Something I Need (xoxo Nashville Book 1) (26 page)

“And our last act going through tonight is Honky Tonk Infusion!”

Cash’s whole body slumped and he feared his heart would stop beating. Onstage, Jonte maintained her composure and clapped for the last successful band. She smiled and nodded and took the whole thing graciously.

What the fuck?

He was indignant on her behalf.

She had been robbed.

Cheated.

There was no excuse for her not getting through tonight. He wanted to boo the other contestants. He wanted to stand up and cheer her name and demand they take her through to the next round.

Turns out Dolly had the same idea.

Precariously balancing on the small wooden table, she screamed at the judges. “BOO! WHAT ABOUT JONTE?”

Poor Tanner was standing guard, making sure Dolly didn’t topple off the damn table. Cash didn’t know whether to go help Tanner, revealing himself in the process, or whether to stay put and watch from afar. Shit. Shit. Shit. Surely Tanner and the other guys wouldn’t let Dolly fall?

The firecracker that was his twin had started an uproar, and now the whole bar was chanting for Jonte.

“JONTE! JONTE! JONTE!” the crowd, stomped their feet, making a hell of a ruckus.

Cash joined in, stomping his motorcycle boots on the floor. Jonte’s face flamed that gorgeous pink color. She was so humble, and probably completely mortified, yet grateful for the uproar Dolly had instigated.

The three judges huddled together, shocked and obviously at a loss for how to proceed now. After a few minutes, the older judge who had announced the finalists stepped in front of the microphone and hushed the crowed.

“Quiet please,” he said, shaking his head, clearly annoyed. “Our decision is final. The calibre of contestants this year has been astounding, and we wish all of those who did not get through this evening all the very best. Enjoy the rest of your evening.”

“Oh my god, this is fantastic.”

Cash turned to see a woman propped up on her stool next to him, clicking away on one of those professional cameras with the long lenses.

“What do you mean?” Cash asked, cocking his head to the side.

“A gorgeous and talented crowd favorite knocked out. The uproar in this place. I was sent here to cover the finals and snap a couple of pictures. But this will make for a brilliant story. I’ve gotta go try to get an exclusive with her,” the woman said, sliding off her stool and making a bee-line for Jonte.

Had Dolly just salvaged this disaster for Jonte?

The judges were ushered out a side door, the crowd still booing. The reporter he’d been sitting with bulldozed her way through the crowd, her elbows out wide, whacking into everyone around her. She finally reached Jonte and was quick to thrust a card in her hand.

Now Dolly was safe and back on the ground, Cash decided it was time to get his ass out of there. He left a generous tip for the bartender and headed for the door.

T
he next morning
, Jonte padded into the kitchen and found Dean and Dolly deep in a hushed exchange on the sofa. She’d gone home to Dolly’s after all of the crazy last night. Jack returned to his hotel because he had some work to catch up on today, and Dean had gone back to his own place.

So she had no idea why Dean was here now. Were they talking about their own shit or hers and Cash’s? She wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know.

Ugh. She didn’t want to be all sneaky and eavesdrop.

“I’m awake,” she said and reached for a coffee mug.

“Morning, J.” Dean turned around and smiled.

“I’ve taken the day off and am going shopping in Franklin today, if you’re interested,” Dolly said.

Jonte grunted and poured coffee into her mug. She was grateful for everything Dolly had done last night, but she was still irate about her involvement with what had gone down with Cash.

“I believe that’s what they call an olive branch,” Dean said, his grin wide and smug. “The polite thing to do would be to take it with open arms.”

“I know I should have picked you up from the bus station two days ago, but Cash begged me. I’m sorry, I’ve already apologized for that. I also know you and I aren’t going to be roomies anymore because you’re probably moving to Ohio –”

“Dean!” Jonte growled, pissed he’d ratted her out. Traitor.

“The day Dean let it slip, I told Cash, and he’s been in therapy ever since. He’s trying to get his shit together, Jonte, and not just for you. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know, stuff that’s not really mine to tell you. Please talk to him before you walk away forever. I think both of you need some kind of closure.”

“Closure?” Jonte repeated.

“Yes. Closure,” Dolly said icily. “It’s exhausting trying to get you two to see sense, so I’ve given up. Be miserable, or not. I don’t care anymore.”

The card he’d attached to the flowers last night hadn’t been particularly insightful. It simply said:
Good luck tonight! Cash.
Maybe they did need closure?

A
nd that was
how Jonte found herself sitting on the leather seats of Dolly’s VW beetle on the way back from Franklin. They’d spent hours mending the bridges that had been broken over the past two days. They shopped, drank coffee, and ate obscene things piled high on yogurt in Sweet CeCe’s. Jonte dragged Dolly into Philanthropy – which of course Dolly had loved – and they had even seen a movie at the historic theatre. Things were good between the two of them again.

Now, they were on their way home so Jonte and Cash could have the de-briefing session they both needed to have to be able to move on. That’s why Jonte was so surprised when Dolly pulled her car away from Franklin’s Main Street in the opposite direction of Nashville.

“Where are we going?”

“Cash wanted to talk with you at his place,” Dolly replied and skipped through the radio stations.

“But aren’t the bar and ranch that way?” Jonte turned and pointed behind them.

“Yes. Yes, they are,” Dolly sing-songed and hit the gas.

“I don’t understand?”

“We’re going to Cash’s. What’s not to understand?”

Jonte let out a breath and shook her head. “Fine. Whatever.”

They traveled a good ten minutes out of Franklin, down roads Jonte was sure she’d never seen before.

The car sped past pretty houses – some new, some old, but all reasonably large – set on acreage blocks. None of the properties were as big as Nannie and Pop’s ranch. Lifestyle properties. That’s what these smaller acreage blocks were called back home. Who knew what they were called here?

Suddenly, the car slowed and Dolly put her indicator on. Jonte read the word
Camelot
off a chunky wooden sign. It looked like it had been newly erected, the dirt around the posts freshly dug up.

Where on earth were they?

Dolly drove slowly down the long, tree-lined driveway, although unlike at Nannie and Pop’s, the trees here only ran along the right-hand boundary fence. The blacktop driveway slopped down to a white wooden house with a grey roof, and the driveway forked, with part of it veering off to the left and up to the solid wooden front door, the other part continuing down to the back of the house and a huge open paddock.

Jonte leaned forwards to look more closely at the paddock that fenced in a stunning white horse.
Oh, my goodness
. She knew that horse, or at least she thought she did.

“Is that Casper?” she turned and asked Dolly.

“You know Casper?” Dolly shot back with raised brows.

“Yeah.” She nodded. “We met once.”

“Interesting,” Dolly muttered.

“Hang on,” Jonte blurted out as everything started to click. “This is Cash’s place?”

“Of course.” Dolly giggled. “I told you before we left Franklin that we were going to Cash’s place.”

“But how? When?”

“Not my place to answer.” Dolly parked the car around the back near a set of steps that went all the way up to an expansive decking. The back of the house was set against the slope of the land. There was a basement level constructed out of stone nestled in under the first level that wasn’t visible from the road.

Nothing made sense. Cash didn’t have a house in Franklin. He lived with Nannie and Pop. What on earth was going on?

“I thought you said no more meddling.”

“Fuck, Jonte.” Dolly threw her hands up defensively. “You agreed to speak to Cash, we’re here to speak to Cash. What in the world have I done wrong now?”

“I’m not sure, but this whole thing feels fishy.”

Dolly shook her head and rolled her eyes melodramatically. “I have no idea what I’m even supposed to say to that.”

Nothing. There really wasn’t an answer and Jonte knew this. She was supposed to be here for closure. But now there were all these questions and confusion.

“Do you want some privacy or do I need to stick around?”

“Huh?” Jonte squeaked out.

“Cash offered to give you a ride back to our place when you two are done talking, but if it makes you more comfortable, I’m happy to stay.”

“Umm…” She didn’t want to ride back to Nashville with Cash, but she also didn’t want Dolly listening to the sordid details of her stupidity.

“So, staying or going – what am I doing?” Dolly tapped her nails on the steering wheel.

Staying. No. Going.

No. Staying. Argh!

“Going,” Jonte eventually said.

“Cool. I really should stop by work and check in on everything.”

Jonte stepped out of the car and grabbed her handbag.

“Good luck,” Dolly sing-songed and then reversed the car.

“Thanks.”
I’m going to need it
, she added silently and waved.

Jonte blew out a deep breath.

Okay. Steps. She should go up the steps and use the back entrance, seeing as Dolly had specifically dropped her here. Dolly gave a quick toot-toot of her horn and zoomed back up the driveway.

Great. Now Cash would definitely know she was here.

D
olly’s car
zipped out of his driveway. Dean and Dolly were damn miracle workers. Jonte was here. Yes, she was here under the pretence of getting closure, which, at the end of the day, he was prepared to walk away and give her. But right now, she was here and she had agreed to listen to him.

And so this was it. His last shot. And he was ready to give it everything.

Cash scooted up off the brown leather sofa and then stopped.

Slow
down
.

Breathe.

Relax.

He stopped and counted to ten fast, no Mississippi’s in sight. Then he made his way across the polished floorboards and over to the French doors that led out to the decking. He pushed down on the door handles right as her head appeared. The fact she was already coming up the stairs, not lingering down below had to be a good sign, right?

Please be a good sign.

He closed his eyes and took another deep breath before pushing the double doors open.

And there she was.

“Hi.” His eyes locked on hers.

“Hi.” She stepped up onto the decking and looked around, breaking their connection.

And then nothing.

Silence.

Crickets.

“Do you want to come in for a drink?” he asked at the same time as she said, “Nice place.”

“Thanks,” he replied just as she said, “I guess so.”

Breathe. Breathe. And let her speak.

Cash held the door open and stepped aside so she could walk in. Inside, she took in the enormous combined kitchen-living-dining area, the high cathedral ceilings, and the built-in stone fireplace. Obviously he hadn’t gone and built the house in the three weeks she’d been in Ohio. But he had completely fallen in love with it when Tanner had brought him out here, and it made him happy to see the smile flit across her lips now. He wanted her to love his place.

“What can I get you to drink?” he asked, leaving the double doors open.

It was silly, but he didn’t want her to feel trapped, and they seemed to have the worst luck when it came to closed doors.

“What have you got?”

Cash wandered over to his brand new stainless steel fridge and opened it up. “Juice, water, soda. Or I can make coffee if you want?”

“Nah.” She shook her head. “Dolly coffee-ed me out in Franklin. A juice would be great.”

“No problem.” He smiled, pulled the OJ off the shelf, and sat it down on the granite bench top.

“This is a really awesome house.” Jonte slid onto one of the black contemporary high-backed stools he’d purchased only a few days ago with the help of Tanner’s interior designer friend, Anya, who’d worked tirelessly to make sure the house was perfect and fitted out as per his specifications.

Cash grabbed two glasses out of the cupboard and set them down next to the OJ. Him pouring drinks, her sitting on a stool. This was them. He poured their juice and nudged a glass towards her, keeping his distance and leaning casually on the opposite side of the counter.

“Thanks.” She smiled and took a sip.

Cash drank his own OJ and watched her eyes dart around the room, possibly avoiding his.

“I didn’t know you owned a place in Franklin,” she finally said.

“It’s a recent acquisition,” he replied with a half-grin, not specifying exactly how recent. “My therapist made me realize I needed to make some changes, stop living life like I was Peter Pan.”

“Your therapist called you Peter Pan?” she asked, not doing a good job of disguising her smile.

He missed that smile.

“Not exactly. That was the name I came up with for how she’d described me, and she agreed it wasn’t a bad analogy.”

“Oh, Dolly mentioned that you’d started seeing a therapist.”

“Yeah.” Cash ran his hands through his hair. “It was probably long overdue. What else did Dolly tell you?”

“Not much, actually.”

“Nothing about our childhood?”

“Nope,” Jonte replied, popping the ‘p’ like she had that first night so long ago back in his bar.

“Okay.” He blew out a breath, ready to tell her everything. “So our mom committed suicide when Dolly and I were five years –”

“Oh, Cash, that’s horrible.” Jonte gasped, her hands flying up to her mouth.

“It is what it is.” Cash shrugged, feeling more at peace with the whole situation than he ever had. The intensive sessions he’d had with Dr. Parker these past couple of weeks had been amazing in helping him realize he couldn’t change what had happened and couldn’t save his mom – that it wasn’t his responsibility to, at five years old. Dr. Parker had even gone as far as to call him a hero for having saved himself and Dolly that night. He was no longer the naïve person he had been; he knew he needed to continue with the therapy and wasn’t going to be cured overnight. But now he was working on becoming a fully functioning adult and living his life.

“What about your dad, is he –”

“No.” Cash shook his head and cut off her question. It wasn’t hard to draw the conclusion that his father was dead, given his obvious absence. “He’s alive and well. He’s in the army and thinks his good deed of putting our mom’s insurance payout into a trust fund for Dolly and me to access when we turned twenty-one makes up for the fact that he abandoned us and left his own parents to raise us.”

“I’m so sorry, Cash.”

“It’s fine. Anyway, the worst thing about what happened, was that Mom, she wanted to take Dolly and me with her. We were in the car, it was late at night, and she told us to take off our seatbelts. I told Dolly not to, and then the next thing I know we’re careering into a damn tree. Our mom died after being thrown through the windscreen.” He omitted the gory details. “But it took a few hours for Doll and me to be found and freed from the wreck. Even though the car was all smashed up, somehow our mom’s damn country music played on. My therapist, Dr. Parker, says I have attachment issues. And, as you know, I generally avoid country music.”
Except for last night
, he added silently.

Jonte’s eyes were wide and she was definitely looking a little pale as she nodded, almost robotically.

“For years after, I used to have these nightmares and they’d take me right back to that night. Anyway, I hadn’t had one in ten years or something, and then that night, after Nannie spoke about us getting married, I had one. I’m not really sure why, but then the next time I went to sleep, somehow the dream changed. It morphed, and instead of my mom being in the car, it was you, and instead of Dolly and me in the back seat, it was what I can only presume was our daughter. And you died, both of you died.”

He watched Jonte closely, but she said nothing. Was that good? Bad? He couldn’t pick it yet.

Keep talking. Don’t let her run again.

“That’s why I pushed you away. I didn’t understand the dream, still don’t really. But I worried maybe I was like Nannie and seeing something that was going to happen in the future. I thought if I pushed you away it would keep you safe, because then there would be no way you could ever be in that car.”

Jonte slid off the stool and slowly walked around to his side of the counter. She rested her hand over the top of his, squeezing his fingers. “Thank you for telling me all of this.” She leaned up and kissed his cheek.

You’re welcome. I love you. Don’t leave me.

“You can’t move to Ohio,” he said softly, pleading now. “Dolly needs you. I need you.”

“We’re a mess, Cash.” Jonte shook her head.

“But we don’t have to be.”

She bit down on her lip and let out a breath. “Even before anything happened, we were so hot and cold – remember in your truck that day after we visited Tanner?”

“That was all my fault. Tanner was teasing me about being attracted to you and I got pissed off.”

“And then later when we went apartment hunting, you got so pushy.”

“You seriously couldn’t have lived in any of those places,” Cash said, fondly remembering that day. He would do it all again. In a heartbeat. No question. “We were destined to fail that day. It was a setup.”

“What?”

“Dolly and Tanner sent us off on a crazy mission impossible. They hand-picked those damn apartments knowing they were utterly uninhabitable.”

Jonte balled up her fist and smacked it down hard on the counter. “Those two little shits! Did you know?”

“Me? No.” Cash held his hands up in the air, surrender-style and shook his head. “That was all Dolly. She only confessed when she found out about you and Seb.”

“This is exactly why I need to move to Ohio. In Ohio there are no meddling twin sisters and no sometimes-psychic Nannies.”

And no me
. Shit. She sure seemed damn determined to move, despite everything he’d said and all the things he’d done to try to fix himself and the situation. The L-word hadn’t affected her, his grand gestures of the river rock and his song had been a bust, and now even his confession of the truth wasn’t succeeding in winning her back. What the hell else was there?

“Can I use your bathroom?” Jonte asked, bringing him back to reality.

“Yeah, sure. Use the one in the master bedroom over there. I haven’t put toilet paper, towels, and soap in the others yet.” He pointed to the door next to the fireplace in the living room.

“Thanks.”

* * *

J
onte quickly crossed the room
, desperate to get away from what was becoming a way too intense situation. She needed space to breathe and think and breathe. Just for a few minutes. He was wearing her down and she wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad thing. Hurriedly, she turned the knob, pushed open the bedroom door, and then let out a loud gasp.

The room was stunning, with the same gorgeous polished floor boards as in the main living areas, but painted in a muted light blue color. So pretty. But unequivocally, the pièce de résistance of the room was the enormous king-sized bed.
Their bed
. Well, obviously not
their
bed. She didn’t live here. But it was the fairy-tale bed they’d picked out that day when they’d gone bed shopping. The beautiful four-poster wooden bed with the padded leather insert on the headboard. Except this one had sheer cream netting wrapped and draped perfectly around the top railings, just like they’d talked about.

“You bought the fairy-tale bed?” She turned to look at Cash.

He smiled forlornly from across the room. “Yeah. I thought you’d like it.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you buy it to go in your house though?”

Cash tousled his hair and walked towards her. “Jonte, I bought a house in Franklin, an almost forty-minute drive away from my bar, because Tanner said that
you
were in love with Franklin. I named the damn property Camelot in homage to that stupid joke
you
made that first morning, and I bought that bed because I wanted you to have the whole friggin’ fairy tale.”

Wow. Just wow.

“You really are an all or nothing kind of guy, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, well I was a nothing kind of guy for so long I figured it was time I tried being the all type. But I gotta tell ya, it’s not really working out for me.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Me too.” He pulled her in for a hug and planted a kiss in her hair. “Hey, this closure thing might be the one thing we finally get right.”

Oh God. It was too much. He was too much.

Tears escaped Jonte’s eyes and she wiped them away. Her head was dizzy, both sad and happy, and struggling to find the answer that would put everything back together again.

“Don’t cry. It’s okay.” Cash cupped her face in his hands. “Maybe now we can actually be friends.”

Friends? After everything, he wanted to be friends?

“You don’t love me anymore?” she asked, searching his eyes.

“Of course I love you.” He kissed her forehead this time. “I think I probably loved you from that first moment you walked in to my bar. But I’m at that point, the acceptance stage, or whatever it is.”

“I’m scared, Cash.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s all out there now. We can’t hurt each other anymore.”

That was her out. She could walk away right now, move to Ohio, and never see Cash again. But if she did, she would create a whole new problem that would eat away at her. She’d come to Nashville chasing her dream because she refused to spend her whole life wondering what if, and if she left Nashville now, she would be forever left contemplating a different
what if
. Her racing heart and spinning head duked it out, going twenty-seven rounds in two seconds.

Run or jump?

Go or trust?

Leave or love?

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m scared because I love you too,” she blurted out before giving herself any more time to think about it. KO – heart wins.

“You love me?” Cash repeated, confusion and what looked like a dash of hope dancing across his face.

“I do.”

Cash grabbed her under the ass and lifted her, her legs and arms snaking around him, bringing them closer. Face to face, he rubbed his nose against hers, Eskimo kissing her. “Never again,” he whispered. “We can’t fuck this up again.”

“You can’t push me away.” She pulled away from his nose so she could look him in those beautiful green eyes.