I was almost out of time.

The shipping crew was going to be here in the morning. I walked around my piece, eying her for what felt like the millionth time. The forge was hot, my tools laid out, ready for me. My t-shirt was damp with sweat, and my leather apron hung from my neck. I had everything I needed.

I’d tried to convince myself she was done. That no one else would think she wasn’t right. That didn’t satisfy me. I’d smoothed her out. Adjusted the tiniest details. Made sure every last bit of her, from the feathers on her wings to the tiny eyelashes brushing against her cheeks, were perfect.

But she wasn’t finished, and I knew it.

It didn’t help that my mind was full of turmoil. Our trip to L.A. hadn’t been the good-for-our-relationship experience Scarlett had assured me it would be. I’d come back feeling unsettled. Frustrated. I was having a hard time reconciling the Leah Mae I thought I knew with the girl I’d taken to that studio party.

The unanswered questions between us weighed on me. I needed to get the hell out of my own head and focus.

I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. Thought about why I’d made this sculpture in the first place. I’d been inspired by Leah Mae—by the vision of her in a cage, being made to perform.

The angel fit my vision perfectly. She was forlorn. Sad. Almost weeping. Looking at her aroused a deep sense of melancholy.

And maybe that was the problem. She was locked inside, her wings faltering. Her spirit diminished, without any hope of escape.

My eyes flew open, the realization hitting me in a rush. Hope. That was what she needed. She needed a way out.

I went over to a shelf and rifled through the contents of my bins. I had it, now. I could see it. It wasn’t going to be easy to finish on time, but now I knew what she needed.

The shipping crew was going to mangle my sculpture and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

They’d arrived late, and now that we were finally getting her on the truck, they seemed hell bent on fucking up months of hard work. As if her being made of metal meant she didn’t need to be handled with care.

The engine hoist jerked and my back tightened. She was wrapped for shipping, but scratches were still a possibility. I could buff them out when I got to Charlotte, but the less of that, the better. There were parts of her where the texture was more vulnerable than others. If these assholes ruined my piece before they even got her on the truck, I was going to lose my damn mind.

“Careful, there,” I said.

None of them answered me, just kept right on adjusting the straps with her dangling in the air. I held my breath as they got it moving again. Let it out when she was on the dolly they’d use to roll her in the truck.

Showing no care whatsoever, as far as I could tell, they worked on getting her up the ramp. One of them stood in the truck and pulled a strap they’d tied around her. The other two pushed from the behind. Between the three of them, they got her on—barely. I’d warned them she was heavy.

I’d been up most of the night finishing her, but I wasn’t yet feeling the lack of sleep. I was still buzzed, on a creative high that I reckoned would keep me up a few more hours before I’d crash.

They started tying her down, and I pushed my way in.

“I’ll get this.” I took the strap from one of the movers.

He just shrugged and they all gave me space to work. I reckoned they thought I was being overly fussy about it all, but I didn’t give a shit. I’d worked too hard on this piece to let them bounce her around down the highway all the way to Charlotte.

My phone rang as I got the last strap tied down to my satisfaction. It was Dee.

“Hey,” I said, wiping my forehead with my sleeve.

“How’s everything going over there?” she asked. “Did the movers get the piece?”

“We just finished loading her.”

“Just now?” she asked. “They should have been on the way to Charlotte hours ago.”

I jumped out of the back of the moving truck. “I’m aware of that, Dee. They were late, and it’s taken some doing to get her in the truck.”

Dee’s huff sounded highly annoyed. Or maybe she was just as stressed about all this as I was. “Well, okay, are they on their way?”

“Soon enough. And Dee, I swear to god, if there is a single scratch on her—”

“Calm down,” she said. “These guys are good. I use them all the time.”

I wasn’t nearly as confident as she seemed to be, and it bothered me that I wouldn’t be in Charlotte to help unload when they arrived. Wasn’t much I could do about it, though.

“Well, she’s on the truck, so that’s something,” I said.

“Okay, good. I’ll see you in Charlotte.”

“I reckon you will.” I hung up the phone and slid it in my back pocket.

The movers closed the back and piled into the truck. One of them stuck his head out the passenger’s side window. “Looks like you have a flat tire.”

The moving truck roared to life and they started down my long driveway. I cringed at how much it bumped up and down and hoped I’d secured my sculpture well enough.

I glanced at my truck. Front tire was indeed flat. “Well, shit.”

I walked over to inspect it but couldn’t find what had caused the puncture. I’d have to put on the spare and take it in. Probably need a new set of front tires. I stood up and kicked the tire. I didn’t have time for this shit. It was a six-hour drive to Charlotte, and I had to leave first thing in the morning.

The crunch of gravel made me look up. Figured it would be Jonah, but it was Leah Mae.

She was still driving that silver rental car. Struck me as odd that she hadn’t bothered to buy something. She must have been spending a fair bit of money on that rental—money that could have bought her something decent enough to drive, even for just a short while. Hell, I could have helped her find something if she’d have asked. But she hadn’t. She was still living in that vacation home of Scarlett’s, too—when she wasn’t staying at my place, that is. But it wasn’t like she had a home.

It all bothered me, maybe a fair bit more than it should. But I couldn’t stop thinking about L.A., and Brock Winston, and how she’d acted at that party. There were a lot of unanswered questions between me and Leah Mae, and seeing her come up my driveway didn’t make any of that better. Made it worse, in fact, because I knew I wasn’t in any state to talk to her.

She parked and got out of the car, smiling at me. She was dressed in strapless top covered in silver sequins with a skirt that looked like a pink tutu. By itself, the outfit might have looked a bit ridiculous, but she’d paired it with her cowboy boots, and the ensemble looked damn adorable. Course, she always looked adorable if you asked me.

“Hey,” she said with a big smile. Her makeup was done, and her hair too. Looked real pretty, but I wondered what was up.

“What’s with the outfit?” I asked, pointing to her clothes. “You goin’ somewhere?”

“I thought we could go out. I know we have to leave in the morning, so we won’t stay late. But I figured you could use a distraction. And now that your sculpture is on its way to Charlotte, it’s not like you have to work tonight.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m not sure I much feel like going out tonight.”

“Really?” she asked. “Gibson’s band is playing the Lookout. It’s always a good time.”

Now I definitely wasn’t going out. “I don’t want to be shoved into a crowded bar with my brother. Sorry you went to the trouble to get all dressed up, but I’m stayin’ in.”

I glanced at the flat tire again and just shook my head. I’d have to deal with it in the morning, which would mean getting a late start.

“What happened to your truck?” she asked.

“Flat tire.”

“I can see that,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d tell me how it happened.”

“I don’t know how it happened. Look, I’m going to have to get an early start tomorrow to fix this before we leave.”

“I know,” she said, like she was trying to mollify me. “But you’ve been hiding out here ever since we got back from L.A. Don’t you think it might be good to get out for a little bit? Take your mind off everything?”

“You’re starting to sound like my sister.”

“Maybe your sister is onto something.”

I sighed. “Not tonight. If you want to come in, that’s fine, but sittin’ in a bar with my angry bastard of a brother is not happening tonight.”

“How long is this feud going to last?” she asked.

“How in the hell am I supposed to know? Until Gibson finds someone else to be mad at?”

“Maybe you could talk to him,” she said. “He seems like he’s in a good mood when he’s playing. Could be a good time to deal with it.”

I shook my head. “Darlin’, Gibson is never in a good mood, playing guitar or not. And don’t worry about me and my brother. This sort of thing happens. Eventually we’ll both forget what made us mad and we’ll go back to the usual way we ignore each other—without the anger.”

“That’s… that’s awful.”

“It’s not awful,” I said. “It’s just how things are between us.”

I was a lot less confident about that than I sounded. I’d never fought with Gibson before. I’d seen him fight with Scarlett. Even Bowie a few times. And that pattern seemed to hold. Some time would go by and tempers recede. I didn’t expect there were ever many apologies from anyone—except maybe Bowie. But he was good with this kind of thing, and the rest of us weren’t. I didn’t rightly know where Bowie had learned it. Maybe in college. Certainly hadn’t been from growing up with Mom and Dad.

But I didn’t know how this thing between me and Gibson was going to end, and it wasn’t something I wanted to think about tonight. Not with everything else I had on my mind.

“Okay, no Gibson,” she said. “But what’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been acting weird,” she said. “Since L.A.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. My head was starting to hurt. We’d been back for a week, and I’d been busy from dawn till dusk trying to get my piece ready to ship. The days I lost taking her to L.A. had taken their toll.

“I’ve just been busy.”

“Yeah…”

“But what?” I asked, not bothering to hide the annoyance in my voice.

“I didn’t say but.”

“You trailed off like you were agreeing with me, but getting ready to tell me how you’re not agreeing with me.”

“It seems like it’s more than that,” she said. “Are you upset about something?”

“I don’t think now is the time for this.”

“When?” she asked. “Is that how you do things too? You ignore your girlfriend until you forget why you were mad and hope everything turns out okay?”

“I’m hardly ignoring you. I’m standing here now, talkin’ to you, ain’t I?”

“Yes, but you’re clearly upset, and I don’t understand why you won’t talk to me about it.”

Frustration burned in my veins, running through me like molten steel. Clenching my fists, I turned and started back to my house.

“Jameson, don’t you walk away from me.”

I whirled around, anger sitting like a hot coal in my gut, searing me from the inside. “You want to talk about why I’m upset? All right, let’s talk. What the fuck happened between you and Brock Winston on that show?”

Her eyes widened, and she froze, almost like I’d slapped her. “What?”

“You’ve never told me what really happened between the two of you,” I said. “And I never asked because I assumed if there was somethin’ to tell, you would have been up front with it. But now I’m not so sure about that.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Her cheeks flushed, and it pissed me off more. I loved the way she looked when her skin got that hint of pink. Damn it, I was angry, not turned on.

“I’m dead serious, sweetheart,” I said. “Lay it out for me.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Nothing? Not a damn thing? You just went around makin’ eyes at each other all season long, but nothing else happened all those times you two were alone?”

“Making eyes?” she asked. “I was supposed to flirt with everyone. I did. Shamelessly, and I’m not proud of that. The show edited the rest of it out to make it look like I was only flirting with Brock.”

“What about all those times you were alone, away from the cameras?”

She put her hands on her hips and my eyes drifted down to the shape of her legs under that skirt. God, she looked good.

“Why don’t you just say it? Ask,” she said.

I blinked, tearing my eyes away from her sexy legs and back to her face. Damn it, why was I getting hard? This was ridiculous.

“Did you suck Brock’s dick in that back room?”

Her nostrils flared, her jaw tightened, and I knew in an instant that I’d just fucked up. Badly.

“No, I did not,” she said, her voice laced with anger. “I followed him into that back room because I knew he needed to talk. He was worried about Maisie, and the producers weren’t letting us have any contact with the outside world. He’d been trying to get them to bend the rules for him, since she’d been injured. He’d told me earlier that they’d said no, and I felt bad for him. He needed someone to talk to. That was all.”

“Were you tempted?”

“Was I tempted to blow Brock Winston?” she asked. “God, Jameson, why would that even matter? Even if I was, how could you hold that against me? We’re talking about something that happened before we were dating. Do I have to answer for every blow job I’ve ever given?”

I almost said yes, but thankfully I stopped myself before it came out.

“He was married, and you were engaged,” I said. “Although you were lying about that to everyone, so I don’t know what that means. If you were tempted, that’s an issue.”

Every time I said tempted, my cock got harder. She was feeling it, too. I could tell. The two of us were fixin’ for a good angry fuck. And maybe that was what we needed.

She stepped toward me, her tits straining against that little top. “Me being tempted by another man before we met is an issue?”

“It wasn’t before we met. We met when we were five.”

“Oh my god, you know what I mean,” she said. “Do you know how crazy you sound right now?”

I threw my arms up in the air. “You make me fucking crazy. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with you.”

She stopped, her posture changing. We were outside, but it was like something had sucked away all the air. She stared at me, her lips parted, and blinked a few times.

The last thing I’d said hung in the space between us. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with you. The truth of that hit me square in the chest. Took all the fight out of me. The lust, too.

What was I doing? Fanning the flame of anger so we could angry fuck and pretend that was making up? Sounded an awful lot like my parents. And they’d been miserable together more often than not.

I had no idea what I was doing with her.

Leah Mae had spent almost half her life away from here, living in a world about as far removed from Bootleg as you could get. And how much of that life had she really left behind? How much did she want to leave behind? She’d slipped right back in easily enough, soon as we were in front of all those Hollywood people. She’d done what they said, like she was happier with someone telling her what to do.

I’d hated it. Hated seeing her like that. I didn’t understand it, and it made me realize, I had no idea what I was doing with her.

I probably wasn’t cut out for a relationship with any woman, but with Leah Larkin? I was damn lost.

“I’m goin’ alone tomorrow,” I said, my voice quiet. “Go home, Leah.”

Then I turned and left her standing there.