Guilty As Sin

by March, Meghan

  I rush to the desk and find a stationery set with a beautiful pen in a decorative inkwell. As soon as my fingers wrap around it, I second-guess myself.

  My songwriting ability was equally a blessing and a curse.

  But maybe . . . just maybe . . . getting the words out is a way of letting go of the past. Maybe this is exactly what I need to do to give myself any kind of shot at having happiness in my future.

  I can write anything and it doesn’t matter. No one will ever see it or read it. It can be just for me. An outlet.

  Giving myself permission is like flipping a switch. As soon as the pen touches the paper, I lose myself in the words and time ceases to matter.

  Line after line, I unburden my brain from the guilt and negativity that have been dragging me down.

  A pattern takes shape, and I flip to a new page. The lines start to rhyme. A chorus chants in my brain. Absently, I hum a melody, and my body rolls with the beat.

  It should scare me. I should throw down my pen and back away from the desk, but instead of fear, I’m filled with an undeniable sense of power.

  What I’m writing has meaning.

  It’s my truth.

  I put words on paper until my hand cramps and my brain finally goes quiet, and the only sound in the room is my calm, steady breathing.

  I stare down at the scattered sheets and realize that for the first time in a long time, writing words that will become lyrics fills me with purpose. Maybe because it’s out of instinct and not duty?

  With my hand wrapped around my now cold mug of coffee, I rise and walk to the windows. I don’t know what time it is, but it doesn’t matter because all I see above me is sunshine and blue sky. The clouds don’t even register.

  A smile tugs at my lips. So this is what it’s like to feel optimistic about the future.

  I finish my cold coffee just as someone knocks on the door.

  Probably Jackie taking a break.

  I turn and walk to the door, my step a little lighter. I don’t bother to check the peephole before I pull the door open with a smile.

  But it’s not Jackie. It’s Lincoln, and he’s holding a takeout bag.

  “Edward called me, worried that you hadn’t ordered lunch or left the room. I told him he didn’t need to report your every move to me . . . but I thought maybe you’d like to eat.”

  I blink, staring at the bag as he raises it higher.

  “Cocko Taco.”

  “Did Cricket tell you it was my favorite?”

  Lincoln shakes his head. “No. You told me once.”

  “And you remembered?” A strange feeling pangs in my chest.

  “I remember everything, Blue.”

  We stand there for the longest moment, staring at each other in the doorway.

  I bite down on my lip, because it’s on the tip of my tongue to say I do too.

  19

  Lincoln

  “Can I come in?” I ask.

  Whitney continues to stare at me, shock evident in her expression. I probably deserve to have her slam the door in my face, but thankfully she doesn’t.

  “Only because you brought tacos.”

  She turns and walks toward the marble slab table, leaving me standing in the doorway. I don’t waste time following behind her.

  “If that’s what it takes . . .”

  She glances over her shoulder at me with a raised brow. “Don’t push your luck, city boy.”

  Her use of the nickname she gave me the night we met gives me hope that I haven’t completely fucked this up for good.

  “Besides, they’re really my second favorite tacos, so don’t go letting your ego get out of control.”

  I set the bag on the table and decide that this challenging version of Whitney is a hell of a lot more intriguing than the girl who let me have my way.

  When I pull the tacos out of the bag—enough for about a dozen people because I hedged my bets by pretty much ordering the entire menu—she starts laughing.

  “Seriously?”

  “I wanted to make sure I got what you liked. Whatever we have left over, we can give to the staff. No one says no to tacos.”

  Her gaze cuts up toward mine. “Thoughtful of you.”

  But I don’t want to talk about employees or how they’re like family. In fact, I want to stay as far away from any topic that’s likely to have us tiptoeing around to avoid land mines.

  “If Cocko Taco is second best, where are your favorites from?”

  Whitney chooses two foil-wrapped tacos and a few napkins. “Torchy’s in Austin, Texas. You have to order the Trailer Park, served trashy. It’s life-changing.”

  “Trashy?” I ask as I make my selections.

  “With queso. If you don’t order it that way, you’re literally missing out on life. Fried chicken with queso is everything. And their guac.” She moans. “Seriously incredible.”

  To anyone else, it might feel like inconsequential small talk, but to me, this conversation is the best I’ve had all day. I latch onto the information she gives me like it’s a golden nugget.

  “Sounds like you’ve been there a few times.”

  She nods and takes a bite. “Some days it feels like I’ve been everywhere . . . but also nowhere at the same time.”

  I follow her lead and unwrap my taco. “What do you mean by that?”

  She tilts her head to the side as if she’s trying to figure out how to explain it. “Before I left here, I wanted to go everywhere. It took a while before I realized that not all travel is created equal. When you’re hitting a new city every day, all you see is hotel rooms and venues and backstage. It all looks pretty much the same. So, while I’ve been to hundreds of cities, I haven’t experienced hardly any of them. No tourists sites. No landmarks.”

  I nod. “I know what you mean. I’ve been to big cities all over the world—and seen their finest conference rooms.”

  “Seeing the Eiffel Tower from a hotel window isn’t exactly the same as standing under it at night, staring at the lights.”

  I chew the bite of my taco, and I’m in complete agreement with her. I’ve seen a lot of things . . . while on the way to and from meetings. But rarely have I had a chance to experience the culture of the places I traveled because there just wasn’t time.

  “So, where would you go first if you were to choose for yourself?” I ask, opening the guac and pushing it across the table toward her.

  Whitney snags a chip and scoops up a glob before crunching down on it and letting out a small moan. After she swallows, she reaches for a napkin.

  “Back to Austin first for tacos, obviously,” she says with a laugh.

  “Seriously?”

  “Maybe as a pit stop on my way to the Indian Ocean. I’ve seen it from a plane window, but I want to stand in that crystal-clear water of the Seychelles.”

  Part of me wants to know where the hell she was flying to see the Seychelles, but that’s not important. What’s important is making the visual in my mind—Whitney standing in the water up to her knees, wearing a tiny blue bikini—a reality.

  “Seychelles sounds incredible,” I reply, reaching for another taco. “So, how did you manage to discover Torchy’s Tacos if you didn’t get to see more than the hotels and venues?”

  “There was a veteran roadie from Austin on all the tours. He was actually an amazing bass guitarist, but he wouldn’t ever audition for a band because he never believed he was good enough. Every time we rolled into Austin, his sister would show up within an hour and she’d have all his favorites. He asked me to join him one day, and I was hooked. After that, he always saved me some because he knew how much I loved it.”

  It shouldn’t surprise me that Whitney would make friends with roadies or that they would make sure she always got her favorite tacos. Whitney’s sweet. Smart. Witty. Sarcastic.

  Sitting around and eating lunch with her is the best part of my day.

  This is what drew me to her before—how easy it was to be around her. How often she made me laugh an
d smile. It wasn’t just the insanely addictive chemistry, although I can’t not think about that too.

  Whitney Gable is, by definition, the whole package. Unfortunately for me, she’s also the one who got away. It hammers home exactly how stupid I was back then. I knew what I had, and I lost her.

  And then I had her yesterday morning . . . and fucked up again.

  She was totally right when she told me she deserved better. She does. She deserves the best I can give her, and I’m going to bring it. No more fuckups. No more mistakes. No more regrets.

  One step at a time, I remind myself. I have to take things slowly and earn her trust back. Maybe that was our problem last time. We had one speed, and it was full tilt.

  What I want from her isn’t a sprint to the finish—I want the marathon.

  I purposely keep things light, and we trade stories as we finish eating our lunch. When I cross the room to toss the empty wrappers in the trash can beneath the desk, scattered pieces of hotel stationery spread out on top of it catch my eye.

  They’re covered in her handwriting.

  I know I shouldn’t be prying, but I’m hungry for every bit of information I can get about Whitney.

  It looks like . . . poetry? Then I remember what Ricky Rango had claimed—she wrote him a love letter.

  “Are you a writer?” I ask as I glance over my shoulder at Whitney.

  She bolts out of her chair and rushes across the room.

  “Oh, God. Don’t look at those. They’re . . . nothing. Really, nothing.” She practically hip checks me out of the way to get to the desk and shuffles the papers together. “I just write stuff. Sometimes.”

  “Is that poetry?”

  She jerks her head up with a nervous laugh. “Oh, hell no. I’m no poet. I wouldn’t even call myself a songwriter, really. No matter how long I’ve been doing it.”

  “A songwriter?” I ask as she clutches the papers to her chest. “You wrote songs? Like . . . for Ricky Rango?”

  Whitney takes a step away from the desk. “Does it matter?”

  “I’m just curious. I remember . . . I remember he said you wrote him a letter.”

  She looks away. “I didn’t write him a letter. He sent me a shitty love song, and I fixed it out of habit and sent it back. That’s what I did for Ricky for years. Fixed his shit. And then he just gave up writing completely . . . and it was all on me.”

  She didn’t write him a letter. She fixed his goddamn song. She wrote his goddamned songs.

  “That lying piece of shit.” I say it more to myself than her, but Whitney huffs out a breath.

  “Oh, you have no idea. He might have been a crappy songwriter, but Ricky was a great liar. All the way up until the end. Even his last freaking social media post that set all his fans on me like rabid dogs. He neglected to mention that the reason I filed for divorce was because he gave me an STD from some woman he was cheating on me with.”

  My brows hike up. “He cheated on you?”

  She looks up at me, her lips pressed together. “Yeah, apparently he never stopped, and I was too stupid to realize it. But when I found out, I was done. I might have been a doormat for most of my life, but I never will be again. Oh, and for the record, I’m clean. I took care of that immediately.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that, but I am glad you took a stand. You’re right—you deserve a hell of a lot better.”

  “It took me a while to realize that.” She looks out the window, and her voice quiets. “My brother would have killed Ricky if he hadn’t . . .”

  Asa isn’t the only one who would be lining up to bury Rango for what he did to Whitney. And now . . . now he’s haunting both of us.

  “I’m so sorry, Blue. I wish I could go back and change everything.”

  She turns back toward me, and instead of looking broken, she straightens her shoulders. “It happened. It’s over. Now I have to live with the consequences and figure out what’s next.”

  More than anything, I want to be first in line for what’s next with Whitney Gable, but that’s not what she needs from me right now. I can offer her a safe haven to start rebuilding her life, and in the process, do everything in my power to earn the right to be a part of it.

  But there’s one thing that doesn’t quite make sense.

  “You wrote or cowrote Ricky Rango’s songs for his whole career?”

  She nods. “I sure did. His first number-one hit, “Summer Thunder”? I cowrote that when I was nineteen. Then there was his first platinum album, Long Live Regret. He didn’t write a single song on it.”

  “How did I not know this?”

  “No one does. I’m not listed as a songwriter or cowriter on any of them. Ricky convinced me that he would look bad if he wasn’t the one writing all of his own music. He was terrified people would think he was a poser.”

  That piece of shit.

  I keep my rage locked down because wanting to kill a dead man isn’t going to help anything. But still, something here doesn’t add up. According to Hunter’s information from Cricket, Whitney is broke. According to Whitney, Rango’s mom is the executor of his estate.

  I’m still trying to figure out how to ask the questions in my head, when Whitney says, “And now his mother is the sole beneficiary of the mess he left behind. It wasn’t much, because the bank took everything. She couldn’t even afford to fight the bank for the future royalties because she didn’t save a penny of the fortune Ricky spent on her over the years.”

  My rage blooms into something even sharper. “You’ve got to be joking. You wrote the songs. He took credit for them. And he left you nothing?”

  Whitney nods slowly. “I spent ten years of my life busting my ass on his career, making him look like the rock star he claimed to be . . . and I walked away with nothing. But at least I got to walk away.”

  My brain is spinning with how to fix this for her. How she could get back her hard work. “I’d have to talk to my legal team, but you should be able to file a copyright suit against the estate and the creditors. Prove that you were the writer and didn’t consent to the assignment of the future royalties.”

  “Sure, if I had a mountain of money I was sitting on.” She slaps the papers down on the desk. “But that’s not the case, and right now, all I want to do is move on.”

  The thought of her walking away from a decade of number-one songs and platinum albums kills me.

  “But you can’t let this go. I’ll fund it.”

  Whitney whips around to face me. “No way in hell. First, I’m not a charity case. I wasn’t before, and I’m not now either. Second, how do you think the press and Ricky’s fans would react if I destroyed his legacy by telling them the truth—that he didn’t write any of the shit they thought he did? I’ve already been through hell with them. I’m not doing it again.”

  I press my fingers to my temples. “I want to help. We can figure this out.”

  “I’m not asking for your help. I’m telling you that some things just aren’t worth the cost you have to pay to get there. It’s not worth it right now.”

  “So you’re just going to walk away without a fight? Give up a decade of your life with nothing to show for it?”

  Her plan is absolutely insane to me. It would be like me turning my back on the last ten years at Riscoff Holdings.

  Whitney straightens. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “You can’t.”

  20

  Whitney

  That man did not just tell me I couldn’t do something.

  Oh, wait . . . yes, he did.

  Because Lincoln Riscoff is the heir to an empire and thinks he knows everything about everything.

  But he doesn’t. He hasn’t lived my life. He doesn’t know what kind of hell would rain down if I made the claims he’s suggesting.

  That confidence I felt building earlier took a small hit when I admitted that Ricky had been cheating on me the entire time we were together, but it comes back as Lincoln challenges me. Mostly becaus
e this conversation sparks an idea that hasn’t occurred to me until just now.

  I cross my arms over my chest and smile. “Actually, Lincoln, I can do whatever I want, and you don’t get a say.”

  He opens his mouth, but I’m not done. I nod at the stack of papers on the desk.

  “If I want to do it again, I could. I thought there were no more words left in me. No more songs. But I think I actually just wrote one . . . and that means there are plenty more. I don’t need to take Ricky’s legacy from him. I can make my own.”

  It’s the most empowering thing I’ve ever thought in my entire life.

  I have a skill. A talent. Something of value to offer the world that no one else can replicate.

  My songwriting turned a kid from Gable into an international rock legend. That’s . . . that’s amazing.

  How am I just now realizing this? I lift my gaze to Lincoln’s, and I can’t read his expression.

  “Are you sure that’s what you really want? Because there’s no shame in building on the foundation that someone else laid.”

  Now I know exactly what he’s thinking about—Riscoff Holdings. Probably because that’s been the focus of most of his life.

  “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. This isn’t about you and your family, Lincoln. This is about my life and my choices. For the first time in maybe ever, I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks is right for me. I’m making my own decisions, and I won’t let you change my mind.”

  He shoves his hands in his pockets, and I wonder how much it’s costing him not to take over. Part of me expects him to try to bulldoze me, and I wonder if in my newfound confidence that I have enough backbone to stand up for myself. I brace myself, ready to try.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. Whatever you want to do, I’ll help any way I can.”

  I blink twice, thinking I must have imagined the words that came out of his mouth, but he continues.

  “I’ll always think it’s bullshit that he took advantage of you, though.”