Epilogue
Lofton
Six months later…
“Oh, come on,” I groaned at Salty. “Why do you always do crap like this?”
He was standing in the middle of his stall, ankle-deep in water, his automatic waterer hanging off the wall, a steady flow flooding the ground.
I unlatched the door, and he ambled out, completely unapologetic for ruining my day.
Devon sidled up beside me with two mugs of coffee and took one look at the situation before saying, “So I guess this is what we’re doing today.”
I took my coffee from his hand and leaned into his side. “You think Daddy would notice if I hired a team to dig out the stalls?”
“Yes,” he smiled at me with that quiet, unhurried, morning expression of Devon Grant that belonged to me in the early morning hours in the barn.
We both took a sip of our coffee.
When we’d first come to the farm, it had been a crisis location. One where I had come back carrying grief, fear, and a bodyguard who didn’t want to be there any more than I’d wanted him to be.
Now, it was our home together.
When we left LA after everything happened with Jason, we hadn’t sat down and made official plans to merge our lives and move to the farm permanently.
I didn’t pack up my things in LA, hire movers, or sell my house.
He still owned his house in Chicago and the Facebook HOA page that accompanied it.
It was just mornings accumulating, one on top of the other, each one a little more ordinary, until I couldn’t remember why I’d ever wanted to leave in the first place.
About a month in, Devon had looked up from his coffee one morning and stated, completely unprompted, “I need to get my driver’s license changed to Tennessee today.”
I blinked at him.
The guilt hit immediately. I had never once asked if that was what he wanted. He had an entire life that existed outside of the farm, my family, and me.
“Devon, we don’t have to—”
“Not a conversation we need to have, babe.” He’d picked his coffee back up. “You live here. Now, so do I.”
And that was it.
No deliberation. No negotiation. No dramatic moment where the weight of the decision was acknowledged and processed. Just Devon, stated a fact, like the conclusion had been reached long before the words and he was simply catching me up.
The decision about my career had taken considerably longer to arrive at.
Devon and I had talked it through more times than I could count—long conversations that stretched into the early hours, his voice steady and unhurried, making it clear that he was behind me completely.
When a role came in that my team had been genuinely excited about, he listened to every detail and told me it sounded like something I’d be extraordinary in.
I’d passed on it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy to pass on the obligations that were already on the books.
Lavender Midnight still had a premiere circuit to run, press junkets to get through, and a handful of promotional commitments I’d agreed to long before any of this had happened.
I honored every one of them. Devon had accompanied me to all of it, jacket on, earpiece in, professionally indifferent to the cameras in a way that had gotten significantly harder to maintain once the internet started paying attention to the way he looked at me when he thought nobody was watching.
He’d also brought Leo along for all the moments when he did not give a damn who was watching, and he snuck me into every dark corner he could find.
And because it was Devon, I had no doubt that he’d probably mapped those dark corners out ahead of time.
But after the credits rolled on my last project, I closed the door.
Three years. That was what I’d given myself to stand still, to breathe, to figure out who Lofton Beck was when nobody was asking. And doing it on the farm, with Devon beside me every morning, had made standing still feel less like stopping and more like finally arriving.
A few weeks after we’d gotten back to the farm, I finally followed through on the idea I’d had about turning the old hayloft into a space for entertaining, but more, a space for me and Devon to call our own.
We’d paid a small fortune for a contractor who was willing to work odd hours around Daddy’s sleep schedule and stay out of sight as much as humanly possible. We’d had a few hiccups, but for the most part, Dad was none the wiser.
It wasn’t anything big or lavish. Just a bed, a bathroom, and a few couches for when people came to visit. Those visits became entirely entertaining when our guests realized we hadn’t changed the rickety wooden ladder to get up there.
The look on Devon’s mom’s face when she’d come to meet me for the first time had been hilarious.
The woman was absolutely gorgeous, with long dark hair, tan skin, and a megawatt smile.
It wasn’t hard to see where Devon had gotten his good looks.
It also wasn’t hard to understand where he’d gotten his attitude from either.
She’d taken one look at that ladder and said, “Oh hell no. I’m not climbing up that.”
So, instead, the three of us sat on a blanket under the trees and got to know each other. She was an incredible woman: smart, funny, and so damn quick to put Devon in his place. The two of us had laughed so hard, Devon declared it was worse than when me and Brooke got together.
I wouldn’t have gone that far, but it was certainly close.
And over the last six months, he’d gotten plenty of experience dealing with us together.
Brooke and Zoey’s house sat at the far end of the south field, with a bright yellow front door, because Zoey had chosen the color from a paint swatch with the finality of a supreme court justice and none of us had been willing to argue with her.
Brooke had called it hideous for four days and then quietly admitted it was perfect, because it was quiet, safe, and theirs.
Zoey was doing as well as possible after the trauma she’d endured.
She’d had hard weeks. Nightmares. A period where she wouldn’t let Brooke leave a room without her.
A brief phase where she’d decided that Devon needed to be within sight at all times, which Devon had accommodated without comment, simply adjusting where he was in the day so that she could always find him.
When I mentioned it to my therapist, she called it a temporary trauma response.
I called it a four-year-old who had impeccable taste in people to trust.
I’d once found them asleep in the hammock in Brooke’s backyard on a random Tuesday. Zoey’s head on Devon’s chest, his arm around her, both of them completely gone, lost in a peace I hadn’t been sure any of us would ever find again.
The animals had helped tremendously too. And not just Zoey. All of us had gravitated toward them, Devon included.
Within the first month, I’d tried to teach Devon to ride.
I’d leased Biscuit from the neighbors for a few months.
He was a twenty-year-old quarter horse, sixteen hands tall, and the equine equivalent of a living room couch.
The neighbor’s daughter had put children on him at birthday parties.
He had once stood completely still while a toddler fell asleep on his back.
Devon had found none of that reassuring.
The first time I’d saddled him up, Devon had stood at the entrance to the round pen conducting what could only be described as a tactical assessment. Eyes moving. Jaw set. No doubt calculating exit routes in case the situation deteriorated.
Meanwhile, Biscuit was quite literally asleep.
Devon Grant didn’t fear men, weapons, or chaos, but apparently, a horse with the personality of a throw pillow was where he drew the line.
Devon lasted eleven minutes on his first ride. Fourteen the second. By the fourth lesson he had progressed ten whole strides at a trot. When Zoey clapped and told him, “That was so good!” Devon had accepted that praise with the puffed chest of a man being decorated for valor.
I never wore mascara on the days he’d ride, because I always ended up laughing until I cried.
And God, tears coming from a place of happiness, was such a nice change of pace.
It had been scary for the first few weeks after Alex had been shot. There had been quite a few complications, including one night where all of us had held our breaths and started praying.
Nobody in the world had been more relieved when Alex finally came home from the hospital than Johnson.
Though Brianna and Apollo were a close second, and for the life of me, I could not figure out how the hell Apollo fit into that equation.
Devon had made me swear never to tell him if and when I figured it out.
As it turned out, Leo was indeed a softie when it came to love. Devon still consulted on cases for Guardian. Though he did it from the farm, only traveling back to Chicago when Leo absolutely needed him. It was an uncomplicated balance that worked out well for all of us.
Devon’s transition to living on the farm had been relatively smooth, all things considered.
Once Dad had decided Devon was his old buddy Roger, he never looked back.
Well, not completely true. Some days he’d stop dead in his tracks and ask, “Who the hell are you?”
Devon would laugh, and reply, “Lawrence, quit messing around. You know my name is Roger.”
They’d laugh and then head out to the barn together.
Devon was always so patient with him. The two of them would wander around doing odd jobs around the property for hours, Daddy explaining the correct way to do things Devon had been doing correctly his entire life, Devon nodding along like he was hearing it for the first time.
Daddy had told Terry once, with complete sincerity, that he could stand to be more like Roger.
The look on Terry’s face could have curdled milk. Terry was a good man and everything Jenn needed him to be. He had also now been ranked below an imaginary mechanic in his father-in-law’s mind and found it understandably insulting.
Devon had studied his boots while grinning.