Page 84 of I Need You Tonight
I staggered back at this revelation. So that was why his family had turned their backs on him. And why Mason hadn’t wanted me to tell the band about his win yesterday. Kirk wasn’t the one with a gambling addiction. It was Mason.
He’d lied to me, like my father had lied to my mother.
“We’re not going to cut you out of our lives like your parents did,” Nolan said, leaning a hip against the blackjack table. “We all care about you. We’re your brothers, which is why we need you to stop this.”
“I’m fine,” Mason huffed. “You don’t have to baby me.”
Jared parked his hand on Mason’s shoulder. “I know we don’t. And we’re not. We just don’t want you going down that road again. We can’t afford to lose you. You’re important to the band.”
The way they were speaking to him, you’d have thought Nolan and Jared were trying to talk him out of jumping off a bridge. But given where my father had eventually ended up due to his gambling addiction, maybe that interpretation wasn’t so far off.
“Are you still in?” the dealer asked.
Mason hesitated for a moment, then glanced over at me. He nodded, but I had no idea whom he was nodding to—the dealer, his bandmates, or me with my unspoken questions.
He stood up, removed his few remaining chips from the table, and handed them to Jared. “Cash them for me.”
Jared gave him a chin nod and walked to the cashier while Nolan and Mason headed for the elevator. Nolan’s hand was resting on Mason’s shoulder, as if the lead singer was worried Mason would make a break for it and head back to the blackjack table.
And I just stood there, lost, broken on the inside, and uncertain what to do. I loved him, but my love wouldn’t be enough to help him. He needed to do it himself. I couldn’t afford to be pulled down the way my mother had been with my father. That was why I had my list. It was to save me from following in her footsteps.
Instead of returning to our hotel room, I hurried to the exit, my mind numb with everything I’d just witnessed. Outside, the icy wind bit my face and hands, and chewed its way through my coat. I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready to face Mason, at least not until I knew what to do.
I wandered along the beach for a long time before I dropped onto the frozen sand and hugged my knees to my chest. At some point I’d started crying, and my face stung from the salty tears freezing on my face.
The frigid wind did its best to turn my heart to ice, numbing it against further pain. A shiver overcame my body, but I couldn’t find the strength to get up and return to the hotel. I needed to be on the beach, a place where I felt oddly at home. Not that the beaches in Southern California ever got this cold.
I’d been staring out at the stormy ocean for who knows how long when Nolan plunked himself down next to me. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked. His tone was casual, but there was no denying the strained emotions underneath the words.
I wiped away the remnants of the frozen tears from my cheeks. “Maybe a little,” I said through chattering teeth, but made no move to get up.
Nolan removed his jacket and attempted to wrap it around my shoulders. I shook my head and shrugged the jacket off. He needed it as much as I did, and it was my fault I was out here instead of back inside the warm hotel.
“He didn’t tell you about his past gambling addiction, did he?” Nolan asked.
I laughed, the sound dry and brittle. “No, but I told him all about how my father’s gambling addiction destroyed my family.” He had known about it well before things had progressed from having fun to falling in love. He’d had plenty of time to tell me the truth before deeper emotions became involved.
“I’m sorry,” Nolan said. “None of us knew about that, otherwise we would have been more honest with you. But we thought he had gotten past his addiction. Or maybe we just hoped he had.”
I gave him a faint smile. “I know.”
Nolan was quiet for a couple of minutes as we watched the waves crash against the beach. “You’re leaving us, aren’t you?” he eventually said.
“This job wasn’t permanent. I’m just leaving a few weeks earlier than planned.”
“When?”
“Today.” My heart and stomach hurt at my saying that. Gambling addiction or not, leaving Mason would be hard. “I love him. I really do. But I’m not sure if my love will be enough.”
Nolan didn’t try to convince me to stay and finish the job I’d been hired to do, and for that I was grateful.
“I’ll take care of the Christmas contest,” I added, “but that I can do at home.” There were a few other marketing tasks I had taken on, but those could easily be completed at home too. “I wish I could stay, but I can’t. Mason and I live two very different lives. Heck, even before I knew about the gambling addiction, I had no idea what would happen between us once I returned home.”
“You guys never talked about it?”
I let out a strangled laugh. Apparently there was a lot we hadn’t talked about. “It never came up. He might love me, but music is his life.”
I reminded myself that after my last boyfriend had moved away, my feelings for him had faded with time. But an inner voice pointed out that what I felt for Mason was nothing like the love I thought I’d had for my ex-boyfriend. Not even close.
