Chapter Nineteen
Oliver
“It feels good to be confided in again. I feel like I’m really breaking ground with Bryar.
I missed that since leaving my last job with Randall.
” Lemon chokes up when she says the old man’s name.
Shana’s father. It’s clear to me they grew close, and it only fascinates me further that she manages her sparkle, despite the grief.
She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye and focuses instead on fastening the ankle straps on her heels. A deflection I know well, and my heart aches for the pain I know she feels.
She scrunches her face in concentration, and it has my jaw twitching to smile. The black dress, with chrome sequins and a long slit, bunches around her hitched up thigh as she struggles with the shoe strap, and before I can stop myself, I’m on my knees for this woman, and my hands are there.
Lemon inhales sharply, but holds my gaze while our hearts pound.
“Let me.” I lace the strap around her ankle, and every brush to her skin feels electric. “You’re the only one that’s ever made any ground with Bry. You’re good with people, kids, surprisingly.”
“Thanks.” She releases a weighted breath.
“Are…are we all right, Oliver?”
It’s only then I realize my hands are still around her ankle.
I like them wrapped around her.
“Oliver?”
“Sorry.” I finish the strap. “We’re swell.
“Swell? You’re older than I thought.”
I huff a laugh. “Well, you’re complicated.”
“And it’s your job to uncomplicate me? Because I hate to assure you that many have tried and none have prevailed.”
I finish her other shoe and meet her amused glare. “I like you complicated.”
“I thought everything about me bothered you. The chaotic mess you kicked off tour?”
“Do you genuinely think I kicked you off tour because you’re a mess, Lemon?”
“That is exactly what you led me to think.”
“I kicked you off to focus.”
“Yeah,” she rolls her eyes, “the band needed to focus on their music.”
“Not the band, Lem. I needed a break from you. I needed to focus on the tour, not on the off-limits daughter of my boss that I wanted for my own.”
“Your own?” She raises a brow. “You’re the one who likes watching. If it weren’t me, it’d be some other girl they were railing and you could watch her, too. I don’t buy it.”
Yet her body says she does, eyes begging for the answer that makes it so, nipples pebbled beneath her dress. She wants it just as bad, and the hardest part about that is she’s already told me so.
“Do you think I do that on all the tours? Even the ones you aren’t attached to? You know me better than that… I didn’t even know what casting couches were before you told me.”
A genuine, beautiful goddamned laugh bursts from her mouth at that, and I shake my head unable to stop the smile that breaks over my still mortified face.
“I still wish I didn’t,” I add.
She presses her tongue to the inside of her cheek, pleased with that, no doubt, and I have to tell her more. The urge to assure her she’s been the only one since Lauren claws from inside out.
To see her smile and keep it there becomes my all-encompassing need.
“After parties aren’t in my contract, Sour Patch. They have assistants and security detail for that. I never had to go.”
“Then why did you?” She steps closer, amethyst eyes reflecting the sun from open windows, sealed shut for half a lifetime.
She opened them for me.
“Because I can’t take my eyes off you.”
Lemon Perkins does not kiss me. Our faces rest centimeters apart, but she does not advance.
Nor does she retreat.
I blink. She blinks. We just goddamn blink until the grandfather clock chimes and she clears her throat.
“We don’t have much time if we plan to get you a new suit, and I delight in telling you that Bryar is right.” She inspects her nails against the suit and shakes her head as I bow mine. “What are you doing?”
“Between you and Bryar, I’m praying,” I tease.
She pats my shoulder. “Miley did say, only God can judge us.”
“That’s the Bible, Sour Patch.”
“No, I don’t think so.” She scrunches her face.
“Pretty sure it was Miley. Either way, your outfit requires divine intervention. Leave it to me. Well, leave it to my decisions, but your credit cards. Does that work? Although I do have a thick wad of ones, I still can’t access my account for my non-stripper money. ”
“You were never a stripper.” I grin at her games. “You can’t prove that.” She grins back, and I know we’re okay then. We might be in the strangest arrangement of all time and have irreconcilable feelings, but we are still okay.
“So, what do you say? Shopping trip?”
“Doesn’t feel like I have a choice,” I concede.
“You don’t.” Her phone buzzes. “Shana and Dustin are locking up to get here. Let’s get you looking like a billionaire, Daddy Nashville.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Don’t tell me what to do unless you’re gonna spank me for not doing it.”
My cock hardens at the thought of doing just that, but I go back to the bet she made with her father last night. She won’t say it, I know she’s worried. I don’t know what she uses her money for, but it’s not clubbing and chaos like she wants us to believe.
It’s something more important than that, and even if she won’t tell me, I’ll do what I can to help, just like she’s helped my girls.
Lemon’s eyes narrow on the keys to the commuter car hanging from my thumb, and she chews her bottom lip. “We can’t take that to the charity, Oliver. I’m no fan of elitism, but I have been forced into extreme wealth from a young age, and—”
“Forced?” I laugh. “You seem to thrive in it.”
She raises a brow. “I’ll ignore that. Now, why are we not taking the Denali instead of…” She huffs a genuine breath of frustration at not knowing the brand of one of the most common cars among lower to middle class families, worrying her lip.
“It’s a station wagon.” I take her hand before I realize my actions, and the way she calms with my touch feels like…
There’s no such thing as coincidence.
“Sore subject?” I ask.
“I never want to make anyone feel less than, but I didn’t…I didn’t grow up with cars like this, which is exactly why we need to act the part to impress Shaylyn’s team. They’re like me…only not. They are the parts of me I hate.”
For a long steady moment, we breathe that in, having shared something silent but loud at all once.
“Well, anyway.” She slips her hand from mine so effortlessly it pains me, and I have to wonder if that’s how it will be, losing her at the end of the summer.
“At the risk of sounding like someone who thrives on wealth, which okay, maybe I do, but at that risk…do you really think the record label who signs Shaylyn Tryst, the biggest singer of our generation—well,” she tussles my grey strands, “my generation, at least…do you think they should show up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?” She jabs a thumb at my car.
“And that’s like before the dad pimped the ride. ”
She’s right.
“But the Denali is all roped up and ready for camping Monday.” I could take the stuff off, but then we’d have to transport the kayaks back to the shed or tarp them down. “We don’t have time for that on top of shopping.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah…shit.”
“Oliver L. Nashville. Did you just cuss arbitrarily?”
“What are you talking about? I cuss.”
“Sure, you do.” Lemon eyes my mouth like a snack. “You should know, it turns me on. It sounds so forced coming from your wholesome dad mouth, and I want to corrupt you every time. Climb your face and make you sin a little longer.”
My cock felt every syllable of that.
“That does nothing to help me see you as a nanny and not…”
“Whatever we are?” She finishes my sentence, getting in the passenger seat and clicking the door shut.
I’m the one holding back.
Not her.
Me.
She’s willing to see where it goes. Live by the moment. But the fear I’ll lose it all again and be forced to shove it in boxes just to manage is crippling. Being with her goes against the very promise I made myself when I held Lauren’s body as her soul left my arms.
I buried it with my memories, the good and the bad, just like my violin, because my song was always for her, and those memories were better off gone than roaming as ghosts in my head, and heart, and home, reminding me that we would never again be whole.
Because she would never be whole.
Never to see, to hear, to touch…
I swore I’d never love again.
Now here’s this…this starlight, and I never want to lose sight of her.
The horn blares in my ear, crumbling my mental fortress, and she’s there when I get in the car, feet propped on the dash, right where her muddy skates were last night.
And even if I don’t want to see or feel or hear her, she brightens my space.
“I don’t know what we are,” I say, “but I know tonight you’re my date, and if you’ll let me, I’d like to kiss you.”
Her eyes soften. “You can kiss me, but only when you’re thinking about me. It’s not fair to either of us if your wife is where your head will be.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because you fiddle your fingers along the side of your clothes when you talk about her, or any time one of the kids brings her up.” She lifts a brow. “You’re doing it now.”
My hand stops.
She deserves to be made first, if I’m to make her anything, and that slices me up and down, because I fear she’s becoming everything.
“You read people extraordinarily well.”
“Tell my father. I’m sure it would be useful in negotiation meetings…if he’d ever let me in.” Her nostrils flare. “He pawns me off to the social media and event planning departments every time. He doesn’t think women belong on the financial side of things. I know it, even if he won’t say it.”
“I don’t think your father feels that way,” I start, but she cuts me off with a sharp look.
“I see you, letting him line your pockets with his decisions, just like the rest of them. It won’t be long before he throws you another bonus at that rate. Maybe even a vacation castle…Bavaria, perhaps? I’ve been there, you know.” She holds my stare. “They make world-renowned violins.”
I don’t miss the accusatory lilt in her tone.
“I saw your abandoned instruments in the closet. Do the kids know you play?”
“Played,” I correct.
“Unsurprising. Another thing you’re scared of loving.”
“Lemon, can we—”
“No.” She frowns. “We have less than three hours to get you better clothes and ditch this ride before the charity. I have a car we can take, but we will literally need to take it. From my father.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“It’ll be fine.” She waves me off, like I’m the crazy one. Maybe I am.
There’s more to say, but we don’t have time for that now, so I comply without another word, but as we’re backing out, my eyes fix on the third story window of our home.
“You think Bryar will be all right babysitting until they get here?”
“I’ve been around her plenty. My personal assessment? You’re a worrywart, and she’s perfectly capable of it.”
“Capable isn’t the same thing as responsible.” I sigh, as my house gets farther away in the rear-view reflection. But it’s possible Lemon and Emil are right; it’s time for her to be given the independence she’s so intent on taking.
Still, a worry lingers in the back of my mind.
“Trust me.” Lemon squeezes my arm.
“Your father told me something similar before he sent me you.”
“And you’re saying he was wrong?” She waits less than a second before issuing a smug grin and clicking on the radio, and as Lovefool, by the Cardigans blasts through the speakers, I see my girls in that top left window, waving and smiling.
Even Kimmie.
“He wasn’t wrong.” I offer her my hand, and every prayer in my head comes true when she takes it. “Wrong doesn’t feel this right.”