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 yelled, 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.