Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
“For some reason I thought Shifters would be like in the movies. You know. Half man, half beast, bad breath. I’m glad I found out wrong.”
— JENNIFER ASHLEY, MATE CLAIMED
M averick took me pumpkin picking for our eighth date.
A sign greeted us that read, CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE EVENT. Beneath it was scrawled: Yes, that means you, and Gate-crashers get toothmarks for party favors . Maverick had reserved the entire patch just for us so I could wander without worrying about photographs or being on display.
He’d also brought hot apple cider in a thermos, and we strolled up and down the rows of pumpkins, the two of us sipping and talking. Maverick insisted on pulling the red wagon for collecting my pumpkin bounty, and it was adorable. I snapped some quick pics with my phone, wondering if I could post them on my Instagram without sparking dating rumors. My followers would love my pumpkin-picking lumberjack with his teeny, size- inappropriate red toy and his T-shirt that announced: Blood Type: Pumpkin Spice!
It didn’t take me long to get into pumpkinpalooza. I pointed; Maverick picked. After the third pumpkin, I realized I should probably check in with him, or at least make it clear that I would be paying for my own pumpkins and not taking advantage of his generosity in the matter of gourds.
“Is there a pumpkin quota? I promise I’ll dial back my picking.”
Crouched beside me, Maverick regarded me with a wry expression as I poked around in the vines. THERE WERE TINY BABY PUMPKINS. They were nestled deep in the vines that spread everywhere, the cutest little pumpkin buds ever. Plus, being outside with my feet and fingers in the dirt made my witchy side happy.
“You can have whatever you want,” he said. “I love your enthusiasm for pumpkins.”
I squinted at him. Was my date making a lewd pun? It was cute and funny coming from him. Maverick’s flirting was typically light and G-rated. He was respectful when he talked (and respectful in a whole different worshipping-at-the-shrine-of-Venus sort of way when we were in bed). Getting to see this side of him made me feel special, like he trusted me in ways he didn’t trust other people.
“Whatever I want, huh?” My inner Chaneque squealed. This was the checkered flag to collect anything and everything.
He nodded, gently twisting a white pumpkin so it popped off the vine and into his big hands. He set it in the wagon. “As you wish.”
THOSE WORDS. Those words were better than a magic spell. Just like that, I was transformed into a gorgeous blonde princess who made her humble but strong lover run all over kingdom come, pleasing her. Acts of service was Westley and Buttercup’s love language. It was Maverick’s too.
I wasn’t sure what mine was. When it came to love, I was a pre-verbal baby, still in the early stages of language acquisition. I babbled. I made playful sounds. Sometimes, I mimicked what I heard. It had never bothered me before, but now I wished I was better at this whole love thing.
I love him.
Where had that thought come from? It should have been too soon to be thinking about forever feelings, but it wasn’t . It wasn’t at all.
Since Buzzard’s Bluff and our fun afterward, we’d stopped keeping our relationship a secret. We weren’t putting out a press release, but we were clearly a couple. He stayed at my place most nights. I stole his T-shirts because they smelled like him and apparently his wolfiness was rubbing off on me—I wanted the whole werewolf community to scent him on me.
There were kisses and hand-holding where we might have been spotted. I knew there was gossip on set about us—heck, we talked about everyone , so it would have been more surprising if there had been radio silence—but we’d decided not to care what people said.
We were still taking things slow, building the intimacy between us one fragile, delicious layer at a time, like the Japanese crepe cake he’d treated me to. The important thing was that we had a cake. We were a thing . Having sex with Maverick would just be the final layer of frosting, the cherry on top of the best relationship of my life. I’d written this book before: a whole lot of funny no, we could never EVER work that became HUH maybe we could work and wow isn’t he sexy . We’d had ups and downs, downs and ups, and maybe we were headed toward happily ever after.
“You know, I still don’t know all that much about what you do.”
“What I do?” I yelped, startling, because my mind was on endings that were actually beginnings and absolutely not on pumpkin picking.
Stay in the moment! Don’t be so future-focused that you forget to enjoy today!
I’d never been in love.
But I loved Maverick.
I love my big, sweet, slightly growly, overprotective, safe werewolf professor.
So many words for so much man.
“Yeah, your occupation,” he teased. “I’m reading your books, but you never talk much about the acting side of things.”
Hold up a moment.
“You bought my books.” I fell over onto my butt. He was going to read my love stories? Where I wrote about sex and supernatural critters and generally poured my heart out on the page even though, naturally, I pretended it was entirely made-up fictional stuff?
Oh. God.
“Of course.” He sat down next to me, crisscross applesauce, and squeezed my hand gently. “Why wouldn’t I? You’re amazing, and it’s part of who you are.”
“I’m pretty sure that if I worked at the Piggly Wiggly you wouldn’t come stand at my cash register and check things out,” I argued. “Or if I was, say, a neurosurgeon, you couldn’t just waltz into my operating theater and pull up a chair. Hanging out at your girlfriend’s place of work is something you do in high school.”
He lifted a big shoulder. “Your books matter to you. They matter to me.”
“Okay.” Was there a way to ask for a heads-up when he got to the sex scenes? Oh GOD. Had I written a werewolf orgy in that one book? I made a mental note to check; I’d been so busy these last few years that I’d promptly moved on to the next book after finishing the last one. The details blurred. “Thanks for the dollar fifty in royalties?”
“You’re welcome.”
I pointed randomly to a pumpkin. He plucked it and added it to my pumpkin collection. SAY SOMETHING.
“You didn’t Google me online?”
He shook his head. “Just in the online bookstore so I could have you on my phone. Do you not want to talk about your job?”
“It’s fine. I mean, it’s just kinda weird that it’s never come up. People always have questions. It’s usually the hot topic of conversation at the dinner table.”
Or in the coffee shop line, the fast-food drive-through, the airport restroom, or the grocery store. Anywhere I went, people had questions. They all wanted to know what it was like to be a best-selling author, and they asked about my books, my TV show, my glamorous celebrity life (I edited my responses to that last one). I hadn’t thought about the prominence of “Tell me about your job” in the Get To Know Sonnet question lists, but it was usually ranked number one. Sometimes, it traded places with “Have you lost weight?” and “What’s your new diet?”
Yet this was the first time Maverick had explicitly asked me about it. It had come up, sort of, in his truck the day we met, when he’d misheard my name, and I’d told him I was a writer. After that, however, his questions had been about what I wished for, my opinions, my preferences. He hadn’t hit me with a thousand questions about being a famous TV actress. Heck, I’d asked more questions about his snake gig—and that was definitely not a topic I’d embraced.
I wasn’t even all that surprised that he’d bought my books. If I’d painted, he would have hung my work on his walls; if I’d been a dentist, he would have told the world that no one filled a cavity better. I could not have written a more perfect hero, and his interest in what I did for a living as an actress and a writer was only the tip of his interest iceberg.
He listened to me. He asked questions and then he listened some more. Most people were dismissive about the romance genre. They explained to me that it was just fluff or brain candy, as if it took less work or thought than literary fiction or “serious” stuff. It was love. How much more important could you get?
“Are you going to ask me where I get my ideas?”
He grinned at me. “That sounds like a trap.”
“Or volunteer to be my research assistant?”
He winked. “I’m hearing you prefer to work alone.”
I grinned back. “Usually, yes. But for you I might make an exception. You have no idea how many people believe I must have done every single thing described in my books.”
“So, they’re fantasies.” His eyes were warm and playful. “That’s good to know. Although I think your books have been mis-shelved.”
“And why is that?”
“Because seeing as how they’re your fantasies, that makes them more like recipes.” He bumped my shoulder with his. “I would be putting them with the cookbooks.”
“Maverick Boone, are you saying that you’re going to follow along like they’re a set of directions ?”
He grinned at me. “Are they good recipes? Do I get a private cooking lesson with the chef?”
Warmth bloomed in my chest, and I couldn’t stop my grin. “You are so bad.”
“Mmmhmmm. And now I’m remembering one particular part.” His eyes dropped to my chest, then moved lower. There was suddenly a whole lot of heat in my kitchen.
Conveniently, there was a fire extinguisher sitting right next to me.
I crawled into his lap. “Writing lesson número uno : show, don’t tell.”
We were in his truck driving back to his place after loading up our pumpkin haul, bickering amicably about the best way to decorate for Halloween, when Elena called.
Her name flashed up on my screen along with a handful of flower, poop, and unicorn emojis. Did I want to answer? Did I have to?
“What’s wrong?”
Maverick glanced over at me, obviously concerned about the ferocity with which I was glaring at my phone screen.
“Nothing, at least not yet. It’s just my sister.” I ignored the call. “I’ll reach out to her later.”
“Your manager.”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t told him about my argument with Elena in Los Angeles, the one where I’d drawn some Maverick-sized boundaries. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to share that she saw my dating a Southern biologist as a career liability—and never mind the fact that he had a somewhat checkered and possibly criminal past. Mostly, she and I had ignored our blow up. We’d kept our texting and emails to business only, and there had been zero phone conversations where anyone could go off script.
The flower-poop-unicorn parade flashed across my screen again.
Elena wasn’t giving up.
“You should take it.” Maverick lifted his chin toward the phone. “She’s family. It could be important.”
“It never is,” I grumbled. Still, I took the call. “Hi?”
“Sonnet,” Elena said instead of reciprocating my greeting. She said my name like you’d greet a dog that was yapping and trying to climb your leg. Calm down. Who’s a good girl? Don’t bark!
I wasn’t an actress for nothing. I imitated her tone, pitch-perfect. “Elena.” You cute little worked up thing you. YOU calm down!
This was not the response she’d expected, and it took a moment for her to remember her next line.
“I’m reaching out about the Wolf Girl script and the London premiere.”
I’d forgotten about the stupid London premiere. Again. Did I even put it on my calendar? Which month is it?
“How many pages do you have for me? The studio wants a status update. They need at least the partial.”
Ugh. I hadn’t written a single page since they’d un-casted me from the role of Wolf Girl.
“I don’t have anything new. Not yet.”
A controlled exhalation. An inhale. I imagined her puffing out her cheeks in irritation like a pufferfish that had spotted a threat. Spines out!
“I’m still brainstorming,” I hedged.
That sounded better than admitting that it was all a big blank page where Wolf Girl was concerned. It wasn’t like me to procrastinate, and Elena knew it. I’d let the project fall off my radar, which wasn’t professional behavior at all. I needed to write the pages or officially pass on the project.
“And London? Do you want me to reach out to Luke’s team?”
“Luke’s team?”
Maverick shifted in his seat. His attention was fixed on the mountain road in front of us, but the set lines of his face announced that he didn’t like hearing the name of my co-star.
“You need a date, and he was your last?—”
“Not a chance,” I interrupted her. “He’s nothing to me.” Then impulsively, I said, “I’ll bring Maverick.”
Maverick took his eyes off the road. He looked at me. Where am I going? his raised eyebrows said. And also: Of course, I’ll go with you, but I may need to put the address into my map app.
Elena didn’t say anything. The pufferfish had spotted a reef shark and was debating a spiny defense versus a hasty retreat into some nice, safe coral.
Finally, she asked, “Do you think that’s wise?”
“I do.”
Another measured inhale. Seriously: she was going to explode. “Okay, let’s put aside our conversation from when you were in LA We’ll just put aside my conviction that hooking up with this random Southern redneck is a terrible mistake. Put all that aside for a minute and consider this. I shouldn’t have to spell it out, but: if you take the community college professor to this premiere?—”
My anger rose.
I kept my voice level, however. “Maverick. His name is Maverick. Do not disparage him.”
She ignored this. “Then your relationship is public knowledge. His life will change overnight. People will dig into his past. Celebrity bloggers and online fan forums will rip him apart. They’ll look for reasons why he’s not good enough for you, and they’ll find them. Or they’ll make them up. He’ll be on the cover of supermarket tabloids and women’s magazines; his pictures will be for sale on all the commercial websites, and they’ll be downloaded and used in places he hates. People will pay attention to him, and he won’t be able to go traipsing off into the mountains looking for hognose snakes without a posse of photographers trampling along behind him. Does he know that? Is that what he wants?”
And . . . the pufferfish had teeth.
It bit me.
There was blood in the water.
Flailing.
Missing body parts.
My anger deflated like a souffle hitting cold air.
“We haven’t discussed it,” I admitted. Crap. Maverick’s accomplishments, his successes, and his good points weren’t the issue here. It was the notoriety he’d gain that was. I’d been so busy playing happy couple with Maverick, living in this perfect dating bubble that we’d created, that I hadn’t thought through what would happen when our solitary bubble rejoined the rest of the world.
It would pop.
Could we build a better bubble? Would he even want to?
“The premiere is in one week.”
“Okay.” Fiddlesticks and flapjacks . I had nothing.
“I’m chartering a plane.”
“Great. Okay. Great.”
“Do you want me to reach out to Luke’s team? He can fly to London with you. You could announce that you’re going as friends. Then you don’t have to put Maverick out there. You’ll have more time to think things through.”
Think things through being code for see things my way and end things .
“Don’t do that.” No way I was spending eight hours in an enclosed space with Luke. “Let me talk it over with Maverick.”
“I need an answer by tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.” Technically, I was her boss. I’d never pulled that card before, but I was tempted now.
“Good night.” She paused, as if she wanted to add something else, then finished up with, “You take care now.”
Her tone was surprisingly gentle and affectionate. It was the tone that belonged to the sister who cared about me and not the businesslike woman who was my manager. I loved one of those and appreciated the other, and some of my anger dissipated. Unfortunately, panic moved into the newly freed up space in my heart.
We ended the call, and I sat there, silently freaking out.
I should have discussed this with Maverick before our first date.
Before agreeing we’d try for forever.
And definitely before falling in love with him.
My brain suggested a million billion ways that Maverick could get hurt. There was no way the world would dismiss him as boring and of no account. They would pry, and pry, and pry. All his secrets would come out, and while I loved this man for a reason and he was awesome, he hated his past.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, rubbing my thigh gently. “Did you get more bad news? Do we need to get pie and ice cream?”
The offer of sugar and carbohydrates merited a smile, but it faded fast. I was switching gears from freaked out to practical. And practical was depressing.
I’d been selfish because I liked him so much. Despite his claim of wanting more than a quick hookup with me, he didn’t understand what he was hitching his wagon to. The overly public first date and the sidelong looks we’d been getting on set were the tip of the attention iceberg.
Oh my God. He hadn’t even Googled me yet.
“So, when I went back to Los Angeles, Elena saw the picture of us on my phone and she didn’t like it. She was worried the photo would leak.”
“I would never share it, if that’s what she’s worried about.”
“It’s not just that photo. I have to go to London next week. There’s a premiere, and I need to go with someone.”
“A date.”
“Yeah. A date, but the right kind of date. Someone who will boost my image and create the desirable kind of buzz.” I’d heard these words hundreds of times in meetings and strategy sessions and lectures (from Elena, naturally) about the ephemeral nature of my success and how we needed to leverage it before it vanished.
“I’m going to be real honest, Sonnet. I won’t be happy if you date someone else, even as a one-night work thing.” His tone was firm, as if he meant business, but also calm and reasonable. He was trying not to sound possessive or dictatorial. He wasn’t giving orders, but he was explaining exactly how he felt.
“I don’t want to go on a date with anyone but you. It would make me very unhappy.”
He thought that through for a second, before asking, “So what’s the problem?”
I held out my hand, and he immediately threaded the fingers of his right hand through mine.
“If you come with me to the premiere, everyone will know you’re my boyfriend.”
He nodded firmly. “That seems like a good thing.”
“ Everyone will know. You will have zero privacy. Strangers will dig through your trash, hack your phone and online accounts, and pop out from behind the produce displays in the grocery store to take your picture. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to be photographed with a six-pack of beer and some toilet paper, and then people will publish stories about your drinking problem and your digestive issues? Worse, they will follow you . And your brothers. If you shift into your wolf, they will photograph you.”
Maverick shifted in his seat, amber rolling over his eyes. Yes, dating me might mean the whole world finds out your werewolf secret.
Could we keep our relationship a secret? Perhaps if we had been discreet, but the discretion horse was totally out of that barn. Everyone on set knew about us. It was a miracle that there were no hints on the celebrity news websites yet. So maybe it’s not too late? What happens in Moonlight Valley could stay in Moonlight Valley?
“Yes.”
I’d lost the thread of our conversation. “Yes, what?”
“Yes, I’m ready to give up my privacy and have people go through my trash. I’ll need to give Ranger a heads-up, though. His personal habits are odd. Maybe I should beef up my online security. Or delete those accounts. I could move out of the family house and get a place somewhere else. I could take Sanye up on the offer to house-sit.”
WHAT? I gaped at him. “You’re actually considering this?”
He had mentioned her offer a few days previously, when Sanye had finally gotten around to explaining her drive-around-the-country-in-a-van plans. At the time, I had not thought he was a fan.
His warm gaze slid over my body. “There will be compensation.”
I grinned despite myself and our unfortunate situation, but even his charm was no proof against reality. “You’ve never lived like this, Maverick. It’s not just what you do now or tomorrow. It’s everything in your past. Every embarrassing arrest photo, every painful, ugly moment that you thought was over and done with will be resurrected. They will talk to people who knew—or claimed to know—you, and then they’ll publish that shit as the truth. You won’t be moving into another place—you’ll be residing in a fishbowl.”
He frowned, turning my words over in his head. We drove in silence, him working things through in his head, me silently freaking out next to him.
Could we just see each other in secret? It was a time-honored rom-com trope. It could work! We’d just sneak around, love each other on the down-low. Our private life would stay private. Maybe?
“You’re concerned that my past will hurt your public image,” he said finally.
I flinched because he sounded hurt and accepting at the same time. He believed he didn’t deserve a second chance, not after what he’d done when he’d been a teenager. “It’s not that. Not at all. Nothing embarrasses me. I am impervious to embarrassment.”
He pulled his hand away. “I’ve been arrested multiple times. There are sordid stories galore. I am not a hero, and your being seen with me would absolutely not be a good look for you.”
I gaped. What. The. Hell. “Don’t worry about me. Or my image.”
“Would you lose more acting roles? Could you be dropped from projects?”
I opened my mouth to deny this vehemently. But the words didn’t come out. Truth was, I didn’t know what the impact would be. I hadn’t given it much thought.
Interpreting my silence as agreement, Maverick cursed.
“Maverick—” I reached for him, and he backed away.
Pain pierced my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I’d never seen Maverick angry and dark, closed off and ruminating. He wasn’t here with me, in our moment. He was somewhere else, on the other side of a dark and scary chasm that had unexpectedly opened between us.
He looked at me from way far away on the other side. It was cold over there, and distant.
“Do you care about your career?” he asked.
I ignored that. “I care about your privacy.”
We were almost to the cabin.
I tried again. “Will you come in? Stay with me?”
He shook his head.
Don’t cry. You are a strong, independent woman. You are not a Maverick appendage. Or Maverick-dependent. “You promised. You promised that my being famous wouldn’t make you leave me. You said I could trust you.”
His eyes didn’t shift from the road. “This isn’t about your fame. This is about my past hurting your future. I promised not to hurt you.”
And how is this NOT hurting me?
“Don’t do this.” I fisted my hands in my lap. He’d backed off, so there could be no touching. I would respect his boundaries. “Stay with me. Stay tonight, and we’ll figure this out tomorrow. I promise you.”
“Not tonight.” Maverick’s voice was unrecognizable, cold and stern and unyielding. “I need space.”