Ten Thousand Words (20 page)

“Mr. Fairfax checked out last night, it seems,” the pretty woman told me as she looked into the computer system.

“What?” I breathed, feeling faint.

She nodded. “Yes. He’s been checked out.”

Panicking, I pulled out my phone and speed-dialed him. Straight to voice mail. Desperate, I racked my brain for what I should do.

Maybe he went to another hotel?

There was one person who I thought would know, and with my heart in my throat, I selected the number in my phone. Being a little after four here, it had to be ten in the morning back home.

“Trey Fawkes speaking.”

“H-hello, um…this is Xanthe Malcolm—”

“It is?” He sounded so happy about that.

“Yes, it is. I’m a friend of Oliver’s.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. Is…is he okay?” Now, he sounded alarmed.

“I believe so. I’m calling because…well, he’s not here. We were supposed to travel to Boston together by car—long story, not important. The thing is, last night, we had a falling out…” I swallowed hard. “Mr. Fawkes—”

“Please, call me Trey.”

“Trey. Okay. You might know me as Elaine Ford.”

“Oh. Oh!” And then, he said,
“Oh.”

“Exactly. I’m just calling to tell you that if he gets in touch with you, would you please tell him how very sorry I am? We’ve had a misunderstanding.”

“Won’t you be able to tell him in Boston?”

“I have a feeling that he won’t make it to Boston.”

“Oliver is a consummate professional, Xanthe. He wouldn’t back out of the contract. And the way he’s spoken of you—”

“It doesn’t matter. He no longer feels that way, and…” My breath caught in my chest, and I fought back my tears of heartache. “Please let him know that if he decides to honor the contract, he won’t have to directly work with me much after today.”

“Xanthe—”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Fawkes.” I hung up. I’d walked to the awaiting rental while on the phone, and right now, I wanted nothing more than to get in it and have a good hard cry. I was going to be hideous at the signing, but I couldn’t really care about that.

I made it to Boston in about five hours with a couple of restroom breaks and a serious amount of gas station coffees. At the first stop, I had given Oliver a call, but it had gone straight to voice mail once more. I’d left him a tearful message.

“Oliver, it’s me…” I’d said, sounding tearful. “I just wanted to tell you—to apologize really. I realize now that I should have been more specific, and maybe a small part of me was holding back from a full-on confession because…you scare the hell out of me. The way you made me feel, what you make me feel…I know you were upset for being chosen as Donovan and not as the photographer, and if I had known from the beginning, I’d never have asked. It’s just…you are everything I imagine the perfect man to be.

“I’ve never wanted so badly to believe that a man as incredible as you could be interested in me. I was insecure and foolish. It’s just…I think I was overwhelmed with everything that was already going on, and to start having these feelings on top of it, knowing you think what I write is mentally fucked up…well, I let that hold me back when I should’ve told you on our first date.

“I understand that you never want to see or hear from me again, so…I won’t be bothering you anymore. But just for the record…” My voice had cracked, and I’d choked around my words. My eyes had welled up, and tears had spilled over, splashing down into my lap. “I just wanted you to know…I felt it, too.”

Unable to bear the thought of him calling back, only to tell me to go fuck myself once more, I blocked his number. Because I didn’t trust myself not to call him again and again—in the hopes that he’d even pick up, only to tell me to go fuck myself anyway—I deleted his number for good measure.

My Donovan was gone.

A little after nine in the morning, I pulled into the convention center. Mandy and I had an hour to make sure everything was up and running.

“Where’s Ollie?” she asked when I arrived. “He said that he’d be riding with you. What’s going on?”

My heart sank even further. “He left,” I miserably told her. “It’s my fault, Mandy. This one is on me. He…he was so angry.”

“Are you for real? He can’t back out with no word like this. He’s under contract. Dreamstone—”

“Can you tell them he had an emergency or something and had to leave straight away? I mean, this signing isn’t like last night.”

“People are expecting to meet Donovan!” she shrieked. “How could he do this?”

“Because…” I told her the whole of it—our dinner date, everything I’d confessed to him. “I said I wrote those stories, that Elaine’s imaginings were mine…I thought he understood. And then we slept together…”

Mandy was twitching. Grabbing a bottle of water, she chugged it down, and I noticed she was sweating. Backing my choice for Donovan, she had vouched for me.

This really was all my fault.

“Okay,” she said, panting slightly. “Okay, I’m going to call Renee. I’m going to tell her that he got an emergency call from…”

“His family?”

“His family is well-known. The London branch might get wind and start sniffing around. I’ll call his business partner first, see what he advises, and we’ll take it from there. We’ve got”—she looked at her watch—“forty-five minutes.”

“I’ll make sure everything is set up,” I told her. “I’ve done it before. You do what you need to do.”

“If I get fired—”

“You’re not going to get fired,” I said. “You’re that firm’s greatest asset. Hell, you practically run that place.”

“If Dreamstone drops us, the rest of our clientele will follow suit!” she snapped.

“If that happens, you know you’ll always have me, Mandy. I’m yours to the bitter end.”

She grabbed me and kissed me before running off, her phone already out. I busied myself with getting the station set up with swag and books. Mandy had already set up the banners.

Seeing Ollie’s face on the books was grating my heart into fine little shreds. This was bad.

“It’s fixed. That Trey sounds sexy as all heck,” Mandy said as she walked up and inspected my swag-placement skills.

“He’s gay.”

“Yeah, he would be,” she replied.

All the other authors had their models with them, I noticed. So did Mandy.

“Look, if the only reason people are coming in to get my book is because of Oliver—”

“Shut it, Xan—er, Elaine. Whatever brings in the readers is an amazing thing.”

I shut it because Mandy knew her job. I’d done mine and written the damn books.

The event opened, and people started arriving in droves. A line formed before my table, and next to me, Mandy sat in what should have been Oliver’s seat with a clipboard and a sign-up sheet.

“What are you doing?” I hissed after handing back the first signed book.

“Where’s Donovan?” the person who I’d handed the book to asked.

“Oh, um—” I started to say.

“Ollie Fairfax had an emergency to tend to back home. He had to leave immediately after the convention last night, and he sends his regards and apologizes that he couldn’t be here for you all. If you hoped for some signed swag from him, please leave your name and address on this sheet, and he’ll make sure to send it personally.”

My jaw dropped.
Damn, Mandy is on fire.

More and more, my readers asked for the illustrious Ollie Fairfax, and Mandy warmly told every one of them the same thing.

However, over the course of a few hours, I was no longer just heartbroken. I’d become fucking irate. To hate me, to be so angry as to cut off our relationship and want to have no personal connection to me, I could understand. I kind of felt that way about myself. But to take it out on my readers, to break a binding contract over something personal…

Mandy was tireless in her graciousness, but I was slowly hardening against Oliver Fairfax. Trey might have believed Oliver would never back out on a contract, but he’d been wrong.

Bastard.
Fuck that douche bag.

My poor readers had been so excited to meet the man who was, in every conceivable way, the living image of their hero.
My
hero.

What a crock of shit. There’s a reason I dreamed Donovan up—because he doesn’t fucking exist!

Hours later, Mandy and I were packing up the remaining swag. I’d be taking it with me on the drive.

“Are you sure you don’t just want to fly back with me? You look exhausted.”

I was, but I shook my head. “I’ve got somewhere to be. I’ll be back in New York sometime tonight. I can call you when I get in.”

“All right. If it makes you feel better, Dreamstone hasn’t dropped him. They loved him to bits. When I get in touch with him, I’ll let him know. I’m so sorry it went down the way it did between you two.”

I shrugged. “Shit happens.”

She sighed. “Yeah, it does.”

Thirty minutes after leaving the convention, I pulled into the parking lot of the cemetery. It was already growing dark, but I didn’t mind. I’d stopped and picked up a couple of bouquets. Pulling out my phone, I went through my Contacts until I landed on my father’s number.

“Hey, honey.”

“Hi, Dad. I’m at the cemetery and thought I’d give you a call. You have a few minutes?”

“Of course. How was the convention?”

“Great. A lot of people showed up…” I ended up telling him everything about the shit with Ollie by the time I made it to their graves.

Elaine Malcolm. Hanna Ford.

“Do you have to go straight home? You could always come to Oxford for a visit. Ellen would understand.”

She would.

“I’d really like that,” I told him. “I’ll change my flight when I get back to the hotel.”

“Okay, sweetheart. I’ll see you soon then. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Stowing my phone in my pocket, I bent down and placed the flowers against their headstones. I hadn’t brought anything for my grandfather. I’d never met him. He had died long before I was ever born.

“I haven’t been here since we left the States. A lot has happened.” I sniffled. “I’ve become an author, and I attended a huge…” I stopped.

If there was an afterlife and they were really around in some form, then they knew.

Still, I told them, “I miss you, and I love you. I think about you both every damn day. I’ve got some shit to work through in my life right now. If you’re truly with me, please help me to be strong.”

Peace and quiet seeped into me. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the cemetery was now dark. I wasn’t creeped out or anything. I wrote about the things that went bump in the night. And love. And amazing sex. But mostly about horror.

Nothing in the graveyard was scary enough to compare to the strangeness that I had in my head.

Ollie

The convention had ended at six in the evening, and I’d made it to the airport in Newark by eight. With booking my flight, checking my luggage, and making it through security, I’d barely made it to the gate by nine thirty. I was in for a nine-hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany, and a three-hour stopover until my connection to Amsterdam.

My anger was absolute. Within my chest was an unfathomable boiling fury. It’d fueled me to just get up and get the fuck out, leave all of it behind. Completely justified that I had done the right thing in leaving the woman who had manipulated me into feeling something for her, I was righteous with it.