by Dani Harper
Liam woke up in a cell, not certain how he’d gotten there and with no idea what time or even what the hell day it was. Waiting for him was pain with a capital P, more than he ever imagined possible. Not from the bruises on his face, or the split knuckles, or even from the spots on his back where a taser had connected—though they all hurt like a sonofabitch—but from the throbbing ache in his chest.
Also waiting for him was an arraignment on an assortment of assault charges (he sure as hell didn’t remember hitting a cop). Uppermost in his mind, however, was that he still hadn’t gotten the chance to talk to Jade. Maybe he shouldn’t have made that his first and only permitted call, but he’d already thumbed the number pad before he thought it through.
It went straight to the machine. What the hell had he expected? He left a nondescript message and hung up. Christ, he should have had the sense to call Mel to find him a lawyer, or better yet, he should have called his uncle, if he could reach him. His agent would have taken care of it. Uncle Conall would have, too—right after the big man threw a haymaker at Vic himself. That mental image cheered Liam briefly, but it was the only bright note in a long and dismal morning.
Dead last in a lengthy line of defendants waiting to be formally charged, he had far too much time to reflect on what he’d done—or might have done. No one had mentioned what condition Vic was in. Liam’s hands were damaged, so he’d obviously beaten the living shit out of the guy he thought he knew. Hell, he could have killed him, but damned if he could dredge up much regret . . . Well, not on the surface, anyway. How could Vic have done this to me? They’d been inseparable since they were twelve, when Liam had first moved in with his uncle and aunt. He and Vic had been in the same classes (and skipped more than a few to go fishing), competed as team ropers in junior rodeo, partnered in 4-H projects, played football, gotten stupid-ass drunk for the first time, set the chemistry lab on fire by accident, double-dated, and finally graduated. All of it as best friends. Vic had been his best man, and Liam was due to be Vic’s in only a few months. What the hell is up with that?
As for Jade, Liam would rather not think about her—not here, not now—but it was like trying to stop a river with a teacup. He was one big, throbbing ball of hurt from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, and he wasn’t certain if he was going to explode again or just sit down and bawl like the brokenhearted kid he felt like. Because while he was infuriated by Vic’s betrayal, Liam was utterly devastated by the thought that his sweetheart, his Jade, had cheated on him.
He never saw it coming. If there were signs, he hadn’t clued in to a single damn one.
It has to be my fault. Has to be. She’d never do such a thing to him otherwise. The stress must have gotten to her, with him being gone so much. He’d been so wrapped up with preparing for this tour that he hadn’t paid enough attention to her. And money had been so damn tight lately, thanks to the overwhelming costs of promotion. He could make changes, make it better. They could work this out, put this behind them. People overcome shit like this all the time, right?
Liam pled not guilty, and bail was set and so was a return court date. More fun and games for later, but he didn’t give a damn at the moment. He was worn out right to his very soul. First on the list was to get a room, to get some real food and real sleep, and then figure out what the hell to do next . . .
Or that would have been his plan if Jade hadn’t been waiting outside the courtroom for him, grim-faced and red-eyed, clutching her purse in front of her with both hands. It killed him that he didn’t even know what to do, how to feel. Shouldn’t he be running to hold her? Shouldn’t she be holding him? Instead, they approached each other warily, like strangers, almost like enemies. Even acquaintances would have given each other a warmer greeting.
“We have to talk,” she said, and he could already tell it wasn’t going to be good.
“Now you want to talk? Seems to me we needed to talk a helluva long time ago.”
“You weren’t here.”
Through some shred of willpower he didn’t know he had left, Liam clamped his mouth shut. It would do no good to air their dirty laundry in the middle of the goddamn courthouse. Instead, he followed her outside, where dark, heavy clouds matched his mood perfectly. They got into her car and drove home—or rather, drove to their house—without saying a word.
They avoided each other for a while, saying nothing. He stripped off his clothes to shower and was astonished at how much blood was on them, Vic’s blood. The clothes went straight to the trash, and Liam stood under the hot water for a long time until he felt somewhat human again, as human as a person could feel when his damn heart was missing. He lingered some more, until he couldn’t hold off talking to Jade any longer.
Things did not improve when the silence was finally broken. All the things he’d guessed were wrong truly were wrong—but those things were only the tip of the iceberg. He opened the curtains in the living room and let in the gloomy gray light. It barely illuminated the damn room, never mind their relationship.
“I didn’t want to get married,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to be married now.”
He stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. “How can you even say something like that? We love each other. We’ve always loved each other. It’s always been me and you. Hell, we couldn’t imagine anything else.”
“That’s the problem. It wasn’t possible to imagine anything else. I didn’t get a chance to imagine anything else. For God’s sake, Liam, I was barely fourteen when we started hanging out together. Fourteen, and you were just sixteen. That’s way too young to plan out the rest of your life.”
“But you planned it anyway. We both did. Jesus, every year we had a different song picked out for our wedding dance. We planned houses and argued over kids’ names. Hell, I even used to sing that old Beatles song to you, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four,’ and one day you dumped a bowl of flour in my hair to make it white. We had an epic flour fight in your mother’s kitchen, remember?” Liam reached for her hand, but she pulled it away and went to stand on the other side of the living room. The carpeted space between them might as well be the Grand Canyon.
“I don’t want to remember. Everything I remember has you in it.”
He stood stock still, as the hurtful words crashed into him. “Exactly when did that become a bad thing?” he managed.
“That’s not what I meant, not really. It’s more like—I’ve never had a relationship with anyone else. I’ve never done anything else . . .”
“Until you did Vic?”
“You don’t understand!”
How he managed not to leap across the abyss, to grab her and shake her, he’d never know. Instead, he turned his back on her, shoved his hands into his pockets, and stared out the window. “No, I don’t understand. You haven’t told me a damn thing. You’ve never said one word to me that might have given me a clue that you were unhappy or that you didn’t want me. In fact, if someone hadn’t sent me a fucking YouTube link, I’d still be in the goddamn dark.”
He wasn’t seeing much now, either. Not the manicured yard and newly planted trees, not the pretty residential street, and not the kids playing next door. Only his entire life exploding in front of his eyes. “Nice video work by the way. What the hell did you do, leave the blinds open? Invite the neighbors?”
“Vic did it. He told me at the hospital. I swear I didn’t know he was filming us—it was a crass thing to do, but he wanted to tell you and I didn’t.”
“Yeah, I can see how that would be difficult for you.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I wasn’t ready to. I didn’t even know what to call what we were doing.”
“Funny, I can think of lots of words for it.”
“God knows, I didn’t love him or anything. I swear I didn’t. It just happened and then it kept happening.” She stopped then, as if she’d said far more than s
he’d intended to say.
Liam turned around very slowly. “How long?”
Her lips trembled in a face gone pale. “Off and on. A couple of years, maybe more.”
She might as well have shot him between the eyes. Incredulous, Liam blinked once, twice. It was a few moments before he found his voice. “Even before the goddamn wedding?” He swallowed hard, again and again. The lump in his throat felt like a golf ball. Finally he worked it out of the way long enough to shout, “Jesus frickin’ Christ! If you didn’t want to marry me, why the hell did you say yes?”
“I thought it was what I wanted! I thought I loved you, that Vic was just some kind of stupid-ass fling, something to get out of my system. And I felt like I had to marry you, don’t you see? Everybody expected it.” She threw up her hands. “Everybody. Name someone in the county who didn’t know us and expect us to get married. It wasn’t just us, playing and pretending, it was jeezly everybody. Even my own family, my folks, were in on it. My mom talked about it all the time, started a hope chest, not for me but for us. Us! Everywhere I went, I wasn’t just me, I wasn’t Jade, I was just half of you. We were like Siamese twins for God’s sake!” Tears burst out as forcefully as her words. “I was Mrs. Liam Cole before you ever put a ring on my finger. Because everyone could see only you. As soon as I said my name, it was ‘Oh, you’re so lucky’ and ‘He’s so talented’ and ‘You must be so proud.’ It was always about you. I was invisible.”
“You should have told me. We could have done something—hell, we did do something: we left.” It was crystal clear now why she’d been so insistent that they move to Portland. “It must be getting better now that we’re here. You just haven’t given it enough time.”
“Time isn’t going to fix this, Liam. It can’t. You’re the one with the music, with something to build, something to dream about and create.”
“I’ve been building it for us! And it’s yours, too. We’ve been building it together.”
She shook her head. “I get to promote you, remember? That’s my part in it. And when I’m not doing that, I’m just another member of the audience. Don’t you get it? I don’t have anything that’s just mine.”
“Is Vic yours?”
She glowered at him. “That’s over. It wasn’t anything to begin with.”
Wasn’t anything, my ass. Only a ten-point earthquake that had torn away all the ground from under Liam’s feet and destroyed everything he held dear. “So you’re saying you cheated on me because I had music and you didn’t?”
“For God’s sake, it’s not that simple. But if that’s all you can understand, then yes. And when you were gone, when your music took you away more and more—I couldn’t find myself! I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I don’t now.”
“Most people take a few college courses, get a hobby, you know? Even take skydiving lessons or something! If you were trying to find yourself, why the hell would you go looking in Vic’s bed?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” She put her hands to her head, and her misery was evident as she sank into a chair. A part of Liam—maybe his little finger—whatever part wasn’t emotionally destroyed, felt a tinge of sympathy for her. Maybe it was habit, but for a fleeting second he wanted to hold her and tell her it was all right, tell her they’d work it out and everything would be all right. And then the moment passed. It’s never going to be all right . . .
As if she’d heard him, she said, “I can’t live like this, Liam. I’m done. We’re done.”
“Tell me you love me or tell me you don’t,” Liam dared, already knowing the answer but not able to live another minute without hearing it. “Say it out loud. Tell me to my face.”
The tears flew as she shook her head. “I’ve been trying to tell you, I don’t. I just don’t love you the way you want me to, and I’m never going to.”
And I’m never going to . . .
The cloying clouds of remembrance finally cleared from Liam’s head just as he finished moving the last of the square bales of straw from one side of the barn to the other. The bales hadn’t needed to be moved of course. It was just something he did when the past reared its ugly head and he had a crapload of unwanted emotions to work off. Some men drove fast, some drank, some drugged, some picked a fight, and some hit the gym. Liam Cole moved bales.
He peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and used it to dry his face and wipe flecks of straw from his perspiring arms. Liam was tall, and he’d always been on the lean side, but his muscles were rock-hard and defined. Hard work was good therapy for him. He’d learned that when he was ten, when his mother first took sick. Emotionally, he had his music. It gave his heart an outlet, his fear and hurt a voice. But some days, there was just no substitute for physically working his body until it could barely move. Achieving exhaustion was the only way he’d been able to sleep at all during the two years Mom had stubbornly fought her losing battle with ovarian cancer.
When she died, Liam had gone to live with his Aunt Ruby and Uncle Conall. They doted on him and he loved them dearly, but in truth, it was probably their farm that had saved his young sanity. They had an organic operation—Steptoe Acres—south of Spokane Valley, Washington, along Hangman Creek. Lots of land to wander, with places to explore, hills to climb, rivers to swim in and fish, horses to ride, and solitude when he wanted it. Real solitude, out in the middle of the quiet wilderness, away from all human voices. And, as with all farms, there was a ton of chores that always needed doing. It was an ideal location for a grieving boy to work through his pain. He’d become whole in this place.
Now here he was, a grown man, and damned if history hadn’t repeated itself: his life had blown up in his face, and it seemed like everything he’d ever touched lay in jagged pieces. Where else would instinct take him but the farm where he’d been healed once before? Liam had needed something to do and a place to do it that was out of the way. And when Uncle Conall and Aunt Ruby moved to Arizona soon afterward, he’d taken over the operation. Liam strongly suspected the couple had moved up their retirement plans just a little for his benefit, and if so, he was doubly grateful. Because Steptoe Acres was exactly what he needed.
For one thing, if you had dairy goats, you damn well had a schedule. There was no lying in bed wondering about the meaning of life when forty Saanen and LaMancha does were waiting to be milked at 6 a.m. No wondering what you were going to do with yourself at night either. Second milking started at 6 p.m. The raw liquid had to be cooled down quickly after each milking, then put through the pasteurizer before going into the storage vat. Sanitizing all the equipment after each milking was a production in and of itself, not to mention all the care that went into the animals themselves.
And then there was kidding season over February and March. Regular barn checks had to be made throughout the night in case a doe needed help or newborn kids had to be warmed up or hand-fed. Meticulous records had to be kept, and—hardest of all, in his opinion—Liam had to come up with a hell of a lot of new names.
After the spring kidding came spring planting. To help retain its organic certification, Steptoe Acres had always grown its own feeds and hay, which produced multiple harvests throughout the long growing season. Fields of market vegetables and fruits had to be planted, watered, weeded, picked, and delivered to the cooperative.
Nope, Liam Cole was in no danger of running out of things to do. With the dairy alone, he was usually too busy to think or feel, and that’s exactly what he wanted. In fact, he quickly found himself a little too busy and had to make adjustments. He soon leased out the orchards to a neighboring organic farmer who would take good care of them, then he hired seasonal help for the fields. He’d thought about carrying on the cheese business, but in the end conceded defeat. Aunt Ruby had made fresh goat cheese, called chèvre, plus slow-aged cheeses dipped in wax, for the area wine-tasting and restaurant markets. Liam had helped every summer since he was twelve years old, so he knew t
he process well, but in the end, he contracted to provide pasteurized milk to a gourmet cheese maker in Spokane Valley.
His uncle and aunt had been understanding of the change. After all, they’d worked the farm as a team. As a one-man show, however, Liam had only two hands—and he wasn’t interested in acquiring any more than necessary.
Despite all the work, the farm gave Liam as much or more than he put into it. Everywhere he looked was a vista of open land and open sky, with rolling hills to the south and mountains rising along the Idaho border. A man could breathe here. There was something deeply satisfying about working the land, being close to the earth. And the livestock? He’d always liked animals, and while there were classic frustrations—like the escape-artist goats finding yet another way out of the pasture—there were also moments of profound connection.
It was a damn good thing he could still connect to something, because he sure as hell didn’t care to be around people. All his efforts over the years to be recognized, to be noticed, to stand out from the crowd, had come back to haunt him. People noticed him, all right. He wasn’t sure which was worse, the whispers behind his back, the furtive looks, or the well-intentioned remarks that would have been better left unsaid. You looked so happy together. That girl must have been crazy to leave you. What a damn shame—why, you two were made for each other! And Liam’s all-time favorite: Well, better to have loved and lost, they say. Personally, he’d like to get his hands on the writer of that particular little saying . . .
Not to mention all the damn reporters who still called him up and asked if he was working on a new album or when he was going to give another performance.
They didn’t know that he couldn’t, of course. Nobody did. Inside him, there was still a lot of anger wrapped around pain. And within that? A whole lot of nothing. His natural feelings for music appeared to have been amputated. Playing, writing, singing—gone, just gone. Where once he couldn’t live without a tune in his head, now there was a terrible silence. It should have scared him, and maybe it did if he looked deep enough. But when it came right down to it, he wanted nothing more to do with music anyway.