Infinity + One

  But Gran had been right about one thing. I didn’t wish my life on Finn, even if I loved him so much I couldn’t imagine life without him. And because I loved him, I was going to give him the opportunity to walk away, if that’s what he wanted to do. Gran told me Clyde wouldn’t come. She told me he was only after one thing. Then she’d proceeded to tell me three. I told Gran he could have all of those things—sex, money, and attention—and that I would give him all of those things as often as he wanted them. Happily. For the rest of my life. And I told her to get used to it, because I was married to him, no pre-nup, no conditions, and she’d better be nice or he might divorce me and sue me for every last dime. Then where would she be?

  She told me she had talked to Clyde and he just wanted out. He just wanted his life back. She told me if I loved him, I wouldn’t want this kind of life for him.

  I laughed at that. I laughed so I wouldn’t consider the truth in what she said, and then I slapped back.

  “Oh, yeah, Gran? That’s interesting. So what you’re telling me is if you loved me, you wouldn’t want this kind of life for me?”

  Gran had stared at me and then made a huffy sound like I was impossible, and she was “through trying to reason with me.”

  That’s when I got good and mad. And that’s when I told my grandmother that I loved her. I told her I was sorry for the way I left. And I told her I forgave her for the things she’d done that caused me to run. I told her she would get a lovely percentage of everything I made every year for the rest of her life. A finder’s fee, so to speak. She could also keep her house, her car, and whatever she’d stuffed in her mattress and in her panty drawer. I was guessing it was substantial.

  And then I told her she was done. I had meant what I said when I said it the first time, ten days before. She was fired.

  Then I called my attorney. Again. I’d had a few little chats with him since being released from the LA County jail on Monday night. And with him on speaker and Gran listening, I outlined Gran’s retirement package.

  I fired the accounting firm which had handled my finances since the day I had won the million dollar recording contract on Nashville Forever. They were Gran’s employees. Not mine. I threatened to sue them for what they had allowed to happen. I had been cut off of my own accounts, put in a dire situation, and they would meet with my me and my new accountant—recommended by a recovering Bear—when I returned from LA, giving me a full accounting of my finances, how my money had been invested, handled, and where the money had been spent over the last six years. They would do this or charges would be filed. I thought Finn would be proud of me.

  My attorney assured me I would win. If there had been any fraud, embezzlement, or gross mismanagement, Gran could go to jail. Gran listened to this little tidbit stonily. I told her sweetly that jail wasn’t so bad. After all, it had been her fault that I’d gone to jail, now hadn’t it? She had created a firestorm that had become a manhunt and a media free-for-all. For what? For attention? For sales? So she could control me?

  It was at that point that I informed her, with my attorney listening, that she would not get a dime of her retirement package until my $500,000 was back in the bank, and until my accounts were all in my name and my name alone, with Finn listed as beneficiary if something were to happen to me.

  That’s when she laughed. And then she disconnected my conference call with my lawyer.

  “Why do you think I got the $500,000 out of the bank in the first place, Bonnie Rae? It was ransom money! Finn Clyde contacted me last Wednesday and demanded $500,000 for your release.” I must have flinched because she made a sympathetic sound like I was five years old.

  I stared into her eyes and tried to remind myself that the cold-hearted, manipulating woman I was looking at wasn’t all she was. There was more to her than that, just like Bonnie, just like Clyde . . . but for the life of me, I couldn’t see it anymore. And I wasn’t going to let her see how her words ripped me up. I wasn’t going to let her see that part of me believed her.

  “He never got it. But I told him it was still his if he left quietly. You’ll thank me for this, Bonnie. When your head’s clear and you’re back on your medication, you’ll thank me. That boy’s trash,” she soothed.

  “You can’t pay him to stay away from me, Gran. If Finn wants an annulment, that’s up to him. And he can have the money—he earned it. But it’s my money, and you aren’t in any position to make contracts with my money. I believe my attorney would agree. Should we call him back?”

  Gran became enraged at that point, and I had to threaten her with my red cowboy boot raised over my head and the crazy Bonnie look on my face, to convince her to back off. Then I demanded her wallet, took her new “company card,” the card reserved for my staff, the card that Bear had used to secure my hotel room, and the only one that hadn’t been closed, and I told her to leave. She had a plane ticket and her passport to use as ID to get back home, along with whatever cash was in her bra. Plus, she had my meds in her purse, the pills she was so convinced I needed. She could pop a few of those to help her through the coming days. I wasn’t too worried about her.

  And then I waited for Finn.

  FINN HAD STUCK his room key in his wallet when they left for the Academy Awards. Even then, with Bonnie’s hand on his arm, with her cheeks still flushed from the kiss he’d pressed against her neck, with the scent of her on his lips, he’d been afraid they wouldn’t come back. His dad was right. He’d expected the worst, he’d mentally planned for it.

  In the limo she’d talked about spending two weeks at the Bordeaux. She told him it would be a true honeymoon. Making plans and making bacon, she’d said. They wouldn’t go anywhere—except maybe shopping. But not at Walmart. Not again. He’d told her he didn’t care where they went shopping, as long as she kept the red boots and wore them often. Even if she wore nothing else. She told him she would wear them every day for the rest of her life if it made him happy. And secretly, maybe even subconsciously, he hadn’t believed her. He had known it was going to end.

  His dad had taken him to the hotel and told Finn that he was a phone call away. Finn hadn’t been stopped or questioned as he’d walked into the posh entrance and headed directly for the elevator. Hope bloomed when his key took him straight to the penthouse floor.

  Fear was a hard habit to break, and hope hurt, but it hurt in a way that promised a happy ending. So he stood, outside the door of the room he and Bonnie had occupied—Room 704—and waited a full five minutes, feeling the pain of that hope, not wanting to exchange it for the pain of despair. Then he took a deep breath and stuck the key into the slot. When the locks disengaged with a sleek buzz, his heart hitched, and he pushed the handle down and opened the door.

  Bedding was piled on the floor, like housekeeping was in the middle of a thorough clean. The TV was on, blaring, and Finn searched the space, walking farther into the suite, climbing the platform that housed the huge bed beneath a ceiling of mirrors. He’d watched Bonnie in those mirrors, worshipped her. Even as she’d slept, feathers in her hair, he hadn’t been able to take his eyes away from her face, from the way she’d looked curled next to him, from the image of them together in that way. Perfect, untouchable.

  There was no sign of Bonnie. She hadn’t called out when he entered the room or come running to see who was there. The euphoria of a working keycard plummeted and pooled like tar in his belly. He felt sick. He walked to the TV, needing to silence it, to soak up what was left of them in the space, and he saw himself, wearing the tux he now wore. He was smiling down at Bonnie and she was beaming up at him like they weren’t surrounded by flashing cameras and shocked faces. They’d made their statement, all right. He could see the stunned fascination wherever he looked. Bonnie had waved and glowed, laughed and blown kisses to fans who were seated in makeshift bleachers in designated areas for a small number of diehard stargazers.

  The screen split, showing the continuing footage from the awards, as well as the news anchor seated on the Entertainme
nt Buzz set, wearing a sleeveless top that showed off her toned arms and her fake tan. She was talking into the camera with the practiced sobriety and professional cadence of a serious journalist, and as the picture on the screen morphed from footage of him and Bonnie Rae into an old black and white photo of Bonnie and Clyde, she began to tell their story, as if it were breaking news and hadn’t happened 85 years before.

  Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow in Texas, in January of 1930. It was the height of the depression and people were poor, desperate, and hopeless, and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were no exception. Clyde was twenty years old, Bonnie, nineteen, and though neither had much to offer the other, they became inseparable . . .

  Clyde listened, unable to look away, to turn it off. He listened as the reporter compared them to the outlaw couple, twisting their story until it was almost unrecognizable. He listened until the reporter shook her head sadly and asked, “What happened to Bonnie Rae Shelby?”

  Then he couldn’t take anymore. Maybe because he didn’t know what had happened to her. He didn’t know where she was, and he didn’t know where to go looking. How was he going to find her? He switched off the TV with a violent shove and turned to leave. He was striding toward the door when he thought he heard the sound of water running. He stopped abruptly, suspended between the fear of being caught in a place he shouldn’t be and the hope that finally he was in exactly the right place at the right time. It was the shower. And in that instant he became a believer. God’s voice did sound like rushing water.

  Finn walked toward the huge bathroom with the heart-shaped, sunken tub and the giant, glass walk-in shower. When he neared the door he heard her, and he smiled, even as his chest ached at the sound. Crying. She was crying in the shower. Again. And Finn found himself laughing through the tears that were suddenly streaming down his own face.

  The door wasn’t locked. Thank God. Or thank Fish—his guardian angel. Somehow he thought Fish might be the one unlocking bathroom doors for his brother. Naked girls were Fish’s favorite thing. He turned the handle and silently asked Fish to please remain outside if he was still lurking around. He needed to hold his wife without an audience.

  He shrugged out of his suit jacket and tossed it on the vanity as he pulled open the shower door and stepped under the spray fully-clothed, taking Bonnie into his arms before she even had time to react. She jerked and pulled back, even as she realized it was him.

  “Finn? Oh, Finn,” she cried, falling against him, holding him tightly and looking up into his face in disbelief. He pushed her streaming hair out of her eyes even as his own dripped heavily down his back.

  “Bonnie. You aren’t fooling anybody crying in the shower, baby. The water hides your tears, but it doesn’t hide the sound, and I don’t want you to cry anymore.” He kissed her as the water soaked through his shirt, plastering the white cotton to his skin, seeping into the black suit pants, and soaking the shoes that had cost way more than Bonnie’s ring. She still wore it, and he kissed that too, frantically. And she cried harder.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back.” She sobbed into his chest, and Finn held her tightly, letting the cascading water wash away the words. He almost hadn’t come back, and the thought made his legs weak and his heart quake. He held Bonnie closer, burying his face in her neck and letting his hands stroke the naked length of her body, needing to reassure himself that she was still his. Bonnie was suddenly as frantic as he was, pulling at the buttons of his shirt, trying to peel it off his chest, as if she needed to feel his skin the way he could feel hers. His shirt fell to the shower floor with a heavy, wet slap.

  “Your grandmother told me you didn’t want to see me again, Bonnie.”

  Bonnie closed her eyes and her hands stilled, her face crumpling with his words. She shook her head emphatically. “No. That’s not true. That’s never been true! Not for one second since I met you. I knew exactly what I was doing when I married you. I was just hoping, just praying, that you knew what you were doing.”

  Bonnie reached for him, laying her palms against his face, tipping her chin up so she could hold his gaze, even as water streamed through her hair down her cheeks. Finn kissed her mouth again, not able to help himself. Her lips trembled beneath his, and he tasted her slick heat and the salty, sweet mix of tears and tender words.

  “She told me none of it was real,” he whispered against her lips.

  “But . . . didn’t we decide that we don’t want real?” she replied, her mouth never leaving his.

  “Yeah. We did,” Finn breathed, “but I’ll take real too. And I’ll take imaginary, and I’ll take it all, Bonnie.” And he wanted to take it all, he wanted to sink into her and let the endless supply of hot water beat down on their bodies, and for a moment he was sidetracked by her lips and her skin and the swell of her breasts and the way she felt beneath his hands. He wanted it all, but Bonnie—though her hands and mouth were as busy as his—had not stopped crying. It was if she couldn’t believe he was there. As if she still couldn’t believe he’d come back.

  “I wanted to come find you,” Bonnie said, her mouth against his skin, her voice as urgent as her hands. “But I had to let you choose. I thought you might have decided this was all too much. My family, my brother, my life. I hurt you, Finn. So much. It’s all my fault. All of it. Bear getting hurt, you getting thrown in jail and accused of things you didn’t do. Even the things Hank did. The things Gran did. I put it into motion.”

  “Shh. No, Bonnie. You can’t take responsibility for their greed. Greed put this whole thing in motion, and you have your faults, but greed isn’t one of them,” Finn soothed. “But none of that would have kept me away.”

  He captured her hands in his, bracing them against the shower wall so he wouldn’t be distracted by her touch, and he laid his forehead against hers, trying to find the right words—the words he needed to say, and the words she needed to hear, so she wouldn’t spend her whole life wondering about the way he felt and why he’d come back.

  “I love you, Bonnie. So much that I hurt with it. And I hate it, and I love it, and I want it to go away, and I want it to stay forever. And I am terrible at this!” He laughed in frustration. “I feel like I’m asking Bear to have sex with me. Damn, that must have been awful.”

  “It was,” she choked out, half-laughing, half-crying. He stole a kiss then, but didn’t release her hands though her body swayed into his, and she protested sweetly.

  “This thing we have, it hurts,” he continued. “But the pain is almost sweet because it means you happened. We happened. And I can’t regret that, no matter how little or how long I get to tag along with you and pretend that I don’t hate having people recognize me or take my picture or having people whisper about my record—”

  “Your record?”

  “My criminal record, Bonnie. Nothing platinum there. I’m an ex-con, and instead of starting over and building a new life where I can put it behind me, I’m building a new life where it will never be behind me, and for you, it’s worth it. It’s easy math.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “No. I’m doing it for me,” he confessed.

  “I like a selfish man,” she said, her face splitting into the smile he loved so much, and Finn felt a tidal wave coming, growing in his chest, and he released her wrists so that he could cradle her face in his hands.

  “What’s Infinity plus one?” she whispered and kissed his unsmiling mouth, and he answered her from his heart and not his head.

  “It’s not infinity after all. It’s not even two. It’s one, Bonnie Rae. Didn’t you tell me? You and me? We’re two halves of a whole. We’re one,” and he pulled her up and into him, the steam making a thick fog around their bodies, reminiscent of the night they met on the bridge. The night Bonnie met Clyde. And Finn realized something then. That was the night they both jumped. The night they both let go. The night they both fell.

  And that was the biggest paradox of all.

  I HAD PULLED all the bedding off the hug
e white bed and made a pile in the middle of the floor because I couldn’t face the mirrors. While I’d waited for Finn to come back to me, I’d slept on the pile, far away from my lonely reflection and the bed where Finn had held me and loved me like he would never let me go.

  Finn carried everything back, making the bed neatly, making me laugh at his fussiness. I tended to destroy a room faster than a tornado—something Minnie had hated, and something I pledged to work on so that my fastidious husband had one less thing to tolerate in his life with me. And I would make sure we had maids. Lots of them.

  “They’re just going to get all messed up again,” I pointed out. “You’re a powerful lover, Clyde. It will all just end up on the floor again. Just like the first time.”

  Finn laughed and blushed, just like I’d intended, and I tackled him, toppling him into the center of the fluffed pillows and the straightened duvet. And then we talked about what came next.

  Vegas was out. Nashville was out. My brother was going to be on trial for attempted murder in St. Louis, and as much as I longed to be far away from anything concerning my family, Finn and I would both be involved in the trial. Hank had gotten desperate. He had a drug habit and he owed money to some very scary people. When I came up missing, and rumors started to abound that I was in the company of an ex-convict, Hank saw an opportunity to capitalize on it. It wasn’t hard. He was living with Gran and knew everything that was happening as it happened. He sent Gran a ransom demand, pretending he was Finn, and arranged a drop off location and a time—Thursday afternoon. But then I’d contacted Bear. Hank got nervous that Bear was going to bring me back before he could get his hands on the money. So he watched Bear’s house. When Bear took off Thursday morning for St. Louis, Hank had followed him. When Bear left Finn’s father’s house in Finn’s rental car, without me, Hank had followed him to the gas station, and he’d shot him—shot him in the back so Bear wouldn’t interfere, so Hank could collect the ransom that afternoon, and so everyone would think Finn had done it. Hank had been stupid though. He hadn’t made sure Bear was dead, and he’d quickly searched the car Bear was driving, stepping over Bear’s body to get there. Bear had seen Hank’s snakeskin boots, the ones I had given him for Christmas a couple of years before, and he’d known who shot him, even as he lost consciousness. If I had gone back to Nashville with Bear, odds were Hank would have shot me too. And the sad thing was, it wasn’t hard for me to believe. Because it wasn’t hard to believe, I didn’t grieve for him, not the way a sister should grieve for her brother. Hank had never been mine in anything but name, and pretending differently didn’t change it.