Page 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Royal

I throw another log onto the fire, stoke the flames.

It’s that midnight hour, the snow falling heavily outside, the world being slowly reduced to just Jade and me.

That would be so much simpler.

If it were just the two of us.

But it’s not.

The music world is a brutal place, a cutthroat place.

And it’s no longer my place.

But it’s her place.

“My grandma used to say there was never anything quite as beautiful as a fire on a cold, snowy night.”

She shivers slightly, and I move to the couch, snag the blanket from the back of it, and bring it over to her.

“Thanks,” she whispers.

“Did you get a lot of snow in Tennessee?”

“Where the farm is? No.” Her lips curve. “But some areas, sure, depending on what your definition of a lot is.”

My lips twitch.

I seem to do that a lot around her.

She lifts the end of the blanket and jerks her chin behind her. “It’s cold. Get in.”

It’s not cold, not really with the fire blazing and the heater going, but I can’t bring myself to do anything other than crawl in behind her, wind my arm around her middle, drawing her back against my chest.

“Tell me about her,” I order softly.

She shifts, her head tilting back, eyes coming to mine. “Who?”

“Your grandma,” I say, but immediately regret making the request because the grief that slides into her expression is intense.

Damn.

“I didn’t have any grandparents growing up,” I find myself saying for no other reason than seeing her sad…hurts me. “But we kind of have one now.”

Her eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean?”

“Aspen—you remember her?”

“Banks’s wife. And Banks is the one I met who plays for the Vipers, right?”

A bolt of jealousy shoots through me. “You met Banks?”

Those storm cloud gray eyes study mine, a flicker of something I can’t read crossing her face. “Yes,” she says softly. “I met him and a few others briefly to sign autographs before I sang the national anthem the other day.”

“Oh.”

I brace, waiting for it, for her to say something to make me feel even more jealous, something my ex-wife, Amber, would have done, just to get a rise out of me.

Yes, I’m fully fucking aware that I have no right to feel possessive. I’ve done almost nothing except push Jade away.

And then find it impossible to truly let her go.

That doesn’t stop the jealousy from snaking through my stomach, tangling up my insides.

She hung out with a bunch of hockey players.

Hockey players. I know what they were thinking about her, what they wanted to do to her, what?—

“Banks mentioned his niece loved me and asked me to sign something.” She covers my hand, the one that’s resting on the gentle curve of her belly, with her own. “I signed, of course, along with a couple dozen other things for the employees and players who were there, but”—her lips twitch—“I think you’re the uncle who’s going to win, considering you made it so I actually got to hang out with Frankie.”

The words take a second to penetrate, and when they do, I freeze, turning them over and over in my head.

She’s not needling me.

In fact, she’s comforting me.

And…that doesn’t compute.

“What do you mean you kind of have a grandparent now?” she asks softly when I don’t reply.

I blink then exhale slowly, clawing my way out of my head to focus on what she’s asking. And truly, it’s not a hard question to answer. “Aspen’s next-door neighbor was this older lady named Mrs. X. She looked out for Aspen when things were really going rough for her, and now that Aspen and Banks are together, they’re returning the favor. She’s become an honorary member of the family.”

“That’s sweet,” Jade murmurs.

“They’re good people. And so is Mrs. X,” I add, rolling to my back when she wriggles against me, as though searching for a more comfortable position. I draw her front against my chest, so she’s lying on me instead of the rug, and smooth my good hand up and down her back. “Of course, she’s also as much of a spitfire as Aspen is, so when those two get together…”

“Fireworks?”

“Sass and laughter and, yes, occasionally there are fireworks.” A beat. “Though usually that only happens if someone insults Mrs. X’s favorite actor.”

“Who’s that?”

“Patrick Stewart.”

She mock gasps and then folds her arms on my chest, resting her chin on top of them. “Who would dare insult the great Patrick Stewart?”

I shrug, as much as I’m able in my position. “Someone who’s dumb enough to miss out on Mrs. X’s baking.”

“She bakes?”

“And cooks. And meddles,” I add because I like the way her eyes look when she smiles. “But mostly, she’s a sweet, little old lady with a big heart whom we’re lucky to know.”

“My grandma was the same”—her eyes twinkle—“albeit without the Patrick Stewart obsession. She was a Denzel Washington fan?—”

“Who isn’t?” I say drolly.

She grins and keeps talking. “Though she did say Chris Hemsworth was quite pleasing to the eye before she passed.”

I chuckle, tug at a lock of her hair, and tease, “Is that the kind of guy you like?”

She grins as she snags my hand. “No,” she says. “I’m kind of partial to tall, dark, and broody myself.”

“Don’t, Shortcake.” I draw my hand free, or try to.

She frowns, her fingers tightening around mine and I hate the sensation—dull, wrong, weak—the reminder—that my entire life imploded and I’m not good for this woman. “Don’t what?”

I tug again, but don’t say anything.

Can’t say anything.

But she’s smart, and I know the moment she gets it because of the way she changes her hold on my hand.

It doesn’t go soft, like I would expect.

She tightens her grip and sits up slightly. “Because of your hand.”

Normally, I’d shut this down, refuse to talk about it. Normally. I would pretend there isn’t even an issue.

But those stormy gray eyes are on mine and I find that I…can’t pretend to be okay.

“It feels wrong,” I mutter.

“Wrong how?”

More questions that normally would be met with my fury.

But, just like I can’t pretend to be okay, I also can’t pretend to be pissed at her.

“You know about the accident?—”

She nods. “They say that it wasn’t your fault.”

“I was speeding,” I say, “so that’s not completely right.”

“Doesn’t everyone speed in California?”

I wasn’t expecting a joke and a laugh is torn out of me. “Yeah.” I sigh. “I wasn’t flying, but I was going ten over on a busy boulevard—not something I would have normally even thought twice about. But I was late to meet the guys at the studio and I was pushing it.”

“And that’s when it happened?”

I nod. “I was thinking about the song we were recording and how the chorus wasn’t quite right and…I didn’t expect the person to blow the red light.”

She gasps.

“One second, I was closing in on the studio, and the next, I was…weightless as my car flew through the air.” I sit up, draw her into my lap, the flash of memories too intense to just lie there.

As though she senses the adrenaline suddenly coursing through me, she doesn’t fight me on the change in position.

“Then everything went black for who knows how long.” I exhale. “I woke up with a concussion, a broken leg, and a mangled hand.”

She tsks quietly and stares down at my hand, her fingers lightly tracing over the crisscross pattern of scars. They’re mostly faded now, pale white and dull rather than red, lifted, and shiny. “That’s how you got these?”

I resist the urge to pull my hand free. “Yeah. They thought I might lose it at first—or so my ex told me. I wasn’t functioning on all cylinders then, too hopped up on drugs and in and out of surgery, so I don’t remember those conversations. I just remember waking up a few days later in the hospital, after that fear had passed. Of course”—I chuckle darkly—“if I’d known I’d end up with this bullshit, I might have rather have it gone.”

“Is it bad—?” She breaks off, starts again. “No,” she says. “I know it’s bad, bad enough that you can’t play like you used to, but…what’s the part that’s actually stopping you from being able to?”

More shit I normally hate to talk about.

And yet, I just lay it all out there for her.

“Numbness, weakness, pain. Though the last one isn’t so bad anymore. But I can’t feel the strings well enough to play correctly, can’t get my hand to do what it needs to. Fuck, just teaching Frankie ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ is a challenge, let alone a Midnight Sun song or ‘Forever in Rewind.’” I pull back now, flexing my fingers. “I can hear it—the melody, the chord progressions—but I can’t do it.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “That must be incredibly frustrating.”

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I tried to get it back for a while, all the physical therapy, all the treatments, but after a year, the doctors told me it’s probably as good as it’s going to get.”

“So, you took a break from music?”

I nod. “I can’t play with the guys on tour and I didn’t want to be the disabled millionaire guitar player with a sob story in the eyes of the world. It’s bad enough the accident and then my divorce was everywhere.”

“I’m really sorry,” she whispers. “About your hand and the accident and the divorce. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been.”

“I was a real asshole for a while afterward.”

“I mean,” she says. “Isn’t that, like, a typical reaction for someone with trauma?”

“Not according to Amber.”

“Your ex?”

“She made it clear to me that she’d signed up to be married to a functioning rock star, not an asshole cripple with a hermit complex.” I shrug.

Because, yeah, the words had hurt at the time.

But Amber was really good at hurting me.

Jade’s reaction isn’t so cavalier. She pushes out of my lap and bursts to her feet. “She said what?”

“You heard me right, Shortcake.”

Her hands fist at her sides. A muscle in her jaw flexes. Bright red burns over her cheekbones. She opens her mouth, and I—never for a thousand years—would I have been able to predict the next words that come out of her mouth.

“Th-that… strumpet! ”