The matching looks on her sibling’s faces stopped Jess’s response from spilling forth. All three of them bore solemn expressions of sheer horror backed by pity. For her. She wanted to defend Sean against their insults and innuendo, but sirens were blaring in her subconscious. Clearly, they knew something she didn’t. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“She doesn’t know,” Manny said to Robert who looked to Marisol, his eyebrows raised and his eyes wide.
“I don’t know what?”
“Obviously she doesn’t know,” Marisol sniped, stepping between them to stand next to Jess.
“Jess …” Manny cleared his throat and started again. “Jess, he killed someone.”
Her body fought against her brother’s words. Her breath hitched, and her heart lurched. Adrenaline coursed through her veins, and her ears rang as tiny pinpricks of light danced in front of her eyes. “No,” she whispered, her knees feeling weak. “That’s not true.”
Robert nodded. “You remember that singer, Cal Grissom? Sean Amory was his agent or producer. I’m not sure which. All I know is Sean’s the one who threw the party where Cal overdosed. Rumor has it he’s the one who supplied Cal’s drugs.”
“No.” She shook her head wildly. None of this made any sense. Sean had a drinking problem, not a drug problem.
Are you sure about that? her subconscious queried.
She was sure, wasn’t she?
Her mind reviewed the few conversations they’d had about his past. When they’d talked about his position at the bakery, he’d told her things had fallen apart down in Southern California, but he’d never told her in what way. Instead, the conversation had focused on the here and now, and the difficulties he faced with his mother and her expectations for the bakery. She’d known he’d worked in Hollywood in some fashion—that had been one of the reasons she’d wanted him to join her on her trip down there next week—but he’d never offered up any specifics about his actual job.
The problem was, Jess hadn’t probed, either. That wasn’t what their relationship had been about. They were getting to know one another without all the baggage associated with their unhappy pasts. And she’d been guilty of holding things back, too. Because she didn’t want Sean to dig too deeply into her issues with food, she’d chosen not to dig either. And now she was sinking in a pile of quicksand of her own making.
“No,” she whispered again as her sister eased her back down onto the sofa.
“How did you not know?” Marisol asked gently.
“I never asked,” she admitted.
“Why didn’t you Google him?”
“I don’t do that,” she answered sadly. “Someone did it to me once, and the date was awful. I spent an hour answering questions about things they’d read online.”
Marisol shook her head. “You poor, naive girl.”
For once, Jess didn’t feel the need to defend herself. Perhaps Marisol, Manny, and Robert were right—she wasn’t as capable as she thought.
Chapter 19
Jess didn’t answer her phone the first time Sean called. He’d really fucked up. He left her a message, but he didn’t know how coherent it was, so he called her again. This time, she picked up just as he thought it was going to jump to voicemail again. There was silence on the other end of the line, and then her voice, strange and distant in a way that baffled and horrified him.
“What do you want, Sean?”
“I want to apologize.”
“Is that all?”
“I—”
“Apology accepted. Have a good life.”
“Wait! Jess, wait!” His heart was beating like he’d just run a marathon.
“What?”
“Can we please talk? I have some things I really, really need to tell you. And ask you.”
She didn’t answer, but he could hear her breathing. He pictured her at home, curled up on her comfortable couch, bare feet tucked under a throw blanket. “Jess?”
“You can come over.”
“I’ll be there in ten.”
He made it in eight, driving Bessie Blue down the quiet streets of River Hill like they were fenced off and striped out for an Indy car race. Her front door was ajar, indicating he should make his way inside. He found her exactly how he’d pictured her, except her face was smooth and expressionless, not the warm, laughing Jess of his imagination.
“Hi,” he said awkwardly.
“Hi.” She didn’t offer him a drink or invite him to sit down. She didn’t do anything but stare at him patiently.
He sank onto the opposite end of the couch, dropping his keys onto the end table with a clatter. He watched as the weight of his body on the cushions threw her off center. He tried not to think of it as a metaphor.
“I’m sorry about the way I acted on the phone the other day,” he said.
“You should be,” she said evenly. “You were a jerk.”
He sighed. “I am a jerk, present tense.”
She raised an eyebrow, and he got the sense that she wasn’t surprised.
“I haven’t been totally honest with you about everything that’s been going on with me. It isn’t fair to you.”
“Why don’t you start now?”
He took a deep breath. “I want to. It’s hard, though.”
“Life is hard,” she said.
He winced. The Jess Effect was absent today. His fault.
“When I was in L.A., I was a record producer.” She nodded, so he went on. “I had a client, tons of talent. Young kid.”
“Cal Grissom,” she said flatly.
“You know?”
“My brothers told me that you killed him.”
“I did.”
Her eyes widened. It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear, he thought. It wasn’t entirely what he’d expected to say, to be honest. Time to tell her all of it then, so she could run screaming from him like she should have in the first place.
“I recruited him to the label. Flew him out to Hollywood, took him to parties, introduced him to my idiot friends. Trying to lure him into signing with us by bribing him with all the usual suspects.”
“Drugs?” Her voice was hard.
Sean shook his head. “I’ve never done them, but I can’t say they weren’t around. I thought I could keep everything under control, monitor him, make sure he understood what was safe and what wasn’t. He was just a kid. He was my responsibility.”
She frowned. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.” He felt the air shrinking around him, felt it getting harder to breathe. Just like when he’d found Cal. The chill in the air around the boy’s body had gotten into Sean’s nose, and he’d thought he’d never be able to smell anything else ever again. He had a sharp longing for the bakery suddenly, wanting to fill his lungs with the scents of warm dough and spices. “That is, I didn’t pay enough attention, and I wasn’t there to keep an eye on him, and when I came to find him, he was—” He stopped, realizing his words were trailing into one another in a jumble.
“You found him?” Jess’s voice was softer now.
He wanted to look at her face, but all he could see was Cal’s hand, frozen in a pill-bottle shape forever. He nodded. “He overdosed. Used the paycheck I’d given him to buy a pharmacy full of stuff his new friends had recommended and tried it all at once.”
“Where were you?”
Sean shook his head again, trying to come back to Jess’s living room instead of that posh hotel room. “Working.” He felt his lips twist into a grim line. “Once I brought him into the fold, I let him go off and have fun while I worked, worked, worked. Wanted to get that damn platinum record. He used to call me and ask if I wanted to go out.”
“You said no?”
Sean nodded. “He was supposed to film a promotional spot that morning for the album. He didn’t show up, so I went to find him. I was so angry. I thought ... I thought he was oversleeping, hung over. I said some horrible things to him. Yelled at him. He didn’t hear me.”
“He
was already gone?”
“He was cold, Jess. His hand—” He broke off, looking down at his own hand, which had curved into the same shape as Cal’s when he’d found him. Jess’s eyes followed his, and she reached out to cover his hand with her own. Her skin felt like the only warm thing in the world.
“You didn’t kill him, Sean.”
He barked out a bitter laugh. “That’s what they keep telling me. There was an investigation and everything. They kept saying I did all I could. It’s bullshit.”
Jess’s eyes went soft. “What happened next?”
He sighed. “I couldn’t stay there. I resigned from the record company and came back home, thinking I’d work in the bakery for a few months while I decided what to do with my life.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About two years,” he admitted.
“What happened?”
“I had—still have, actually—these nightmares. And the only thing that made them stop…”
“Drinking?”
“Ding ding, you win.” He slumped against the couch. “I pickled myself for a long time.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“My friends cut me off.”
She raised an eyebrow. “They were giving you the booze?”
“No, not exactly. But—Look, you met them. Between them, Max owns Frankie’s, Noah owns the best vineyard in town, and Iain owns the local distillery. They called every restaurant and bar in town and blacklisted me.”
“They must care for you a lot,” she said quietly.
“They’re good friends.” If he thought about how much his friends had done for him, he might start to cry, so it was time to move on. “But I’m still the same person who was drinking, still the same person who got Cal killed. I can’t ... I can’t seem to get past it, Jess. And being with you is so easy. And wonderful. I feel like I don’t deserve it.”
She slid along the couch until her thigh bumped up against his. “You’re also still the person who has dinner with his mom, and who let a complete stranger teach you to make a pie to take to your friends’ house. Everyone is good and bad, Sean.”
“The bad seems to outweigh the good,” he said. He loved Jess’s positive attitude, but it couldn’t survive forever. Without the Jess Effect, was there any Jess? He could kill her as easily as he’d killed Cal. “I want to be with you, Jess, but I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t want you to hurt me either,” she said. “But I’d rather go out trying than not have the chance.”
He leaned his head on her shoulder and felt her arms come around him. “Last night I found a bottle of whiskey in my desk.” Her body stiffened imperceptibly.
“What did you do?” Her voice was even, but his answer mattered. A lot. They both knew it.
“Funny thing. There was also a cookbook in the same drawer, one of my mom’s old family ones. And while I was trying to ignore the whiskey staring at me, I started flipping through it. And this piece of paper fell out.”
“What was on it?”
“A recipe for a whiskey glaze.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. I’d actually been looking for a recipe for exactly that, hoping to convince my mom to change a few things at the bakery if I could prove that even our family recipes have variations. I’d given up on it before I got to this book. But there it was.”
“And?”
“I took the book and the bottle both down to the bakery in the middle of the night like some sort of weirdo and left them there.”
“Both of them?”
He nodded. “I’m going to talk to my mom about it, see if she’d be willing to let me try a few new things.”
“So you want to stay in River Hill?” Her voice was suddenly strange, and he raised his head to look her in the eyes.
“I honestly don’t know for sure, but stagnation isn’t helping anybody any more than the drinking was.” He’d realized last night that they were two sides of the same coin. His mother wouldn’t take risks with the bakery because she didn’t know what the future held; he’d gotten drunk every night because he couldn’t handle his past waiting to taint his future. But neither one of them were moving forward. “I want to see what’s next,” he said, and let his lips meet Jess’s.
A low hum rose in her throat, and he felt the Jess Effect washing over him. He smiled against her lips.
“What?” she asked, pulling back slightly.
“Nothing.” Her eyes narrowed, and he laughed. “I just really like being with you. I promise that’s all.”
She put a hand on his chest, preventing him from kissing her again. “What about L.A.?”
“Oh!” He smacked his forehead with his hand. “That’s the best part. I can’t believe I didn’t get to it.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“Actually, in a bizarre coincidence, I got an interesting email. Have you ever heard of the show ‘Died Too Soon’?”
She nodded. “My sister loves it.” Then her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! Are they, um, doing an episode about Cal?”
“They’re filming next Friday. And they want me to interview me for it.”
Her eyebrows wrinkled together as she frowned with concern. “Are you—can you—?”
He slid an arm around Jess and pulled her up into his lap. “I think I can. I might completely fall apart on camera and start blubbering, but Cal deserves for his story to be told, and I think I can help to tell it. Especially with you around. If the offer still stands, I’d love to join you in L.A. for your audition. I’m pumped for you, and I know you’re going to nail it. Getting to watch you kick ass at that audition is way more important than my freak out about going back to my old haunts. And if you’re with me when I interview—” He broke off. “I need you, Jess. More than you’ll ever know.”
She melted against him, and he felt as though his entire body exhaled in relief. Her arms came up around his neck and her fingers tangled in his hair, and he bent his head to hers to claim her lips again.
She might be on the verge of leaving River Hill for a tremendous career opportunity, and he might be giving serious thought to staying here for the rest of his life. But he couldn’t bring himself to care. A weekend in L.A. with Jess sounded like paradise. And watching her take control of her future was exactly what he needed in order to claim his own. He couldn’t think of a better place to be than by her side, for as long as she would let him.
Unless, of course, it was in her bed. Which was where they headed next.
Chapter 20
Suppressing a grin, Jess unclipped the wireless mic from her belt and passed the small device back to the production assistant. Jai had warned her before she’d arrived that she’d be auditioning on the actual set where the show would be filmed. Silently, she offered up a word of thanks to Sylvia Barrows for the opportunity that had led to this moment. Jess didn’t want to pat herself on the back too much, but she’d nailed the audition, and she had the segments she’d done with Sylvia to thank for that. She never would have been comfortable with the director’s prompts otherwise.
When she turned to exit, her eyes connected with Sean’s, who was standing off to the far side waiting for her. No one outside the production team was supposed to be on the set, but when they’d pulled up to the curb earlier, Matt Combs, the head producer, had been arriving at the same time. He’d recognized Sean, and the two men had spent the next five minutes chatting about this new venture with The Beauty Network. When Sean turned to go, Matt had invited him inside. Jess could tell he’d been uncomfortable at first, but now he looked at her with so much warmth and affection that her cheeks flushed under the weight of his admiration.
“You were amazing,” he mouthed from across the room.
“Thank you,” she mouthed back as she made her way toward Matt and his business partner, an older gentleman who’d introduced himself as Bill Kingston. Bill would serve as executive producer, as she understood it. He made all the final decisions
while Matt handled the day to day operations.
As she spoke with the two men, her eyes kept darting between Sean and the digital clock over Bill’s shoulder. They were in Universal City, but Sean’s interview was a few miles away in Burbank. The studios weren’t that far apart, but as Jess had learned when they’d landed at LAX the day before, it could take an hour to drive even just a few miles in L.A.’s infamous traffic. Sean needed to leave soon if he was going to make it on time.
She focused her attention back on Bill, her potential boss, and he extended his hand. “Thank you again for flying down, Jess. I have a really good feeling about what we saw here today.”
She smiled. “Thank you for the opportunity. I hope to hear from you soon.”
“Oh, you definitely will. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lunch date.” Bill shook her hand as well, and then stalked quickly across the studio, his long, lean legs eating up the space.
Matt looked to where Sean was stationed thirty or so feet away, and his gaze turned momentarily sympathetic. “He looks good.”
Jess didn’t want to pry, but her curiosity about Sean’s life prior to Cal’s death was too hard to ignore. Matt was the only person she’d met who knew the old Sean, the one she could see now and then glimmering under the surface of this new, more somber man. “I get the impression you two were friends before …” She trailed off, unable to bring herself to say the words.
“Not friends, exactly, but we ran in the same circles. Even before the kid’s death, there was talk.”
A thread of unease skittered down Jess’s spine. “Talk?”
Matt leaned close and dropped his voice low. “This is a work hard, play hard industry, Jess. And Sean worked hard, but he played even harder.” He tapped the side of his nose twice.
A lump of unease formed in her gut. She might be naive, but she wasn’t stupid. She understood exactly what he was saying. Sean had told her he hadn’t used drugs, but he could have lied about that.
No, she thought vehemently. Sean had no reason to lie. He’d told her his darkest secrets and shared his harrowing pain. Cutting himself open like that only to hold something back didn’t jibe with who he was. Matt was wrong about the vice, but that didn’t mean he was wrong about the partying. She was about to tell him so when he took a step back and lifted his chin in greeting, his entire demeanor changing.
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