But he wasn’t calling her. Just sending a text message. Even though she wished she had enough willpower to delete it unseen, she swiped her screen again and the new message appeared.
You don’t have any reason to forgive me, but I still hope you’ll come.
Below the message was a small image and she frowned at her own inability to just let it go.
She tapped the image and it blew up, the headlines filling the screen.
Jett Carr
One Night Only
She slowly sat on the side of the bed, expanding the image even more to read the smaller print.
And when she had, she bolted down the stairs, nearly plowing right into Brady as he came in through the front door.
Even though he had his own phone at his ear, she waved hers in his face. “Do you believe his gall?”
He pointed to his own phone as he brushed past her, dropping his tie on the couch as he passed it. “That’s all it took?” he said to whomever was on the other end of his call. “Fifteen minutes?”
She followed him through the kitchen. “I should’ve listened to you all along. You said he was hiding something and—”
Brady turned on his heel and held up a silencing hand. “That’s good news, Kane. Thanks.” He ended the call and waved his hand in front of her. “What’s got you so wound up? As if I don’t already know.”
“He’s having a concert! Right here in Rambling Rose. It wasn’t bad enough that he lied, but now he has to rub our faces in it?”
“I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.” Looking entirely too calm about it, he picked up Murphy, who’d been dancing around his legs, and headed out the back door. Boyish squeals greeted him and he was kissing Harper when Arabella stomped out after him.
She propped her fists on her hips. “What way would you put it?” The wary looks she earned from both her brother and Harper annoyed her even more. “Why am I the only one who’s upset here? Jay—” She shook her phone in the air. “Jett is having a concert. Right under our noses!”
Harper disentangled herself from Brady’s arms. “Do you know why?”
“Because he’s a deceitful—”
“Generous,” Harper said firmly, as if Arabella were no older than Toby and Tyler.
“Generous!” Arabella snorted. “He’s—”
“Donating his ticket sales to Hotel Fortune,” Brady said. “Callum announced it at the staff meeting.”
She felt poleaxed. “What?”
“You were there. What the hell did you think he was talking about?”
She blindly felt for a patio chair. “I wasn’t listening,” she mumbled.
Brady poked his finger at her nose. “For whatever reason, your crush is throwing us a lifesaving buoy and I don’t want—”
“Brady.” Harper closed her hands around his arm. “Arabella is the reason,” she said gently. “And it’s way more than a crush. Jay is in love with her.”
“She’s too young.”
“I am not!” Arabella’s ire instantly refocused on Brady as she shot to her feet.
“She’s only a year younger than me,” Harper added.
Brady frowned. “That’s different.”
Harper’s amused eyes met Arabella’s for a moment. “You think Jay—who has managed to keep his alter identity a secret all of these months—revealed himself to the public by volunteering his concert proceeds to Hotel Fortune because he’s been so thrilled working there as a management trainee?”
Arabella sank right back down into the chair she’d just vacated. “He volunteered?”
“Criminy, Bella. Have you been listening at all?”
She shook her head, ignoring her brother in favor of Harper. There was a gnawing hole in the pit of her stomach, outsized only by the ache growing inside her heart. “Why would he do that?”
Harper smiled. “I think he found a way to be heard.”
The days leading up to Friday were the longest days of Arabella’s life.
She couldn’t turn on the news without seeing some mention of Jett Carr. His mysterious disappearance from the public eye, now ended just as abruptly and just as inexplicably. There was speculation that he’d gone into hiding over a woman. That he’d been recording a new album for which his latest song was just a teaser. That he’d been abducted by aliens.
There seemed to be no end to it, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that the singer, himself, was refusing all interviews until after the concert.
Posters of Jett Carr—bearded, sunglasses-wearing Jett Carr—cropped up all around town. They were in the grocery store. In the flower shop. At Provisions. Everywhere Arabella turned, there were people talking about the coming event. The motels miles outside of town were full.
Mariana’s Market was supposedly even transforming itself into a campground of sorts for the weekend.
Meanwhile, aside from that one text message that Jay had sent her, Arabella didn’t hear another word from him.
Not even when she went out to his grandmother’s place—bearing the linen napkin that he’d wrapped Louella’s chocolate chip cookies inside that very first time she’d been there with him—did she see him. Instead, Arabella had been stunned silly to see Louella and Mabel sitting together on her porch as if their brouhaha had never occurred at all.
When she’d finally just asked if Jay was there, Louella had shaken her head. “Gone to California.”
Arabella’s heart had fallen through the floor. “Is he coming back?”
His grandmother had merely peered cagily from beneath her shady hat. “Got a concert tomorrow night, doesn’t he?”
Arabella hadn’t had the guts to tell her she’d meant was he coming back to her.
By the next afternoon, the traffic lining up for the concert stretched all the way from the blocks surrounding the hotel that had been cordoned off by the police to the other side of town.
As she sat in the rear of the air-conditioned black SUV that had been sent for her and Brady, Harper and the kids, Arabella felt twisted tighter and tighter into a knot of nerves. If the ticket she had wasn’t hanging around her neck inside a plastic lanyard, she would have twisted it, too, into a sweaty, pulpy mess.
“What’re they
