Hero Worship (Music City Moguls Book 6)

by Cheryl Douglas

  “She’d been my confidante for a lot of years, Tash.” He swiped a hand over his mouth before bracing both hands on the window frame and hanging his head. “She was more than just a friend to me.”

  “Obviously,” Natasha muttered, feeling a little ashamed for being so petty.

  “I know you think you understand, but you don’t,” he said, turning to face her. “You know how they say you can choose your friends but not your family?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Julie was the family I would have chosen.” He smiled, obviously recalling some memory, before his expression turned grave again. “She was the only one who encouraged me. You have to remember I knew her long before I ever hit it big. She and Den were high school sweethearts.”

  Natasha sat on the edge of the armchair, listening and trying to imagine what their relationship had been like.

  “My brother was so busy trying to eke out a living he didn’t have time to worry about me. And well…” Clint ran a hand over his head, wiping sweat from his forehead. “You know how it was with my parents. They thought I was wasting my time with music.”

  “But Julie didn’t?” Natasha didn’t know why it stung so much to realize that the world would have been deprived of Clint’s musical genius had it not been for the woman in question.

  “No, she didn’t.” He sat on the edge of the sofa and faced her. “There was this big old tree on Den and Julie’s property. It was her favorite spot because she loved the scent of the magnolias.”

  Natasha tensed as she thought of the magnolia tree on Clint’s property. She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d built his house so close to that tree because it reminded him of Julie.

  “We used to sit under that old tree for hours,” Clint said, looking wistful. “Just talking. I’d bring my guitar along once in a while, when I was working on a new song and wanted to get her take on it.” He looked at his clasped hands. “She was the only one who didn’t think I was crazy to pursue a dream that was clearly a long shot. I mean, come on, thousands of talented musicians head to Nashville every year hoping to make it big, but how many do, right?”

  “I guess you’re right.” Natasha tried to imagine how she would have responded if Clint had shared his dream with her all those years ago. She wanted to believe she would have been as supportive as Julie had been, but she wasn’t much of a risk-taker, and Clint certainly had built his life around a risky proposition. But for him, it had paid off, and he apparently owed that to Julie’s unwavering support.

  “She was the only one who believed in me back then,” he explained. “My parents, all my friends thought I was crazy. They told me to use my degree to get a job and put music out of my head. They said if I loved it so much, I could play a few gigs on the weekend or a wedding now and then, but they said a record deal would never happen for a guy like me. You had to know people, have connections, to make it in this business.”

  There was some truth to that, but Natasha found new talent every day. It wasn’t impossible to be discovered the way Clint had been.

  “You can’t understand how much it meant to me to have even one person drown out all those other voices.” Clint looked her in the eye, his pain barely concealed. “She made me believe in myself. She made me believe I could do it. And she convinced me that even if I didn’t make it, I’d never regret the chance I took. I’d regret the one I didn’t take.”

  “Smart woman,” Natasha said begrudgingly.

  “She said the graveyard was filled with people who’d left no footprints. They’d been here but lived so quietly, in the safety of their comfort zone, terrified of taking a risk, that they’d never really lived at all.”

  Natasha took a moment to process Clint’s words, thinking how different his life might have been if he’d chosen to listen to the naysayers instead.

  “I didn’t want to go out like that. I wanted God to use me, to use my gift to entertain people.” He gripped his chest. “You know how many emails and letters I’ve gotten over the years from people telling me that my music, music I wrote, inspired them or got them through a tough time?”

  “I can imagine.”

  Clint was one of the best songwriters in Nashville. When he wrote lyrics, he left everything on the table. He didn’t worry about what people might say or think if he tackled a controversial subject. He just wrote from the heart, and that resonated with millions of people who were proud to call themselves his diehard fans.

  “When it’s my time, I want to go out used up, knowing that I’ve given everything I had to give, faced all of my fears, climbed literal and figurative mountains to make it on my own. Julie knew that. She saw that in me.”

  “And she was the only one who did.”

  “Yeah, she was.” Clint curled his hands around his knees as his eyes sought Natasha’s. “I had just broken up with a girlfriend. It didn’t work out because…” He swallowed. “Well, because Sharyl wasn’t you.”

  “Me?” That was the last thing she’d expected him to say, and she questioned whether she’d be a fool to believe his claim. Her heart was trying to guide her toward the truth, but her head kept throwing up roadblocks.

  “Yeah, you.” He rolled his eyes. “I was an idiot for thinking I could have made that work. She wasn’t right for me.”

  Clint hadn’t mentioned Sharyl often, but when he had, Natasha’d gotten the impression he was just biding his time until someone more suitable came along. She never would have guessed he’d thought that someone could be her. “Then why’d you waste your time? And hers, for that matter?”

  “Julie asked me the same thing, and I had no answer for her.” He shrugged. “I guess I was just tired of being alone. Being with the wrong woman was better than…” His voice trailed off as he shook his head. “I was wrong. Being alone would have been better, for both of us.”

  Natasha believed being single was a choice. She’d happily made that choice for years before Clint had convinced her to take a chance on a lifetime with him. If she’d known about Julie’s journal when Clint had proposed, she liked to think she would have told him it could never work, but given how caught up she’d been in that moment, she couldn’t honestly say how she would have responded.

  “Julie knew I was crazy about you. She encouraged me to tell you how I felt.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “You and I had a good thing going,” he said. “At least that’s what I told myself. I didn’t want to admit that I was too much of a coward to take a chance. When it came down to it, I think I was just afraid of being rejected.”

  It was hard for Natasha to imagine someone as self-assured and successful as Clint would have the same insecurities as everyone else, but his transparency gave her no reason to question his honesty.

  “I loved Julie, no question about it. But I wasn’t in love with her.” His pinched features were etched with pain. “In so many ways, we were soul mates. We talked about that, during our last conversation. We talked about being soul mates.”

  “Soul mates?” Natasha repeated the words as a dull ache settled into her bones. How could she spend the rest of her life with a man who believed he’d loved and lost his soul mate? It would be akin to emotional suicide, and she refused to put herself or her son through that.

  “I’ve never subscribed to the theory that soul mates have to come wearing a lover’s mask.” His smile was faint and brief. “I don’t know, maybe it’s the artist in me, but I’ve felt that soul-deep connection plenty of times. Even when I’m co-writing a song and we’re in the zone, as though we can read each other’s thoughts and feel what’s in the other’s heart.”

  Clint’s poetic take on that didn’t surprise Natasha. He was a master with words, with drawing people into his world and making his listener feel what he was feeling and relate. But she couldn’t allow herself to get sucked in. She had too much at stake to take that kind of risk.

  “To me, a soul mate is someone who can take one look at you and know what you’re feeling with
out hearing you say a word.” His gaze traveled over her slowly, his expression solemn. “Right now, you’re questioning whether you can trust me. You’re wondering if I’m being honest with you or just saying what I think you want to hear.”

  He was right, but Natasha wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he could read her so effortlessly.

  “I knew the first time I met you there was something special between us.” Clint inched over on the sofa until he was close enough to touch her. “You made me laugh harder than I’d laughed in a long time.” He smiled at the memory. “That’s when I realized you’d come into my life to bring me joy like I’d never known.”

  His words were penetrating her anger, as she was certain he’d intended. “I remember Evan invited me to come watch you in the studio, to see how a real pro did it. By the end of the day, my sides hurt from laughing. Every time there was a break between songs, you’d come over and regal me with stories about your time out on the road and all the crazy things fans had done to try to get your attention.” She hadn’t thought about that day in years, but he was right. It had marked the start of something special.

  “I became addicted to your laugh that day,” Clint said, reaching for her hand. “I knew I had to hear more of it. As often as possible.”

  She felt tears sting her eyes as he curled his hand around hers. “It was easy to be your friend, but I never let myself believe there could be more between us. I thought guys like you went for a certain type of girl, and I definitely didn’t fit that mold.”

  “You had no idea how beautiful you were,” Clint whispered, kissing her hand. “I could tell that right away. I made it my mission to help you see in yourself what I saw in you, to make you realize that you could be unstoppable.”

  As Julie had done for him, Clint had helped Natasha realize her dream of returning to college wasn’t out of reach. “I think I have a better understanding of your relationship with Julie now. You felt about her the way I felt about you. She was…” She thought of the old song that always made her smile. “The wind beneath your wings.”

  They shared a look before they both laughed at her trite insight.

  “Seriously,” Natasha said, squeezing his hand, “whether you realized it or not, you were my rock. Everyone thought I was crazy for going back to school. I already had a great job. I was making enough to support myself and my son, so why bother, right?”

  “You had to,” Clint said, repeating what he had when she’d told him about her dream. “You’d made a commitment to yourself before Austin was born that you’d get that degree someday. If you didn’t, you would have felt like you’d let him and yourself down.”

  “You’re the only one who got that,” Natasha said, thinking how happy she’d been when he’d talked her into taking the risk. “I’m so grateful you believed in me more than I believed in myself.”

  “We all need that sometimes, someone who believes in us until we can learn to believe in ourselves.”

  “You’re right.” She wanted to be that person for her son, the one who encouraged him to reach for his dreams no matter how nonsensical they seemed. She wondered if she could still be that person for Clint, the one he could count on when it felt as though the rest of the world were against him.

  He took her hands and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “The talk I had with Julie before she died made me realize some things about myself.”

  “What kind of things?” she asked, grateful her pain at the mention of Julie’s name had receded. Instead of dreading it, she wanted to hear more about what had happened that night.

  “That I still wasn’t living full out. Sure, I’d taken a lot of risks, and most had paid off. But I was still holding back where you were concerned. Julie made me realize I wanted with another woman what I’d always had with her. Confiding in her was safe. Letting my guard down with her was easy because there was no risk. She couldn’t reject me, and I knew she’d keep on loving me no matter how much of an ass I was.”

  “She made you feel secure,” Natasha offered, thinking about her experience with Clint. “There was nothing you couldn’t say to her.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “But when she left, I realized I had to be willing to do the same with you if I wanted that kind of relationship. That’s what I’ve been committed to doing these past couple of months, letting you see the real me, scars and all.”

  Natasha had to ask, to silence her fears once and for all. “Did you ever want to build a life with Julie?”

  Clint chuckled. “No, never. Julie was like a sister to me, Tash. I told her that when she came to my hotel room the day she died. She was emotional and confused, but I think she was just at a crossroads in her life, seeking something different than what she had but not sure what she wanted.”

  “I know what that’s like,” Natasha admitted.

  “I tried to set her straight, to let her know things didn’t have to change between us. She was too important to me to let anything come between us.”

  If Natasha had heard that a few hours ago, it would have crushed her, but she had a better understanding of where it was coming from. “Then she agreed you were better off as friends?”

  Clint brushed his thumb over the back of Natasha’s hand, fixating on the repetitive action. “I’m not gonna lie to you. It was a tough conversation. Like I said, Julie was confused about her feelings for me, but once I told her I would always love her but I’d never love her like that, I think she made peace with it.”

  “Did you get to talk to her again before she died?” Natasha remembered Den telling her that he’d talked to Julie in the hospital, and she wondered whether Julie had asked to see Clint too.

  “No.” Clint’s voice broke. “I was already heading back to Nashville. I got a call from Den…” He shook his head as a sigh wracked his body. “I couldn’t believe she was gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Natasha whispered, stroking his back. Seeing how much Clint still missed his friend made her confront the fact that life was too short, too unpredictable, to live in the safe zone because she didn’t want to get her heart broken.

  He looked up and stroked her face gently. “I don’t want your pity, sweetheart. What I need is your understanding. Please tell me you still want a future with me.”

  ***

  Clint felt breathless as he waited for her response, caught between praying she would say what he so desperately wanted to hear and terrified that she would ruin him with just a few words. A few seconds of silence felt like endless minutes.

  “Say something,” he whispered.

  “I left your place tonight thinking there was nothing you could say or do to change my mind about ending things. I still believed that when you showed up at my door.”

  “And now?” he asked.

  “Now I see things differently. I think I understand how Julie felt when she wrote that entry.” She held his hand. “Still, Den must be so sad. I can only imagine how I’d feel in his position.”

  Clint thought about how hurt his brother must have been when he’d read Julie’s words, but there was nothing more he could say or do to help Den. “I have to believe, in time, my brother will be okay. We had a long talk after you left, and I did everything I could to put his mind at ease.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I told him the truth. While they may have had their problems, I truly believe Julie still loved him.”

  Natasha tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’m sure hearing that helped.”

  “I actually hope this will help Den move on with his life.” Clint had thought about it a lot on the drive to Natasha’s, and he believed this may have come out for a reason. Den needed something to remind him that things with Julie hadn’t been as perfect as he wanted to believe. “Julie was an amazing woman, and I know how much my brother loved her. But this thing with the journal brought to light the fact their marriage wasn’t perfect. Like any relationship, they had their share of problems. I think Den was so caught up
in his grief that he forgot that.”

  “Yeah, and he couldn’t even think about moving on as long as he was still fixated on the past.” Natasha nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this will be a good thing for him.”

  “I hope so.” Clint tried not to let his anxiety get the best of him, but it was difficult when Natasha seemed determined to avoid talking about their future. “I want my brother to find happiness… almost as much as I want us to be happy.”

  Natasha settled her arm along the back of the sofa as she toyed with the ends of his hair. “You can’t make me happy.”

  His stomach tightened as he processed her words. “Because you won’t give—”

  “Because it’s not your job to make me happy.” She leaned forward, surprising him with a brief kiss. “That’s too much pressure to put on another person. I’m responsible for my happiness. Always have been, always will be.”

  Clint admired her strength and independence, but he wanted to argue that she would be so much happier with him than she could ever be raising Austin alone.

  “I’ve never subscribed to the theory that we find our happily ever after when we take our wedding vows.” She smiled. “I’ve always thought we need to find ourselves before we can find the right person.”

  “I agree with that.” He wouldn’t have been ready to make a lifetime commitment before he was established in his career. That had to come first so he could devote more energy to a wife and family.

  “I think everyone comes into our lives for a reason. Every relationship has a purpose, to teach us something about ourselves.”

  He didn’t know if her philosophical take on relationships should scare him, but it did. “What has your relationship with me taught you about yourself, Tash?”

  She grinned before climbing into his lap and straddling him. “I’m glad you asked. It’s taught me that I still have a lot of work to do on myself.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, feeling marginally better since he could feel her heart beating against his.

  “I thought I was a pretty together person, but tonight proved to me that I’m not as evolved as I thought I was.” She pursed her lips. “All of my insecurities came back to the surface tonight when I found out about Julie’s feelings for you. I thought I’d gotten rid of those voices asking whether I was good enough, but I heard them again tonight. They were drowning out all my sense of reason.”