Chapter Twenty-Nine

The question seemed so simple on the surface. Why marry a man she barely knew? She was tempted to laugh at her own stupidity, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop before she started to cry.

“He asked. And it was so romantic. I wanted to complete the moment. Play my part. And I thought I loved him. Or at least really, really liked him.” She looked up at Ian, willing him to understand. “You have to understand, when you’re famous you’re part of this bizarre club where you don’t really know any of the members and they don’t know you. I just wanted to feel connected to someone and I was so grateful to him for not wanting anything from me. For seeing me as a person rather than a career boost or a sex symbol. I loved the way he looked at me—and maybe that was unfair. Maybe I was using him because I was so lonely and I just wanted someone to share things with—though in my defense, I didn’t know I was doing it at the time. And he was probably doing the exact same thing with me. I loved how he made me feel and I threw myself into us, but it was a performance. It’s always a performance. But I’m good at performing. I can even convince myself. I told myself it didn’t matter that it was fast. That the impulsiveness made it romantic…” She trailed off. Hating the next part. Hating that she was going to have to admit it.

“And then?”

“And then I wrecked it. Classic Maggie.” She tucked her chin, avoiding his gaze, focusing on the sand and the feel of it on her feet. “I didn’t mean to cheat. I wasn’t even thinking about Demarco that night. It was like I forgot he existed—which is horrible. I know it’s horrible. I was stupid and oblivious and never even thought about the fact that it impacted him.” She wasn’t in the habit of cleaning up her own messes anyway. She had people for that. “It was Alec. My charming ex. The one who wrote the tell-all? I was out at a club and here was this guy who had broken my heart and always made me feel like I wasn’t good enough and suddenly he was begging for me to take him back. I didn’t think about Demarco or about why Alec suddenly cared, I was just high on that feeling—that he wanted me and couldn’t have me. I felt powerful for the first time in our relationship. And I kissed him. It didn’t go any farther than that, but that was far enough. Someone took a picture and when it came out a few weeks later, I lied about it and tried to cover it up. Tried to get my decoy to say it had been her all along. She said no, even when I threatened her and fired her, but even if she’d agreed I don’t think it would have made any difference with Demarco. Things were already over between us. They probably would have fallen apart at some point anyway, but he didn’t deserve the way it happened. The scandal and the paparazzi. And now Alec is stirring it all up again with this thinly veiled tell-all of his. It’s fiction, you know. But everyone knows it isn’t. It’s gossip. And calling it fiction just makes people that much more eager to believe every sordid detail. Even the ones he embellished.” She grimaced. “I merit three whole chapters all by myself. Lucky me.”

Ian spoke beside her. “You said there were legal options?”

“We could try to sue, but I don’t know. I kind of just want to let it run its course and die a natural death. Other times when we’ve sued it doesn’t always feel like you thought it would when it’s over. Even if you win.” She dared a glance at his face, something in her chest unknotting when she didn’t see condemnation there. She’d just shown him her ugliest parts and he was looking at her like he might still think she was worth something.

“I can understand that. When my mother started this lawsuit, I couldn’t wrap my head around why she would want to put something so painful right at the center of her life and drag it out for years. If you can choose to move on with your life, why wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe she couldn’t,” Maggie murmured. She could understand that too, not being ready to let something go. “Has she heard anything more on how the suit is going?”

Ian grimaced. “There’s a hearing or an arbitration session or something this week. She seems to think it’s going to make a difference.”

“Are you going with her?”

Ian stopped suddenly. “Are you ready to go back?”

No. Maggie froze, and it took her a moment to realize Ian meant back to the house, not back to LA. They’d walked down the beach until they could no longer see the house, and still the swath of sand seemed to go on forever. “Not quite yet,” she murmured. Cecil had already abandoned them, trotting back toward the house, but Maggie wasn’t ready to stop walking.

Ian started along the beach again and she joined him, avoiding the subject of his mother’s lawsuit as a companionable silence settled between them. She didn’t know what it was, but Ian always made her feel like she could tell him anything and he would understand. Did she do the same for him? She was constantly sharing, constantly reaching out for a connection, but Ian threw up walls and deflected, changing the subject whenever they started talking about his father, his ex, anything real.

He’d said he talked to Lolly, but did he have anyone he confided in now? He and his mother had never exactly been confidants and there was only so much you could share with a nine-year-old. Did he have friends from Nashville that he kept in touch with? Other parents from Sadie’s school he could commiserate with? Or was he, in his own way, just as isolated as Maggie was?

Though she got the sense with Ian it was a choice. A desire to keep everyone at a safe distance.

“Do you keep in touch with any of your old friends from Nashville? Or high school?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “We stopped having quite so much in common when they were touring and I was suddenly a twenty-four-year-old with a toddler.”

“There must be other dads—”

“I don’t need you to fix me, Maggie.”

She snapped her mouth shut. “I wasn’t trying to. I just…” Okay, she had been trying to, but what was so wrong with that? “It’s okay to rely on people. To talk to them. You can talk to me.”

“I know.” He stopped again, facing her. “But you’re leaving. Everyone leaves Long Shores. Sometimes it’s easier, if you know the person is going away—either when the weekend is over or they finish going through a house—to not get in the habit of relying on them, because it’s that much harder when you have to do it all on your own again.”

She stepped closer, gently placing her hand on his chest. “You don’t have to do it all on your own.”

“Yes, I do.” The words were soft, whispered, and seemed to draw her in closer. Maggie found herself leaning toward him, going up on her toes in the sand. The denim of his work shirt was soft beneath her fingers. Ian reached between them, gently touching her chin, his thumb pressing into the indentation there. “We shouldn’t…”

“I know,” she whispered back, as his lips settled on hers.

It was soft. Slow. A lingering whisper of a kiss. She was wearing a ridiculous yellow painting smock of Lolly’s that she’d found and the wind caught it, making it billow, but Ian’s hand slid beneath, warm calloused skin against the smooth skin at the small of her back. He only touched her there—her chin and her back—but she felt like an electrical current arced between those two points, electrifying all of her senses.

When he lifted his head, she breathed a sigh against his lips, bracing her hands on his upper arms so she didn’t fall right into him.

“We can’t keep doing this,” he murmured against her lips, the movement sending shivers down her spine.

“I know,” she agreed again—and he kissed her again. Firmer this time, hotter. The sweet restraint of the last kiss burning away beneath the rush of this one.

No one could see them on this isolated stretch of the beach. Her arms twisted around his neck, drawing him close, and Ian’s strong arms wrapped around her, lifting her up against him, off her tiptoes.

“We can keep it private,” he groaned when he finally released her lips to kiss along the line of her neck.

“Sadie doesn’t have to know,” she agreed, willing to agree to anything in that moment as long as he didn’t stop.

The sand was warm as they sank down onto it, soft and dry—except for the stick that gouged into Maggie’s hip. Laughter broke the passion, but it only rose up that much hotter when Maggie had twisted to the side and Ian had flung the offending stick away.

No clothing came off—they were both too keenly aware of the fact that anyone could come down the beach and find them—but there was no one coming as far as the eye could see in either direction and Ian shoved the painting smock aside, his hands sneaking beneath as she unbuttoned his jeans. There was something about the idea that they could be caught, the secrecy of it, that sizzled in her blood, making her heart pound even harder.

“Ian,” she whispered brokenly, and his response was a monologue of whispered encouragement.

That’s it, baby. Just like that, sweetheart. I’ve got you.

And he did have her. Maybe he always had. Maybe she’d always been his. Maybe this was what forever felt like as it burned through her veins until he had to kiss her to swallow the cries that would have echoed down the beach.

“I have to get back,” Ian murmured a while later, straightening his clothing, helping her to her feet. “After Sadie goes to sleep…?”

She didn’t have to think. There was only one possible answer. “Yes.”

* * * * *

Lolly’s bed wasn’t nearly as comfortable as Ian’s, but they’d agreed Ian sneaking into his house at a strange hour was easier to explain away than Maggie sneaking out. In case Sadie caught him, he’d devised a story about not being able to sleep and taking a long walk on the beach—and Maggie told herself that she didn’t mind the secrecy, that she completely understood why they needed to keep this, whatever this was, hidden from Sadie.

It was just practical, until they knew what they were going to be to one another in the long term. It didn’t have to be a sign that Ian was keeping her at arm’s length.

The night was quiet around them as Maggie rested her head against his bare chest, listening to his heartbeat. Ian’s breathing was deep and steady beneath her ear, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. He needed to head back to his own bed before he fell asleep in hers, but neither of them moved.

“You can be mad at her for leaving you too,” Maggie said into the stillness of the night, the words cautious. Ian had a tendency to deflect when things hit too close to home—changing the subject or simply walking away—and she didn’t want him to leave, but she needed to say this.

“What?” His voice was clear, not at all fogged by sleep. She knew he’d heard her, but he was giving her a chance to back out.

Maggie pushed onward, the words soft. “You said it didn’t matter what Scarlett did to you, that you were only mad at her because of Sadie, but she left you too. It’s okay to be angry at her for that. To be hurt.”

He took a breath and she could tell before he opened his mouth that he was going to argue. “Sadie—”

“I know. Sadie lost her mom and that sucks, but you not only suddenly became a single parent, you got dumped. It happened to you too. You can be pissed.”

He shook his head, but he didn’t get up to leave. She would take that.

She drew a line on his abdomen. “I may not know anything about being a single parent, but I know about not having anyone to share things with. Everything’s harder when you have to do it alone.”

“At least it wasn’t in the tabloids,” he murmured.

“The tabloids aren’t so bad,” she said, letting him change the subject for now. She’d said her piece. “It’s just the price of fame.”

“Do you like it?” he asked. “Being famous?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, really thinking about it for the first time in a long time. “I always thought I would. I wanted it so badly because I was so sure it would make me feel special. Celebrated. But…” She shrugged against his chest. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like me they’re cheering for. Like I don’t really deserve it and they only love me because they have this idea of me that I can never live up to.”

“You deserve it,” he murmured and this time it was Maggie who shook her head.

“No. Not really. There’s no logic to any of it.” She propped her palms on his chest, looking toward his eyes in the dark. “It’s like my decoy, Bree. She’s this incredible artist. She can create things that reach right into your chest and make you feel so much you think you’ll explode from it and she’s been struggling to make ends meet for years, while I’m rolling in money, which just feels stupid, because what did I ever do?”

“You reached into people’s chests and made them feel,” he said, curling a lock of her hair around one of his fingers. “That’s what you do on the screen and why people pay you so much to do it. You don’t have to apologize for being successful.”

“Don’t I? When it’s so random? There are thousands of actors, good actors, who never make it. Who never get anointed by whatever gilded hand decides who rises and who falls.”

“So be grateful you were the one who was picked.”

“Hashtag blessed?” she mocked.

“It’s not like you didn’t work for it. I know you went to all those classes.”

“You never stop working for it,” Maggie admitted. “It’s everything you eat. Everything you wear. Every expression on your face every time you step out of the house. And you’re constantly being reminded of where you stand in the hierarchy—which awards shows want you present, where they seat you, what your billing is, where you land in the line-up on talk shows…it’s all a competition.”

“And you were always competitive. I knew that from the first day you jumped into that lake so I wouldn’t do it first.”

“True. But sometimes it’s exhausting, spending my entire life trying to prove my worth.”

“Hey.” He jostled her gently. “You don’t need any of that to be good enough.”

Don’t I? Was it really so horrible to want the validation? To want to have those accolades to hold up as a shield against her insecurities? Against those voices inside telling her that she didn’t deserve it, that she was a fraud and someday everything she’d been given was all going to be taken away when the world figured out who she really was—just a scared girl faking her way through it all.

Ian rolled suddenly, catching her in the middle of her doubt spiral and pinning her between his arms, his eyes dark and serious as they stared into hers. “Maggie May, I have known you since you were seven years old—”

“Eight.”

“—since you were seven or eight years old. I know you, inside out and upside down, so trust me, I know what I’m talking about when I say you are one of the most incredible, resilient, lovable people I know and you are worth everything. Understand?”

She couldn’t look away from his eyes, her own tearing, her throat closing so she could only get one word out. “Likewise.”

And when he kissed her, for once, she could actually make herself believe it.