Chapter 38 #2
“What registration?”
“You haven’t seen it.”
“Seen what?”
“Laurel registered a new publishing entity.”
Something tightens inside my chest. “What entity?”
“Bellamy House Songs.” The words hit harder than the litigation.
I move farther down the tunnel, away from the crew. “What the fuck is Bellamy House Songs?”
“A publishing company, Grant. Keep up.” Tessa’s patience with me has deteriorated alongside everything else.
“The filing is public, so music accounts have already found it. Bellamy House Songs LLC is Laurel’s.
It appears as publisher on a new composition she registered with Nora Keene.
No Mercer administration, no existing shared publishing vehicle. ”
No me?
“What song?”
“Honeysuckle Summer.”
Everything around me drops out.
I know how Laurel writes when she’s hurt, the phrases she circles three times because they’re close but not right, the little mark she leaves beside a chorus she loves and refuses to admit she loves, the way she chews the inside of her cheek during playback and rewinds the same four seconds until the entire room wants to lose its fucking mind.
I know her process better than I know most people.
And I have never heard this damn song.
“Has Vale signed it?”
“No public filing shows Vale House as publisher or administrator.”
Relief hits so fast I fucking hate myself for it.
Tessa hears it anyway. “Don’t make this about Beckett.”
“I didn’t.”
“Your breathing did.” A beat passes. “Grant, there are pictures from Columbia.”
Every thought in my head cuts off. “What pictures?”
“A local posted them. They’re not paparazzi shots. Laurel and Beckett leaving a restaurant in the rain. From what’s visible, they’re standing close. Nothing else.”
Nothing else.
Two words shouldn’t piss me off this much.
“Send them.”
“No. I handle corporate communications for the interim committee now. I’m not your personal publicist, and I’m definitely not feeding whatever the hell you’re about to do with these pictures.”
“Send me the fucking photos. I’m going to see them either way.”
She mutters something under her breath that sounds like fucking idiot, and three images hit my phone less than a minute later.
Laurel is wearing a green dress, the back cut low, and I know the fucking dress.
Three years ago in New York, she came out of a fitting room wearing it and asked what I thought.
I told her paying that much for a dress missing half its back was ridiculous.
She told me my opinion had been requested, not granted veto power, bought it with her own card and wore it to dinner that night.
I spent half the meal with my hand resting on the bare skin above her waist, so of course I remember it.
Now Beckett is standing beside her under an awning, hands in his pockets, and Laurel is laughing up at him in the same goddamn dress.
The second picture catches them heading for his black Aston Martin, no touching.
In the third, her hand rests on his forearm as she steps around a puddle.
That’s it. Three fucking pictures, and they feel more intimate than finding Sloane naked in my hotel bed ever did.
Sloane and I spent six months with our hands all over each other and built fuck-all.
Her pussy kept me coming back and her blowjobs could make me forget my own fucking name, but once we got dressed, there was nothing there.
Beckett and Laurel can stand three inches apart under an awning without touching and make me feel like I’m watching a door lock from the other side.
I want to call her, then I want to drive to Green Hills, wait until she comes outside and make her tell me to my face that our marriage is over enough for her to be out in the rain with him before the court has even signed the papers.
The fact that every lawyer I’m paying would lose their shit keeps my ass in the arena.
Mom answers on the fourth ring. “If you’re calling to interrogate me about Laurel’s evening, I’ll hang up.”
I laugh without humor. “So you knew.”
“I knew she had dinner.”
“With Vale.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Bullshit.”
“Your ex-wife is allowed to eat pasta without filing a report with your mother.”
“She’s still my wife!”
Mom goes quiet. When she speaks again, every trace of humor is gone. “You’ve used that sentence so many times it no longer sounds like you loved her.”
I sink onto a folding chair beside a stack of road cases. “She’s dating him.”
“Is she?”
“There are pictures.”
“You slept with Camille after begging Laurel to repair the marriage.”
“That has nothing to do with—”
“Say the rest,” she tells me. “I dare you.”
I press my palm over my eyes. “It’s different.”
“Why?”
I’ve no answer that doesn’t expose me completely.
Laurel is mine. Some fucked-up, primitive part of me knows she always will be.
Sex with Camille meant nothing beyond the hour it happened—skin, sweat, a hotel room I barely remember afterward and the hollow fucking relief of getting out of my own head for a little while.
Sloane was supposed to be the same thing.
A stupid mistake I kept making because it was easy and she wanted me.
And hell, I know the shit I did was bad. I know I hurt Laurel. But none of it fucking warrants this—her laughing in the rain with a man who might actually matter.
“Harold used to say that,” Mom mutters. “Every affair existed outside the marriage in his head. Just sex. An appetite. Something a man did that supposedly had nothing to do with where he came home. But let another man look at me too long at a Christmas party and suddenly fidelity was sacred.”
My stomach turns. “Don’t compare me to him.”
“Then stop handing me the ruler.”
∞∞∞
The proffer reaches the board that afternoon, and Sloane’s revenge on me starts chewing through whatever is left of her own career.
She signs a declaration admitting she knew Laurel had never personally cleared Magnolia Rain, knew I told her to keep the working title in place until late in the showcase process and knew Laurel would probably object once she found out; she also admits she lied publicly afterward because she was pissed I froze her project and figured making Laurel look vindictive might pressure Mercer into putting her promotion back on track.
So much for the argument that Sloane was some innocent artist dragged through all this by a powerful executive. She was used, sure. She also knew exactly when to use people back. Both can be fucking true.
Her cooperation gets her negotiation, not absolution.
Outside counsel agrees to discuss an orderly termination of her artist agreement and limits on certain company claims if she turns over the rest of her archives, retracts the bullshit she said about Laurel, pays whatever negotiated amounts come out of the improper disclosures and keeps complying with the protective order.
The violation complaint is still outside Mercer’s control, her former manager’s arbitration is still alive, the sponsors are still gone and her distributor doesn’t magically come crawling back because she finally decided honesty was useful.
What she gets is an exit from Mercer instead of the career Grant Mercer apparently promised her would last forever.
Some bitter part of me wants the terms harsher when I hear them; another part understands exactly why the board is doing it. Nobody wants to spend three years setting money on fire just to keep Sloane chained to a label that can’t make a dime off her anymore.
Elena calls it “economic triage.” I call it rewarding blackmail.
Naomi corrects me before I’ve even finished the sentence. “She is providing evidence regarding company misconduct in exchange for negotiated civil treatment. If you have evidence that she extorted anyone, provide it.”
I hang up on her.
Ten minutes later, the independent committee expands the litigation hold and sends me a formal demand to preserve every device, account and paper file tied to Laurel’s catalogue, Daniel Price, Sloane, the lender facility and every outside offer involving Laurel.
Mercer may also come after me personally for losses caused by anything I did outside my authority or in breach of duties I owed the company.
Charles reads the letter beside me in the arena office and goes so still I can practically hear another bill generating.
“Stop contacting anyone connected to the investigation.” I tell him I haven’t.
He reminds me Heartland writers count. “That’s unrelated.
” He drops the letter on the desk. “Nothing is unrelated anymore.” Then he sits across from me and delivers the sentence I’m getting fucking sick of hearing. “You need liquidity.”
“I have liquidity.”
“Less than you think.”
The bridge lender still wants more collateral, the preservation order keeps disputed assets out of reach, the tour guarantee is down, two endorsement checks have vanished and legal bills are multiplying like fucking rabbits.
The Russell debt is still sitting there even though the shares I bought with it no longer support the valuation I paid, and now the D Laurel wrote half an album on the screened porch and used to fall asleep out there with her notebook still open on her chest.
“No.”
Charles doesn’t argue, which pisses me off more than if he did. He moves to the vintage cars.
“Fuck off.”
“Publishing interests?”
“Collateral.”
His expression barely changes. “Exactly.”