Oh God, kill me now.
I looked over at him, and that amazingly warm light that had shone from his eyes since we introduced ourselves on the plane was gone. Instead, a cold, flat look of disdain blasted me, chilling me to my soul.
Renee tugged me toward the table. I wanted to rip out of her grip and run to him, throw my arms around him, and beg him to please, please see that I had truly thought he knew I was Elaine, that I’d never have considered being in a relationship with him without telling him something so important. In desperation, I tried to recall every detail of the conversation last night, and although I hadn’t said, I’m Elaine H. Ford, specifically, I had told him.
Cold and clammy, I tried to breathe around the ache slowly bleeding from my chest to my stomach and behind my eyes. I couldn’t cry now.
“Look!” cried Renee, reaching for something on the table.
Haunted Bonds.
I might just cry after all. My precious baby, my brainchild, was…in hardcover. Oliver Fairfax appeared hard, determined, angry, and beautiful on it, as if he’d been plucked straight from my imagination and dropped onto the front of the book.
“We made sure to save this one for you,” Renee told me.
My dry throat was sore as I tried to swallow around the lump that had formed.
“It’s the very first printed hardcover copy, and it’s yours.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Looking at it…I wished my mother were here to see it, to see me right now, holding this. I had created a story worth sharing with the world. The encouragement she had given me as a child, the protection her name had offered as I wrote through the darkest moments of my life…it was all right here, in this hardcover copy. My fingers clasped tightly around the rigid edges before I brought the volume to my chest, against my pounding heart.
For a split moment, it really was okay. No matter what happened from here on out…it would be all right. Elaine and Hanna were with me, watching over me. My mom and grandma had never left me. They were in my heart, giving me the courage to do what I had to do.
Elaine Hanna Ford was a part of me.
Feeling Ollie’s presence behind me, I knew he didn’t understand that. To him, I was no longer Xanthe. This damaged me deep down because, with him, Xanthe was all I had been. He no longer saw me as me…but I would let myself be crushed later. For now, I had to pull Elaine up to the surface and protect the little bit of Xanthe who had reached for the sun and gotten burned.
Ollie
Xanthe is Elaine. Holy fucking shit…Xanthe is Elaine!
Stunned didn’t adequately describe what I had felt when that bit of information was tossed my way. All this time, I had thought Xanthe was just a quirky, wonderful weirdo indie author who had gotten recognized for some hidden talent behind those hipster glasses.
Xanthe is Elaine.
A vision dressed as a ’40s pinup, Xanthe had transformed once more. My God, she was the most seductive female I’d ever come across, and my arousal shot sky-high.
She had been nervous but so brave as she had given me my smile, striking a pose as she’d asked me to take her picture.
My heart hadn’t been earned; it had been stolen.
Xanthe is Elaine!
Xanthe was the one who’d requested that I be cast as Donovan. Her Donovan. Not a man she loved in a story. A man she had created herself. She’d been the one who had her PA, Mandy, ask Trey to pimp out FairFawkes’s photographer. Dropping the Dreamstone name, Trey had thrown me to the wolves.
From the moment Xanthe and I had met, this woman had lied to me.
Who the fuck is this person?
Beautiful and sleek, she’d walked up to her station to paw at a book, her book. Renee had laid the volume in Elaine’s slightly shaking hands, her unpainted fingertips clenching around it.
“Thank you,” she’d whispered.
Then, it’d hit me. Really fucking hard. With a creeping sense of horror, I realized she hadn’t been about to confess her love for me this morning.
Fuck, I’d all but told her I was falling in love with her, and she…she was just Elaine H. fucking Ford!
“Showtime, people!” cried Renee.
Everyone took their places behind their respective stations. Mandy flitted around, checking over the perfect piles of swag. I sat down next to Elaine, trying desperately to ignore how much she smelled like Xanthe.
“Oliver…” she whispered my name.
I wanted nothing more than to congratulate her for fooling me so thoroughly.
Gabriella, Bianca, Whitney—as full of themselves as they could be, at least they were transparent. Xanthe had had me in knots from the get-go, and I’d had to dig deep to find out who she was. And I hadn’t even been able to do that. Instead, I had dug out an entirely different woman.
“Not here, Elaine,” I told her.
She sucked in a sharp breath but left it alone.
For the next four hours, I played my part—signing posters, taking photos with Elaine’s readers, mingling and flirting with those who enjoyed that sort of shit. I took some photos myself, and some of them were of Elaine meeting and greeting her fans. I had to admit, she was gracious, taking the time to speak with each of them and thank them for reading her books.
Within me though, I was destroyed, gutted. I felt an anger so blistering, it charred its way into the deepest parts of me. I was twisted up inside with it, sick that I had lost my heart to such a manipulative person. All this time, I had waited for the right one to reveal herself, and she was just so fucking wrong herself.
This whole week had been a lie.
When the convention concluded, I grabbed my camera bag and got the hell out of there, making my way toward the elevator.
“Oliver, wait!” Elaine called out.
For whatever reason, I stopped. Her heels clicked madly on the tiled floor, and I was incensed to find myself still physically drawn to this woman.
“What?” I barked.
She came up to me as I stood by the elevator. “I’m sorry. I truly thought you knew—”
“Bullshit!” I half-shouted.
People started to take an interest in us. The elevator door opened. Grabbing her arm, I thrust her inside, ready to unleash unholy hell on her, but an older couple joined us, so I seethed until we made it to the tenth floor. Then, I marched her to room 1013.
With shaky fingers, she passed the key through the slot. Once inside, she turned to me, her eyes pleading with me to understand. But I didn’t. I was coursing with a fury previously unknown to me.
“This is all just a huge misunderstanding, Oliver,” she said quickly. “I truly believed you understood me last night, and I’m so, so sorry—”
“Who the fuck are you?” I raged.
“I’m bloody Xanthe Malcolm!” she shouted back. “That’s who I’ve always been! Elaine is my fucking pen name; it’s not a bloody alter ego! I fucking told you so last night. I told you things about me that hardly anyone else knows. I’m just Xanthe.”
“I don’t even know who the fuck that is!” I shouted. “This whole fucking time, you knew who I was, what I was here for, and you played me for a fucking fool! You used me!”
“The fuck I did!” she yelled. “To my face, you berated a woman, called her fucking crazy, when you had no idea who she was! If you had known Elaine was me, would you have even sat next to me and spoken to a person you considered mentally unhinged?”