by Flynn, Avery
Walking in with his hands up, he stopped a few feet away from her. “We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.” She pushed her glasses up her nose and inhaled a shaky breath.
“I owe you an explanation.” He tried to think of a decent counterargument for when she told him to shove off.
She considered him for a moment, her jaw tight as she rubbed her upper arms. “If that’s what it takes to get you to leave, let’s hear it.”
Surprised, his mind went blank. Shit. What did he do now?
While he fumbled for words, for where to begin, she stared, not giving him an inch. He took a deep breath. As Julie Andrews said, the beginning is a very good place to start.
“My dad was a frustrated actor who’d never gotten his big break, so he was determined to make his son a success. I started going on auditions as soon as I could sit up on my own. Commercials led to television shows, which led to movies.”
“Don’t forget the Oscar.” A hurt bitterness twisted her tone.
Damn, he had fucked this up so bad. He hated that he’d done that to her. “Yeah, and an Oscar. Rupert got parts of the story right. I was wild. I did things I shouldn’t have and took advantage of people whose only goal was to be with someone famous.”
Those days were hazy, but the ugly loneliness came through in crisp detail. It still had the power to rake its claws through his flesh and leave a gaping wound that never seemed to heal.
“But it caught up to you,” Natalie prompted.
If only it had been that easy. “No.” Sean shook his head. “My father caught up to me. He had a wicked backhand but when I was younger he’d usually made sure to land the real nasty blows on places that the camera wouldn’t pick up. Forgotten lines might mean a swift smack the first time. The second time resulted in the whistle of his belt. If I fucked–up a third time, I’d spend the night in the closet. Being a child actor wasn’t fun and games for me. It was a way of keeping my dad appeased. He controlled everything I did and every hour of my day.”
Her hand covered her mouth in horror. “My God, how long did it go on?”
“Until I got big enough to fight back.” He shrugged. “Those are the days when I’d report to the set early so the makeup artists would have time to cover the bruises. They figured I was just another head case with too much money and fame, running wild. I never bothered to correct them.”
Natalie crossed the room. Her gentle fingers brushed the scar above his eye from when his father had launched a coffee cup at him. “I’m so sorry, Sean.” She rose up on her tiptoes, kissed the scar, and stepped back.
He hated losing her touch, but he had to finish. It couldn’t be only about pity for him. “That wasn’t the worst of what my father had done. My mom had taken off shortly after I was born. So it had been just my dad and I. When I was eighteen, my grandmother moved to California. She lived nearby, but not close enough to see what was going on. Ruby Sue reminds me of her—a deadly combination of brass–knuckle tough love served with a side of cookies. At that time, I wanted nothing more than to retire from acting, but my dad was dead set against it. Once I’d gotten too big to beat, he had to learn other ways to keep me in line and acting.”
She took his hand in hers and squeezed. “What happened?”
“My grandmother got sick.” His voice broke. He closed his eyes and saw her frail and helpless in the hospital, too weak to complain but too strong to let go. “Really sick. And my bastard of a father, her own son, used her care as a bargaining chip. He’d found a script and thought I’d be perfect for it. If I didn’t agree to take the part, my grandmother would go from her expensive but exceptional nursing facility to a state–run place. He was her legal guardian at that point and had total control over where she lived.”
It wasn’t until the bastard had offered that ultimatum that Sean really learned how deep his hate could go. “I took the part. She stayed where she was, but she didn’t get better. She died a week before the Academy Awards.”
Natalie brought his hand to her soft lips and kissed him. The gentle reminder of her presence saving him from falling down the rabbit hole of painful memories.
“I don’t remember a damn thing about the awards ceremony until I was up on that stage. I stared down at my father with so much hatred in my heart that I wanted to kill the bastard right there on national television. Instead, as soon as I got offstage, I gave him the statue and snuck out the back. I stole a car and started running. I didn’t stop until I got to Salvation. Everything about me here started out as a lie, but I swear to God that lie helped me find the truth. It helped me find you.” The gossipy little town had saved him and falling in love with Natalie had set him free. “So that’s it. Now you know everything.”
“Do you ever miss acting?” she asked, her eyes swimming with emotion.
He almost told her no, just so to make those unshed tears disappear. But he was done lying to Natalie. “Only when I remember that feeling of being totally free and losing myself in a role. Sure, it was just glorified pretending, but I was good at it and a part of me still loved it despite my father.”
“Sean—” A blaring alarm went off in the brewery. Red lights flashed and the emergency lighting flipped on. “What the hell?”
He pulled Natalie close, adrenaline shooting through his veins. The saboteur, it had to be. “Power outage.”
“How?” She moved toward the research room’s door and reached for the knob.
“Not how, who.” He moved ahead of her, standing between her and the door. “Stay in here and keep the door locked.”
Pulling her close, he lowered his mouth to her soft lips. There wasn’t time to tell her everything else he wanted to say, but he was never good with words that didn’t come from a script anyway. All he could give her was himself and pray like hell it was enough. He ended the kiss and sprinted out of the room, determined to find the asshole fucking with the brewery before he could do more damage—or worse, hurt Natalie.
Shadows filled most of the brewery floor. As he hustled toward the electric panel to throw on the lights, a human–shaped shadow peeled away from the gloom.
He saw the flash before he heard the gun’s crack.
The bullet tore through his upper arm, knocking him off his feet. Falling backward, his head hit the concrete hard and bounced twice before an inky blackness fell.
Chapter Fourteen
Natalie grabbed an empty beer growler from the shelf and ran out into the dark before the gunshot finished echoing. She had to get to Sean before whoever was out there got him, if she wasn’t already too late.
Adrenaline shot through her veins as she hurried as fast as she could through the brewery. The fermentation tanks, brew kettles, and tall stacks of malt and barley loomed high, casting shadows in the soft–red emergency lighting that spanned most of the concrete floor. Visibility for shit, she slowed her pace, searching for Sean in the darkness.
Her pulse pounded in her ears, almost as loud as her panicked breathing. A staticky white noise buzzed in her head and her lungs pinched closed as the panic attack hit with thunderous effect. The sudden lack of oxygen knocked her to her knees. She hit the concrete floor, pain jolting up from her kneecaps, and she cried out. Unable to get more than a sip of air into her lungs at a time, her chest burned.
“You weren’t supposed to be here, but it looks like I’m the lucky one tonight.” Low and mean, the voice stabbed its way through the static blaring in Natalie’s head. “Get up or I’ll just shoot you here.”
A foot slammed into her side and she winced. Fighting against the blackness, she didn’t reach for the pearls. She didn’t have to. A vision of Sean out there somewhere, needing her help, brought light back to darkness and oxygen into her lungs. She wouldn’t let the anxiety win if that meant losing Sean.
“Come on,” the voice ordered. “I don’t have all night.”
Gritting her teeth, Natalie pressed her hands to the cool concrete and pushed herself up. Once upright, she took a good
look at her attacker—and realized she had no fucking clue who it was. “Who are you?”
The woman had golden–blonde hair arranged in a complicated updo that would make a Miss America contestant jealous. Her makeup was flawless and she wore head–to–toe black, like a cartoon version of a cat burglar. “Joni Brennan. I believe you know my husband.”
Shock cut through the panic eating away at the edges of her vision. “You’re Carl’s wife?”
“The one and only.” Joni raised an all–steel .357 Magnum with a three–inch barrel and aimed it right at Natalie’s head.
Her heart almost stopped in her chest. “Where’s Sean?”
“Start moving and I’ll take you to him.” Joni clicked off the gun’s safety. “Gotta tell you though, he’s probably not worth it. Look at me. I bet all my chips on that son of a bitch Carl, and I lost. Big. It turns out my parents were right. I didn’t marry a man with potential. I hitched my wagon to a mean drunk with illusions of grandeur. I became a laughingstock.” She shoved the gun in Natalie’s back and pushed her forward. “You of all people should understand the horror of that. You’re a Sweet, after all.”
Refusing to surrender to the anxiety still eating away at the back of her brain, Natalie took a step forward and then another. If she could keep Joni talking, the other woman might get comfortable enough to let down her guard. It wasn’t much, but it was the only plan Natalie could come up with on short notice.
“What does that have to do with the brewery?”
“Everything,” the woman snarled. “The Sweet Salvation Brewery was supposed to be ours.” She pushed Natalie around a corner. “Instead, you three bitches come along and steal it right from under us. Owning this brewery and making it a success would have shown my family and the rest of this town that they were wrong.”
Natalie tripped over something solid at her feet. Desperate to stay upright, she grabbed the first thing her flailing arms encountered: Clyde’s workbench. Her knees cracked against the concrete floor but the move kept her from falling straight down.
That’s when she saw it. Saw him. The red emergency lighting outlined Sean’s motionless body at her feet.
The world came to a standstill as an entire lifetime of what if and now never will be ran through her mind. She’d come to Salvation to solve the problem of Natalie and find her own happily ever after. And for a minute, she had. She hated Sean’s lies, but after hearing his explanation understood why he’d done it. He’d been fighting for control just as much as she had. What had he said? That she hated change she couldn’t control? Well, she sure as hell hadn’t been able to control her feelings for Sean. She’d fallen in love and now it was too late. Every part of her ached with regret.
Then Sean’s chest rose with a shaky breath and she nearly sank to the floor with relief.
When they got out of this alive, she was going to kill him for running into the brewery as though he had a stunt double around the corner to take the hits.
“Come on, klutz,” Joni ordered.
Every ounce of worry and fear drained out of her, replaced with a rage ocean–deep and mountain–wide, with only one target. Palming a wrench, Natalie slid it up the sleeve of her sweater and straightened.
Her first instinct was the strike out immediately, but she knew she couldn’t. If she had any hope of taking Joni out, she had to time it just right.
She kept her hand close to her thigh and continued forward. “Does Carl know?”
“That idiot? Of course not.” The emotionless cold in Joni’s voice added an extra bit of creepy to the whole fucked–up situation. “When he got out on bail after running your sister off the road, I bailed him out, got him drunk and kept him that way so he missed his court appearance. And while he was passed out, I made sure things started going wrong here. Now, I never expected him to shoot himself after I spiked his morning whiskey with PCP, but the unexpected happens and you have to deal with it.”
“You set him up,” Natalie prompted, leading Joni farther away from Sean.
“A nice little bit of irony there, wasn’t it? Of course, I didn’t expect law enforcement to be so dead set against actually investigating the accidents.” She jabbed the revolver into Natalie’s back. “That’s far enough.”
Swallowing her fear, Natalie put everything she had into remaining calm. “Carl’s in jail, you won’t be able to blame him for this.”
“True, but the sheriff’s deputies aren’t much interested in investigating the goings on at the Sweet Salvation Brewery, are they? They’ll tie the explosion to a gas leak and it’ll be just another horrible accident at a poorly run craft brewery that resulted in two people’s deaths.” Joni took a step back. “Too bad for you it had to end like this.”
Using every trick and tip she’d ever learned from Dr. Kenning, Natalie marshaled all of her focus and intent into this moment.
She inhaled a deep breath and let the wrench drop into her palm.
Tightening her grip around the metal hidden behind her back, she centered her weight on the balls of her feet.
The ominous sound of a safety being pulled back sounded.
“No.” Natalie spun on her heel, bringing the wrench up at the same time.
The move startled Joni and she fired, but the sit went wide.
Natalie brought the wrench down with all her strength.
It cracked against the other woman’s shoulder.
The gun fell and clattered against the floor, skittering into the shadows toward Sean.
Before Natalie could even make a play for the weapon, Joni screamed like a woman possessed and came at her.
A shot cracked.
Joni went down in a crumpled heap to the ground, howling, “You shot me in the ass.”
Behind Joni, Sean stood with the gun. “Are you okay?”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he collapsed to the ground, blood streaming down his arm.
Three hours later, the hospital was a mad house. TV crews and tabloid reporters had swarmed the Salvation County Medical Complex like a plague of locusts. The news had gone viral when Rupert Crowley had breathlessly reported on the shooting at the brewery on the country’s highest–rated cable news program. Everyone from the doctors to the sheriff’s deputies working crowd control were talking about how Sean O’Dell was really Hollywood heartthrob Sean Duvin, who’d disappeared six years ago moments after accepting his Oscar, never to be heard from again until now.
Really, it was the best piece of gossip Salvation had whispered about in decades.
And Natalie didn’t give a rat’s ass. She needed to lay eyes on Sean and confirm what the paramedics had said about his condition. A concussion and minor gunshot wound were serious, but they were a helluva lot better than getting blown sky–high in a gas explosion, as Joni had planned.
Fresh from a mind–numbing interrogation by law enforcement, Natalie and Miranda elbowed their way through the crowd to the hospital’s front doors.
“There she is,” someone hollered. “It’s Natalie Sweet.”
A platoon of cameras turned in her direction. Reporters rushed forward en masse, shoving microphones in her face and yelling questions at her.
“Are you sleeping with Sean Duvin?”
“Did Sean save your life?”
“Will you move back to California with him?”
“Is it true he has a harem living with him?”
“Did you lie to the police to protect his identity?”
“Are you his biggest fan?”
Natalie shrank back from the blazing lights and the deafening noise. Her chest tightened, squeezing all the oxygen from her lungs. The buzzing blared in her head.
Just when she thought she was going to crumple, her sister grabbed her hand and yanked her through the hospital’s front doors.
Miranda pulled her into a quiet waiting room with its florescent lights, white–tiled floors, and heavy scent of disinfectant. “You okay, sis?”
Natalie fought to calm her breathi
ng before she hyperventilated. In. She pictured Sean’s face as he told her about the stout he was making for the invitational. Out. The feel of his fingers as he tucked her hair behind her ear. In. The sound of her name coming from his lips. Out. The way he looked at her as if she was his and always had been. Her heart rate slowed and the hospital waiting room came back into focus.
She gave her sister a thumbs–up. “Better.”
“Good. You stay here where the jackals can’t see you. I’ll go find out Sean’s room number.” Miranda marched off to the nurse’s station.
Relieved not to have to see the crowd anymore, Natalie sank down into a chair. How ridiculous was it that she could face down a deranged woman intent on blowing up the Sweet Salvation Brewery, but couldn’t handle the shouting reporters gathered outside?
“It’s horrible how they behave, isn’t it?” A thin, balding man sitting in the corner spoke up. “I told Sean I think it will only get worse now that the press has found him.”
Salvation was a small town. While she may not know every person by name, she knew pretty much all of them by sight, and this guy in his ironed designer jeans and blinged–out T–shirt with a tiger on it was definitely not local.
Wary of another sneak attack by a reporter, Natalie stiffened. “Who are you?”
“Sorry, it’s been a crazy day and I think I left my manners somewhere above Iowa.” He gave her a friendly wave. “I’m Hartley, Sean’s former manager. And you must the Natalie that Sean told me all about. I flew in this afternoon, after I heard the scuttlebutt that Rupert Crowley had found him. I wanted to warn Sean that the swarm outside was coming, but it looks like I was too late.” He shook his head. “At least he’ll have better protection from their prying eyes once he gets back home to California.”
Her heart stuttered to a stop. “He’s leaving Salvation?”
Natalie knew she shouldn’t be surprised. She’d fired him. Told him to get out of her life and stay out. He’d only come back to the brewery tonight to explain himself. That was all. It didn’t mean he wanted to stay. It sure as hell didn’t mean he wanted her. She glanced out the window at the press milling around outside. Especially not after he’d been found.
