Chapter 50
CHAPTER FIFTY
DECLAN
This damn sketch wasn’t cooperating. I’d been reworking the same piece for the better part of an hour—a half-sleeve commission for a client coming in next week. The lines were clean, the composition was solid, but something about it just wasn’t sitting right.
Or maybe I couldn’t focus because my head was somewhere else entirely—somewhere it had no business being at eleven-thirty in the morning on a workday.
Specifically, on the way Penelope had looked this morning when she’d padded into the kitchen—still half asleep, one of my T-shirts clinging to some of my favorite parts of her, her copper hair a disaster.
She’d walked up, wrapped her arms around me, and pressed a kiss in the center of my chest like she’d been doing it for years instead of weeks.
Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like she planned to keep doing it.
That possibility alone had been fucking me up for the past three hours.
“Helloooo.” Rowan’s voice cut through my thoughts, but I didn’t look up.
“What?”
“You might be able to finish that sketch faster if you stopped smiling at your phone like a love-sick idiot.”
“I don’t smile.”
“Uh…you absolutely were. And it was deeply unsettling.”
I grunted and refocused on the sketch, adjusting the curve of a line that kept wanting to go somewhere I hadn’t planned. Kind of like everything else in my life lately.
“Sooo…” Rowan’s tone was deceptively light in a way that made my hackles rise. “I finished The House of Sovereign Sin last night.”
It took more effort than it should have to keep my expression neutral. But a surge of satisfaction hit me square in the ribs that I had to shove down. “Good for you.”
“Couldn’t put it down. That woman can write. I was laughing and crying and fanning myself through the entire book. The scene in chapter fourteen alone—” She let out a low whistle. “I had to put my Kindle in the freezer.”
I didn’t respond, just kept sketching. Kept my hand steady and my expression blank even though pride was bursting inside my chest over the knowledge that Penelope—my Penelope—had done that. Had evoked such visceral reactions from someone like Rowan, who was as rough around the edges as barbed wire.
“But I gotta tell ya—I didn’t peg our sweet, shy, reserved librarian for writing emotions so visceral they left me sobbing and filth so hot it nearly melted my Kindle.
I guess it really is always the quiet ones.
” She tossed a wadded-up paper towel in my direction that I deflected on reflex.
“I just want to know why you didn’t tell me, you ass. Made me feel like a damn idiot.”
The pride that had filled my chest a minute ago surged into something else entirely, every single nerve ending in my body shifting from warmth to laser-focused in the space of a single heartbeat.
I set my pencil down slowly and lifted my eyes to hers. “Say that again.”
Rowan raised a brow. “Which part? The part where your girlfriend writes filth so hot it makes Mabel blush, or the part where you’re an ass for not telling me?”
“The part where you know it’s her.”
Rowan’s smirk faltered at whatever she saw in my expression. “It’s all over town. The book club is losing their minds—everyone’s hoping we can get her to come to the discussion night. Your mom’s apparently already—”
“Who else knows?”
“I just told you. Everyone. Some teens from one of her clubs figured it out, I guess. It’s been spreading like wildfire.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Mabel has it on a billboard by now.
” She squinted at me, her teasing expression giving way to something sharper.
“Why do you look like that? Are we not supposed to know?”
I couldn’t answer her. Not when I was already on my feet. Already reaching for my jacket, my keys, my phone. My chair rolled backward and hit the tool chest with a clang that made Cam glance up from his station with a raised brow before focusing back on his client.
“Dec?” Rowan called after me, all trace of humor gone. “What’s going on? Should I not have—”
“Reschedule my afternoon.” I didn’t stop moving. Couldn’t. “All of it.”
“All of— Declan, you’ve got three clients booked—”
“I don’t care. Move them.”
I was out the door before she could respond, the bell jangling violently in my wake as I hit the sidewalk at a near run. The October air was sharp against my face, but I barely registered it.
All I could think about was Penelope.
She’d been at the library all morning for a pop-up Saturday Fanfic Club meeting, and I wasn’t sure when she’d be done. All I knew was I needed to find her and talk to her. Tell her what happened before anyone else got to her first.
I pulled out my phone and called her. It rang once. Twice. Three times. Then her voice mail picked up.
“Fuck.”
I tried again and got the same result. Quickening my pace, I dodged the passersby wandering through downtown as I cut down the side street toward the apartment. My mind was already in damage-control mode—what to say, how to say it, how to get ahead of the fallout before it consumed her.
Because I knew Penelope. Knew her better than she probably wanted me to. And I knew that the second her carefully compartmentalized worlds collided, she was going to spiral. And I wanted to be there to catch her when she fell.
Once inside our building, I took the stairs two at a time and shoved through the apartment door, hoping she was already back from the library. Hoping she’d been here and hadn’t yet heard what apparently the whole goddamn town already knew.
I found her curled on the couch. She wasn’t reading or writing.
She was just sitting there, perfectly still.
Her bag lay on the floor, the contents scattered in a way that was so wholly not Penelope.
Tissues littered the coffee table and the cushion beside her.
And Darcy was pressed against her thigh, his ears flat, like even the cat knew something was wrong.
But her face was what nearly buckled my knees.
Her eyes were red-rimmed, and tear tracks cut paths through the freckles dusting her cheeks. Her skin was blotchy, her glasses slightly askew, and her mouth was set in a tight line that trembled at the edges.
She looked absolutely wrecked. Not the kind of wrecked I’d made her in the best ways over the past few weeks. This was something else—the kind that came from having something precious ripped away without warning.
I closed the distance immediately, needing her in my arms. Wanting to soothe away her tears and tell her it was going to be fine. That we’d get through it. “Rebel, we can figure this—”
“You promised me.” Her voice was rough and low, the three words stopping me dead in my tracks.
“What?”
She lifted her gaze to mine, and the look in her eyes—Jesus Christ, that look—was a knife straight through my heart. It wasn’t anger or fury. It was betrayal. Raw and deep and so goddamn certain it made my chest cave in.
“Why would you tell anyone, Declan?” Her voice cracked on my name, and something in me cracked right along with it. “You swore it would stay between us.”
For long moments, I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I just stood there, her words rearranging themselves in my head over and over as I tried to form them into a shape that made sense. But it didn’t work.
In the end, it all boiled down to the same truth.
She thought I did this.
She thought I was the one who’d spilled her secret. Who’d taken the one thing she’d trusted another person with and handed it out like it was nothing.
She thought I was the kind of man who’d do that to her. The kind who thought nothing of betraying those he loved.
The kind of man my father was.
“You think I told someone.” The words came out flat. Measured. Saying them aloud just to make sure I’d heard right. “About your books.”
“You’re the only person in the world I’ve told. The only one who knew.” Her eyes filled again, tears spilling over and down her cheeks. “I just don’t know why you’d do that.”
Silence fell around us—not the kind that had become ours in the time we’d shared here. It wasn’t comfortable or full of all the things we said with our bodies instead of our mouths.
This was something else entirely.
Something cold and sharp that sliced through every warm thing we’d built in this space, leaving the leftover pieces scattered at our feet.
I could handle a lot of things. I could handle being the town’s problem child. Could handle my brothers giving me shit. Could handle the sideways looks and the assumptions and the reputation I’d earned through years of deliberate distance and troublemaking.
But I couldn’t handle this.
Not from her. Not from the only person I’d ever let close enough to see me without the walls I’d built around myself. The only person I’d trusted with the jagged, ugly truth about my father and my fear that I was made from the same rotten wood.
A few nights ago, she’d looked me in the eye and told me I was nothing like him. Nothing like a man who betrayed the people he was supposed to love most.
And now she was accusing me of doing the same goddamn thing.
“And I just don’t know why you even think I would,” I said, my voice flat and hollow.
I held her gaze for another second—long enough to see the first flicker of something that might’ve been doubt cross her face.
Long enough to feel the pull—that relentless, goddamn gravitational pull toward her that hadn’t let up since the first day she’d marched down those library steps and read me the riot act all those months ago.
But I couldn’t do this with her right now. Not when she’d branded me as the one thing I’d been striving my entire fucking life to avoid becoming.
I turned and strode down the hallway to my bedroom, putting one foot in front of the other. Like walking away from her—even if it was just a few feet—wasn’t the hardest thing I’d ever done.