“I had a word with our legal team,” Mitchell continued. “You were right. He’s been pushing it. Putting us in a potentially untenable situation. Something had to be done.”
Translation: Mitchell was avoiding a law suit. She glanced sideways at him, but his face was impassive. She might wish he’d taken action for nobler reasons, but at least something had been done.
“Well, I hope he can make a success of his new role,” she said.
As Mitchell nodded in agreement, she resolved to keep her ear to the ground.
Then Eli gave her a nod, and they heard him introduce her to the crowd. Feeling the familiar butterflies in her stomach, and the adrenaline start to race in her blood, she adjusted the strap on her old Gibson. It was a bit battered now, a few of the edges knocked off…but the heart of it was the same, the sound still true.
Kind of like her.
“Break a leg,” Mitchell told her.
Then she walked out onto the stage…with no idea how she’d be received.
Eli greeted her with a kiss on each cheek, sending a message to the audience, the cameras, the world—they were on the same stage, and everything was great. Then he took her hand and held it up, the gesture of a champion, imbuing her with a little of his own magic.
“Jacinda Prescott!” he announced, as though she’d already triumphed in some mighty challenge, and the audience roared with approval.
She waved to her mom, who was standing with Hannah in the front row, and then held her hand out to the crowd. So far, so good. Off stage, she’d always been quiet, diffident about attention (particularly the unwelcome sexual kind). But on stage, in front of people waiting to be entertained, she always felt transformed, revolutionized—and now she remembered that high all over again. Their anticipation was palpable, charging her with a buzz better than anything available over the counter or in a back alley. In a way, she was standing before them as someone completely different. New hair, a new look, and a new strength. And a new name. Cin Scott was no more—not forgotten, but put to rest along with the other parts of her past.
The things that had made her what she was, but couldn’t be part of her life now.
The people.
Liam.
For the briefest moment, she closed her eyes. Part of her brain was hardwired on New Zealand time now, and she knew without calculating that if it was nine at night here, it was just hitting evening there. A summer Sunday, the sand still warm, the tide on its way in or out, the ocean hiding one less secret now. She opened her eyes again and looked up to the winter sky, refusing to mourn the lack of stars…the lack of him.
She raised her chin. No one said moving on would be easy. She was different, but the music was always there. And the people were here, waiting, row after row of expectant faces, waiting to see what this new version of her would bring. She had no idea if they would go along with her on this new path, or if this path was even the one for her—but she was setting off anyway.
She nodded behind her to Eli’s band, and struck the first chord of Hourglass Reverb. She had a ton of other material to choose from, and after everything that had just happened, she’d intended to pick something else. But for this night, Eli had asked her to play that one. Now, at the sound of the familiar song, a cheer went up from the crowd, and she knew it had been the right choice.
Just as it always did once she started to sing, something cut loose. Some indefinable switch flipped in her mind, and she was herself again, set free, everything else forgotten under the stage lights. For a few minutes, the world narrowed to music and melody, the power and precision of the band behind her, the audience singing along with her heartfelt lyrics. Tonight, after everything that had happened in the bay this summer, the words had an extra, bittersweet resonance.
It was relief and bliss, satisfaction and emotion, rolled into one heady package.
But as she started into the last chorus, the band in full swing, a murmur of something rippled sharply through the audience. All at once, she knew she’d lost them somehow, their attention no longer on the music. Instead of moving as one in time to the beat, they were scattered, distracted, pointing...
She faltered, the Gibson suddenly heavy on its strap, and turned to see what they were looking at.
A man was standing on the stage, with Eli’s guitar. But although he was tall and handsome, like Eli, it wasn’t him.
Her breath caught in her chest, and she stopped singing.
It was Liam.
Chapter Forty-One
As he walked toward the front of the stage, Liam kept his eyes focused on Jacinda. When he’d asked Hannah to help him make this happen, he hadn’t factored in the possibility of gut-wrenching stage fright adding to his nerves. He’d never been on stage in front of fifty people, let alone five thousand or more, not to mention the robotic cameras trained on the stage. He concentrated on Jacinda’s face—currently frozen somewhere between confused and shocked—and on not tripping over the lead attached to Eli’s guitar as it trailed alongside him.
It didn’t help that she seemed to be backing away, one hand over her mouth, the other clutching the neck of her guitar. But after a couple of steps, she bumped into the other guitarist, and came to a halt. The band stopped playing. She looked around at them, questioning, but they all just grinned. She had no idea that they were in on it too.
He came all the way to the front of the stage, a few feet from where she was standing. To his right, thousands of people waited and wondered in a hum of curiosity, obviously poised to complain at the interruption, but unsure what was going on. Here and there, a phone was held up, recording the moment. He swallowed.
Breathe.
Breathe.
The bass player came over and handed him a microphone, and Jacinda’s eyes grew even wider. She took a step toward him.
Realizing something was up, the roaming camera guy who’d been taking close-up shots for the big screens on each side came nearer. Liam ignored him, zeroing in on the woman in front of him—smart, talented, beautiful…and off-limits.
Or not.
He’d thought about her constantly since she left.
Regretted leaving her standing naked in his room, her beachwear clasped to her chest.
Regretted the staggering stupidity of drunkenly offloading his pain and secrets onto the stranger who’d turned out to be Lainey Kingsley.
Regretted that he couldn’t prove to her, in that phone call, that they could overcome anything standing in their way—the pain of the past, or the uncertainty of the future.
The only thing left to do was come and find her, and lay it all on the line. Because if he didn’t, he’d regret that too. And he was done with regrets.
Here on stage, in her natural habitat, she was even more beautiful than he remembered.
He held the microphone tight, and smiled at her. “Hey.”
“Hi,” she replied cautiously, and her headset mic picked up the word and broadcast it out across the crowd.
“Hi!” some smartass yelled back, and a few others echoed the greeting, causing a ripple of laughter.
“Which brother are you?” someone else bellowed.
Jacinda flinched, and Liam looked out to the audience. Shit. This crowd could either help him, or totally undermine him, and make everything a hundred times worse. He squinted a little, trying to make out the faces beyond the first few rows. Hopefully they’d take pity on him. He turned back to Jacinda.
“You look amazing,” he told her.
A volley of wolf whistles came from all sides, and she frowned.
Damn. That was the wrong thing to say. He couldn’t help that he was blindsided by her beauty, even if she refused to be defined by her looks. And he knew how much more there was to her. Standing in front of her, he started again, without preamble.
“Jacinda…I screwed up. And I’d give anything to undo that. I’m sorry.”
“He’s sorry,” a woman in the front row called out.
“He’s hot,” her friend y
elled, and there was an eruption of catcalls and whoops from the women in the audience.
He felt his face heat up, and swiped his forearm across his brow. Jesus, it was warm under these lights.
Jacinda ignored the women and stood silently, watching him. With tousled hair and black eyeliner, holding a battered black electric guitar, she looked every inch the rebel—a woman doing things on her own terms. She’d planned a life for herself, without him. It was entirely possible that she didn’t want to be convinced of anything different.
“I know our past is messy—” he began.
“We all know that,” someone shouted from the audience.
Jacinda looked toward the voice, her brows knit, then back to him. “We do,” she said. “Even our recent past.”
With a sick feeling, he realized that putting her on the spot could completely backfire. But there was no going back from here. He looked out to the audience, now dotted with phones held high. Obviously, this was going to be on the internet, so he’d better make it good—good enough to knock his previous screw-up off the front page of every entertainment site out there.
Good enough that Jacinda would give him a chance.
Holding the bridge of the guitar, he forged on.
“I know our past is messy,” he repeated. “And our recent past, which is my fault. But the rest of it was no one’s fault. Ethan made his choice, and I carried it with me for years. And then it became your burden too. I never wanted that to happen.”
She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek, her eyes bright under the lights, but stayed silent. He didn’t care about the audience now, or the band members standing nearby, or Eli Tyler watching from the wings, or the camera guy sliding ever closer. There was only her.
“But you and I are still here,” he said. “We have our lives ahead of us. And when I look at my life without you—” The thought was a lump in his throat, and all he could do was shake his head, his eloquence gone. “If you’ll let me, I’ll do whatever it takes to make it up to you,” he said, plain and true. “And maybe one day you’ll forgive me.”
Inevitably, someone yelled from the darkness, “Forgive him!”
“I’ll forgive him for you,” offered a woman’s voice, triggering a wave of laughter. “Send him out here!”
“Put him out of his misery,” advised someone from down the back.
The audience was restless, and so was he.
Jacinda remained silent, a line of doubt etched between her brows. He wanted to go and kiss the line away, along with all the complications and sadness, until her beautiful face was lit up in a smile again. Instead, he waited.
Finally, she spoke, her voice uncertain. “Your family, though…”
“They know I’m here,” he said. “And we’re figuring it out.”
She tipped her head sideways, disbelieving. “Really? Your mom? Because that’s important.”
She glanced out to the audience, and he followed her gaze to where her mother was standing in the front row, looking back at her daughter. As Trina put a hand to her heart and smiled at Jacinda, he thought about his mother, now back in Australia doing damage control. After the visit to Sam and Danielle, fortified by snickerdoodles, they’d gone home and talked…and talked…until they found the beginning of an understanding that had been missing for so long. He hoped he could eventually do the same with his father—who was probably still apoplectic about having family secrets spilled online. But he’d be damned if he’d let either of his parents stand in the way of this.
“It’s a work in progress,” he said. “But you were right. We have to move on. And I want to move on with you.”
“Oh…”
She worried the corner of her lip, maybe processing what he’d said. Seeing the doubt still in her eyes, he reached for his last piece of ammunition. From his back pocket, he pulled out his old blue notebook, full of lyrics.
“Open it to the marked page,” he said, handing it to her.
From the way she looked at him, her brow furrowed, he knew she remembered it from the day she found it on his nightstand. She took it, and opened it to the page he’d folded down. He watched as her eyes ran over his handwritten lines, and then she looked up at him.
“This is the song. From the beach.”
He nodded. He’d never forget that night by the fire, playing backup on the old acoustic guitar, listening as his own lyrics came from Ethan’s mouth. Watching Jacinda’s face soften and her eyes grow dreamy as the words entangled her heart. Sitting there, gutted, as she and Ethan walked away from the circle of light and warmth, leaving him dark and cold with jealousy. Because even then, he knew what he felt for her was true and right, even if it seemed wrong. And it was more than the careless summer fling Ethan was having.
Now, years later and half a world away, she stood holding the words in her hands, along with his heart—proving him right.
“But…this is your notebook…your writing,” she said.
“Yeah.” He waited for her to join up the dots.
“You wrote these lyrics?”
“I did,” he replied. “I wrote them for you. They say everything I never could back then. Everything real I felt about you, even if I shouldn’t have.” He paused. “And everything real I feel now.”
He watched as emotions rolled across her face, like the sunshine and shadow of a spring sky. “But they’re so beautiful,” she whispered, and the words fluttered from the speakers into the crisp, charged night air, where the audience stood riveted by the scene unfolding in front of them.
“Like you,” he said.
A collective ‘oh’ went up from the crowd, in time with Jacinda’s own. Maybe he did have a chance. He’d crossed an ocean for this—to claim back his words, and claim her heart.
He adjusted the guitar, took a breath, and started to play.
Chapter Forty-Two
Jacinda had come on stage ready for whatever the night threw at her—but Liam wasn’t one of the possibilities she’d imagined. She listened to him sing, captivated and disbelieving, and in that moment, everything shrank to him. His hands on the guitar, his ocean-blue eyes on her, his intentions clear.
She was standing on a stage in Los Angeles, but she was on a beach under South Pacific stars.
She was twenty-seven, and she was seventeen.
She was lost, and she was found.
As he sang, the words touched her like they did the first time…except it was different. The two of them were different. Everything was different.
* * *
The earth turned true and brought you here
Your stars in my eyes, a galaxy near
The moon and tide in quiet awe
My waiting arms still wanting more
Where oceans break, my heart goes too
The only thing I want is you
* * *
Once, those words had led her to a decision that changed everything. To a guy who was charming, and handsome, a high school hero who didn’t love her. But she hadn’t loved him either—they were only kids, venturing into an adult world that held challenges they couldn’t have anticipated.
Now, though…she was a grown-up, and so was Liam. Both battle-scarred, but unbeaten. They’d been on opposite sides, but when they suspended hostilities it had been the hottest, sweetest truce in history.
She hadn’t thought a permanent peace was possible…but after that phone call, he’d come all this way to persuade her otherwise. Taken the risk of widening the rift in his family. Acknowledged his screw-up—in front of thousands of people—and asked her for a chance.
Maybe it was possible.
Maybe they weren’t on opposite sides after all.
She watched him sing, the simple melody carrying his lyrics on that dirty-sexy voice she’d had no idea he possessed. To her left, the audience was now a hundred per cent with him, the rectangular fairy lights of their phones setting the slanted seating of the Greek aglow. When the last note of the unnamed song echoed into the sky, they w
ent crazy, clapping and cheering. But the sound seemed to wash over him as he held her gaze, focused only on her. His feet were planted squarely on the stage, the guitar resting low and easy against his body, but she could see the tension in his jaw, and the intensity in his eyes. He looked a little weary—maybe jetlagged from the flight—but he carried the edge of tiredness and a five o’clock shadow with a rugged sexiness. She wondered how much sleep he’d had over the last days, while she’d been rehearsing, fending off requests to do press, and trying not to think about him every minute of the goddamn day. Every minute of the day, until he turned up here in her world—the world he’d once resented her for being part of.
Her heart was pounding.
He waited.
The audience waited.
Just as she opened her mouth to speak, a shout came from the seats. “Kiss him!”
“Kiss him!” yelled another voice, and then another, and then all five thousand plus voices were raised in a repeating chant of “Kiss him, kiss him.”
She felt her cheeks flame, because that was exactly what she wanted to do.
He grinned, but turned toward the front of the stage and held out his hands, palms downward, trying to hush them. Finally, they settled down, and she spoke.
“So you wrote that song for me,” she said.
He nodded. “I did. For my sins.”
“I like it. A lot.”
“That was the plan.”
She remembered the beach, the bonfire, and the flickering flames. Two brothers, both talented, smart, and handsome. One with a self-assured exterior hiding his very human vulnerability. The other always in the background, with a quiet strength he’d been forced to draw on for all the years since. She was suddenly struck with regrets for everything that had happened—her past decisions, one on top of the other, that had built toward the ending she never saw coming.
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