Her hand was shaking when Troy’s voice broke into her thoughts from the other room.
“Ellie?” His tone carried alarm. Fear. And drained every ounce of excitement from her belly.
He knew. He. Knew.
Quick footsteps touched her ear just before Troy called again, “Ellie…” and came around the corner into the kitchen as if he were chasing her. But halted his forward momentum with a hand on the doorframe, and his gaze homed in on the phone in her hands.
And the look on his face—the oh-shit-what-have-I-done look on his face—told her everything. The phone was not in the drawer by accident. The phone had not lost its battery by accident. Troy had not disabled her phone so they could disconnect from the world together.
He’d done it knowing what the consequences would be for her.
A second of supreme, deafening silence stretched while Giselle quivered with tension, with hurt, with disbelief, praying he would blurt out some plausible reason—any plausible reason—for doing this.
But his eyes fell closed, his shoulders dropped, and his head lowered.
Everything from their past swirled in, combined with everything from their present, and cut into the possibility of their future.
“How did this happen?” she asked, holding out the very last thread of hope. “Why did this happen?”
He lifted his head and came forward with a look that implored her to understand while knowing she wouldn’t. He’d pulled on only boxer briefs, and his hair was a tousled, sexy mess.
“His messages were getting more and more…crazy. I was afraid he’d trace your phone and I didn’t want him coming here and creating any more stress for you.”
“You read the messages.”
He pressed a hand to the counter, standing so close, the afternoon light shone through his irises, turning them a beautiful and clear
shade of brandy. “I…saw them.”
She waited. Waited for him to pull some miraculous excuse out of the ether to make all the hurt inside vanish. But nothing more came.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” Anger balled in her gut. “You saw them?”
He straightened and took a deep breath. One of those, oh-here-we-go-type breaths. “You promised me a week, El.”
“Don’t. Don’t even. What you did here has absolutely nothing to do with any time limit, and you know it.” She thought back over their time together, over the things he’d said. “You knew where my phone was when I asked. You knew those messages were waiting. And you knew exactly how important they were.”
She started past him toward the bedroom.
He caught her arm. “El—”
She jerked from his grasp. Pain throbbed beneath her ribs. “I can’t believe you did this. I really can’t.”
“What can’t you believe?” he barked. “That I love you and don’t want to lose you to that damned career again?”
“No, Troy. I know I hurt you when I walked away. And I expected some insecurity. What I didn’t expect is the way you minimized the importance of my career by hiding these messages from me.” She held up her phone. “This is not meshing our careers. It’s controlling and deceitful. It’s unacceptable.”
Turning away, she pushed her feet into the bedroom and grabbed clothes from a chair.
“Giselle,” he said, following her. His use of her full name made her shoulders inch up around her ears. “Take a few minutes to calm down and put this into perspective.”
Her mind felt like a messy, slippery knot of seaweed. Her heart felt like shattered shards of glass. She wouldn’t calm down in his presence, and she wouldn’t do it in a few minutes. Perspective in this situation would not come easily.
She jerked a skirt from the arm of a chair and pulled it on, then riffled through a pile of things on the dresser and found panties, dragging those on beneath the skirt.
“Pepsi, Bud, AEG, Live Nation?” She swung toward him, on the edge of hysteria. The more she thought about the magnitude of the offers on the table, the deeper his actions cut and the more panic-stricken she became. “We’re talking promotion at the level of Kenny Chesney, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan…the Rolling-freaking-Stones, for God’s sake. You know this. Seriously, Troy. Seriously. Step back for a minute and really look at what you’ve done.”
She was yelling now, her emotions completely out of control as the enormity of the situation sank past the shock and the hurt. “You’ve made it look like I couldn’t care less what offers are on the table. Like I don’t have the time of day for the biggest opportunity the music world could offer. But what makes it even worse is that you did it knowing how long and how much I’ve sacrificed to get those very offers.”