An illusion, a bitter voice mutters in my head.
Yeah, I guess it was. And the sad thing is, Callum doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t even realize he’s living in a house of lies.
Or maybe he does. Maybe he’s fully aware that his son is sleeping with—
No. I refuse to think about what I saw in Reed’s bedroom the night I skipped town.
But the images are already bubbling to the surface of my mind.
Reed and Brooke on his bed.
Brooke naked.
Brooke touching him.
A gagging noise flies out of my mouth, causing the elderly woman across the aisle to glance over in concern.
“Are you all right, sweetie?” she asks.
I swallow the ball of nausea. “Fine,” I say weakly. “I have a bit of a stomachache.”
“Sit tight,” the woman says with a reassuring smile. “They’re opening the doors now. We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.”
God. No. A jiffy is too soon. I don’t ever want to get off this bus. I don’t want the cash that Callum forced on me back in Nashville. I don’t want to go back to the Royal mansion and pretend that my heart hasn’t been shattered into a million pieces. I don’t want to see Reed or hear his apologies. If he even has any.
He hadn’t said a word when I walked in on him and his father’s girlfriend. Not one word. For all I know, I’ll walk through the door and discover that Reed is back to his old cruel self. Maybe I’d prefer that, actually, and then I can forget I ever loved him.
I stumble off the bus, holding my backpack strap tight to my shoulder. The sun has already set, but the station is all lit up. People bustle around me as the driver unloads everyone’s luggage from the belly of the vehicle. I don’t have any bags, only my backpack.
The night I ran, I didn’t take any of the fancy clothes Brooke had bought me, and now they’re all waiting for me at the mansion. I wish I could burn every scrap of fabric. I don’t want to wear those clothes or live in that house.
Why couldn’t Callum leave me alone? I could have started a new life in Nashville. I could have been happy. Eventually, anyway.
Instead, I’m in Royal clutches again, after Callum used every threat in the book to bring me back. I can’t believe the lengths he went to in order to find me. Turns out the bills from the original ten grand he gave me had sequential serial numbers—all he had to do was wait until I used one, and then he was able to pinpoint my location.
I don’t even want to know how many laws he broke to trace the serial number of a hundred-dollar bill in this country. But I guess men like Callum are above the law.
A car honks, and I stiffen when a black Town Car pulls up to the curb. The one that followed the bus from Nashville to Bayview. The driver gets out—it’s Durand, Callum’s chauffeur-slash-bodyguard, who’s as big as a mountain and just as forbidding.
“How was the ride?” he asks gruffly. “Are you hungry? Should we stop for food?”
Since Durand is never this chatty, I wonder if Callum ordered him to be extra nice to me. I received no such order, so I’m not at all nice as I mutter, “Get in the car and drive.”
His nostrils flare.
I don’t feel bad. I’m sick to death of these people. From this point on, they’re my enemies. They’re the prison guards and I’m the inmate. They’re not my friends or my family. They’re nothing to me.
It seems like every light in the mansion is on when Durand stops the car in the circular driveway. Since the house is pretty much a sprawling rectangle of nothing but windows, all that dazzling light is nearly blinding.
The oak doors at the pillared entrance fly open and Callum appears, his dark hair perfectly styled, his tailored suit clinging to his broad frame.
I square my shoulders, prepared for another showdown, but my legal guardian smiles sadly and says, “Welcome back.”
There’s nothing welcoming about it. This man tracked me all the way to Nashville and threatened me. His list of dire consequences if I didn’t return seemed endless.
He would have me arrested as a runaway.
He would report me to the police for using my mother’s identification.
He would tell them I stole the ten grand he gave me and have me charged with theft.
None of those threats are what made me cave. No, it was his emphatic declaration that there was no place I could run that he couldn’t find me. Anywhere I went, he’d be there. He’d hunt me for the rest of my life, because, as he reminded me, he owed it to my father.
My father, a man I never even met. A man who, from the sound of it, was a spoiled, selfish jerk who married a money-hungry shrew while neglecting to tell her—or anyone else, for that matter—that he knocked up a young woman when he was on shore leave eighteen years ago.