Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Do I still believe in true love? Yeah, I guess I do. I think the hard part is knowing when you’ve found it and knowing what’s just an imitation.”
Lolling around at an all-inclusive Mediterranean resort might seem glamorous, but the next few days are torture. Week four seeps into week five with minimal fanfare—just a perfunctory ceremony where Roland tells us he can see a future with all of us, and Addison rolls her eyes.
On TV, it’ll seem like the overnight dates are back-to-back, but in reality Roland gets a day or two in between to, uh … recover.
For the first few days of the week, as filming focuses on Monica’s overnight date and then heads up the coast on Roland’s “recovery day” for interviews, Rhett is nowhere to be found.
But on the evening of Addison’s overnight date, a sheet of paper is slipped under my door.
Midnight. Meet me at the beach—R
My heart thrums as I run my fingers over the words. R for Rhett, R for Roland—but I’m fairly confident about who sent this note.
Just before midnight, I pull on a tank top and palazzo pants and hide the new burner phone in my pocket so no one finds it while I’m out. If anyone notices I’m gone, I hope they’ll assume I’m on a midnight stroll.
I walk through the deserted garden in the back of the hotel, my way lit by hidden lamps in the stubby bushes that make them glow like radioactive sheep. Following a line of cypress trees, I head down to the beach and kick off my sandals.
“You came.”
I whirl around as Rhett emerges from the darkness like a shadow. He’s swapped the garish floral shirt for a short-sleeve button-up and jeans. When he holds out his hand, I take it, his guitar-string calluses rubbing against my fingers.
We set off, not toward the hotel’s beachfront, but in the other direction.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He just shakes his head, a small smile on his lips.
Once we’re around the bend of the beach, he stops and turns to me.
For a heartbeat, he looks deep into my eyes, then he slips a hand around the back of my neck, draws me closer, and kisses me.
I melt into him like sugar in water, fingers tangling in his hair, his hand steadying my back.
He tastes like lime and sun and sweat and sand and—
“I missed you,” he growls against my lips.
I lace our fingers together. His jaw ticks, eyes darting to the side. There’s something on his mind.
“What’s wrong?”
He runs a hand through his hair, over his jaw. “You know what’s coming,” he says, voice stuck at the bottom of his throat.
My heart sinks. “The overnight date.”
He nods, then smiles ruefully. “It’s harder than I expected to watch you with him.
Guess I finally understand what it’s like to be a contestant on this show.
I’m not saying—I’m not asking you to leave.
I know you need to be here for your job.
I just want to know if…” The back of his neck goes pink.
“I want to know if this is real. If you really want this.” He squeezes my wrist, running his thumb over the rose tattoo etched there.
“I do,” I breathe, guilt crashing over me. I may not deserve it—him—but that doesn’t stop me from wanting him so badly it hurts.
“Georgia…” He swallows hard, wiggling his jaw. “It would always be like that—like in Nashville.”
My mind races to his fingers on my waist, hot and heavy in the alleyway. But that’s not what he’s talking about.
“Everywhere I go, someone’s watching,” he says. “I’m lucky to get to do something I love so much, but it’s also hard.”
I frown, finally voicing something that’s been in the back of my mind for weeks. “Why come back then?”
He runs a hand down his face, looking careworn.
“I owed Lainey,” he says. “You know what happened now. I made some mistakes, and she helped me keep it quiet. Not so much for me, but for my family. When Cassidy and I got married, the press was all over my mom, and she hated it. If they were coming after me about the arrest, I worried they’d go after my mom too.
” He shakes his head, disgusted. “I couldn’t let that happen.
I couldn’t be responsible for her losing her privacy like that.
This is the life I’ve chosen, and I don’t want anyone else to pay the price for that. ”
“Are you two close?”
He nods and smiles down at our hands, still laced together. “She’d like you. My dad wasn’t … he didn’t deserve her. And I swore I’d never cause her the kind of pain he did. After I got arrested … I was done. That’s why I stopped drinking.”
He looks out over the ocean, then chuckles. Despite his embarrassment, he seems so much freer here, when it’s just us. It must cost him so much to be in front of all those cameras, acting like someone he isn’t.
All that pretending takes a toll on a person. I should know.
“I think I came back to get away from my life too,” he says. “After everything that happened with my dad and Cassidy—and then with you.”
He turns to me, leaning closer until I feel his breath on my nose.
“I looked for you every time I was in LA,” he says, voice low.
“Every concert I went to. I started to think maybe you didn’t exist, maybe I’d imagined you.
But you didn’t give me your real name—I knew that as soon as I looked you up.
So I thought it was a good thing I’d left—that you just wanted a one-time thing. Something simple.”
“I don’t want something simple,” I say, tears pricking my eyes. “I don’t want Roland. I want you. I’m sorry I dragged you through this whole shit show. But I only want you, Rhett. It was only ever you.”
I bite back the rest: that his texts are sitting in the hands of a woman I don’t trust, that I put them there. That I’m no better than the paparazzi that chased us in Nashville.
He pulls me into a kiss as waves rush up to our ankles and leave my toes tingling. I reach down, slowly unbuttoning his shirt, tracing the lines of his tattoos, the mountains on his arm all the way across the ocean, the flower of the state that made him. Beneath my fingers, his heart is pounding.
A gust of wind blows along the beach, and I shiver. “You’re sure no one will see us?”
“Positive.” He puts his hands on my hips and smiles. “I think Roland and Addison are a little too busy.”
His hands frame my face, rough edges and soft palms on my skin. He kisses me again, warm and gentle as the steady waves rocking our legs.
Laughter and shouts roll down the beach and I pull back, raking my eyes over the shore for any sign that someone’s seen us.
“Come on,” he says, turning away from the water. “I know somewhere we can go.”
I follow him up the sand, thinking we’ll escape to a more secluded part of the beach, but instead he heads toward one of the cottages along the rocky shore.
“Where are we going?”
“Well…”—he hesitates—“this is the only place I can think of that will definitely be private. But it’s okay if you don’t want to—this is where Roland and Monica spent the other night. They’ve reset it by now.”
Eyes wide, I look from him to the cottage and back again.
“So…”—I turn around, squinting at the other cottages we passed—“are he and Addison…”
“Probably,” he says, craning his neck to look around the bushes at the neighboring cottage whose windows are conspicuously dark. “But it’s okay. There’s no cameras in the overnight suites. I think that would be illegal.”
I can’t argue with his logic. The little house is set back from the water, hidden behind so many cypress trees that I doubt anyone could see us unless they were pressed against the windows. To the right of the door is a wooden outdoor shower, nestled among the trees.
“I think we should wash off the sand first.” His voice strips me of my remaining hesitation, and he kisses me, guides me backward until my spine meets the wood paneling of the shower.
Mouth still glued to mine, he reaches down and peels off my loose pants, tossing them aside.
He lifts his lips only to pull off his own shirt, shimmy out of his jeans, and turn on the showerhead.
I look at him, his green eyes almost eclipsed by the midnight darkness, the water spray making an aura around his head.
Above us: open black sky.
I press myself into him, our skin sticking together as I kiss his neck, running my tongue along his collarbone.
“Georgia.” His breaths are coming in rasps, his hands harder on my body.
He drags his fingers under my soaked tank top, biting his lip when his fingers reach the bare swell of my breasts.
“The fact that you never wear a bra…” His voice is ragged.
He rolls his thumb over my nipple, and I breathe in sharply. “I think it might ruin me.”
I grin against his lips as water slides between us, from his mouth into mine. He grabs the hem of my shirt and wrenches it over my head, runs his lips down my neck to my chest, then takes my nipple between his teeth.
I drop my hands between us and tease his waistband until he groans and brings his mouth back up to mine. His hands fall to the hem of my underwear. He hooks a finger into the top and slides them down a few inches as I cling to his back.
With a throat-ripping groan, he kneels in front of me and presses his mouth to my hip, running his tongue along the bone, teeth grazing over my tattoo.
He looks up at me through the dark spray of water and slides my underwear down my legs until it puddles to the ground, then reaches over to turn off the shower.
Steady steam rises from our burning skin as he shakes his hair out, sending droplets flying.
Sitting back on his heels, he runs a hand through his hair and looks up at me before leaning forward to bracket my hips with his hands.
“Is this okay?” he asks, lips mere inches from the pulsing point between my legs. His voice is a growl, a challenge, a plea. “Or do you want to lie down for this?”
I don’t answer right away, so he stands and lifts me onto his hips.
I wrap my legs around him and let him carry me to a lounge chair on the small deck of the cottage.
He lays me on my back, then leans over me, nudging my legs apart with his hand.
He kneels on the chair below me, silhouetted against the distant ocean.
My stomach tugs as he lowers himself between my knees. He hooks my leg around his arm and slings it over his shoulder. With a last smile, he nestles his face in the gap between my thighs and presses his tongue against me.
“Ohmagar—” I slur, then clap a hand over my mouth.
He laughs, and I feel it all the way to my core as his tongue moves in slick circles.
It takes everything in me not to shatter under his touch. He presses a hand to my stomach to keep me from wriggling, then lifts his mouth to look up at me. “You’re fucking beautiful,” he whispers.
He nips a kiss on my thigh, then moves back down, his mouth hot and heavy. I grip his shoulder as white-hot sensation builds inside me. My hands tangle in his hair as his tongue moves faster, deeper, his fingers pressing harder into my thighs.
“Please—” I beg, gasping for breath. I tear my eyes from the ocean and look down at him, the sheen of sweat on his forehead visible through the darkness.
“Can you—can you look at me?” It comes out as a plea.
“I want to see you.” I need to see him, to watch him taste me, savor me—to assure myself that this is real. “I want you to see me,” I whisper.
He raises his eyes to mine and holds them as he nestles deeper into me. “Georgia,” he breathes. The way he says my name is orgasmic, the quick bite before the sweet, dripping release. “I always see you.”
His words push me over the edge, and I hold his gaze as heat rips through me. My toes curl, my back arches, and I let out an unsteady groan, wrapping my fingers around his wrist to stay tethered to earth—to him. I need his gravity now that it seems I’m flying.
When I go still, he smiles and presses his lips to the tattoo on my hip. As he climbs over me, burying his face in my neck, I shiver from a breeze I hadn’t noticed before. “Come on,” he says, rubbing my arms. “Let’s go inside.”
I retrieve our discarded clothes from the shower stall as he opens the door to the cottage. He steps in ahead of me, looking for a light switch.
Crash.
Rhett jumps back. “Who—”
“I’m sorry!” cries a familiar voice.
Clutching my arms around myself, I scurry forward to where Rhett stands in front of—what the hell?—Olie.