god in me buzzed to life. Or maybe this time it was me who wanted to know her heart. Wanted to know why she felt the need to protect people from love. And who had hurt her.
“Demi,” I whispered, trying to keep my other half at bay. He wanted to unleash the ballad he’d written for her. “I’m sorry, I came off harsher than I meant to.”
She looked up, avoiding my gaze, yet she didn’t pull away from me.
“I deserve it. You don’t think I know everyone blames me for all the unhappiness in the world right now?
Even my father does. But I had good intentions.
Either way . . .” She hit me with her perfected glare.
“I won’t be your show’s villain. And I have every intention of helping each woman this season find true love, even if the goddess part of me has been known to give faulty information. ”
“What?” I blinked. “That’s not possible. Those sides of us don’t lie.”
“Well, mine has once. Anyway . . .”
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. But it did.
“Hold on. We aren’t skipping past this. I need to know what happened.” I was more than curious about why she thought her goddess had lied to her. Maybe I could help her see she was mistaken. And possibly salvage the fragile friendship we’d tried to forge.
She squared her shoulders.
“That’s never happening. Just know this, Roman Archer, I will not play some wicked role for your show or let anyone tell me what my story is going to be.”
She pointed at her nightshirt.
“There will be no more black clothes. No more trying to pit me against anyone. I am going to be the perkiest, cutest, biggest cheerleader you have ever seen. And with any luck, I’ll have matches made for everyone by the end of week one, and it will be an entire season of corny, sappy love and everything my rule book goes against.”
She flashed me a snarky grin. Like she’d just declared war with pom-poms.
“Get ready to take notes, son of Cupid.”
I’ll give her this—she was radiant in her rage. Albeit scary. I dropped my hand and stared at her incredulously. She was going to do more than sabotage my show—she was going to take it over.
“Oh, and don’t bother running with me tomorrow,” she added. “I’d rather have a tree fall on me than let you try to get into my head again and use it against me for ratings.”
“I wouldn’t—” I started, desperate to defend myself and try to steer this conversation back to the original intent of my traipsing over here in the middle of the night.
Didn’t she see the gods were determined to meddle?
Determined to forge some type of friendship between us, come hell or high water. Most likely hell at this rate.
“Good night,” she chirped, way too happily and with a victorious smirk. Then, she slammed the window shut and yanked the curtains closed like the closing punctuation mark in her declaration of war.
Well.
That hadn’t gone how I’d planned.
You should’ve sung her the ballad, my rogue half chided.
Oh, I had a ballad for her, all right:
“Closed-Hearted Goddess of Love, Bane of My Existence.”