Why did he have to be so damn good-looking?
“Just so we’re clear, five orgasms or fifty won’t ever earn you the right to boss me, asshole.”
“Noted.” The disbelief in his tone wasn’t lost on me.
Total asshole.
And with another lopsided smile, Chasin sat and looked to Nixon. Bobby and I sat across from Chasin.
“I’m Alec.” A man cleared his throat and introduced himself.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Genevieve.”
“Got that.” He chuckled and I could feel my cheeks heat in embarrassment.
As the mortification of my stupidity set in, which I firmly blamed on Chasin and his highhanded order, I looked at the table.
“Ms. Ellison,” Nixon called.
“Please call me Genevieve,” I muttered.
“Okay, Genevieve, how long have you been in Cliff City?”
“Ten days,” I answered.
“And since you’ve been here, has anything happened?”
Other than meeting a man, spending the weekend with him, and thinking that I’d met the man of my dreams?
“No.”
“Something happened back in Tennessee,” Bobby answered and my gaze snapped to her. “We didn’t want to say anything until I met with you, but another letter was left at her home in Oak Hill.”
“We?” I asked.
“Leslie, Mel, and I.” There was a beat of silence then, “Don’t be mad,” Bobby rushed out. “We know this is a lot for you. We didn’t want you upset.”
No, they didn’t want me stressed. They wanted me writing music.
“Bobby, you know I love you. We’ve been friends a long time and you’ve been by my side from the beginning. All of you keep saying I’m not taking this seriously. Well, how can I when all of you are trying to handle me?”
“It’s my job to—”
“Fuck your job, Bobby. You’re my friend. You’re supposed to have my back, not listen to Melissa and Leslie.” My friend’s eyes widened and her brows pulled together. Fuck me, she didn’t understand why I was pissed. Whatever. “What’d the letter say?”
She opened up her big, slouchy handbag, pulled out two Ziploc bags, and set them on the table. “I opened it. Once I saw what they were, I tried not to touch them and put them in the bags.”
And there it was—proof there was no getting away from this person.
Enjoy Maryland.
Nothing else. Heavy block letters, black ink, white paper.
Staring at that note, something struck me. Something I’d known my whole life, but right then, I felt the cold hard slap of reality.
I had the shittiest luck known to mankind.
Of all the men in Kent County to be kayaking past my dock at the exact moment I’d lost my balance and fell in the river. Of all the men in the entire world for me to lock eyes with and think, oh, yeah, I’m inviting him in and then go so far as hoping he’d want to stay awhile, it had to be Chasin Murray.
But he didn’t stay awhile. He left, thinking I was a cheat.
As if.
Now here he was. My shitty luck continued—he worked for the security company my manager wanted to hire to protect me.
I was almost too afraid to ask if it could get any worse because, in my personal experience, it could. Which meant it would, and I was not at a place in my life where I could take much more. I was on the verge of throwing in the towel, moving to an island by myself, and living the life of a hermit prepper.
The last thing that hit me was Bobby had obviously stopped in Tennessee after leaving Los Angeles before coming to Maryland.
“Why did you go back to Oak Hill?” I asked.
Bobby’s head tilted, the movement so dramatic her ear nearly touched her shoulder.
“What?”
“I thought you were flying straight here from LA?”
“Vivi, I told you on Monday I had to go back to Oak Hill.”
She was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. Monday hadn’t been a good day for me. It was the day after Sunday. The day after Chasin had left me and I’d been up all night writing, crashing for a few hours, then waking up and going straight back to my guitar. I’d been lost in my head all week, but Monday had been the worst of it.
“I was writing,” I told her.
She’d been with me long enough to know what that meant. When I was in the groove, I lost time, sometimes hours, sometimes days. It depended on my mood and what I was feeling.
But even knowing me well, Bobby still looked concerned.
“Right,” she muttered.
Bobby wasn’t stupid. Even without Chasin’s outburst, she would’ve put two and two together and come up with me and Chasin having a wild fuck-fest. But, she wouldn’t put two and two together and come up with me being heartbroken because Chasin had bailed after calling me a cheating bitch.
“Will you tell us about the first time this person made contact?” Alec asked.
“That’s hard to know. But the first time it hit our radar was when gifts started being delivered to Vivi’s house,” Bobby told him.
“How is that difficult to know?” Alec continued.
“Because fan mail gets sent to a PO box and then someone at the label goes through it.”
Alec nodded and scribbled something on a notepad in front of him. “And no one at the label picked up on anything out of the ordinary? Threats? Romantic overtures? The same fan sending an excessive number of letters?”
“Romantic overtures? Sure, Vivi gets marriage proposals all the time. Men and women both send letters saying they’re soul mates, or the sender says that Vivi looked at them from the stage and when their eyes met they knew they were meant to be. Stuff like that happens all the time. Threats are less frequent but they happen. If someone doesn’t like a song or they think some of the lyrics are too suggestive, or they didn’t like what she wore during a concert or in a video, they think they have the right to tell her to stop making that kind of music or change her clothes. But most of the time, those letters are simply telling her she’s going to burn in hell.”
Burn in hell.
How many times have I heard that? Tons. Some people were outrageously unkind. Some people were straight-up mean. After years of reading and hearing things about how horrible I was, one would think I could let it roll off me—not care and move on. But the truth was, it hurt.
My gaze slid from the creepy note I was staring at to Chasin. He wasn’t looking at the note, or Bobby; his attention was on me.
All of it.
Suddenly it felt like we were the only two in the room.
And just like when we were sitting on my couch, his eyes locked to mine. Only then, I’d been stupid. I’d allowed myself to have fanciful thoughts. Delusions of grandeur. I’d desperately wanted Chasin to see me. He had no idea who I was. He didn’t know Vivi. There was no recognition when he saw me. No hint of acknowledgment when he heard me talk.
Chasin hadn’t the first clue who I was, and it’d felt so damn good, I’d let myself get swept up in it. At the time I was dizzy with it, captivated by it, riveted to him and him to me.
Now it felt cold.
Now he knew me and I knew him and everything was ruined. My life was like a bad country song. You know, the one where the girl loses her man, her dog, and her pickup all in one night. Maybe that’s why I’d never owned a dog, I was too afraid of losing it. And I didn’t drive a pickup. I drove an El Camino I’d found at a junkyard and had restored. I loved that thing.