by Stacy Gail
Fletcher swallowed audibly. “The reason I swapped my painting for yours was because I knew you’d be angry at what I’d done, so I hid it by swapping the paintings out. I mean, I knew you’d eventually discover what I did, but I guess I thought that I could at least put it off for as long as possible. And who knows, maybe something good for me could come out of this once my painting was seen…”
“What did you do to my painting?”
Fletch expelled a sharp breath. “I put my foot through it.”
“Fucking cunt.” At last Sage moved, plowing his fist through the painting he held. Then he tossed it away as the garbage it was and launched at Fletcher, taking him by the front of his Chicago Bears sweatshirt and throwing him against the wooden garage door to hold him there by his neck. One little squeeze… “You destroy her painting, I destroy you. That’s how this shit goes.”
“No, Sage, stop. Please.” Mads latched onto his arm just like she had in Payne’s office in a grip that told him the world would end before she’d let him go. “He’s not worth it.”
“He hurt you. His existence hurts you. I don’t allow anyone to hurt me and mine. That’s what you are—you’re mine. My family. My everything. He has to pay for hurting you.”
“Not like this. If you hit him you could kill him, and then that’d be it. I’d lose everything, even you. Please.”
Please.
It took every ounce of will he had to loosen the hold he had on the other man’s throat, and when he stepped back it was just about the toughest thing he’d ever done. The moment his hand dropped from Fletcher, the other man sagged, looking so damn weak and victimized Sage wanted to smack him. A moment later Mads stepped in, and all at once the blind rage swamping his brain vanished when he realized her breaths were coming in strangled, hitching gasps.
“We’re done here,” she said, and when he looked down he saw the tracks of tears shining on her death-pale face. “Now and forever, we are fucking done here. Let’s go.”
*
Mads’s head pounded out a rhythm of misery, made that much worse by the tears she couldn’t seem to turn off. She’d been able to get some semblance of control during the drive back to Sage’s place, but the misery boiling away deep inside kept trickling from her eyes as they hung up their jackets and kicked off their boots. If she could just turn it all off and not feel anything, that would be a vast relief. But how was she supposed to not feel anything when she had no choice but to face the fact that her father resented her more than loved her?
That kind of betrayal didn’t just hurt. It crippled.
And then, of course, there was Sage and his knee-jerk reaction when he’d seen the switched paintings.
Logic told her it was understandable. It had confused her at first, as well.
But he should have known better.
He should have had faith in her.
Did this mean deep down, he didn’t believe in the person she was?
What was she supposed to do with that?
“I still don’t get why he switched my painting for his.” Her voice had aged during the ride over. She barely recognized it as her own. Hanging up her scarf, she turned to look at Sage with what felt like the world’s ugliest, most swollen eyes. “Why wrap up his and put it in place of mine? Did he really think I would just meekly let that happen?”
“Who knows how that petty bitch’s mind works? What matters is that he’s out of your life forever. And I do mean forever, Skittish,” he added, his tone as hard and cold as ice. “There’s no goddamn way I’ll ever let him within ten feet of you from now on.”
“I have to tell Payne and Scout what happened.” Her stomach rolled sickly, and she almost burst into a fresh storm of tears. To combat the rising tide, she tugged her phone out of her back pocket and tried to focus. “They need to know that I have nothing to show for the auction now. They need to erase me from the website. Maybe they’ll have a chance to get new flyers and programs done up before—”
“Don’t worry about them now.” He plucked her phone from her hand and put it in his own pocket. “Just worry about yourself, okay?”
“Myself? There’s nothing left for me to do, don’t you get that? It’s all gone. I sketch and I do digital work. I almost never put anything on canvas. Everything I’ve struggled to accomplish these past few weeks is now ruined, thanks to that… that idiot father of mine.” She dragged her hands through her hair and understood for the first time the level of rage it took to make a person pull their own hair out. “You’re right. I can’t have him in my life anymore, Sage. I just can’t.”
“Glad to hear you’re on board with that. And I don’t care what sob story your sister might come up with at some point down the road,” he added, his tone so vicious it made her shiver. “The next family get-together had better not include that fucker. Otherwise you’re not going to be seeing your sister anytime soon either, and I will be more than happy to make that abundantly clear to her.”
“Sage, don’t.” She stared at him through bleary eyes and wondered if this show of protectiveness was just that—a show. “Serena’s not just my sister, she’s my best friend.”
“And you’re my woman. If Serena loves you the way you deserve to be loved, then she’ll understand. More than that, she’ll be like me and want to protect you like the precious treasure you are.”
“Stop saying things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not sure I can believe you mean it. I’m not sure I can believe in anyone, or anything.” A painful sob ripped through her before she could get a hold of it. No surprise there. From the moment she’d laid eyes on her father in his workshop—the man who’d raised her, sheltered her, loved her in his way—it had taken every drop of strength she’d had not to shatter. “Oh God, he betrayed me, Sage. My own father betrayed me.”
“Baby.” Warm arms came around her, and suddenly her feet parted ways with the ground as he cradled her in his arms. He didn’t loosen his hold on her until he lowered her onto the bed she’d made that morning, with Sage sliding in beside her. “If it helps, I don’t think that prick actually planned on betraying you. He’s not a big thinker, ol’ Fletch. I don’t think his mental processes ever venture too far beyond feeding his own needs. His jealousy over your talent drove him to taunt you while you were growing up, and it drove him to destroy the painting you wanted to share with the world.”
“I wish I’d been born with a dad like yours,” she whispered, wiping the cuff of her sleeve at the wetness on her cheeks. “Your dad took one look at your very first sculpture and immediately put it front and center, where everyone could see it. Mine put his foot through my painting.”
“I’ve got to admit, I’m getting a new perspective on my old man.” His hand came up to stroke through her hair, and he brushed his mouth across her brow. “Compared to your pops, mine’s a fucking saint.”
“I’m glad some good can come out of this mess.”
“I wouldn’t call it good, but it’s something. A step in the right direction, anyway.”
She tried to feel happy for him, but at the moment her heart was nothing more than a lead weight in her chest. “I think I want to go to my place. I need to think of what to do next.”
“Now that would be a step in the wrong direction. You’re not leaving,” he added, his voice hard and his grip tightening on her when she tried to sit up. “Not until we hash out what happened between us today.”
“There’s nothing to hash out.” Not the way she saw it, anyway. “It’s simple. The first sign of weirdness, you bailed. Maybe you didn’t walk out the door this time around, but you forgot to believe in me as surely as if you got struck with a sudden case of amnesia. End of story.”
“You’ve got that story all wrong.” he said with a lick of fire just beginning to show beneath his calm. “I didn’t stop believing in you, but it’s obvious you don’t have any belief in me.”
How was she the bad guy here? “You thought I’d switched
out those paintings, don’t deny it.”
“I didn’t know what to think, and I’m not going to apologize for being fucking confused. I will say I’m sorry for making you think, even for a second, that I lost faith in you. It’s my job to make sure you know I’ll always be a safe harbor for you, but this crazy shit your father’s unleashed has obviously made you think otherwise.”
“It wasn’t my father, Sage. It was you.”
He let loose a curse. “I told you, I was confused by that painting—”
“I’m not talking about that. Well, I am, but that’s just a part of it.”
He made a sound of impatience. “A part of what?”
She took in a calming breath and tried to put her thoughts in order. “I wasn’t a big believer in love being a positive force before I met you, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t fall for you anyway. You know I fell, because you wouldn’t rest until you got that confession out of me. You know I love you. But never once have you even hinted that you might have any feelings for me in return.”
He was quiet for a handful of seconds. “You think I don’t love you?”
“At this point it doesn’t matter if you say you do,” she said, devoid of emotion. She didn’t have any left in the tank. It had all been burned up, and now she was nothing but an empty husk. “It also doesn’t matter if you admit that you don’t. All I know is what I saw today in your eyes in that raw, unmasked moment when Payne accused me of being some sneaky saboteur out to get him and House Of Payne. For just a second you believed it. And if you could believe that of me, after all we’ve been through, there’s no way you could feel about me the same way I feel about you. Because I never would have believed the man I loved could be so heartless as to sabotage the auction, Sage. Never.”
“You’re hanging me for something that didn’t happen.” He rolled her onto her back so he could glare down at her. “I didn’t lose faith in you, Daniels, because I know the woman you are. You’re the woman I love, so get all that nasty shit out of your head right now, you hear me?”
“Now he tells me,” she muttered to no one in particular, even as the faintest little spark lit inside her at his words. But it was way down deep, buried under a mile of burned-out ash that used to be her world. “Your timing leaves a lot to be desired, pal. A lot.”
“Jesus, maybe I really am a chip off the old block,” he muttered as if to himself, a look of pure, self-directed frustration shooting across his face. “My old man neglected to tell me those all-important words until there was no way I was going to believe him, and here I am now, making that same damn mistake. Daniels,” he went on, returning his burning attention back to her, “you need to listen to me, okay? I do love you. I do believe in you. We belong together, and I’ll move fucking mountains, if that’s what it’ll take to prove it to you.”
She stared up at him while that spark inside grew, and she hated it. That spark was hope, and she couldn’t take any more of that today. “Like I said, timing,” she whispered, while the damn tears came back to leak out of the corners of her eyes. “The thing is, when I told you that I loved you, it was a real risk. I had everything to lose. But you telling me how you feel now, today of all days, it seems like you’re doing it because you have nothing to lose. See the difference?”
“Daniels. Mads.” He cupped her cheek in his palm, wiping her tears away. “The man who loves you would do anything to chase your darkness away. That’s me. Don’t you forget that. Don’t you ever forget who I am to you.”
“Darkness, Vanquished.” The thought of that work and the meaning behind it made her smile, if in a painful, twisted way. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you brought Darkness, Vanquished home with you before my father got a chance to see it. He probably would’ve destroyed it as well.”
“Yeah,” she said absently, for a moment looking into the middle distance. Then he focused back on her. “He doesn’t get to destroy who we are to each other.”
She wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. “I guess.”
“I know. That bastard wanted to stop the world from seeing your greatness, but I won’t let that happen. Come hell or high water, Skittish, I’m going to give back to you everything he tried to take from you today. You have my word on that.”
Chapter Twenty
“Happy birthday, Mads.” Dressed in a shiny silver body-con dress with long sleeves, a drapey collar and a plunging, showing-all-the-skin dip in the back, Serena stepped into Mads’s tattooing booth, a coat draped over one arm and a neon purple present in hand. “Are you just about wrapped up here?”
“Yeah.” With Latex gloves in place and spray bottle of bleach in hand, Mads gave one last wipe-down of her workstation. “Regular business just ended at five. Everyone has an hour to get ready for the auction’s opening at six. Luckily, I have a whole hour to figure out how to get out of going. That’s lucky, right? See, I’m trying to be optimistic about this whole debacle.”
“You’re kidding.” An unmistakable shadow of tension flitted across her sister’s lovely face. She’d been let in on everything that had happened, mainly because Sage had insisted on it. He’d then talked to Serena for nearly ten minutes himself, just to make sure her sister understood to never again set up a family get-together involving Fletcher Daniels. “Sebastian Payne won’t release you from your obligations? After… you know… what happened, I would think he’d be a little more understanding.”
“That’s what I thought, but he said that since I’m the freshest face here at the House, the media still has an interest in who I am. He assured me that he and his manager, Scout, will be right by my side to field any embarrassing questions about why I don’t have anything for the auction when it was advertised that I did.” With a rough sigh, she peeled off the Latex gloves and tossed them in the trash. “I’d rather set my hair on fire than face this auction without having anything to show for it, but no one seems to give a shit about the fact that I just want to curl up and die.”
“I’m just so sorry this happened, Mads.” Her sister’s pale eyes were made up for the evening’s festivities, and she looked like a million bucks in her sexy little club dress. But when those eyes filled with tears, the whole silvery sex-kitten vibe threatened to dissolve. “I feel so responsible. I should’ve just let sleeping dogs lie instead of inviting both you and dad over to dinner that night. You could’ve just gone on with your life, blissfully ignoring each other’s existence instead of going through all this heartache. I hope you can forgive me.”
“For trying to get your family together during the holiday season? Silly,” she chided on a huff of wry laughter and moved to wrap her sister up in a tight hug. “There’s nothing to forgive. Not when it comes to you, anyway, so don’t cry, okay? If anyone’s going to be doing any crying, it’s me, because Hulk-smash rage-tears are never far away whenever I think of Dad’s foot going through my painting.”
“Hey, no crying for either of us tonight. It’s your birthday, and Christmas Eve, so tears from you are absolutely not acceptable.” With a bright smile that looked only a little forced, her sister handed her the brightly wrapped present. “Happy birthday to my best friend, and the best sister anyone could ever have.”
And this was why her sister was so damn amazing. “Thanks, Rena.” Taking a moment to admire the brilliant purple foil wrapping paper and bow, Mads carefully unwrapped the present and opened the box. A sick knot formed in her stomach as she pulled out an ornate trifold frame. If Serena had put a photo of the two of them and their father in a three-part frame as a not-so-subtle reminder that they were still family, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do…
But when Mads opened the frame, a sound of surprised pleasure escaped her as she took in the photos of the two of them at various stages in their lives together. “Oh, Rena, this is wonderful. This picture of us decorating Christmas cookies has always been a favorite of mine.”
“Mine, too.” Rena came to look over her shoulder, and she smiled as she touched the frame. “Look
at us, covered in flour. I think we were no more than five and seven years old.”
“And I’ll never forget your graduation from nursing school,” Mads added, looking to the photo on the other end of the frame. “That was such a happy night. That’s the face of a woman who knows she should be proud of all she’s accomplished.”
“My personal favorite is the middle one, where you’re giving me my one and only tattoo—sisters forever.” Serena pulled back her shiny silver sleeve to reveal the small infinity sign comprised of those two words in cursive. “Sage mentioned your booth didn’t have any homey touches to speak of, so I thought I’d help get you started on that. Though it looks like he beat me to the punch,” she added, nodding to the framed photo on the workbench. “You two really look good together, Mads. Happy. Like you belong together.”
“Hm.” If only she could find a way to make Sage fall in love with her like she had with him, her life would be complete.
And that was the crux of the situation, she’d realized at some point over the past two days. She could understand and even forgive Sage for thinking for a split second that she’d planned some wild scheme with her father to upend House Of Payne. It had been a crazy, confusing moment, so his baffled suspicion—even though it had hurt—she could understand.
What she couldn’t understand was why she thought they might still have a future together when she loved him, and he didn’t. Or, at least, he didn’t love her in the same way that she loved him. Their relationship was hopelessly lopsided, and as far as she could see, there was no future in a relationship like that.
But the thought of letting him go shattered her already cracked heart.
“I just wish I had something for this auction.” Setting the trifold frame down, Mads tried to focus on something other than Sage, and gave the dress she’d brought—currently hanging on a hook by the door in a protective garment bag—a nasty look. “This is going to go down as the worst birthday ever. Even worse than when I wound up in the hospital with pneumonia for my sweet sixteenth.”