And it was a heroine, the strongest woman that I'd ever known, who took me on her tale. Tanner wrote of a woman who started out with nothing, but built herself up into a real American success story. She did so not through luck or through chance, not through scheming, but by pure strength of will and character. And eventually, even though her enemies figured out how to steal back most of what they'd lost to her, to bring her back down from the pinnacle of success, she never lost that inner core that made her strong, that made her always care and work to better herself.
Tanner had told me, plenty of times on dates, that the heroine in his book was based on me. But how could that be true? I looked at my own life, and then tried to see how it possibly meshed with the incredible character that he'd described so eloquently in the pages of his novel.
Was this truly how he saw me? Tanner looked at me, the woman who came into her fortune through marriage, the woman who lost her husband after less than half a decade of marriage, the woman who had nasty rumors constantly swirling around her from all corners, and saw a goddess? He saw...
I blinked, the tears now carving trails down my cheeks. This was how he saw me. This was how the man I loved had looked at me. There was no possible way to deny that, just given the writing in this novel, he loved me too, perhaps even more deeply than I felt towards him, if such a level of emotional connection were possible.
I heard a very soft cough, and glanced up. Julius once again stood at the entrance to my bedroom, his arms tucked behind him and his lined face looking worried, as usual. "Miss O'Callahan, is everything proper?" he asked, frowning at me.
I smiled at him, even through the tears. "Everything is wonderful, Julius," I responded, sniffing and reaching up to wipe my face with one sleeve. "I have a bone to pick with you about sneaking in this book, here, but it will have to wait until you've brought me another plate of food."
For an instant, before he locked down his expression into the carefully neutral features he usually maintained, Julius looked... delighted? There was the hint of a grin, one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look much warmer, suddenly a kind grandfather instead of a starched and proper servant. The expression only lasted a fraction of a second, but I didn't miss it.
"I shall fetch you more to eat right away, Miss O'Callahan," he replied. "Any requests in particular?"
"No, and Julius, how many times do I have to tell you-" I paused, blinking as I replayed the last few seconds of conversation. "You didn't call me by the married title any longer!"
If the man looked any more blank, he'd be a sheet of printer paper. "I'm not sure what you're talking about, Miss O'Callahan. I'll have the food up to you right away."
And before I could say anything else, he was gone.
I sighed, smiling after him. Julius really did care about me, I knew, even if he didn't generally do much to show it. I reached out to pick up my phone, and for the first time in weeks, noticed that I had more than two dozen messages and voicemails waiting for me. I opened them up, and discovered that Champagne also apparently cared more about my welfare than I'd thought. She hadn't stopped by to visit, but she'd clearly been blowing up my phone with texts and calls, none of which I'd answered. Guilt gurgled in my stomach. Oops. That was entirely my fault.
I hesitated for a second, torn between sitting back down in bed, walking around as I answered Champagne's frantic cries to make sure I was still alive, or poring over Tanner's novel some more. Finally, making a decision, I threw back the covers on the bed and climbed out, stretching in the midday sunlight. I padded over to my dresser and, for the first time in weeks, changed into clothes that made me almost suitable to be seen out in public.
Returning to the bed, I fully intended to check out all of Champagne's messages. The novel, however, called to me. Why not read a few more passages, some of my favorite parts of the book?
When Julius returned with a fresh tray of food, I was eighty pages into the book, and unable to put it down. Julius had to cough, twice, before I managed to pull my eyes away from the current page.
"Ah, great." As soon as the tray was within range, I snatched a croissant from the plate of pastries, jammed half of it in my mouth. My eyes never left the book.
Julius silently set the tray down, and started to creep away. I finally managed to reach the end of the paragraph and break away, however, before he could make it out of the house. "Hold on, Julius," I called, and he froze in the doorway of my bedroom like a child who hoped to get away with committing some rule-breaking offense.
I carefully marked my place in the book with a finger, closing it around that ersatz bookmark. "You haven't heard anything from him, have you?"
I didn't need to specify the focus of my query. Julius knew. There was only one person whom I wouldn't name aloud.
He took a second before answering. "Nothing, I'm afraid," he finally said.
"How did you get the book?"
"A courtier dropped it off. He said it was for you." Julius hesitated. "There was no note or return address, however."
I sighed. When I'd checked my messages on my phone, I hadn't seen any from him. Tanner had, it seemed, at least taken my last command to heart. He'd gone away, and he'd left me alone.
Except for delivering me this book. He'd given me one last gift, one that gave me more insight into his head than I'd ever expected to receive.
And suddenly, after reading a novel dedicated to me, with a heroine that was stronger than I ever could have believed possible, I felt that damn, uncrushable spark of love once again flaring up inside my chest. I'd hoped that the last month and a half of lying in bed, trying not to think about the man, would extinguish it.
Instead, it seemed, it had just been biding its time, waiting until now, when it could come roaring back with the strength of an inferno.
I still loved Tanner, despite his lie. He'd lied, but I'd assumed that the lie colored his entire view of me. I had assumed, when I screamed at him, when I realized that shocking truth, that he'd just been playing me. After all, I was the lonely woman with more money than I could hope to spend, or even give away, in a lifetime. When I learned that he'd lied, I assumed that he was just trying to use me.
But now, thinking back, I couldn't remember a single time when he'd asked for my help or for me to purchase anything. I'd seen him wince a couple of times when he picked up the check, had thought nothing of it – but he'd never asked me to help out. If he'd been playing some kind of confidence game, he'd done a pretty poor job, I considered now to myself. He never actually got around to the step of asking me for money.
Instead, if this book had any basis in truth at all, he'd loved me this entire time, strong and true. Even after I rejected him, he went ahead with publishing a story dedicated to me, dedicated to the incredible woman that he loved.
What had I given up? What had I lost when I sent him away?
I knew what I ought to do next. I wasn't sure if I had the courage to do it. So instead, I sat back down and finished off the rest of the novel, reading it for the second time as I shoveled food into my half-starved body.
Only then did I finally get up and, phone in my pocket, leave the safety of my bedroom for the first time in weeks.
The house certainly didn't look as clean as the last time I'd walked around. Now, seeing it once again starting to slip into neglect, I realized how much Tanner had been helping out, how little Julius had the time and energy to handle. Why hadn't I seen it before, done something to lighten the man's load?
He'd never asked, that was why. I'd been blind to his needs, just looking straight ahead. It was Tanner who was able to look outside my high and lofty station, to roll up his sleeves and pitch in with what needed to get done instead of just pretending that the problem didn't exist. He'd tried to hide his own shortcoming, but when he saw one in others, he immediately jumped to help fix the problem.
He did it selflessly, not asking for any credit or acknowledgement. As Julius said, he did it for others. Not for himself
.
I stepped outside to the garden, and almost wished that I hadn't. Weeds had sprung up eagerly between the plants, all but overgrowing some of my more fragile flowers and smaller plants. If I didn't get to work right now, they'd end up being choked out, and my work would be for naught.
The roses, however, were still going strong. They were flowering, now, and huge blooms opened up at the ends of their branches. They turned the green of the rest of the garden into a riot of different colors. The entire garden was full of their soft scent, carried on slight breezes to my nostrils. I inhaled, and felt more alive than I had in weeks.
Standing there, my roses gave me strength. They'd survived multiple bouts of neglect, had the deep roots to hold on and the patience to wait for the right chance to grow back out. Now, even amid the chaos of the rest of the garden, they bloomed proudly, defiantly, proclaiming their status as kings and queens among the weeds.
If they could hold out, stay strong throughout my weeks of neglect, I could also muster up inner strength.
I withdrew my phone, my fingers trembling only slightly as I punched in Tanner's phone number. Thankfully, I hadn't quite had the strength to delete it entirely from my phone. I dialed it, lifted it up to my ear.
It started ringing. I shivered, fighting the irrational urge to chuck the phone away, into the brambles of the nearest rosebush. I stood there, my nostrils full of the scent of the flowers, my eyes taking in their blooms of perfect pastel color, listening to the phone ring in my ear.
The phone clicked. The ringing cut off. I held my breath. Had I gotten an answering machine, been sent to voicemail? Or had-
"Hello?"
It was his voice. Tanner's voice. Even after all this time, my heart surged up in my chest, rising so high that it nearly choked off my breath. I fought it down, struggled to breathe amid the love and panic that, in turns, threatened to suffocate me.
"Hi," I said back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
TANNER
*
Helen was calling me. I hadn't had the heart to delete her number from my phone's memory, and for a few seconds, when the screen lit up with her face and name, I just stared at it. My hand trembled, paralyzed between declining the call, or lifting the phone up to my ear and answering.
What should I do?
I knew the smart answer, of course. I should ignore the call, especially when I was on a deadline. Incredibly, even though my novel had only debuted on bookshelves a few days ago, I already had my agent breathing down my neck about my next work.
"You don't understand, Tanner," he'd insisted to me, speaking with a bit of a Jersey accent that made me envision him as a cigar-smoking gangster in a room behind a bar somewhere. "People are loving your book, and when I say loving, I mean that they're raving! I knew that this was some good shit when I read it, but I'm glad that I'm not the only one, know what I'm sayin'? They want more, and you've gotta give it to them soon. Strike when the iron's heavy, eh?"
"Hot," I corrected him. "Strike when the iron's hot."
"Well, that don't make any sense. Why would you hit a hot iron? Seems like a good way to get burned. But you, buddy, you're gonna get burned if you don't get your ass cracking on the trilogy! You should see the dollar signs in some of these guys' eyes when I start talking about this being a series. We're talking six figure advances, buddy!"
A couple months earlier, that would have made my eyes pop out of my head. Over a hundred thousand dollars, just for my book? I couldn't have fathomed anyone ever paying that much, even in my daydreams.
But now, the money really didn't mean much to me. I'd written this book for an audience of one, and I didn't care about how the others interpreted it. I had a stack of reviews, from newspapers and magazines, piled on my desk. I hadn't read a single one of them. Linda kept on handing them to me, and I kept stacking them aside for later.
On that day, when Helen told me that she knew my secret... out of all the low points in my life, that one had been the worst by far. I'd driven back home, thrown myself down on bed, and bawled my eyes out. Can you see it? Me, a big six-foot guy, stoned and fit, blubbering like a cow because my heart hurt so badly!
I couldn't have imagined that it would hurt so badly. My heart literally felt crushed, like an MMA fighter threw me to the ground and stomped his heel straight through my ribcage. If Death himself, the skeleton in a hooded robe, had appeared in front of me and offered to reap me a few years early, I gladly would have taken him up on the offer.
But somehow, despite the pain and anguish, I couldn't seem to stay still. I barely laid in bed for more than a few minutes before, filled with horrible, nervous, unfulfilled energy, I leapt back up and started pacing the length of my room.
I needed some way to get all that energy out. I needed to do something, or else I was likely to go lock myself in a garage and try to kill myself with the exhaust of a car – and that was a problem, because given the size of Richard Stone's garages, I'd be stuck in there for hours waiting for it to fill up with carbon monoxide.
So I kept on writing.
I'd already finished the first book, after all. It still needed some edits before the final version would go to printers, but Random House had said yes. They'd given me two weeks to make the necessary edits so that it would be ready.
I finished the edits before midnight of that day. I saved the updated novel, sent it off to my agent, and then pulled up a blank page.
I filled that page with words. Then another, and another, and many more. Writing was the only way that I could keep my brain silent, from spinning in a million circles and tearing itself apart over what I'd lost. As long as I kept writing, I didn't think about Helen, didn't feel all the pain of losing her.
Many times, I thought about taking a break from writing and trying to go see her. Maybe, if I managed to convince her to see me, if I got down on my knees and begged, if I poured out all the feelings choking my heart, I could convince her to give me another chance.
But in the back of my head, I knew that I didn't deserve that second chance. Helen O'Callahan was an incredible woman, one who had such strength, had accomplished so much, that she outshone me like the sun beside a flashlight.
I needed to focus on myself. I needed to finally think about my future, about bettering myself. I'd talked about it for far too long, but hadn't done anything.
So I wrote. I wrote so much that, by the time my agent called me up to excitedly tell me that my book was about to finally debut on shelves, that they needed three whole pages inside the front cover for all the positive quotes from critics and advance readers, I nearly had the sequel completed. I told him, and I think the man practically shit his pants.
"You what??" he bellowed into the phone. "Are you just fucking with me, Tanner? You've got another one? And this one's the same level of quality?"
I shrugged, not sure how to answer that. Derek, I remembered. Derek Waters, that was the name of the man.
"It's honest," I said, because that's what it was. The first book had been filled with all the hope and optimism and sudden sense of possibility that Helen had instilled in me. This one, written after she'd left, contained all the sorrow that I felt filling up my heart to the brim. In a futile attempt to empty it from my heart, I'd poured it onto the page, creating a story that reflected my own struggle.
"Well shit, if your earlier story was honest, and this one's honest, I'm pretty sure that I can sell it, eh?" Derek Waters said finally, apparently regressing to the philosophy that capitalism was the best way to measure anything. "Wanna send it over to me?"
"Oh, and one other thing," he added, just as I was about to hang up the phone. "Since the book's gonna shoot up the bestseller lists – and that's not me bragging, you get me, that's a promise – I've got a bunch of extra copies. Supposed to send them all to readers, but what the hell, let's get some of them to actually have to buy the thing, eh?" He laughed merrily at his own joke. "So?"
"So what?" I asked, not following.
&
nbsp; "So who do you want me to send 'em to? Friends? Family? Some girl that you really wanna impress?" If I could see the man, he'd probably be winking at me in a way that made me feel like I needed to go take an immediate shower.
I named a few people – Richard deserved a copy, of course, and Linda, for offering me their home. I elected to send copies to Teddy and his wife, Callie, and to Sebastian and Tori, although I doubted that Sebastian would ever be willing to commit to reading an entire book. I had one more name in mind, of course, but I could barely bring myself to say it.
Finally, just as Waters was about to hang up, I forced it out. "And Helen O'Callahan," I said, my voice almost cracking on the name.
"You got it, buddy. And send over that sequel. God, where were you hiding when I was younger, still trying to find the right book to get my foot in the door?" My agent cackled at his own joke as he hung up.
I sent over the sequel, and a few hours later, received a response from the man that was just filled mostly with curse words. "Goddamn this is a sad book, you asshole," read one particular sentence. "I haven't cried like this since grade school! How the hell did you do this to me? This is going to sell like a fuckin' orphanage on fire!"
I assumed that this was a good thing, given all the exclamation points scattered liberally through the email. For a literary agent, Derek certainly had his own... unique relationship with punctuation.
But even still, I didn't feel any happier. I'd give up all this success for just one more conversation with Helen. I still couldn't bring myself to close my eyes at night at a reasonable hour, and had to exhaust myself by staying up late, writing more and more until exhaustion finally came up to swallow me into the darkness.
And then, a couple of days after my book came out, as the world finally discovered me and rushed to read my first novel, my phone finally rang.
I reached for it without glancing at the screen at first. Probably Derek again, trying to convince me to go out and do some sort of press tour. He'd been harping on me for a few days about this, telling me that I needed to do some signings, needed to show up on talk shows like Oprah and tell everyone how they ought to go spend twenty bucks and change on picking up a copy.
For Love of Passion (Stone Brothers Book 4) Page 17