Glitter on the Web (42 page)

Authors: Ginger Voight

He addressed the crowd. “Thanks for coming out everybody. FFF is near and dear to my heart, and I’m so excited to debut this new song here. It was written for someone very special,” he said as he flashed Julie a smile. It was one she returned, so giddy she could practically stand still. It tore at my gut. I knew that look he wore well. It made me wonder just how close Julie and Eli had to get to finish the song. How did she inspire him?

You could have heard a pin drop when he sat at the piano. From the first notes, I knew it was the song he had worked on all year. It was still haunting and beautiful. And now I got to hear what he did with the words.

“
She's beautiful

More beautiful than she knows

She's sexy

I stare at her for hours

Wondering how I missed it before

She's fearless

She doesn't take any shit

From me or anybody else

She deserves everything

Everything

Carly
.”

It took me a full second to realize that he hadn’t said Julie’s name. He had said my name. Not only had he said my name, but I remembered those exact words. It was what he had said to his mother all those months ago.

What the hell did that mean?

“She haunts my dreams

She pushes me

Inspires me

Enrages me

Carly

Can't live without her now

Can't wait to show her how

I'm a better man

For her loving me

She deserves everything

Carly.”

His eyes scanned the crowd until they landed on me. Tears poured from my face as he continued, with beautiful references to our crazy year together, honoring the time we spent, validating it as real with every word.

“I told a lie

She rewrote it into truth

Kept us from falling over

Each time the road wasn’t smooth

Saved my heart

When it threatened to disappear

I call for her every night

Hoping one night she will hear”

He repeated the chorus again, and then took it into the bridge.

“I gave her a year, she gave me more

Because of her, I know who I’ve been singing for

Come to me, Carly, believe once again in our dream

Give me your heart, I’ll give you everything, everything

Carly…”

His earnest words reminded me what he said about making a promise to his sister all those years ago through his award-winning song. “
You put a promise to music and it’s sacred. Unbreakable. Eternal.
”

I was suddenly moving and I didn’t know why. The crowd around me was in tears as well, and was propelling me towards the stage like a tidal wave. He stood and walked to the edge to pull me up, to sing the chorus to me directly.

“She haunts my dreams

She pushes me

Inspires me

Enrages me

Carly

Can't live without her now

Can't wait to show her how

I'm a better man

For her loving me

She deserves everything

Carly.”

He pulled me close and kissed me soft. “Neither wanted to be the first to say it. Neither of us wanted to be that vulnerable. But that’s what love does. It makes you brave enough to be vulnerable. To go for broke. To risk it all. To take that first step into thin air, even if you plummet to the ground.” I could barely breathe as I listened. Those beautiful blue eyes misted, like April rain. “Nothing I could ever risk would hurt as much as losing you. My life is empty without you in it. I love you, Carly. I want to start over. Today. This day. Please say yes.”

I could say nothing, so he bent for another kiss. When he pulled away, I had to ask. “So this is real?”

He cupped my face. “You’re the only thing in my life that ever was.”

My brain scrambled. “The whole thing, with the club, with the money… that was all a ruse?”

He shrugged. “I needed some time to finish the song. I finally finished it over Christmas. Gabby helped,” he added with a smile. “But I couldn’t stay away. God, how could I stay away?” he asked as he held me tight. “It’s like finding a hundred dollar bill. You want to keep it in your pocket before anyone sees it and tries to steal it.”

He had done all that because he was jealous of Caz? “You acted like an asshole.”

“You were expecting an asshole,” he pointed out. “If I told you then I loved you, you would have never believed it.”

I gaped at him, speechless. I spotted my Fellow Floozies on the sidelines, crying, clapping and nodding at me. “Wait. Did Clem and Antoine know?”

He nodded. “I wasn’t under a NDA,” he added with a smile. “I had to get you back, Carly. I knew I was hopelessly in love with you the minute I tried to kiss Julie and couldn’t get you out of my head.”

I had to laugh. “That’s what happened when I tried to kiss Caz.”

He chuckled. “So we broke up over nothing.”

I nodded. “A little bit. Yeah.”

He held me tight. “Well, I’m glad we got that out of our system, because we’re never doing that again. I never want to look up and see you in another man’s arms again” He motioned to the window to my office above. Suddenly it all made sense. He really had thought I had turned to Caz. After everything, he was as afraid to be left as I was. So he pulled the trigger first, to make me tell him the truth. When I didn’t, he lied too.

“Eli,” I said as I caressed his face. “You never shared me. And you never will.”

“Good,” he said. “Unless it’s family. Or friends. Or maybe… our own kids.”

My stomach dropped. “I thought you didn’t do forever.”

“I just needed a forever kind of girl.” He paused and said, “And I think I just wrote my next single.”

I laughed and hugged him. “I missed you, you big dumb jerk.”

He cupped my face again. “And I love you, Carly Reynolds. For real. For always.”

It was everything I wanted. My fairy tale was coming true on the day I had expected to lose it all. He had done that for me. He had done that on purpose. “I love you, Eli,” I said through my tears. “You bastard.”

He laughed and spun me around. There was thunderous applause as everyone cheered, and all of the glitter cannons exploded in unison, but I had forgotten all the cameras and the crowds. Nothing mattered beyond this man in my arms, my new family; my new life.

He pulled away with that infamous smirk. “By the way, Julie says you owe her $40.”

I threw my head back and laughed. “Shut up and kiss me.”

And he did…

And he did.

ABOUT
THE
AUTHOR
:

Ginger Voight is a screenwriter and bestselling author with more than twenty published titles in fiction and nonfiction. Her nonfiction works cover everything from travel to politics, while her works of fiction range from romance to the paranormal, as well as dark “ripped-from-the-headlines” topics, such as those featured in her book
Dirty Little Secrets
.

Ginger discovered her love for writing in the sixth grade, courtesy of a Halloween assignment. From then on, writing became a thing of solace, reflection, and security. When she found herself homeless in L.A. at the age of nineteen, she wrote her first novel in longhand on notebook paper while living out of her car.

In 1995, after she lost her nine-day-old son, she worked through her grief by writing the story that would eventually become
The Fullerton Family Saga
.
In 2011, she embarked on a new journey: to publish romance novels starring heroines who look like the average American woman. These “Rubenesque romances” have developed a following thanks to her bestselling
Groupie
series. Other titles, such as the highly-rated
Fierce
series,
tap into the American preoccupation with reality TV, giving her contemporary stories a current, pop-culture edge.

Ginger isn’t afraid to push the envelope with characters who are perfectly imperfect. Rich or poor, sweet or selfish, gay or straight, plus-size or svelte, her characters are beautifully flawed and three-dimensional. They populate her lavish fictional landscapes and teach us more about the real world in which we live, through their interactions with each other, and often through gut-wrenching angst. Ginger’s goal with every book is to give her readers a little bit more than they were expecting, with stories they’ll never forget.

For more, please visit
gingervoight.com
. Follow Ginger on Twitter (
twitter.com/gingervoight
) and “like” her author page on Facebook (
facebook.com/gingervoight
) for all the latest news on her public appearances and new releases.

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