Feisty Red (Three Chicks Brewery #2) - Stacey Kennedy Page 0,49

to know something was terribly wrong. One look at Maisie’s curled shoulders said enough. “Consider me warned. What is it?” Clara asked.

Maisie’s brow wrinkled as she closed the distance to offer her cell phone. “I saw this in my news feed on Facebook. I came right away.”

First, Clara made out she was looking at an article from a trashy rag. Then she stopped breathing at the headline: Sullivan Keene has a secret love child. That in itself wasn’t the only problem; it was all the details of their lives that followed. They’d twisted every event that shaped their lives. They knew he’d left her, and they blamed him. Only him. And the final sentence in the article was a dagger to her heart: Can she forgive him for walking out on her son and her?

“Oh, my God,” Clara breathed, glancing up at Maisie. “How could they do this to Sullivan? To Mason?” Word after word, it painted them in the worst light. Sullivan looked no better than his abusive father. Clara looked like a weak woman who drowned without Sullivan, barely able to raise her son. Mason was dragged through the mud alongside her and Sullivan. “How could they do this to a child?”

Maisie recoiled. “I know. It’s bad. I’m sorry, Clara.”

Amelia scooped up the phone, read the article, and growled, “And why do they care anyway if he left and moved away? Or that you have a son together? Don’t they have more important news to report on instead of Sullivan’s personal life?”

Clara had seen Sullivan’s face on the grocery store tabloids for years. “Not when Sullivan sells magazines.” The worst part was that the picture they had used was from when they went to the zoo together. A reporter had obviously been following them. They’d taken a happy moment and twisted it until it became ugly. The photograph was of Mason running away from them, and while they hadn’t been arguing at all, Sullivan had his head bowed and looked sad. Clara remembered that moment. Sullivan had wanted to tell Mason the truth and not keep secrets anymore. “Why would they do this to him?” she asked, mostly to herself, shaking her head.

“Because they’re paparazzi,” Maisie said, peeking around the curtain and out the window. “They’re paid to twist stories.”

Amelia handed Maisie her phone back then said to Clara, “This doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. Anyone who believes this trash talk doesn’t matter.”

But someone did matter, someone above anyone else. “Mason matters.” Clara took the phone from Maisie again, searching for anything bad said about Mason. While he wasn’t mentioned directly, the article stated that Clara hated Sullivan for leaving them, and that Sullivan hadn’t wanted a son. Her heart squeezed tight. Gossip ran like wildfire through town, which was likely how the reporters got wind of Sullivan’s son no one knew about. Surely, a kid a school would mention it to Mason and bully him. Especially since Mason had been boasting about his dad being a professional baseball player. She never wanted Mason to think Sullivan didn’t want him.

With trembling limbs, she moved back to the window, watching Sullivan talking to the reporters, handling them like he seemed to do so well. But she wasn’t used to any of this, and her head swarmed with worries. “This is our story, not theirs, and they’ve twisted it. Made it so ugly.”

Before Clara could even think what to do next, the front door opened, and Hayes rushed in. “Fucking vultures,” he growled.

But in that exact moment, before Hayes slammed the door shut, Clara heard something else.

“Do you still love Clara Carter?” a reporter called. “Did you ever love her?”

It occurred to her right then that she had been fooling herself. And that, from day one when it came to Sullivan, she’d been all in. Because her unguarded heart bled as Sullivan answered, “No, not now. Not ever.”

13

An hour had gone by since the cops showed up at the brewery to clear out the reporters, and Sullivan’s mood was in no better state than when he’d arrived after being alerted to the article by Marco. “Thank you for coming by,” Sullivan said to Penelope’s husband and cop, Darryl, as the sun sank lower behind the mountains.

Standing on the porch steps, Darryl rested his hand on the barrel of his weapon. He was a scruffy guy with a thick beard, tough for sure. “Hey, man, not a problem. Sorry you’re dealing with this. Let me know if you need me to