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"So what did she say?"
I stared at him. "I haven't spoken to her."
Cormac laughed, and the sound made my blood boil. "This is funny?" I shot to my feet and turned on my brother, nearly toppling back to the couch as the Bourbon swished around in my bloodstream and my ankle screamed. Damn that Half Cat. I steadied myself with a hand on the round head of the snowman standing at the end of the couch. "This is exactly why I left the West Coast. Everyone close to me has an agenda, something they're trying to gain by knowing me, getting near."
Cormac continued chuckling, much to my irritation, and then took another long swig of the bourbon. "You're so fucking full of yourself," he said, wiping his mouth. "How far from the spotlight do you have to get to see that the world doesn't revolve around you?" He shook his head and stood up, looking toward the back rooms where the girls had gone suspiciously quiet. "We're gonna head out. I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and figure out a way to get back the first person you've met that actually didn't care who you were and might even have loved your sorry ass."
The anger burning in my blood had cooled, as my drunkenness and Cormac's words settled in.
"Girls!" Cormac called, and soon they were all scuttling back out the front door, leaving me alone again.
Just like I’d always been.
I found my phone an hour or two later, when I’d sobered up a bit and managed to force myself to eat something. There were no more messages from April, and I felt both satisfied to see that she'd taken my point seriously, and somewhat disappointed to find that she'd stepped away so easily. But maybe that just proved the point—she hadn't been in it for anything to do with me, with us. She was in it to advance her failing career, to save her own butt. And everything else? Had been an act.
* * *
The sound of buzzing woke me. At first I thought it was just a particularly poignant hangover symptom, but after a while, I realized it was the buzzer on the front gate. I stumbled to the front door to answer it, and April's voice came through the speaker.
"Holiday Homeshere for filming, Mr. Whitewood." She sounded determined and confident, and my heart sank in response. I didn't want her to be confident aboutHoliday Homes. I wanted her to be confident about me, about what we’d been to each other. But then I remembered that there was no us. That had been a dream.
"Yeah, that's not happening," I said back.
"You signed a contract."
"Fuck the contract. And I didn't sign it. I'm not appearing on camera." Anger flared in my chest, making it easier to act like a self-important asshole. My brother's words echoed in my mind and I pushed them away.
"Callan, don't worry about appearing. But you did sign the previous contract, remember?" Her voice had softened, and I heard an edge of pleading there now.
I sighed. Despite my determination to be angry, I also wanted to see her, to hear her tell me she'd been using me to my face. "Fine." I punched the button to open the gate, and went back upstairs to run a comb through my hair and brush my teeth. The doorbell rang as I was pulling jeans on, and I took my time getting back down to open the door, my ankle and my heart protesting the whole way down the stairs.
After a deep steadying breath, I pulled open the door. April stood there, her gorgeous face pale, dark smudges beneath her eyes. The camera crew waited just behind her, and while I wanted to see them all as greedy vultures, ready to pounce and fight, all I saw was the woman I had fallen in love with, looking tired and upset, next to the guys she worked with.
"Hi," she said quietly, and then cleared her throat and glanced to one side, as if remembering we weren't alone. "Hi. Can we come in and set up?"
I took a deep breath and stepped back. "Come on in."
April's eyes scanned my face for a long second before she moved forward, and I could see the questions there.
I was at war with myself. I was angry—she hadn't been honest with me, right? But just seeing her face made it somewhat clear that maybe I’d jumped to conclusions a little bit. I’d been hurt before—by so many people who'd stuck close when they knew I had things to give them, when being close to me meant getting things for themselves, but who had fallen away like ants jumping from a sinking stick when they'd realized I was no longer on the way up. It had been painful, because I’d been too self-absorbed to consider who the people around me were before that. I’d been a star, and even I hadn't been able to see past the trappings of that for a long time.
And when I’d fallen—literally and figuratively, it became apparent that the world I’d built was flimsy and fragile. And in the fallout, I hadn't been able to determine what was real from the construction I’d lived in for so long. I’d fractured any real relationships—like those with my teammates on the Sharks—in the process. And then I’d been alone.
Was I blindly slashing at the real connections in my life again in my anger?
The crew moved in behind her, and April stared down at a clipboard in her hand. "We'll start in the parlor where the big tree is, if that's all right." She looked up at me from beneath her dark lashes, shy around me now. Tentative.
Every cell in my body screamed at me when she looked at me that way. I wanted to simultaneously comfort her and fall on her, pounding her into the wall with my cock until she screamed my name. Instead, I nodded. "Sure."
I stood by as April directed the crew, and I ended up following them around the house as they filmed, wishing April would stop and talk to me, wishing I hadn't been so aggressively short via text the night before. As she directed shots, answering questions from the two guys with cameras, April barely looked at me, and she didn't speak to me at all.
She didn't ask me to be on camera. She didn't mention the new contract. She was professional, efficient, and so beautiful it made my bones ache beneath my skin with the want of touching her.
As they got close to the end, the cameramen trudging out into the light snow covering the lawn out back to shoot some of the yard and the river, I caught her wrist in my hand. "Hey," I said, realizing that when she left my house today it might be the last time I ever saw her if I didn't figure out a way to make things right.
April stared at the place where my fingers circled her arm, and then her eyes slid up to mine, lingering there for a long moment. "Please let me go," she said. And I sensed that she meant more than that I should release her hand.
"April," I said, still holding on. "We need to talk."
