by Lexi Ryan
“You’re still lonely, aren’t you? And you think you’re going to come to town and take my family away from me,” Olivia says, “but maybe he doesn’t want you. Maybe he just feels guilty for getting exactly what he set out to get from you. He wants to be a better man, but I hate to see him sacrifice his family to make that happen.”
I feel sick, and I make a fist around the necklace and rush from the reception.
* * *
Keegan
Five years ago…
“Keegan, my name is Amanda, and I’m an admissions counselor at Blackhawk Hills University. I noticed you weren’t enrolled in classes yet, and I wondered if I could help you with that.”
I sit up in bed and drag a hand over my face. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure I’m coming anymore.”
“Oh.” She’s silent for a long beat. “May I ask why?”
Because I don’t know if I can live a straight life without Emma guiding me. Because I’m fucking empty and broken, and I don’t know if I can be the man she believed I was. “Money, I guess,” I mutter. “I’m not comfortable taking out the loans.”
“There’s no need for loans,” the woman on the phone says. “There’s a trust set up in your name. Your tuition and room and board are paid for, and there will be a small stipend, too. Didn’t you get the letter?”
The letter would have been mailed to my mom’s house in Texas. That was the address I used on the application when I had no intention of going to BHU, when it was all just part of the cover story to get money from Emma. I haven’t been there in years. “I didn’t. Who set up the trust?”
“It’s a program through the university. We have donors who go through the applicants and choose a student or students to sponsor anonymously. You should consider yourself very lucky for being the beneficiary of someone’s generosity.”
A trust? A donor? “Can I find out who my donor is before I accept?”
“I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”
“And what happens if I decide not to enroll?”
“Well, that’ll be up to the donor, of course. Perhaps they’ll give the gift to another student, or perhaps they won’t. Either way, I’m sure that after the time they’ve invested in you, they’d be very disappointed if you walked away from this opportunity.”
I drag a hand through my hair and pace my bedroom. Did Emma do this? Is this her way of apologizing for pushing me away? I don’t want her money, and the idea of her finding some way to give it to me makes me sick.
The woman clears her throat. “Is there a change in your life and you need to postpone your start date? We could have the trust lawyer contact your donor and find out if you can accept the gift in the spring or even next fall.”
“No, I—” I sink onto the couch and lean my head back. What if the money’s not from Emma? What if I’m being given a chance to change my life? What if the best chance I have at getting Emma back is going to BHU and being who I pretended to be with her?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Keegan
When we’re finally released from picture duty, I search the reception tent for Emma and can’t find her. I find her back at the house, sitting by the fire pit, her arms folded as she stares off into the distance. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
She licks her lips as she turns to me, and I can tell by the way she holds herself and the pain on her face that she has something to tell me. Is she leaving? Is this over now? “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If you needed money?”
Oh, damn. “I’m okay.” It’s almost true. I’m on my way to okay. I’ll get there. I’ll sell the bar and maybe think about selling my house in Blackhawk Valley to make ends meet until I can get into a cheaper condo lease. “What’s going on?”
She tilts her head to the side then reaches toward me with a closed fist and slowly opens her fingers to reveal a sapphire necklace. “I told you there was nothing you could take from me that I didn’t want to give. I meant it.”
The necklace. “Where did you get this?”
“Olivia was wearing it.”
I search her face, and my heart falls to the pit of my stomach. Hurt twists her features, as if someone is cutting into her chest with no anesthesia.
“I’m leaving now.”
“Leaving?” I shake my head. Why did Olivia have the necklace? “Wait. Emma, I didn’t give it to her. She must have found it in my drawer and borrowed it.”
“Found it in your drawer.” She closes her eyes and swallows. “Do you even hear yourself? You had it, Keegan.”
“And I can explain.”
She shrugs. “I don’t think I want to hear your explanations anymore.”
“What’s going on? Why are you leaving? Mia and Arrow will wonder where you went, and I want—”
“I’m leaving you, Keegan. I’m not just leaving the wedding. I’m driving home tonight.”
I shake my head. “No. What happened?”
“All you had to do was ask. For the money for college, for the necklace. I would have given you anything. But you knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you fed me lies. Olivia told me everything.” She swallows thickly, and I hear it. It’s the sound of a closing door, the sound of her drawing in truth I don’t want her to have. “How I was the perfect mark. How you set out to get the money to pay for BHU.”
I frown. “But I didn’t take money from you.”
“No, you were too clever for that. I made sure it was anonymous.”
I shake my head again. None of this makes any sense, and my confusion is turning into panic. “What did Olivia say to you? Don’t go without talking to me.”
“I don’t even know what to believe anymore.”
“Believe in us. This is real.” My whisper is jagged with my own desperation. I drop my drink on the bench and walk toward her. She inches backward but doesn’t turn away. I cup her face in my hands and look into her eyes as they fill with tears. “You and me. Right here. Right now.”
“How can I live with someone I don’t trust?”
I flinch from that blow. “But you can trust me. Olivia’s right. I was in the game. I was after money, but I’m not the same man I was then. I wasn’t even the same man by the end of the summer. I was—” I look away. It hurts too much to see the truth in her eyes, to see clear as day that it doesn’t matter what I say right now. She’s been poisoned, and everything I say is tainted.
“Will you just tell me something?” she says.
“Anything.”
“The first time we made love. The way you kissed me and touched me. You said you got carried away, that I did something to you. Was that real, or was it part of the plan? Was any of it real.”
“It was real. Completely real. I went in with a plan and I fell hard.”
“But you wouldn’t have approached me if you didn’t want my money.”
I pull her closer because I can feel her slipping away. “Does it matter?”
She squeezes her eyes shut and tears roll out the corners. “Yes, Keegan. It matters. The fact that your mom is alive and living in Texas when you told me she’d died of cancer matters. The fact that you’re not from where you said matters. The fact that you’ve never shared details—true details—about your childhood, that matters.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” Her voice hitches with a sob. “But I don’t even know you.” She steps back, and it feels like she’s taking my heart with her. “I have to leave.”
“I’ll take care of you.” My hands fall to my sides. I’m a shell. “I’ll give you anything. Don’t do this. Don’t give up on us.”
“You can’t give me what I need.”
If there was anything left in me, it would ache with those words. Because that’s what I’ve always feared. I can’t give her what she needs because I’m not enough. Because I don’t know how to love like that. “What do you need? I’ll try. Please.”
“I need to know that the man I love has always wanted me for the right reasons. I need to know th
at all the things he said to me, the words that made me feel cherished for the first time in my life, I need to know those things were true.” A tear rolls down her cheek. “You can’t give me that.”
* * *
“What are you doing all the way over here?” Bailey asks. Her dress swishes around her feet as she makes her way toward me. She motions in the direction of the reception tent and the setting sun. “The party is that way.” She grins, but the smile falls from her face when she sees mine. She takes off her sunglasses. “What’s wrong?”
“Emma left.” The words don’t feel right. Somehow, even though it’s not the first time, even though I knew we still had shit between us, somehow I was a sucker and believed we could do it. I believed I could have more.
“Oh. Is she okay? She was in such a good mood earlier. Is she sick? Oh my God, is she pregnant?”
I shake my head. I feel sick. I feel hollow.
The first time she left me, I honestly never wanted to fall in love again. It hurt so fucking much. It’s like I was the Tin Man who only wanted a heart, and she gave me one and then stabbed a knife into it. And here we are again, and I have no one to blame but myself.
“Keegan? What happened?”
Opening my hand, I stare at the sapphire necklace she gave me before walking away.
“Holy shit,” Bailey says. “That’s beautiful.”
“I screwed up. Olivia… I don’t know how she knew… My dad must’ve… Fuck. Why would he tell her all that? Except she told him dirt too…” I drag a hand over my face.
“Olivia’s been hanging out with your dad at The End Zone a lot when you’re not there. They’re best buddies. My guess is she’s been plying him with beer and savoring the details she could use to get you back. She’s a fucking bitch.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “She’s still the mother of my child, Bail.”
“Right. That.” She sighs. “Sorrynotsorry. She’s still a bitch.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
She turns toward the reception before turning back to me. “Go after her. I’ll cover for you.” When I don’t move, she says, “I’m serious, Keegan. You want her, you go after her.”
“What happened to ‘people like us are only entertainment to people like them’?”
“I’m a jaded bitch. Go. After. Her.” She sinks onto the bench beside me. “Come on. Give a trailer park girl a reason to believe in happily-ever-after. Please?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Keegan
“I was raised in Texas.” The few words are only the first of many I need to say tonight, but they feel like they were superglued into my chest, and pushing them out rips me apart. I step into the guest bedroom in time to see Emma zipping a suitcase, but I don’t let that stop me. “I only went to Blackhawk Valley once as a child. I was there because Dad was working a con on an old widow who lived here. But the place reminded me of something out of a movie, and I thought if I ever had kids, I didn’t want to drag them from town to town like Dad dragged me around. I wanted them to be raised in a place like this.”
She slides the suitcase off the bed and onto the floor, picks up her phone, and taps into the web browser.
I might as well be invisible, and that hurts so much I want to stop. To protect myself from more pain. But I push on. “My mom never had cancer, but I spent my childhood watching her shave her head and walk around looking as weak as possible so people would think she did. The sick woman was her con of choice, and maybe she didn’t die of cancer, but when she left us—when she left me after conning the man I call my father—it felt like she died. She barely knew him, but she had no trouble walking away and letting him raise me. It was easier to tell the story she’d claimed so many times than it was to tell people the truth about where I came from.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, and when she opens them, her fingers fly across the screen of her phone as she books a hotel. I want to look and see how far she plans to get tonight and where she’s driving—back to Savannah or to LA? But I don’t let myself. I have to focus on saying all the things I should have said five years ago.
“Before I met you, I never intended to go to college. I never had any designs to play college or pro ball, because I was exactly who my father raised me to be. I was a guy who knew how to get by without ever having to work. A guy who’d spent so much of his life blurring the lines between truth and lies that some days I didn’t even remember what was real.”
I think about closing the bedroom door and blocking her way out, but I can’t do that to her, so I stay to the side, keeping the path clear and praying she won’t use it. “I’ll never forget the day I saw you walking on that beach. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen and I couldn’t stay away. I saw you walking that little dog, and I just…” I look at her. She hasn’t spoken a word, and I can’t decide if that’s good or bad. I can’t decide if I want to know what she’s thinking or if I just want to get through this. “I wanted you. I knew who you were immediately. I always thought you were pretty when I saw you on TV, but in person… Fuck, Em. In person, you glow. I knew that you were untouchable and I could never have anything as beautiful as you.”
She shakes her head—the first indication she’s given me that she’s even listening, and that gives me the courage to continue.
“I knew I couldn’t have you, and that pissed me off. There are a lot of things in my life I’ve wanted and couldn’t have. I’d made my peace with that. But you? God, it ate me up inside to look at you and know you’d never be mine. I was sick of settling. So when you say that you can’t trust that I was attracted to you, fuck that. Attraction was the easy part. What I wasn’t prepared for was what you did to me”—I tap my chest—“in here. You had so much. You had everything, and I wanted a piece. And along the way, just to say fuck you to the universe, I wanted to pretend for a minute that I could have you too. It didn’t go like I planned, and by the time I slept with you, I didn’t want your money anymore. I just wanted you.”
“You should have told me.” A tear rolls down her cheek. “You had so many opportunities.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you the truth without losing you. How could I tell you I used you and I conned you? I set you up with a plan to take everything I could from you, and then when you believed I was better than that, I wanted to believe it too. I won’t ask you to forgive me for what I did—for what I set out to do—because I know how ugly it is. But what I need you to do is consider what happened to me along the way. You changed what I was after. You changed who I was and what I believed I could have. By the time it ended, all I wanted was a chance to be the man you believed I was.”
She shakes her head. “It was all a lie.”
I feel her slipping through my fingers, and reach out to grab her but then force my hands back to my sides. I need her to stay because she wants to. I need her to want me enough that it’s worth finding the courage to stay. “But the lie became the truth. That’s who I’ve become. You didn’t just make me want to be a better man, you turned me into one. It was as if your love reached into me and changed the structure of my cells, the very essence of who I was. You gave me the strength to be someone better. I know you don’t need me, and I know you can leave me today and carry on just fine without me, but you will always, always be the very best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Thank you,” she whispers. She tucks her phone in her purse and slings it over her shoulder before rolling her suitcase to the front door.
“I couldn’t go back to the guy who used everyone. I’m not him anymore.” I follow her, fists clenched at my sides, stomach in knots. “Emma. Don’t leave me again. Please.”
She steps outside and unlocks the car that brought her here. “I need to think, Keegan,” she says as she walks to the trunk. She loads her suitcase and avoids my gaze. “I need to step away and process everything.”
“You’re running.”
She pauses wit
h her hand on the driver’s-side door. “Yeah. I guess that’s what I do.” Then she ducks her head and climbs into the car, and I’m just standing there in my tux, helpless to do anything but watch as she drives away.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Keegan
“You took money from Emma. You conned her out of money I told you I didn’t want.”
Dad spins around on his barstool and gapes at me. “What?”
After Emma left, I came straight to the bar and found my father right where I thought I would. “You had no right.” My voice shakes, and I can tell by his pale face he knows I’m telling the truth. I want to blame this all on him—my decision not to tell Emma the truth sooner, her decision to climb into that car and drive away. I drag a hand over my face and collapse onto the stool beside him. “Olivia told Emma everything.” I swallow. “She left me. I don’t think she’s coming back. I love her and I’ve lost her.”
He picks up his half-empty beer and drains the rest. “That’s my fault,” he says softly. “I thought you’d choose Olivia after you were done rescuing Emma from her canceled wedding, and I was trying to get close to her, hoping you wouldn’t push me out anymore if your girl wanted me around.” He shakes his head. “It was careless, telling her all that, but I swear I wouldn’t have done it if I’d realized…”
I wave to Patsy, the server who’s running The End Zone while the rest of us are supposed to be at Mia and Arrow’s wedding. She pours me a shot of whiskey and slides it down the bar. I stare at it. “You shouldn’t have had her pay for BHU. I never would have taken the money if I’d known it was from her.”
He stares at his empty glass. “I know, but it was the closest I could come to paying for it myself. I wanted that for you, and I thought she owed it to you—sneaking around with that old man while she was supposed to be with you.”
