Chapter 15 Lofton
LOFTON
The house was quiet when we got back.
Daddy’s light was off, which meant Apollo’s check-in had been accurate and he’d been asleep the whole time I was gone. Out of habit, I checked his door, pressing my ear to the wood just long enough to hear the steady rhythm of his snoring, and then allowed myself to breathe.
Devon was already on his phone before we’d even made it inside.
I’d caught bits and pieces. Something about footage. An alley. And a bunch of security mumbo jumbo I didn’t understand. Which, after the night we’d had, I was grateful not to.
Each time his eyes found me, he’d grin, tight but reassuring, and then go right back to business, clipping sentences as if he’d never heard of a pronoun.
I filled a glass of water and leaned against the counter, watching him for a moment. Which, at this point, was practically a hobby.
Devon Grant was beyond gorgeous. Tall, dark, and absurdly sexy.
Great. Fine. Noted. Moving on.
Except I hadn’t moved on. Not even a little. Because somewhere between the burned bagels and our mornings in the barn, Devon Grant had gone from the man I couldn’t read to the story I couldn’t put down.
Devon wasn’t like the men I’d met in LA.
He wasn’t flashy, all swagger and noise, demanding to be noticed.
He was a man who went to great lengths to keep his true self hidden.
You wouldn’t find him in his words. He was too careful with those.
Deliberate, as if he had a finite number to give.
The real Devon lived in the unguarded moments when his instinct to act got ahead of his need to hide.
I still couldn’t piece together why he was hiding in the first place, but make no mistake, I saw Devon Grant.
I’d seen him when he’d taken me to the funeral home in the middle of the night, pausing to say a goodbye of his own.
And the night he’d curled his hand around the back of my neck in my childhood bedroom, telling me I’d done the right thing by hiding in the bathroom, like he simply couldn’t stomach the idea of me blaming myself.
I saw him again when he’d stepped between me and Sebastian at the gate, the filthy pieces of my past fueling him into action rather than driving him away.
As if he’d heard my thoughts, his gaze flicked my way, phone still held to his ear.
I set the glass in the sink and whispered, “I’m gonna head up to bed.”
He nodded. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I whispered, reaching out to give his arm a squeeze.
He stared at me for a beat, but before he could work his voodoo and plunder my emotional grid, I padded toward the stairs. I couldn’t be sure, but I swear I heard his chuckle when the first step groaned beneath me.
When I got to my room, I swapped my dress for an old t-shirt and sleep shorts, washed my face, and sat on the edge of the twin bed.
That room had never felt so small. The farm was like that at night.
The stillness in the air finally allowed the thoughts I’d been outrunning all evening to catch up with me.
The unease of stepping back out into a world that had already proven itself unsafe.
Devon’s booming voice caused a wave of fear that nearly leveled me.
The flash of white light across the street rendered me immobile.
The fact that even now, safe inside a home with more cameras than a movie set, my hands trembled.
I pulled my knees to my chest and pressed my back against the headboard, desperately fighting a losing battle with my emotions.
I was so damn tired of being scared.
But, if I were being honest, fear was just the most recent layer of my exhaustion. And it wasn’t even the heaviest one.
I hadn’t truly rested since the morning Jenn called me two years earlier; her guttural screams telling me that Mom was gone had altered my life forever. I’d sat on the floor of my trailer between takes, in full hair, makeup, and costume, while my world ended on the other side of the country.
After that, while still reeling from Sebastian’s betrayal, my father declined rapidly. I spent countless nights, plagued with insomnia, scouring the internet desperately trying to find a treatment that would keep me from losing him too. But all the money and fame in the world couldn’t cure him.
I filled my days with scripts and early call times. The relentless forward motion of a career that didn’t know how to pause for grief. Denial was easier.
Though sitting in my childhood bedroom, one I’d left at only sixteen, I realized the layers of my exhaustion went back even further than the tragedies of my life.
I’d been so busy building something extraordinary that I hadn’t noticed when ordinary had slipped through my fingers entirely.
The quiet Sunday mornings. The ability to go to the grocery store without a plan.
Dinner with friends that didn’t require background checks and rented out restaurants.
The simple, unremarkable comfort of feeling like nobody was watching.
I’d spent years chasing a life of glitter and grandeur, convincing myself that the shine was worth the cost. And it had been for a long time.
But I missed the ordinary.
Closing my eyes, I pulled the zebra-print comforter up to my chin. A tear slipped down my cheek, and I wiped it away fast. It was a worthless effort because another one followed it, and then another, until I gave up wiping and just sat there furious at myself because I was sick of crying too.
A soft knock came at the door, snapping me out of my pity party.
“Lofton?” Devon called.
I sniffled and frantically used the neck of my shirt to dry my face. I’m not sure why I thought that was going to hide anything. The tears just soaked a puddle into my collar instead. I didn’t know why I was trying to hide it from him. Devon was an emotional bloodhound.
“Yeah?” I croaked.
The door opened, and his thick frame filled the doorway. His eyes went straight to my tear-stained cheeks, only straying long enough to take in the wet spot on my shirt. “What’s going on?”
I laughed, but it was wholly sad. “Just doing my nightly skincare routine. Moisturizer, serum, and tears. Trust me, it’s all the rage on TikTok.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Thought you were good.”
“I was… I mean, I am.” I sighed. “Wine always makes me emotional.”
It wasn’t a lie. It also wasn’t the truth.
He nodded, clearly unconvinced. “Right. Well, if that changes, you know where I am. Yeah?”
“Yep,” I popped the p, but only to hide the lump in my throat.
He started to pull the door shut, when something inside me moved faster than my pride could stop. “Will you stay with me for a little while?” I shook my head, hating how needy I sounded. “You don’t have to. It’s not like—”
He interrupted what was surely going to be an epic ramble. “Okay.”
Just like that.
No deliberation. No sigh. Just okay.
He walked into the room and then promptly stopped at the foot of the bed like he’d hit an invisible wall.
He scratched the back of his head, then cracked his knuckles, then wedged a hand in his pocket only to pull it back out and run it through the top of his hair.
His eyes moved around the room, making brief stops on the show choir trophy, the ribbons, the ceiling… the floor.
Okay, so not exactly the company I’d been hoping for.
The man who could clear a room, read a threat, and talk me off a ledge without breaking a sweat stood at the foot of my bed with absolutely no idea what to do with his hands.
The absurdity of him being nervous was amusing enough to loosen the knot in my chest.
“You can sit down,” I said.
He turned his gaze to me. “I’m fine.”
“Devon. Sit down.”
He exhaled through his nose, which I was learning was the Devon Grant equivalent of a growl, and then lowered himself onto the foot of the bed as far away from me as the twin bed would allow.
The mattress let out a groan so loud it could only be described as a full-scale complaint.
I pressed my lips together as Devon tipped his head to the ceiling as if searching for divine intervention. Unfortunately, it came in the form of a wooden slat slipping off the frame. The foot of the bed dropped beneath him.
But it was the way he didn’t move a muscle and just sat there, inches off the floor, cussing under his breath that made me lose it.
A loud laugh sprang from my throat, continuing until I was crying for a different reason.
Without even asking me to get up, he dropped to the floor, lifted the mattress and box spring with one hand while using his other to slide the wooden slat back onto the frame.
When he stood back up, he planted his hands on his hips and glared at me. That look had probably made grown men cower.
But as his lips twitched, it lost all heat.
“To be fair,” I said between laughs. “It’s done that to me before, too.”
“Deeply comforting,” he muttered. “Scoot over.”
I grinned, wide and proud, inching to the side.
The bed produced a secondary creak of equal drama as he settled against the headboard beside me. His shoulder pressed warm and solid against mine.
“You want to tell me why you were crying?”
I sobered immediately. “Not really.”
“Okay then.”
I focused on the moonlight coming through the gap in the curtains. “Can we maybe talk about something else for a while?”
He crossed his legs at the ankles. “We can talk about whatever you want, Lofton.”
The smile that stretched my mouth threatened to swallow my face. I felt like I’d been waiting a lifetime for him to open that door. I did not delay in sprinting through.
“Do you have a girlfriend, wife, or significant other?”
His brows shot up his forehead. “Wow. You went straight for it.”
“I figured I better get it in there before you give me the whole speech—” I dropped my voice low to do a bad impression of him. “The less questions you ask about me, the less I have to act like a dick when I shut you down.”
He chuckled. “Alright, smartass. I think we’re a little past that. I’ve shared plenty about myself with you.”