Invitations? That was the one detail that Mathers purposely decided against. What was the point? He wasn’t hosting a wedding because he wanted a fucking spectacle. In fact, he knew that Mathers was against the idea of marriage if only because it was one of the goddamn stipulations his father imposed on him. He’d stay a lifelong bachelor if only to stick his middle finger up at the old man.
But then he met Grace. Suddenly, Mathers was itching to get hitched. If they were married, she couldn’t escape him. Legally, she couldn’t, and the poor woman naively believed that no one should ever break the law. With how willing Mathers was to bend them, he’d have her forever. So long as he had a wedding license—forged or not, he didn’t care—and an official married them, that’s all that counted. Refusing to have a single witness other than Boone, and maybe Pope… it just wasn’t in the cards.
So invitations?
Boone shook his head.
“Let’s get on that.”
“Yes, sir.”
17
When Grace danced, she felt free. She felt untethered. She felt alive.
The music was in her blood, pumping through her veins. It didn’t matter what played. From her time on the stage, she had an affinity for classical, but she didn’t limit herself to Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Mendelssohn. She adored upbeat Broadway numbers, sappy ballads, the twang of a country tune. Jazz got her moving, and gospel was so incredibly uplifting, she got greater height to her leaps. She could even practice her pliés and demi pliés in time to hardcore rap.
She hadn’t brought much with her when she fled from Dayton to Hamlet. Her music. She had that. There was no way she’d leave that behind. Like her toe shoes and her hair ties, they were just a part of who she was. If it wasn’t for her songs, she might have already tossed her worthless phone into the gulley.
Cell service was nonexistent in Hamlet. Internet? Nope. Not unless you could figure out dial-up. Like Maria, most locals ventured out of town if they really, really had to use technology. It wasn’t often, though. They didn’t know what they were missing, so they didn’t miss it.
And while it might have been a huge culture shock when she first came to stay in town, Grace was used to it by now. Even more surprisingly, she liked it.
She held onto her phone, refusing to take it off airplane mode because that’s how she’d kept it these last eight months. If it wasn’t for the time she spent dancing on her own, she probably wouldn’t even have bothered with charging the damn thing. All of her CDs were in storage. She digitized her whole library years ago, syncing her music to her phone. With a full battery and a pair of wireless headphones, she could turn on her music, lose herself in the beat, and let her body go.
It had been another successful dance class. Sally’s turn-out had improved greatly since October, and Bev performed a battement tendu directly into an arabesque with only a little wobbling. Plus, after a little prompting, Fina remembered all five positions and did them without falling over once.
Grace was so proud of her girls. Seeing the joy on their faces, watching as they tried their hardest, it reminded her of when she was a little girl. Sure, her dance lessons started when she was three and they soon became daily instead of weekly, but still. Even after retiring this year—being forced off the stage by Tommy’s obsession—Grace’s love of ballet hadn’t faded.
Which was why she went outside after the girls left, pulled up her good mood playlist, and turned the entirety of Ophelia’s backyard into her own performance center. There was no audience. No cheers. She didn’t need them. She never had. It was the music, the movements, and the freedom… and she missed it like nothing else in her life.
Tommy stole her career, but he’d never steal her ability to lose herself in the moment as she spun and leaped and, for a moment, forget about all the bad out there. She purposely focused on the good.
Rick.
It had been two weeks since the morning he came to her reeking of alcohol and smoke. When his hangover faded, she was worried he’d take it all back.
He didn’t.
To her surprise, when her big, burly Marine committed, he committed. It was hard for Grace to remember dating in the time before Tommy, but she’d had a few lovers before. She wanted so much more from Rick; she just never expected it. She should’ve. He was a good man, and a man who knew what he wanted.
Now that he’d admitted that he wanted her? He wasn’t shy in showing it. Within days of their first date at the coffeeshop, there wasn’t a soul in town who didn’t know that their deputy was taken with the outsider woman—or that he shot down Natalie Newton in front of the whole crowd at the coffeehouse. Maria even had to turn off her radio to keep from some of the gossips—her friend Caro, Caro’s mom Bonnie, Adrianna from the coffeehouse—constantly buzzing for a fresh scoop on Grace’s relationship with Rick.
Maria thought it was hysterical. Rick turned beet red when she told him all about it during pillow talk. Grace put up with it all because Maria was her friend. And, hell, Rick was adorable when he blushed like that.
In the last couple of weeks, things had gotten even better between them. The only sore point?
Rick wanted more details about the ex chasing after her. And she point-blank refused to give him any.
She knew he wanted her to confide in him, but she couldn’t. Not because she didn’t trust him; it was because Grace didn’t want him to doubt her affection for him. If he knew all of the dirty details behind why she was hiding out in Hamlet, she’d go from someone he wanted to sleep with to someone he felt honor bound to protect.
It was bad enough that she confessed she had a troublesome ex when Rick first started to train her. If he knew the truth, if knew how crazy and insistent Tommy Mathers was, things would change. She was sure of it. And she never wanted Rick to question her attraction to him—or her motives.
Would he wonder if that’s why she came onto him? It would crush her if he did.
Tommy was her problem. If—and when—he came after her again, she’d deal with it alone. She wouldn’t let Rick get involved because, damn it, she couldn’t. She was absolutely positive that Tommy wouldn’t hurt her; she needed to be alive and healthy and whole to finally be his bride. But Rick?
No matter how hard she tried to deny it, she already knew what would happen. If Tommy ever met Rick face to face, he’d kill him. Whether he pulled the trigger himself or stood by as he gave the order to Boone, he’d kill him.