Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Deacon
My heartbeat drummed in my ears. My whole body shook in silent rage as the phone rang and rang and rang and Cody never answered.
Finally, I got one text message: I quit.
Reading that message was like being smacked with a wall of ice.
No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. How could he do this to me? After all these years?
I gripped my phone so tightly I thought I might break it as I left the house still yanking my T-shirt on. I stormed across the gravel road and up the hill toward the zoo, finding a suspicious number of boats in the harbor as I went.
Shit. I’d been afraid this would happen. I had wanted a slow, controlled announcement of our relationship. Instead, Cody had mutinied me. Luca was already on the phone with my lawyer. I was going to sue the shit out of that son of a bitch.
But lawsuits could wait. My first concern was warning Dove before she saw any of the vitriol being printed about her. Running barefoot up the cold pavement, I braced against the morning chill as steam curled from my lips. I ran up the front steps of the old house—the one filled with thousands of memories—as Evelyn’s old dog, Phoebe, announced my arrival with a chorus of barks.
“I’m here.” I threw open the door, not bothering to knock, and tumbled into the kitchen to find five members of the Lachlan clan staring daggers at me and, behind them, Dove with red-rimmed eyes. My heart shattered at the sight of her.
A white-hot knot lodged in my throat. “Can I talk to you?” My chest rose and fell in heaves. “Cody just rage quit and released a bunch of nonsense to the media, and we’re hiring a crisis PR team and going to sue his ass and we’re going to deal with it?—”
Hawk took a step forward, crossing his arms tightly across his chest, his eyes filled with the kind of rage that made me take a step back. He was definitely about to punch me. “Did you sleep with Lynx Madigan?”
All the blood drained from my face at that question. “What? I . . . How did you . . .”
Finch tossed her phone to me and on the screen was a grainy video of twenty-three-year-old me kissing Lynx Madigan on a not-so-private Queensland beach.
“That son of a bitch,” I growled. “How could he do this to me? I thought he’d killed that story years ago. But of course, he kept it just in case he ever needed it.”
I hadn’t realized I’d said all of that out loud until the group around me collectively grumbled, inching closer, as if they might mob me like a troop of baboons. I looked at Dove pleadingly. “It was a long time ago. We?—”
“I think you should leave, Deacon,” Finch snarled, rising an inch, and I wondered if she was thinking about all the ways she could kill me and make it look like an accident.
“No,” I choked out. “Dove, please, talk to me.”
Hawk took another step, and I was certain then that I was about to get my ass kicked, when Dove barked, “Stop.” She moved around her brother, eyes downcast, not meeting mine. “It’s fine, guys. Let’s just talk outside.”
I thanked every spirit in existence for that as I followed her quietly out the door and down the main path, away from view of her inevitably prying family.
“I am so sorry about these stories,” I said. “I promise they’ll all die down in a week or two. Luca is already on top of it. We’ll have a new team hired in the next hour and—” I reached for her, and when she stepped away, it felt like someone cleaved my chest in half.
She wiped angry tears from her eyes. “Explain the Madigan thing to me,” she demanded. “You knew my family hated them. How did your paths ever even cross? Unless it’s true you have a weird fetish thing for zookeepers.”
“Dove,” I begged. “It’s not like that. We met on a photoshoot when I was touring Australia as Lucky Role,” I explained, scrubbing a hand down my face. “It was an Australian tourism campaign. I was still making a name for myself and it was good money and?—”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“I . . .”
“That’s not a no,” she said tightly. “So that’s how it is.”
“It was five years ago.” I reached out and again she stepped away. “Just a one-night thing. It meant nothing. I was a rock star, for fuck’s sake. I mean, we’ve both had other people.”
“Oh, spare me,” she gritted out. “I don’t care if you were elbows deep in pussy for the last decade, you don’t just accidentally fuck your best friends’ archenemy. You did it for a reason, why?”
“Because I missed you!” I erupted. “And I thought I could feel something about her as a substitute since you never answered my messages and cut me out of your life. I wanted to feel something like what I felt for you, and it was immediately clear to me how stupid that was, and that was it. I never talked to her again. I?—”
“You fucked her because you missed me ?” Dove seethed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. And the photos?”
“Lynx called the paps.”
“Of course she did,” Dove said with a bitter laugh. “I could’ve told you that she’d do that. She’s been chasing fame her entire life. You should’ve known better.”
“I got Cody to pay them off to kill the story,” I offered. “I didn’t think it would pop up again. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” she muttered.
I reared my head back. “What? Really?” I was prepared for a long punishment and many acts of penance, not her instant forgiveness.
“Yeah,” she murmured, wiping under her eyes. “I mean, I’m still pissed about it, but we all did some really dumb shit when we were younger. And the Madigans are total manipulative snakes.”
“Then why are you crying?” I reached for her, and she took another step away. “Dove, please. Why are you pulling away from me?”
“Because all of those articles are true.” A sob wracked through her. “In some small ways, they’re right. Him with her ? All those comments.”
“You know better than to read the comments?—”
“I can’t live with the entire world hating me forever,” she cried. “Even if I don’t have social media or never go online, I can’t deal with having every girl who’s ever fantasized about you wishing I were dead, threatening to hurt my family. I can’t travel the world with you always worrying that I’ve put them in danger just because I was too selfish to give you up.”
“I will keep them safe,” I pleaded. “I’ll hire a full-time security team. This place will be Fort Knox for as long as it needs to be. But this will all die down soon, you’ll see. The internet has a shorter memory than a goldfish.”
“Goldfishes’ memories aren’t actually that short,” she retorted, so stubborn she had to correct my animal facts even as she was crying.
I gave her a soft smile. “It will quiet down. I promise you.”
“But it will always be there,” she said. “And I can’t be that person for you. You know I don’t want to live in a spotlight. I don’t know if I can survive all that comes with it.”
“I’ll quit acting,” I announced, carrying on even as Dove shook her head. “I just got everything I ever wanted and I’m not giving it up. I’ll quit today. Consider me retired.”
“No. You can’t?—”
“Dove, please,” I begged. “I don’t care about anything as much as I care about being with you.”
“I’m not going to ruin your career.” Her voice cracked. “You’ve got songs to write. The world deserves your music, Deacon. It’s your calling, your passion. I know you want that, and I won’t be the one to take it from you. You are made for this life.”
“I’m made for you.” The words caught in my throat as my eyes began to well. “I love you more than any of it, Dove. I want this more. Please, I love you.”
“You can’t love me anymore,” she replied definitively, her words a knife to my heart. As if it were a switch I could just flip. “It will only hurt us both in the end, more than it already has. I’m taking myself out of this equation.”
“You’re pulling away from me before I can let you down again. But I promise I won’t,” I vowed. “I won’t move on from this, from us, please. Don’t do this.”
I grabbed her, and for one split second I thought she’d change her mind as she lifted on her toes and kissed me. Salty tears coated our lips, and I tried to silently tell her all the things I felt, all the memories only she and I shared, all the dreams I knew we still shared together too.
But when she lowered back down, she choked out, “Please don’t follow me.” She took another step. “Goodbye, Deacon.”
I saw my heart rip in two as she walked away, half of my soul going after her, half staying put. I watched as the ghost of me followed her and took her hand and we wandered off into a life of love, marriage, a family one day, a quieter life. I’d write the music that spoke to the deepest parts of me, and she’d save the world one endangered species at a time. I felt in my bones what it would be like to live that life more viscerally than I felt my feet on the ground now, and I watched as that future flickered away, out of sight.