The Vixen and the Vet (26 page)

“Please, Asher,” she whispered.

“How long?” he demanded, his eyes flashing open.

Her voice broke when she answered. “Since the grove.”

“Wow,” he gasped, looking away from her. “The first night we kissed. The first night we made out.” He breathed out, and it was a harsh and labored sound. “What a vixen. You really threw yourself into the role of seductress.”

“No, it’s
not
like that. There was no role. Maddox
knew
I was falling for you. He knew it, and that’s the story he wanted. And I just …”

“…
screwed the cripple. For a story. To save your career.”

“Stop it! No!” she said, with surprising conviction. She swiped at her eyes. “How I feel about you is real. None of it was an act, and I was uncomfortable writing our story for a
newspaper, so I thought if I used pseudonyms it would protect us but still deliver the story. But they must have wanted it to feel more genuine. If I’d known … Asher, I never would have sent the story if I’d known they’d use our real names.”

“Do you think that’s what matters to me?
The use of my name
? Savannah, what happened to me in Afghanistan? That was terrible, but it wasn’t a secret, and it wasn’t sacred.
You
were sacred to me.
We
were sacred. What we were building. What we had.” He swallowed the massive lump in his throat, running his hand through his hair. He looked into the face of the woman he loved, the woman he’d started today wanting to marry, and his stomach turned as he realized that they were in such different places. “What bothers me is that you took the most meaningful, most amazing moments of my life and splashed them across the Lifestyles section of a newspaper for anyone to read. You took words that we said to each other, our feelings, our most personal, intimate moments, and you
used
them. For entertainment. To get your precious career back.

“Whether you started off meaning to or not, you ended up using us. You didn’t just tell some sweet, anonymous story. You told
our
story, and without my permission. You used specific details that defined who we were to each other. How I told you I was falling in love with you in bed? That was personal. Really personal. It is
not
okay that you shared that. And it makes me wonder what value you put on us. Because for me, what we had was everything. It was paradise. It was forever. And for you … it was just a scoop.” He paused, his chest heaving. He was exhausted and dizzy, and he wanted to curl up on his bed and cry like a baby. “Did
any
of it matter to you?
Really
matter?”

She reached for him, but he pulled his arm off the table and leaned back in his chair.

“It
all
mattered to me.
You
matter to me more than anything, Asher.”

“No. No, you don’t get to say that.” He stood up from the table and looked away from her because the sight of her was almost unbearable. “That’s a lie. Clearly I
don’t
matter to you more than anything because you turned in a story about us even though you just said it made you uncomfortable. You knew what you were risking, but your career trumps all.”

“It doesn’t, Asher. It did, but it doesn’t now.”

“Even if I believed that, it’s a little late now, don’t you think? For an attack of conscience?”

“Don’t say that. Please don’t say it’s too late. I already told Maddox I don’t want the damned job. I told him I could
never
work for him after what he did.”

“That’s a shame. You worked hard for it.”

He heard the icy tone in his voice, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t know what to believe. He wanted to believe her, but it didn’t look good from where he was standing. She’d used them to put her career back together, not to mention the scorching embarrassment of the article itself. There were parts of the love story that had touched him, or would have, if it hadn’t been about him. But it
was
about him, and the way he was portrayed was beyond humiliating.

“Asher,” she sobbed, standing up to reach for him, then lowering her hands when he backed away.

“Savannah, I have no idea what’s true and what’s not. Things between us happened really fast, but I believed that it was because we felt so much and we just opened and followed our hearts. But I have to wonder now if you were motivated by delivering the article they wanted. I have to wonder if your feelings were fabricated for the sake of a good story. The beautiful things we said to each other are all out of context and cheapened in that article, splayed out like a whore who tripped on the pavement.”

Tears covered her face as she stepped forward and pressed her palms flat against his chest. “I’m so sorry for how this happened. I’m so sorry I ever wrote it. I’m so sorry I trusted them not to betray us.”

He gulped, his body jolted by the touch of her hands, combined with the inaccuracy of her words. “
You
betrayed us when you sent that story to them, Savannah, when you exposed us to that sort of public inspection.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“But you did, baby. You did.”

“Asher, please tell me you still love me. Please tell me you’re just angry and it’s not too late for us.”

His breath hitched, and he groaned from the pain her words caused him. He took two deep breaths and clenched his jaw as he peeled her hands away before they could make him weak. His voice shook and rasped from the effort it took to put distance between them because he was steel to her magnet, and all he wanted was to be with her, even if it was wrong.

“This is killing me right now, Savannah. I barely had the strength to say good-bye before this happened. I can’t handle this right now. I have to leave for Maryland in the morning. I have an operation on Tuesday. I can’t do this anymore right now.”

“Please tell me this isn’t over.” Tears fell down her face in streams. “I made a mistake. Such a big mistake. I love you so much.”

“I think you love yourself more.” The words were out before he could stop them, before he could evaluate if they were even true. But he was so angry, he leaned into them and felt surrender course through his body like a balm against his anger and shock and sadness. His voice was bitter and soft. “You got your story. You’re back in the game.”

“Ash—”

“But now I think you should leave.”

He turned his back to her, heading toward the kitchen door.

She wept in heart-wrenching sobs behind him. “Oh my God, Asher,
please
don’t do this.”

“
I
didn’t do anything,” he said in a broken voice. When he turned to look at her, the morning sun filtering through the kitchen window made her so beautiful he couldn’t bear it, so he looked away from her. “Except make the mistake of actually falling in love with you while you were”—he shrugged—“giving an Academy Award–winning performance to save your career.”

She gasped, holding her breath for a moment like it hurt to breathe. He ordered every cell in his body not to reach for her, and they obeyed, but it cost him, and he ached from the deprivation. He turned to walk through the door, and her voice stopped him.

“I know you’re angry, Asher, but it wasn’t an act. None of it was an act,” she said, her voice thick with tears and regret as she spoke to his back. “I made a mistake. I just made a mistake.”

Tears burned his eyes as he walked through the door, letting it slam shut behind him.

The first time you realize he’s your home

Over the next week Savannah learned something terrible.

She learned that when your heart is broken, the rest of your body stops working too.

Her eyes, which started every day watering, looked fruitlessly for the one face that could relieve her pain and soothe her swollen, burning eyes. Her ears tuned out every sound around her, recalling only the timbre of his beloved voice. Her fingers reached into the void beside her in the dark of night, seeking the warm skin of his body. And no matter the depth or volume of the air she breathed, she couldn’t assuage the terrible tightness in her lungs that was a constant reminder of her loss.

Her regret was unyielding.

And her heart, which had never been broken before, felt empty, as though something beautiful had once made its home there, but vacated without notice or permission. And the beauty left behind only an essence, sharp and elusive, like a deeply imbedded splinter that ached constantly as it reminded her:

I lost him.

Scarlet picked her up from his house after their fight, and Savannah had called and texted Asher several times since, but his house phone was off the hook indefinitely and he didn’t pick up his cell phone or return her messages. By Tuesday she stopped trying, as she didn’t want to distract him from his surgery, but by Wednesday her resistance dissolved, and she called again to tell him how much she loved him and that she was thinking of him. She developed a compulsion for checking her phone, which invariably led to unceasing tears because, while her phone was inundated with messages from various news shows looking for interviews and editors looking for scoops to further exploit her relationship with Asher, there were never any messages from
him
. By the weekend, she had had enough. She threw the phone in the toilet and hadn’t seen it since.

Killing her phone had the benefit of
mostly
cutting her off from the world, but when the house phone rang, her heart still leaped with hope that it was Asher … and then bled some more when it wasn’t.

Twice she got into her car to drive to Maryland and demand that he listen to her and give her another chance to explain. Though she wanted badly to be with him, for him to have her love and support as he underwent painful procedures, she stopped herself both times, knowing she was
probably the last person he’d want to see, the last person from whom he could find comfort. He didn’t even believe that what they’d had was real.

Sometimes she would feel angry at him. Hadn’t he said he loved her? Hadn’t he promised that he belonged to her just as certainly as she belonged to him? How could something like a newspaper article make him turn his back on his feelings for her so completely? But then she’d review the article in her head—the way it read, the way it looked—and she understood why he’d asked her to leave. She could blame Maddox
McNabb and the
Times
until she was blue in the face, but if she hadn’t written and sent the article, if she’d placed a higher value on Asher than on her career, none of this would have happened. It was her fault her life was now separate from his.

Though Asher hadn’t actually said the words “It’s over,” the anger and betrayal in his eyes as he asked her to leave his house made it feel like he was also asking her to leave his
life
too. And without him, it was as though the anchor of her life had been pulled up and she’d been set adrift on a cold and dark ocean. With regret as huge and sweeping as that cold sea, she knew that she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. In trying to even the score with Patrick Monroe and the
Sentinel
, she’d risked Asher, the love of her life. And she’d lost. She’d catastrophically lost. And it was unbearable.

I
ronically, the career for which she’d risked everything meant nothing to her. In the days after the article was printed, she turned down the job at the
Phoenix Times
two or three times, and if she still had her phone, she’d be turning down offers from other newspapers every day as well. She never wanted to write another newspaper article for as long as she lived.

Ha. If you could even call her life
living
.

Savannah felt the world moving around her—Scarlet leaving for work in the morning, her mother baking goodies for the local tea shop, her father occasionally peeking into her room to remind her of the other fish in the sea—but her deep regret set her apart from the rest of humanity. She lost interest in everything around her except for one thing on which she worked obsessively: recording every detail of her time with Asher.

After the dinner she didn’t eat each evening, she climbed the stairs back to the bed she’d left just hours before, closed her eyes, and remembered the details of each specific day she’d spent with Asher, starting from the very beginning, when she saw the flash of his eyes in the mirror. She remembered every touch, every look, every word spoken between them, and then she’d re-create the days on the page, painstakingly recording every detail as accurately as possible until her eyes burned and dawn lit the skies outside her window. Because for Savannah, reliving the days they’d spent together was the only bearable way to live through the days that they were now apart.

The future was too bleak without him, so she tried desperately to hang on to the past, to ignore the eventuality that she would run out of precious days to remember and drift into the dark void of a long life without Asher Lee.

***

“Wake up,
Vanna.”

“Go away, Scarlet,” she mumbled into her pillow.

“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. On a Monday. You have to get up. We’re going for a walk.”

“No. Not
gonna.”

“This whole poor-me pity party is getting a little tired,
Vanna. I know you’re hurtin’, but you need to pull up your big-girl panties and get ahold of yourself. For Lord’s sake, I’m getting married in six days.”

That jolted her out of sleep, which, Savannah suspected, was its intention. “Oh, I’m so sorry my broken heart is interfering with your wedding.”

“No, you’re not. You’re wallowing. And we’re still going for a walk.” Scarlet threw some sweats and a T-shirt at her sister’s head.

Savannah sat up groggily. “You’re the devil.”

“I know you don’t mean that, my sweet sister.”

“The hell I don’t.” She pulled the T-shirt on over a sports bra she’d been wearing for two days straight.

“You don’t. I know how much you miss Asher,” added Scarlet softly, and Savannah froze for a moment, suppressing the sob that threatened to break from her throat just from the mention of his name.

Scarlet held out a pair of sneakers. “Come on now. Put these on. I want to talk to you.”

Scarlet led the way downstairs, and Savannah stopped at the bottom step to find her mother looking up at her worriedly.

“Off for a walk, button?”
“Scarlet’s insisting.”

“It’s good for her, Mama.”

Judy nodded at Scarlet before turning her glance back to Savannah. “It’s been over a week, honey. Haven’t you—”

“Haven’t I
what
? Let go? Gotten over it?” Savannah’s voice was full of misery and fury. “I love him, Mama. He’s
everything
to me. I’m not letting go of him. I’m not going to just get over it.”

“That’s not what I was going to say, although now that you’ve mentioned it, this looks a heap more like
givin’ up than holdin’ on.” Her mother palmed her hot cheek gently. “I was going to say, ‘Haven’t you felt sorry for yourself long enough? Don’t you think it’s time to figure out how to get him back?’”

Savannah sucked in a breath.
Get him back.
The words were hopeful and tantalizing, and her mother had used them as if they were possible. As if Savannah hadn’t betrayed him, exposed him, humiliated him, lied to him by omission, and devalued their relationship so much that she’d exploited it to save her drowning career. Get him back? He’d have to forgive her first, and that didn’t seem very likely.

Still, she couldn’t lie to her mother. A tear trickled down her cheek, over her mother’s hand.

“Go with Scarlet, button. Listen to what she has to say.”

Judy turned and headed back to the kitchen, the smell of something lemony and sweet wafting into the hallway, and for the first time in more than a week, Savannah’s mouth watered.

Scarlet took her arm, leading her sister through the front door, down the porch steps, between the once-crimson azaleas that flanked the picket gate, and out to the sidewalk.

Get him back.
Savannah’s heart leaped hopefully, repeating the words in a loop, wondering if it was possible. How could she fix everything she’d done wrong? How could she convince him that despite the mess she’d made of everything, she loved him more than her career, more than anything else in the world? She thought of the flinty anger in his eyes as he’d asked her to leave, and her heart clutched.

“I did something,” blurted Scarlet, tightening her grip on Savannah’s arm as they neared the end of the block.

“What? What did you do?”

“I found your phone in the toilet, and, well, I read that if you put a wet phone in a bowl of rice for a while sometimes it will fix itself.”

“Did it work?”

“It did.”

Savannah’s heart sped up, and she stopped walking, one question crowding out every other thought in her head. “Has Asher—”

“No. No, honey,” said Scarlet, shaking her head with sympathy. “No. I didn’t mean to get your hopes up. There wasn’t any message waiting from him.” She waited a beat, then started again with a brighter tone. “But a whole bunch of other folks want to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone else, Scarlet! That’s how I got into this whole mess! There is only
one
person I want to talk to!”

“Well, he doesn’t much want to talk to you, now, does he?”

“Screw you!”

Scarlet clasped Savannah’s arm and marched her down the hill to their elementary school playground. “Don’t you
dare
speak to me like that, Savannah Calhoun Carmichael. I don’t care how much your heart’s been broken.” She took a seat on one of the swings and looked up at her older sister, brooking no argument. “Sit. Swing. Listen.”

Savannah was taken so off guard by the command that she complied, sitting down, then pushing off gingerly to set her swing in motion.

“Have you gotten me a wedding gift yet?” Scarlet asked.

Savannah’s shoulders slumped. No, she hadn’t, and she hated that she’d allowed herself to become so selfish, so consumed with guilt and sadness and regret that it hadn’t even crossed her mind.

“I’m sorry, Scarlet. I’m a mess.”

“I’ll take that as a no,” said Scarlet primly. “For the record? You are, hands down, the
worst
maid of honor I have ever seen, heard about, read about, or encountered in my entire life. I know my wedding isn’t at the top of your list, but you’re my sister, and I know you’re sad about Asher, but you did this to yourself, and you’re not doing a danged thing to make it right or get him back.” She huffed once, angrily, then she seemed to center herself, pulling back from her rant. “Listen, there’s only one thing I want from you. So don’t bother with a gift. Just give me what I ask for.”

“What is it?”

“Say you’ll
do
it first.”

“Fine. Whatever you want.”

“I want you to call Todd Severington at True Love Publishing. He’s an editor. He’s expecting your call, and I want you to listen to what he has to say. That’ll be your wedding gift to me. Making that call.”

“A romance editor?” She tried to keep her voice calm. “Have you lost your mind?”

“It’s possible Trent thinks so when I’m going off on bouquets and boutonnieres, but in general? No, I’m quite sane.”

“No, you’re not. You have lost your ever-
lovin’ mind if you think I’m going to call some romance editor, Katie Scarlet Carmichael.”

“Oh, good Lord, you are trying!” Scarlet took hold of the chain on Savannah’s swing and yanked it hard until it stopped. “You are depressed and despondent. You barely eat. You barely bathe. You don’t do anything but tap on your keyboard all night long keeping me and Mama and Daddy awake. You
’ve made a
royal mess
of your
life, and I am trying to
help
you, you mule of a big sister. I told you that you couldn’t ride two horses with one ass, but did you listen to me? No, you did not. Now you will. You
will
talk to Todd Severington, and you
will
listen to what he has to say. Do you hear me?”

Savannah wondered if it was possible for someone’s face to actually get any redder. She was afraid Scarlet was about to burst something if she didn’t agree. “O-Okay. Fine. I’ll listen to what he has to say.”

With that, Scarlet smiled and fished Savannah’s phone out of the back pocket of her floral capris. “Right here, right now.” She tapped the keyboard and handed it over.