Unstoppable (Fierce) (18 page)

She linked her arm in mine and led me up to the three story brick home with a long porch that led to a dark red door.

We walked into the warm, welcoming
house with rich paneled walls and a majestic stone fireplace in the living room. Everything was tidy and refined, just like I expected it would be.

“Mama!”
Shelby called out as she pulled me through the specious room.

Sherry Goddard wiped her hands on the frilly apron she wore over her sweater and jeans. “Jordi!” she greeted as she approached. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

We had met once before, after Shelby had been eliminated. She had been the picture of polite Southern hospitality then and she was now, as she gave me a brilliant white smile. I tried to shake her hand but she wasn’t having it. She pulled me into a hug.

“How was your flight?”

“Fine,” I answered.

She touched my back gently.
“Any turbulence? I know you’ve been having some back trouble. Flying always gets me wrenched out of alignment.”

“Mama used to ride horses,” Shelby filled in. “She got sidelined by a bad back about ten years ago.”

“There’s no pain quite like it, is there? Except maybe childbirth, but you’re way too young to know about that!” She laughed.

“There was a little turbulence,” I said. “But it’s fine.”

“Wonderful. Come on in here, I’ve fixed you some lunch.”

Shelby fell into place beside me as we walked through the arched doorway toward the large, open kitchen. “Mama is the best cook.
She’s been in the kitchen all morning.”

Sherry waved her hand. “It’s nothing.”

We walked to a table overflowing with country goodies, from fried catfish to homemade biscuits. “Doesn’t look like nothing,” I said. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”

“Nonsense.
Our Shelby has done nothing but sing your praises since she met you last year. It’s like you’re part of the family.”

Great
, I thought.
Guilt in tandem
.

“It looks wonderful,” I told her as I took a seat at the large oak table. She poured me a glass of sweet tea.

It tasted even more wonderful than it looked. It made me wonder, again, how Shelby could be so skinny, especially since she put away just as much food as I did.

I could only pray for her genes.

Sherry was much more genteel. She had one filet of fish and a spoonful of broccoli almondine. When it came to the sky high lemon meringue pie, she didn’t even have one bite at all. But Shelby and I were reduced to giggles when we both noticed the white tips of our noses as we dug in.

“This was wonderful,” I said as I leaned back in the chair, stuffed to the gills. “Let me do the dishes, at least.”

“No, no, no,” Sherry said. “You’re our guest. I’m sure you’re tired after your long flight. Just go get settled in and I’ll take care of all this.” She turned to Shelby. “Show her to her room, Shelby.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Shelby answered dutifully before she linked her arm with mine to lead me up the stairs. At the end of the hall, in the guest room across from Shelby’s childhood room, was an ornate wood canopy bed covered in cheerful yellow eyelet, with throw pillows in the shape of daisies.
Across the room was an enormous bay window that looked over their lush, green backyard complete with a kidney-shaped pool.

“Wow, this is really nice,” I said.

“Thanks!” she said as she hopped up on the bed.

“Thanks for letting me stay here with you. It’s a lot homier than a hotel room. Kind of nice after
all the city hopping we’ve done.”

“You’re helping me,” she insisted. “I’m the baby so when I’m home
all the attention is focused on me.”

“Must be nice,” I mumbled, thinking of how differently I had grown up.

“It’s good for about two days, and then I’m looking for an escape route. That’s why Los Angeles was such a relief, despite all the stress and the performing. The tour too,” she added. “After I came back, after I was eliminated, Mama and Daddy were very hands on with my career. I think it might have been the first time they ever took it seriously.”

I sat on the other side of the bed. “They seemed very supportive in L.A.”

“They’re great, but in a, ‘oh, isn’t that cute she wants to be a singer,’ kind of way. Honestly I think the only reason they let me go to Los Angeles in the first place was so I could see how lofty the dream was once I fell flat on my face.” She grinned. “Didn’t work that way though, did it?”

I had to smile back.
She continued.

“When I came home Daddy pretty much took over everything. He was calling everyone he knew to get me a record contract.”

“Wait… aren’t you with Graham?”

She shook her head sadly. “Daddy didn’t want to go that route. He wanted someone local. Someone he could get to know, one-on-one. He said Los Angeles is a pit that would swallow me whole.”

“Well, no wonder you’re not getting all these offers, Shelby. Graham could make amazing things happen for you.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t worth the fight. Honestly, I was just thrilled Daddy finally supported my career. Like I was going to alienate him after finall
y winning him over, right?” She paused. “So, after I got back he convinced me to go with a smaller label. Said they would work harder, I’d be treated more like family instead of getting lost in Graham’s stables.”

“No one gets lost with Graham,” I corrected. “Honestly, he’s been more supportive to me than my own family.”

“How can you say that? Your family uprooted itself from Iowa to be with you on the show.”

“Emphasis, ‘show,’” I confessed. “My mother has never supported my dreams, Shelby. She always wanted me to pull my head out of the clouds, go to school, work a ‘real’ job and wait to get married.”

Shelby giggled. “Well, you didn’t’ have to wait for long,” she teased. “How is Eddie, anyway?”

I took a deep breath. “He’s Eddie,” was all I could say.

Shelby sprawled on her back on the bed, a dreamy look in her face. “All my life I’ve dreamed of what it would be like to find The One. It was like he was in my dreams, but I could never see his face.” Her eyes closed. “Until a year ago, anyway. I could never have predicted the way that it happened, but yet it was so perfect.”

My stomach tightened. I knew she meant Jace.

“There’s still so much in our way,” she confided. “He’s not over Amy,” she finally said.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, though I already knew. I wondered how much of the story she would actually share with me.

“When we were at Disneyland, it was so magical, Jordi. I felt like a princess. We dressed up, we took part in the parade. Every photo we took, he had his arm around me like I had always dreamed. So that night, when we were watching the fireworks, I reached up and I kissed him.” She blushed as she continued. “It was such a brazen thing to do. I don’t do things like that. Normally I’m the one pushing the guys away because they want to go too fast. But that night things were just moving way too slow. Here was this romantic moment with a real live hero… I wanted a happily ever after for my fairy tale, and that could only happen if he kissed me. Since he wouldn’t, I did.”

I gulped. “And what did he do?”

Her eyes became dreamy. “For a split second, he indulged me. Kind of like he was caught up in the fairytale too. When I felt those lips on mine,” she began, but then shuddered and didn’t finish the thought. “Anyway, he pulled away. He had this look on his face like he had done something wrong. That’s when I knew. He loves someone else. Who else could it be but Amy? They were engaged to be married and she broke his heart. It makes sense he’d still hold deep feelings for her.”

I hated to hear that Jace had kissed anyone else, but knowing he told the truth about pulling away and setting her straight warmed my heart. “Of course,”
was all I could say in response.

“So I’ll wait,” Shelby said as she spun around to lie on her tummy. “I knew from that moment it would eventually happen, and he’d be worth it.”

The truth bubbled up in my throat, almost gagging me as it sat there in a gridlock of unspoken words. I wanted to tell her the truth. She deserved the truth. But the truth was a double-edged sword that could cut the person I loved most in the world, and I didn’t know if I could trust her to carry it. She was my friend, someone who had done nothing to make me question her – but she was also a girl very much in love. What would she do if left hopeless and heartbroken?

“Sometimes,” I started cautiously, trying to figure out exactly how I was going to talk her down from the ledge without divulging my biggest secrets, “we just have to let life handle things. The universe knows better than we do. If Jace still harbors these feelings for someone else, it may be fate’s way of steering you another direction.”

Her eyes met mine. “What are you saying?”

I cleared my throat. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt if he chooses someone else,” I answered, and it was the God’s honest truth.

She smiled. “Oh, I’m not worried about that. I think that kiss changed something in him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Amy was nowhere to be seen while we were in Dallas,” she answered with a knowing grin. “Instead I got to stay at his family home with him. He’s definitely ready to move on.”

Apprehension dug at the pit of my stomach. “Did he say something?”

“He didn’t have to. His mom did. She really wanted him to marry Amy, but when she met me she knew I was the better match. I would never hurt him like Amy did. And I’m pretty sure he invited me to stay with them to prove that to his mom, so she’d get off his back about Amy.”

“I see,” I said softly. “Did you…
did anything…?” I trailed off, unable to ask a question I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted the answer to.

She giggled again. “No. The next time we kiss, he’s going to be the one who does it.
And I won’t pull away.”

My eyebrows rose. “You mean…?”

She nodded. “I’m ready. Jace is going to be my first… hopefully before this tour comes to a close.”

This is when you tell her the truth
, my inner voice screamed. But I couldn’t find the words. Or the courage.

“Which means,” she continued as she sprang off the bed, “I need to exercise. After seeing what Amy looks like, I have some pretty perfect shoes to fill!” She turned toward the full-length mirror that stood in the corner. She smoothed her jeans close to her flat stomach. “
God, I’m so fat,” she pouted.

I looked at her reflection in the mirror as I came to stand beside her. If she thought she was fat, what must she think of me? “I think you look pretty perfect, too,” I mumbled.

She grabbed her ass cheeks in either hand. “Are you kidding? Cottage cheese galore. I’d never get naked in front of him looking like this. All he’d be able to see is the ghost of Amy.”

I looked at my reflection, which suddenly seemed a lot wider than when I left the hotel room that morning. I thought about how we’d lounged around naked the past two days, his hands on my body, his eyes inspecting every single n
ook and cranny along my generous proportions.

Had he been seeing the ghost of Amy?
Had she crossed his mind at all in an invariable comparison, when I couldn’t do what she might have done, especially now that my back had gone kaput?

Had he really looked at me the way I looked at him?
As a step up from lovers past?

“Come on,” she said as she spun back to me. “Let’s go swimming. That won’t hurt your back, right?”

I forced a smile. “I guess we’ll see.”

I had packed a swimsuit at her behest, because she wanted to use the heated pool to wind down from the stressors of the tour. It was one of the ways we regularly wound down at the
Fierce
mansion while taping the competition. “I really wanted Jace to stay with us, too,” she confessed later as we soaked in the warm water. “But my parents are way too conservative, especially after my sister Kendra got pregnant out of wedlock at seventeen.” She leaned toward me to whisper, “Daddy was running for city council, but had to withdraw from the race the minute Kendra showed him the little plastic stick. Can you imagine? A red state Christian Republican with a pregnant teenage daughter?”

Yes, I could imagine
, I thought to myself. I grew up in a blood red county in Iowa, so I was familiar with the concept that one’s principles didn’t always bleed over into their actions. Despite the church-going folks who lived there, we had our share of unwed pregnancies and moral scandal.

One only needed to look at my mother for that
, who went to church faithfully every Sunday but had very recently shacked up with a murdering pedophile.

“Anyway, they locked my chastity belt after that. I couldn’t date without a chaperone until I was 18, and even then I had to get Daddy’s permission on the guys I dated.
Church members only, no tattoos, no drinkers, no smokers – in other words, the perfect guy.”

“
Wonder what they will think of Jace? He has tattoos.”