Before I finished reading the scene, betrayal had me biting my cheeks so hard they bled. I threw my pen across the room. It bounced off the wall and hit the floor, and Larry chased it into a corner. Under normal circumstances, the raise of his hackles and hop, hop, pounce attack would have me giggling, but these weren’t normal circumstances.
Alex did it.
The one thing I needed him not to do. The thing I couldn’t recover from. The thing I needed him to know would be a dealbreaker for me…
My story became the pivot point for his book.
He’d changed my name. Drew’s too…but just barely. Instead of Drew Stephens, he was Stephen Drews, and I knew, I just knew he’d read this book. He’d see our story, barely camouflaged as fiction, and he’d come rip-roaring back into my life to blow it to smithereens.
I’d deal with Drew the way I dealt with his first insult. By ignoring it. By being a duck and letting him roll off my back like water. But what Alex did? I couldn’t ignore that. I couldn’t take this betrayal from him.
I thought he was so much better than this. I thought he understood me. I thought he knew this would kill me and discarded the idea out of respect, or understanding, or even love.
I scoffed. “Looks like I overestimated him the way I do everyone else.”
Amelia’s voice whispered in the back of my head, you should have talked to him the day you found the note…
I pushed it away as I flipped back through the beginning of the manuscript, stopping at all the red ink scratches of my notes. As I re-encountered the story, it became apparent this wasn’t the first time I’d made it into the plot. Bits and pieces of the female lead belonged to me. Her tight smile. Her guarded nature. The more I read, the more I realized that this whole damn book was me, and it didn’t paint me in a great light.
If this was how Alex saw me…weak…compromised…damaged to the point of uselessness…
With my heart pounding, I marched across our yards and banged on his door, not even stopping to grab a coat. His door swung open and I pushed through.
“This isn’t a good time, Evie—”
I held out the handful of papers. “Is this how you see me?” I gave them a shake. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before, but is this…am I…who am I to you?”
Alex’s face hardened. His lips formed a thin line, and he folded his arms over his chest. I’d never seen him look so cold. So detached. Even on that first day in the rain, he’d looked at me like I might be special. “Evie—”
“I can’t believe you told my story. I just can’t believe it. You know how private I am…” I dropped the manuscript on his coffee table. “Obviously, you know it all too well, if the female lead has anything to say about how you see me.”
I waited for him to say something, anything, but he simply stared.
“I saw the note. The bracketed note about using my story. And I was gonna say something about it, but then you snuck into my house and took it out. I thought that meant you’d thought better of the idea, but it looks like you just didn’t want me to get upset before you’d had time to write scene forty-eight.”
His silence said everything I didn’t want to hear, and I arched an eyebrow. “Damn it, Alex. Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” He turned away, his face so hard, my heart splintered against the sharp angles and immovable features.
“You don’t know what to say? How about ‘I’m sorry?’ Or ‘that’s not how I see you?’ Or ‘I’ll rewrite that scene because I knew it’d bother you the second I had the idea?’”
“I do see you like that. Your smiles and sweetness are an armor to hide how afraid you are underneath it all.”
My jaw dropped. My heart broke. I blinked in surprise. “I…”
What he said was true, and it was something I’d been working on. Hell, my entire trip to Wildrose Landing happened because I’d decided to work on becoming fearless. But to hear Alex, someone I thought understood me, point out my flaws so coldly? I wrapped my arms around my stomach like I could fold in on myself and disappear.
“Look. Evie. I don’t know what to say here. The scene is staying. And if you don’t like the way I’m writing that character, just remember, it’s fiction.”
But it wasn’t and he’d just said as much. That character was me, in all my vulnerable glory. “What’s gotten into you?”
“This is just business.”
“This is not just business. This is us.”
Alex scoffed. “This is life with me. I’m not always available. I’m not a private person. Everything is open for story inspiration. If you can’t handle it, then maybe you should follow Candace’s lead.”
I stared for several long minutes, trying to make sense of the man in front of me in context of the man I thought I’d known.
I couldn’t. I had no idea how to connect the dots between how he’d been with me just a few days ago and how he was acting now. “You know what?” I swiped at the tears wobbling in my eyes. “I’m gonna go. If you want to talk to me later, when you’ve had a chance to think this through, then you know where to find me.”
“I don’t know what you think we have to talk about.”
“You can’t publish that!” I jabbed a finger at the manuscript lurking on the table.
“I can. And I will. If you can’t get good with that, then I don’t think we have much more to say to each other.”
I retreated toward the door. “Izzy told me you weren’t like your dad. She said you were kind and thoughtful and went out of your way to prove you weren’t him. I
