by Megan Crane
Devyn thought there would be a revolt. The harder, more aggressive exes seethed. But not too loudly, not under Derrick’s watchful eye. Howie turned on his heel and stalked for the door.
And one by one, they followed him. All the would-be stepfathers. All the sneering, dismissive boyfriends. All the men who had played their parts in Melody’s life, and Devyn and Sydney’s too, walking one by one out into the night.
This time, she knew she’d never see them again.
And when they were gone—except the one or two who hadn’t taken part in the semicircle of indignation in the first place and were seated out in the crowd with the rest of Melody’s friends and family, like Vaughn’s father—no one inside the barn knew what to do.
It was much too quiet. And Melody looked crestfallen.
“Mom, it’s okay,” Sydney said, moving to Devyn’s other side. “They all sucked the first time.”
And then, from behind them, there was that laugh.
Devyn knew that laugh.
“Looks like that didn’t work out, babe,” Derrick said, his deep voice...lazy.
Melody sighed. She smoothed her hands down the front of her dress and didn’t turn to look at him.
“I’m sure that makes you very happy,” she said.
Derrick Voss pushed away from the bar and crossed the distance between him and Melody. He stood there in front of her, until Devyn found that she was holding her breath. Beside her, Sydney was digging her fingers into Devyn’s arm.
Slowly, almost carefully, Melody looked up.
“Are you ready to stop playing games, Melody?” Derrick asked, intense and low. “After all this time?”
Devyn expected her mother to laugh. To roll her eyes, do one of her little dances, or something else to cut the tension in the room.
But instead, she raised her eyes to Derrick’s as if this had been where she was headed all along. Right here, to him.
And she nodded.
It took Devyn a moment to realize that the shocked gasp she heard came from her. But it was echoed around the room.
Her father grinned. Then he held out his hand and waited for her mother to take it. When she did, his grin widened.
“It’s about damn time,” he growled.
He pulled her into his arms, glared at the band until they started to play, and then, what to Devyn’s wondering eyes did appear but her father, dancing with her mother in his arms as if this was the happily ever after they’d all been waiting for all this time.
“Oh my God,” Sydney whispered in her ear. “I don’t know if I want a cigarette or therapy.”
“You and me both,” Devyn managed to say.
But the band was playing. The party was starting.
And her parents were a love story, happening right there in front of her.
Which meant she too was going to have to take responsibility for her own messed-up love life, she thought. One way or another.
She made her way through the crowd, looking around for Vaughn. She kept getting caught by her mother’s friends, or her family, all of whom wanted to talk—at length—about what had just happened between Derrick and Melody.
“What is there to say?” Devyn asked Skylar and Scottie, and they all stared at each other in mutual amazement. “Where do I put that?”
“I literally can’t imagine what I would do if our parents got back together,” Scottie said from beside her sister, looking horrified at the very notion. “It would just be...”
“I don’t know what it would be,” Skylar retorted, “except awful. How are you even sober right now?”
Devyn didn’t feel sober. She felt wasted, though not drunk. Ruined, maybe. She pushed between this group and that, looking for that cowboy hat. Looking for six feet and four inches of undeniable male beauty, but she couldn’t find him anywhere.
She made it all the way to the big barn doors and even peeked outside to where a few hardy souls were smoking in the latest snowstorm, before she accepted what had to be the truth. That Frederick—never the showboating type—had probably slipped out after the horde had made their dramatic exit, and Vaughn had likely gone with him.
Because why would he stick around? Devyn had given him absolutely no reason to stay.
Well, she told herself, the good news is, no one is flying out tonight. And you know where he’s staying.
“If I could have everyone’s attention, please,” came a familiar voice through the microphone.
Devyn turned, very slowly, and was glad that she was all the way at the far end of the barn so she could stand with her back against the doors before her knees gave out.
Because Vaughn was on stage. He had a different guitar in his hands than the one he’d had in his hotel room, that cowboy hat was on his head like he was trying to hurt her with all that hotness, and he wore a smile on his face that she didn’t entirely recognize.
“I’m not much of a performer,” he said into the mic. “But there are a few songs I wouldn’t mind singing for you, if you don’t mind.” He nodded to the person beside him, and it took Devyn long moments to realize that it was Rayanne, grinning and adjusting her own mic. “I’ve got a member of the family to help me out and I’m pretty sure she’ll keep me in line.”
And then he began to play.
Devyn had had more than enough time since Christmas Eve to do what she should have done from the start. She’d looked the man up on the internet. She’d woken up much too early like a little kid on Christmas morning and had lain there in her bed in one of Melody’s guest rooms, torturing herself with Vaughn Taylor.
So she knew the songs he’d written. And the fact he never, ever performed anymore. He was a behind-the-scenes kind of a guy, and even when he sat in interviews with people who gushed all over him about how good his voice was, he’d shrug it off. Tell them that some people had it and he wasn’t one of them, and that was fine with him because he got to get lost in the music all the same.
But he was singing. Here. Up on the stage with her cousin as if he did it all the time.
And she couldn’t imagine what it was the real country stars had if Vaughn thought he didn’t possess it. Because all she could see was the glory of it. Of him. He had a rich, supple voice, shot through with hints of that drawl. Rayanne sang pretty harmonies and together, the two of them took the room through some of the best country songs that had come out in the past few years.
It made Devyn’s heart feel almost too big for her chest that Vaughn was responsible for all of them.
They finished the last one, a big hit that had crossed over to the pop charts the previous summer, and then Rayanne stepped back from the mic and picked up a guitar herself.
“I hope you’ll indulge me,” Vaughn said. He wasn’t smiling now. His eyes moved over the crowd, and Devyn knew the instant he found her, standing there so far in the back. “I wrote this song this weekend. With the snow coming down and maybe a little too much inspiration. I’ve never played it for anyone before, so y’all will have to tell me what you think.”
And then he began to sing.
Devyn recognized the tune instantly. It was the one he’d been playing in his hotel room that night.
And he was singing about a girl. About a broken heart and a missed chance. A girl with eyes like summer and hair like midnight, who made him act silly when he wanted to be strong. He sang about love when it was least expected. About falling so hard he thought it knocked him silly. About it happening so fast it made a blizzard feel slow.
And Devyn didn’t breathe. She couldn’t.
She found her hands over her mouth. Her heart in her throat.
She vaguely noticed that every last one of the Greys in the room had turned around to watch her watch Vaughn singing this song.
To her.
About her.
And when he was done singing these mad, impossible things about falling too quick and what was left of his heart, he didn’t take a bow. He didn’t joke his way off the stage. He stood there a moment,
his gaze locked to Devyn’s down the length of the barn.
“Get ready, Devyn,” he said into the mic, fierce and unsmiling, his dark gaze so hard on hers from across the bar that she felt it like a touch. “I’m coming for you.”
Vaughn jumped down off the stage, then stalked through the crowd, not seeming to notice the way they parted before him.
Devyn looked around, sure there had to be somewhere less public to have this conversation—but then he was in front of her.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about running away,” he said, and he was different tonight. There was a different light in those dark eyes of his. Some kind of certainty. Or, she thought, as if he’d come to a decision.
Her stomach flipped over at that, then seemed to settle low.
“I’m not running,” she managed to say, though she shook...everywhere. “I was looking for somewhere private.”
“You can go anywhere you want,” he told her, as if he was making her a very serious promise he intended to keep. “But I have something to say to you.”
“Me first.” She went up on her toes, and put her hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have taken out whatever that was on you.”
“I could have told you what I did.” His mouth moved beneath her hand, and it tickled. More than that, it sent sensation streaking through her and she knew he could tell because she felt the way he smiled.
“Here’s the thing,” she told him, her heart beating at her ribs. “You sang a lot about love, Vaughn, and I don’t know how to do it.”
He reached up and peeled her fingers off his mouth, then held her hand to his chest.
“No one knows how to do it. There’s no knowing how to do it. There’s just you and me, doing whatever it is we do. I’m not asking you to change your entire life because of a few days in the snow. I’m just asking you not to write me off before you give it a chance.”
“I was going to say that I might not know how to do it, but you make me wish I did,” she whispered. “You make me want to try.”
“I don’t want this weekend to end,” Vaughn said in a low, intent voice, as if it hurt. “And I don’t want to be your secret. So tell me, Devyn Voss, who was never my stepsister. Do you want to give this a real try?”
She was the same Devyn who had landed in the Jackson Hole airport a week ago. The snow had gotten to her, maybe. Or her parents acting out a love story, right there in front of her.
Or maybe it was the magic of Christmas, sunk down deep into her bones, giving her the one thing she never would have asked for, yet wanted most of all.
“I do, Vaughn,” she whispered, because she could think of a thousand reasons to run and hide and lock herself away, but on the other side of that was Vaughn. “Oh, how I do.”
“Excellent,” he drawled. He pulled her closer, and she tipped her face up to his. And basked a little bit in the wonder of his smile. “Darlin’, don’t you know? It starts with a kiss.”
And then he showed her exactly what he meant, right there in a big barn dressed up for Christmas and shining bright, with her favorite people in the whole world all around them, cheering.
Chapter Sixteen
Vaughn took her home early, with a detour to that hotel suite he would always think of as theirs, where the two of them reaffirmed the decisions they’d made with some glorious privacy.
“How do we do this?” she asked him the following morning, when he picked her up to take her to the airport, to tie up this whole Jackson, Wyoming, experience in the proper holiday bow.
“We’ll figure it out,” he promised her.
And that was what they did.
Because Vaughn discovered that in the end, he’d learned more from his father than he’d ever given himself credit for.
Vaughn was a remarkably patient man, it turned out. Or at least, he was where Devyn was concerned.
It took him a solid year, flying back and forth on weekends and holidays, doing the long-distance thing, attending family weddings—her cousins and then, happily, his father’s to a lovely, not even remotely dramatic woman who looked at Frederick like he was the color and noise in her world—for Devyn to look up at him one night while they were sprawled over each other in his Nashville house.
And finally say the thing he’d been deliberately not saying for months.
“There’s no reason I couldn’t do the same sort of job in Nashville that I do in Chicago,” she said.
“No reason at all,” he agreed.
And showed his joy at that decision in other, more carnal ways.
And when she didn’t want to move in with him because she didn’t want to “jinx it,” or some such crap, he was nothing but understanding.
“Stay with me until you find a place,” he told her, the very soul of Southern hospitality.
And six months later, after he’d found fault in every apartment she’d looked at in Nashville, she lifted up her head from where she was stirring her grandma’s famous chili one night. With a strange look in those gorgeous blue eyes of hers.
“You have no intention of me finding my own place, do you?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, grinning when she shook her head at him. “It’s been a year and a half, Devyn. You need to start thinking about the fact I’m not playing. When I said I was coming for you, I meant it. Are you ready?”
“Is that a real question?” she retorted. Because she was his Devyn, stubborn to the end. “Because it sounds like a hypothetical.”
And what kind of question it was had gotten a little lost when they found themselves using the kitchen counter in a notably non-culinary fashion.
A week later, they went out on a long-planned trip to visit her mom and dad in Wyoming. Vaughn still thought it was cute how little Devyn could get her head around the fact her parents were actually together.
Still together. They spent some of their time in California and some of it in Wyoming and scarier to Devyn than that was the fact they seemed...happy.
“It’s been a year and a half,” she told Vaughn under her breath when they sat in that sprawling western house with both Melody and Derrick at the table and summer views of the Tetons on the other side of the windows. “I figured it would be, you know, a birthday thing. And then over by New Year’s.”
But Vaughn knew better. He could tell that Derrick Voss knew exactly what he had and had no intention of letting it get away from him again.
Vaughn felt the exact same way.
“Are you guys getting married?” Devyn asked at that same dinner, only pretending to eat her food.
“Your father’s not the marrying kind,” Melody said, but she laughed while she said it. And it wasn’t one of those trademark Melody Grey laughs that Vaughn remembered. This one sounded real. And all the more infectious because of it.
“I’m not generally into that kind of thing,” Derrick agreed, but the way he looked at his daughter, steady and forthright, made Vaughn like the man even more. “But I told her that for her, I’ll do it. If she decides to stick around.”
“If we make it six years, apparently, that will be the magic number.” Melody laughed again. She was so much less brittle than Vaughn remembered her. Brighter, somehow. “But I have to tell you, baby girl, I’m not sure I’m going to care.”
“My parents living in sin?” Devyn asked, with a dramatic sort of gasp. “I’m shocked and appalled.”
“That works too,” her father replied, a curve to his mouth.
After dinner, when the stars started to come out, Vaughn told Devyn he had a surprise for her.
“If it’s the usual surprise,” Devyn said with a grin, “you don’t have to be so dramatic about it. I already planned to open it later, right here in the guest room.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” he said. “But we’re going out.”
It was summer, and that made everything different. They drove down from Melody’s house into the pretty town of Jackson, and he took her to the hotel they’d last seen whe
n it was under all that snow and ice.
Once inside, he ushered her into the elevator and took her straight up to the same hotel suite where he’d stayed a year and a half ago.
“Did you get the room for the night?” she asked as they walked down the hall. “I had no idea you were so romantic.”
“You have no idea.”
And when he opened the door, she gasped.
There were candles everywhere. Candles and the flowers she liked, and every other thing he could think of to show her how much he loved her. He drew her inside, and turned to look at her once the door closed behind them.
“I feel like we were always in the dark when we were here,” he told her. “So I wanted to make sure there was light tonight. I love you, Devyn. You make me wish I’d made a move on you when it was completely inappropriate, so we could have had all these years together already.”
“Why do I find that so sweet?” she asked, laughing up at him. “And I love you too. I think maybe I always have.”
Vaughn drew her further into the room and then dropped down on his knee. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring he’d bought the minute he’d gotten back to Nashville after that first Christmas. The ring he’d been holding on to ever since.
“I love you,” he told her again, cracking open the box. “Marry me, Devyn. I want to make music about you. I want to make babies with you. I want you. Always.”
“And I love you,” she whispered, her beautiful blue eyes welling up with emotion. “I had no idea that love could be like this. I had no idea that it grows and grows, more and more every day, and that we can grow with it. I love you so much.”
“Devyn.” Vaughn shook his head. “It’s a yes or no question.”
And she was laughing and crying a little bit too, and then she was saying yes—with her mouth and her hands and the way she wrapped herself around him as she slid to the floor with him.
It was a long while before she tried on that ring.
But once Devyn put it on, she never took it off again.
Not for the rest of their lives.