Page 19 of Ever With Me

Brooks clenched his jaw, resisting the urge to tell her to fuck off.

“I’m not coming to LA right now,” he said at last in a voice that sounded much calmer than he felt. “Or following Darren’s ridiculous idea. I’ll get my new assistant to send you a PR plan by the end of the week. Until then, I’ll be lying low.”

“One week is too long.”

“Tough. I need time to come up with a solid plan.”

He hung up, his head pounding.

Ava wouldn’t call back right away. Despite her no-nonsense, hard-ass approach, they’d had a good working relationship for years. He’d only signed on with the label again recently because of that. But he didn’t want to think about Ava or the label right now.

He had no idea what the hell he was going to do.

First things first, find Cormac.

He headed back to the cabin. Cormac hadn’t mentioned in his texts that he was leaving the cabin, so maybe he’d just gone out?

That didn’t explain the state of the cabin, but who was he to judge?

This time when he got to the cabin, rather than going to the front door, he banged on a few windows on the way to the back again.

A click,followed by a soft metallic slidingwhooshsounded as Brooks approached the back door.

Cormac stepped out onto the patio, a look of bewilderment on his face. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Thank God.

“I knocked a few times on the door.” He scrambled up from the ground. “But you didn’t seem to hear me.”

Cormac blinked at him. “Sorry, the place is an absolute wreck. I ended up having to rough it in an old sleeping bag I found in the closet and was curled up inside it. You must have been out here for hours. Why didn’t you call?”

“No service.” He didn’t bother correcting Cormac’s ideas about how long he’d been here because that would mean an explanation about the accident and lots more he didn’t feel like getting into. “Where’s your car?”

“Shed.” Cormac grimaced, his dark brown eyes lively. “Yeah, I should have warned you about service and the smallness of things around here. Why do you think I wanted to get the hell out of this town as a kid?”

“I’m seeing that.”

“So it turns out that my parents had some issues with carpenter bees this past summer, and no one told me about it—but I don’t think we can stay here. I slept here so you wouldn’t show up and think I’d bailed on you, but we may need to find another place. Unless you really feel like roughing it.”

As Brooks squinted at him, some early morning sun poked through the treetops and hit him square in the eye.At least someone still tolerates me. Understands me.

But, no, he didn’t feel like roughing it.

After the night he’d had and Ava’s phone call, the sound of a sleeping bag and a wrecked cabin was the last thing he wanted. Hell, he’d worked too hard in life to deal with that anymore. He’d never really been the type to throw his money around, but maybe it was time for him to start living the way people thought he did.

Embrace the asshole persona everyone had boxed him into.

He grinned, a carefree feeling curling through him. “Actually, I have another idea.”

7

MADDIE

“This is bad.So bad. I can’t believe you didn’t call me immediately,” Naomi said from behind her fingers, which still covered her mouth.

“I don’t know. It looks like she jumped right on taking care of the bigger problems.” Pops squeezed Maddie on the shoulder gently. “Did Garrett say how long it’ll be before the window can be replaced?”

“A month at least. Maybe more. He says it’s gotta be custom ordered.”

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