Chapter Six
· Adriana ·
Mom pursed her lips in disapproval. Instead of voicing her thoughts, however, she stared across the breakfast table at Duncan, her husband. He squirmed in his seat. The scrambled eggs he arranged on his bagel suddenly required all his attention.
“Come on, out with it, Maureen,” Renee said. She reached past me for the maple syrup.
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Mom said after a beat of awkward silence. “The park’s belonged to the town since it opened. Privatizing feels like blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy?” I snorted. “Because we don’t all worship at the altar of Bravetown enough?”
“Hey.” Renee shoved her elbow into my side.
“Don’t ‘hey’ me. That would make you the pope.”
“Oh, in that case. In omnia paratus.”
“That’s Gilmore Girls,” I said.
“Really? What’s the pope thing?”
“Urbi et Orbi,” Duncan supplied.
“Hello?” Mom waved her knife and fork through the air, a piece of pancake still stuck to the latter. “Don’t ignore me. You come here for my food.” She pointed the fork at Renee. “You came out of me.” She pointed at me. “And you come into me.” She pointed at Duncan.
“Mom!”
“Oh, please, we’ve all had sex.” She rolled her eyes at me, even though Duncan was the one turning bright red from the top of his shiny bald head to the collar of his polo shirt.
“I come here for my goddaughter and the food,” Renee interjected. She and Mom had grown up together, and she’d been a constant in my life since the day I was born. These Sunday morning brunches were basically family tradition.
“Your goddaughter is the one who brought this usurper into our lives. As if he hasn’t done enough damage.”
The table fell quiet, all the humor drained from the conversation with those few words.
I hadn’t given Mom the full details of what had happened in Nashville, so of course she blamed Brooks.
Him cancelling the tour was the start of everything going wrong.
She never said it, but I suspected that she blamed him for more than that.
He’d helped me navigate the scene even before my first album had come out.
I couldn’t blame him for everything that was wrong in the music industry though.
I couldn’t blame him for being unaware of the sexism I was faced with when he wasn’t just a man, but a man who had started his career before social media became big.
His standard white T-shirt and blue jeans outfit had become a staple even before the outfit repeater meme existed.
“Brooks is my friend,” I said. “He’s not the bad guy here.”
“Maureen, you may not like it, but he’s saving hundreds of jobs,” Renee said.
Mom huffed but instead of arguing, she took another bite of her pancake.
At least now I knew why Brooks had come to the saloon yesterday.
He’d been in a meeting with Renee and Wild Fields’s mayor to discuss becoming a shareholder in Bravetown.
The park belonged to the city. There was no big corporation behind it, no film studios that could offset a bad tourist season with box office income.
And apparently, the park had barely been keeping the lights on for the last few years.
Renee said that she had accidentally let that detail slip in front of Brooks. I doubted it was much of an accident. She lived and breathed every detail of that park. There were no accidents with her.
“I get that it’s good for Bravetown,” I said, “but I just don’t see what Brooks is getting out of this.”
“He said that he’s been looking for a secondary career and his daughter is obsessed with all things Old West.” Renee shrugged.
Mum pursed her lips again and stared hard at her plate.
This time, I knew it was about me, not Brooks.
I hadn’t told her about Skye. Pictures of her with her dad in the park had hit the press after their visit.
The headlines had vanished within a forty-eight-hour news cycle.
They had started with “now we finally know why country legend Brooks Monroe retired.” Then his team issued an official statement asking to respect the decision to keep a young girl out of the limelight, that he was dedicated to offering her a normal, stable upbringing.
Which, in the time of nepo babies, had turned into the public praising him for keeping his child on the down-low.
But when Mom asked me directly, I couldn’t lie to her.
Yes, Skye was the reason the tour had been cancelled, but that hadn’t been my information to share.
I had a feeling it was hard for her to accept that Brooks had done the right thing for his daughter, and it had been the catalyst for her daughter’s unraveling.
“The eggs are amazing,” Duncan mumbled.
His attempt at distraction failed. Mom pushed off the table. She dumped most of her pancake in the trash and started rinsing and scrubbing her plate in the sink while the rest of us chewed in silence.
Physically, I was a carbon copy of my mother.
We were both five feet four, had the same medium build, rosy skin covered in freckles, and identical faces from the hooded eyes to the pointy chin.
We only differed in our coloring. Mom had brown eyes and auburn curls, and I had gray eyes and honey-blond hair.
I must have gotten those things from my dad, but since Mom had no clue who or where he was, never mind what he looked like, I had no way of verifying.
She’d been with Duncan for five years now and as much as I liked him, he’d never be any sort of father figure to me.
He did, however, get my mom. So when she stopped scrubbing and just stared at the plate in her hands, he went and hugged her from behind, pressed a soft kiss against the back of her head and whispered something in her ear that turned her frown into the faintest smile.
“I should go. I have the lunch shift, and my boss is a real dick about me being on time.” I shot Renee a grin and she responded by sticking her tongue out at me.
In moments like this, it showed that Mom had me when she was nineteen—and her best friend from middle school became my godmother when they’d both still been teenagers.
This wasn’t the picture-perfect family you expected in a place like Bravetown, but it was mine. And I loved it.
· Brooks ·
I stood two steps from the top of the staircase like a creep.
Not fully on the balcony. Just far enough to be able to see the bar, and the blond woman behind it.
I’d caught the lull between lunch and dinner.
Only a handful of people sat downstairs, and the staff section upstairs was completely deserted.
Addie leaned against the counter while she scribbled something on a wooden clipboard, her eyes moving back and forth between her notes and the bottles on the wall.
I still couldn’t get over how different she looked.
Not just because she was in a historical costume that really should have looked matronly but only accentuated how small her waist was while the rest of her curved out against the fabric.
And I really shouldn’t have been noticing the way those buttons were working overtime to stay closed over her chest as she worked behind the bar.
But Addie looked…healthy. Her cheeks had color that wasn’t painted on.
Every little move flowed, relaxed, uncalculated.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen this version of her.
I could have watched her for hours. Alas, a glass shattered downstairs, her attention swung up, and her eyes landed on me.
Her mouth flattened into a thin line.
Time to suck it up.
“Hi.” I took a seat at the bar, watching her for a sign of yesterday’s fight and flight response.
“Hi.” She set the clipboard down. “What can I get you?”
“You’re not going to try to kick me out again?”
“I heard that you’re part-owner now, so you can go wherever the hell you want.
But don’t expect me to call you Mr. Monroe just because you’re technically my boss.
” Adriana’s claws had always come out when she felt the ground shaking beneath her feet.
While I loved that she hadn’t changed into someone who cowered with her tail tucked, I hated that I’d been the one to make her feel like she was losing her footing.
It probably didn’t help that I hadn’t even gotten to tell her about this new development myself. News traveled fast in Bravetown.
“Not yet. The legal teams are still working on the contract.”
“Since when are you into theme parks?”
“To be fair, this one is pretty great. Skye loves it.”
“Right, so you decided to buy your daughter a theme park for her thirteenth birthday? It’s giving Veruca Salt. Daddy, buy me an Oompa Loompa.”
“No.” I chuckled at her Veruca voice. “There’s actually more to it…”
“Okay, I’m listening.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and popped her hip out, and I should have known better than to stare at the way her skirt flowed around her, hinting at the lush curves underneath.
Heat pooled at the base of my spine. Shit.
I’d always known she was beautiful, but we’d met when she was twenty and her first album hadn’t even been released yet.
The power imbalance between us had been so glaring, I never had any intention of pursuing her in that way.
“Do you want a drink?” she asked.
“Yes, please.” Maybe this was the wrong call. When I’d come here with my plan yesterday, I hadn’t factored in that Addie was all grown up. It probably wasn’t smart to do this if I was attracted to her.
Bourbon appeared in front of me and I took a big swig.
Screw this. She was too young. She was my friend. I’d figure out how to keep it in my pants. This wasn’t about me. It was about making things better for my daughter, and for Addie.
“I wanted to talk to you alone,” I said. “When do you get off work?”
Adriana raised her sharp brows at me, then waved her hand around as if to point out that we were the only two people on this balcony.
“Right.” I cleared my throat. “This is kind of big. I don’t want us to be interrupted.”