His voice rose. “It wasn’t a woman who broke my heart! It was the music that did that!”
She’d paled and taken a step back as he shouted the words, and he felt even worse.
“I would never hurt you,” he said roughly.
“Bzzz,” she said thickly. “Too late.”
And she closed the door in his face yet again.
He sighed wearily. “Bella, please. There’s no other woman. There’s only you.”
“Maybe you should go.” He jerked his head back, looking up at the voice from above. Harper was leaning out an opened window. “Brady’s going to be home soon and once he sees the state Bella’s in—” She looked almost sympathetic. “Give her—give them—a little time, Jay.”
He squinted up at her. The sunlight was creating a halo around her dark head. “You overheard, I guess.”
“That you’re the sexy missing Jett?”
He grimaced, feeling his neck get hot. He’d blushed more in the last twenty-four hours than he had in his entire adult life and he didn’t much like it. “Just Jett,” he muttered.
She propped her head on her hand. “I overheard.”
He spread his hands and his grandmother’s diamond ring on his pinky winked in the sunlight. “I should have told her. I know that. But I can’t undo the past. So what am I supposed to do now?”
“Undo the future?”
“There is no future. Not without her in it.”
She smiled slightly. “Find a way to make her listen,” she suggested, and then disappeared back inside the window.
Jay blinked against the sun again. He looked around the yard. Spotted the gate finally, as well as the sturdy metal lock on its latch.
Resigned, he climbed back over the gate, this time at least managing to miss the dog crap.
He walked back to his truck, feeling the itch on his spine of several pairs of eyes, but when he looked back at the house again, he saw nothing but the twitch of curtains in the windows.
He got behind the wheel and started the engine.
As if the fates were mocking him, the radio came on to his own voice singing back at him. He spun the dial and a droning voice reciting farm futures replaced his song.
Harper’s words echoed in his head. Find a way to make her listen.
“How in the hell am I supposed to find a way to do that?”
He made it all the way back to his grandmother’s place before the obvious hit him.
He drove around the house—something he never did—and parked next to the stone barn. Inside, he flipped up the piano bench and shuffled through the music books until he found a couple sheets of staff paper.
He flipped down the lid of the grand piano with shocking disregard for its value and dropped the paper on top of the gleaming black wood. He located a stub of a pencil and then he sat down at the keyboard and got to work.
“Ohmigod, have you heard it?” Hallie squeezed a folding chair in between the ones Arabella and Beulah were occupying.
It was Monday morning and even though Arabella would have preferred to be anywhere else, family loyalty had made her show up at the hotel for Callum’s big staff meeting.
“Heard what?”
“Jett Carr’s new song. It dropped just last night and every music station’s been playing it practically nonstop. There’s a rumor he was even spotted right here in Texas. Can you believe it?”
Arabella closed her eyes. “Hallie, I don’t—”
It was too late. Hallie had already started the video playing on her phone. This time there was no shot of Jay. Or Jett. Or whatever he was calling himself.
Just hands on a piano keyboard. One raised scar on a long, tanned finger against ivory and black.
The melody was simple but haunting.
“Your love healed me,” he sang softly. Much like the way he’d sung that shoe-tying song to her nephews that day that felt so long ago. “Your love revealed me—”
“Thanks to everyone for coming today.” Callum’s voice cut over the soft music from Hallie’s phone that she quickly turned off and tucked away.
Healed me. Revealed me.
Try as she might, Arabella couldn’t keep the words from circling inside her mind. To such an extent that she missed almost everything that Callum was announcing.
She’d been so afraid that Jay would also show his face at the staff meeting, but he was nowhere to be seen. More proof that he wasn’t the man she’d believed him to be. Jett Carr might have been spotted and now it was Jay Cross who’d disappeared.
She ducked her head, surreptitiously swiping at the tears that kept leaking out.
She wasn’t the only one who was crying, though that was more caused by the announcement Callum was making.
“This Friday night,” he was saying. “That’s just four days. So spread the word. The more people who turn out, the better off we’ll all be.”
Brady hadn’t told her they’d be having a final party. But that was what it sounded like Callum was talking about.
Then the meeting broke up again and Arabella filed out miserably behind the others.
Hallie’s car was parked next to Arabella’s. “Think you’ll go back to Austin?”
“You mean if this doesn’t work?” Hallie shrugged. “How could it not?” Considering the situation, Hallie looked quite cheerful.
Arabella got into her car and drove back to Brady’s. She went inside and her energy took her as far as the narrow twin bed in her bedroom. She threw herself down on it, staring blindly at the geranium plant sitting on the windowsill. She could hear the muffled sounds of Harper and the boys from the backyard accompanied by Murphy’s excited yips.
She could sell her car. Maybe she’d get enough to pay for a one-way flight back to New York.
At least her dad would be happy.
She swiped her cheeks and pulled out her cell phone. She had two text messages, both from Tammy Jo Pendleton, containing photos of her and Ham wearing their wedding finery.
Arabella was so miserable she couldn’t even summon a speck of annoyance. She texted back a polite congratulations and then dropped the phone like a hot
