'Hey man,' said Luke, the toe of an expensive boot tapping on Deacon's porch. 'Mind if I come in?'

'Er... sure, yeah.' Deacon stepped aside, holding the door wider and wondering if the visit was out of business or displeasure. He had no idea if Luke knew about his counter-proposal, and he watched him carefully, taking in his tense shoulders and deliberate friendliness.

'What can I do for you Luke? You want coffee? I just put a pot-'

'No, thanks, I'm good. All caffeined out for today. The Mrs wouldn't love me climbin' the walls all night while she's tryin' to get some shut eye.'

There was an awkward silence, maybe only a few seconds, but enough time for Deacon to imagine in great detail Rayna in bed with a caffeine-laced Wheeler. He cleared his throat.

'I er, I asked Rayna to move in with me,' Luke said, faux-conversationally, taking a couple of strides towards Deacon's couch but making no move to sit down.

In the midst of feeling like he'd been kicked in the gut, Deacon wondered why the hell the guy was in his house telling him such information. He considered sitting down himself, in preparation for the next blow - that she said yes. She'd said yes a lot to Luke Wheeler lately.

'She said no.'

He tried, for all of a second, not to let himself hope. It was useless; hope, along with its cousin, fear, bloomed across his chest and made his heart skitter.

Luke studied his reaction. 'She doesn't wanna uproot the girls and unsettle them any further, thinks they've had enough on their plates this year or so.'

Deacon nodded gruffly. Damn right. Maddie did not need another father in her life, and the idea of her living up on that pretentious ranch Luke sprawled about in... The idea of Rayna up there...

'Whatever's best for the girls is what's best for Rayna.'

Luke picked up the framed picture on Deacon's coffee table. 'Whatever's best for the girls...'

He ran a finger over the glass, and Deacon shifted, watching him uncomfortably. That was his family, and he felt no happier about Luke holding a picture of them than he did about him holding Rayna at night. It should be him - it should always have been him.

'So I've asked her to join my tour instead.'

'You've what?'

'If I can't be with her at home, I wanna be with her out on tour. I mean I'm not gonna be at home much the next couple months anyway, so it makes sense for her not to move up to the house 'til we're married. The young 'uns will have got used to things by then.'

'You've asked Rayna to join the tour. Your tour. The one I'm supportin' you on?'

'Yip, that tour. Co-headline is what I've asked her, if we're talkin' specifics.'

Deacon digested this, wary of Luke's reasons for wanting to tell him in person that Rayna could be spending the next two months metres from him.

'So... what'd she say?'

'You better put the toilet seat down on that tour bus, Claybourne. She's in.'

He set the picture down, and Deacon couldn't work out the look on his face. He shoved his hands in his pockets and threw him a smile and a nod of the head as he turned to leave.

'Oh and Deacon?' he said, pausing on the handle. 'I'm not Teddy. Remember that.'

The screen door creaked on its hinges as Deacon stared at the back of his retreating head.

#

'Babe, you can't seriously think this is a good idea. Deacon in the next room every night... don't you think you're playing with fire there?'

'I don't want to talk about it Tandy.'

'Well I know, but I think you should talk to your sister about the fact that you're going to be spending a considerable amount of time sandwiched between your fiance and your... Deacon.'

'No one is going to be sandwiched anywhere Tandy, and I probably won't even see Deacon much- it's a big tour, there are a lot of people.' Rayna lowered her voice, looking pointedly towards the group of women trying to be discreet while they stared at her from the other side of the street peppered with casual shoppers. 'It's fine, just drop it.'

'Why in the world did you say yes to this ?' Tandy hissed. 'I thought you didn't even want to go out on tour right now anyway. What changed your mind?'

Rayna sighed. Tandy was right; she didn't want to go out on tour. She wanted to stay home and work on her label and live out of a closet and not a suitcase, but the disappointment on Luke's face when she'd told him - as gently as she could - that she didn't think it was the right time for them to move in together, that it was too much upheaval for their kids for the moment, had been hard to take. When he'd asked, as a consolation, if she'd go on tour with him instead, she'd panicked.

'Luke changed my mind, I guess. I haven't been around much lately, you know, everything's just been so busy.' She looked down at her feet, trying not to think about how crushed he'd been when she'd told him she couldn't just drop everything to go away for two months. Turning him down twice in one night was not a good feeling. 'It'll be nice, bein' out on tour with him.'

Her sister was quiet for a moment , and Rayna braced herself; a quiet Tandy was even more trouble than a Tandy running her mouth.

'Because it's less of a commitment than moving in with him?'

'I don't know Tandy,' Rayna huffed, throwing her hands in the air. 'Yeah, maybe, somethin' like that - it's a big thing, you know?'

Tandy caught her hand and held it aloft. 'And this isn't?'

The late afternoon sun glinted off the diamond on Rayna's finger, and it blinded her for a second before she yanked herself free.

'Of course it is. I just... I'm not ready to pack up our lives and move, combine our families, everything that comes with it.'

'Will you ever be?'

'You are wearin' me down here - can we please just stop talkin' about this? Look, there are purses on sale, y'all know how you love purses. Let's go in there and have a look.'

She started for the store with its gaudy signs, heavy on the exclamation marks, but Tandy grabbed her elbow and pulled her back. 'There's something you're not telling me, I know it. And I would bet all the purses in Italy on it having something to do with Deacon Claybourne.'

'I said drop it.'

'Is that why Luke wants you with him, so he can keep an eye on you?'

'Why would he want to keep a damn eye on me?'

'Oh come on, he knows your story with Deacon, he wouldn't exactly be crazy if he thought he might just have something to worry about, would he?'

She shoved Tandy off her and spun around, hurrying towards the store in the hope that her sister would stop talking once the smell of expensive leather overpowered her, but she was surprisingly quick on her stiletto heels.

'Would he?'

It had been one question that had changed Rayna's answer about the tour. Maybe it was guilt, certainly it was fear - fear that Luke would look at her and see written across her face all she didn't know how to say, to herself, even.

'It is because of Deacon?' he'd asked.

'No,' she'd told him, a moment too late, and he'd rubbed a hand over his face.

'I might need you to help me believe that, Rayna.'

He wanted her on the road with him to be close to her, there was no doubt of that, but the part of him that doubted her, that doubted himself, wanted to keep them in plain sight, to see for sure that there was no longer anything between them.

'No,' she told Tandy, and she watched her sister's expression change to one she knew well, one of resigned disapproval, pity, almost. 'He wouldn't be crazy.'

#

She dreamed about his hands on her. Not in a sexual way, though there was always - in her sleeping and waking versions of him - something sensual in the way Deacon touched her.

She could feel a hand in her hair, stroking her cheek, her jaw, his fingers smoothing over her stomach and curling around her hip.

She wasn't wearing clothes, suddenly - why did that always happen with Deacon? - and the tips of his fingers were rough, his movements barely there, tickling her skin and making her squirm lazily. He made patterns along her collarbone, traced her sternum, slid his whole hand up her thigh until she shivered and looked up into his face.

'Why is there a wall between us?' she wondered, and her voice had sounded oddly thick, far away.

'There is no wall, Ray,' he replied, gravelly and liquid at the same time.

'Yes there is, this isn't my room.'

It was white, sterile; hotel-impersonal. Music came from somewhere down the hall, the sound of a guitar, faint voices. The air-con whirred them almost inaudible.

'You don't have to go back.'

'We've been here before, in this room. And we burned it down.'

His mouth was wet, soft, when he kissed her, and she forgot what she was trying to say. Something about burning... 'He's not what you want.'

His stubble was just the way she liked it, a couple of days in. She wished he'd brush it over her neck again.

'How do you know?'

'Because I am.'

/

When she woke up, Luke was fast asleep beside her. A half-filled suitcase was next to the bed, her belongings tossed into it untidily.

Rayna watched him for a long time. He was so still, Luke; she wondered, if he were to succumb to sleep on one foot, whether he would wake just so, like a flamingo.

He was what she wanted. He was good, kind, his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and his smiles were for her.

In a world where Deacon didn't exist, Luke Wheeler would be exactly what she wanted.

#

Maddie had been slamming doors since she'd got home from school three hours earlier. Teddy arriving to drop Daphne from her swimming lesson had done nothing to diffuse the situation, and Bucky had politely excused himself when she'd turned on the angry music and refused to come down for dinner.

Rayna managed to plea-bargain her way into her room, footstep by footstep, and standing at the foot of her bed, she was fairly sure her daughter had only relented so that she could yell at her about nothing in particular.

'I don't care that you're marrying him,' she spat eventually, in no context Rayna could identify. 'Do what you want. It's not like it would be any better if you weren't anyway.'

'What does that mean?'

'Even if you weren't with Luke you still wouldn't be marrying Deacon.'

Rayna's mouth dropped open before she could stop it, and Maddie capitalised on her shock and set her jaw. 'Deacon is my dad. I want us to be a family, Mom.'

'I thought you liked Luke,' Rayna said weakly.

'I do, he's nice, there's nothing wrong with Luke. He just... isn't Deacon.'

Maddie dropped onto her bed in apparent defeat, and taking it as a sign that her rage was running out of steam, Rayna sat gingerly on the edge.

'I see how you look at each other, you know - I'm not stupid. You're engaged to Luke but every time you're in the same room as Deacon it's like... like there's a big magnet pulling you together.'

Rayna looked Maddie in the eye, and she was struck suddenly and unexpectedly by just how much she looked like Deacon. It was unimaginable that he'd never seen it, that he'd looked at her a hundred thousand times and not known that she was his daughter. Rayna had seen it - of course she had, every time she'd looked at Maddie. It had ripped her apart when she'd been a baby, when she'd rocked her to sleep and her small, sweet face had peered up at Rayna like a neon sign to remind her of all that couldn't be, like Deacon himself was staring back at her. The resemblance had found a place in Rayna's subconscious as Maddie had grown up; her hair grew darker, her eyes more soulful, the line of her mouth more solemn and more Deacon every day, but it had been a necessity, not to feel the pain of their impossible situation every time she looked at their child.

And yet there it was, freshly apparent. His eyes, staring back at her sadly, angrily, from a face that looked like Rayna, too.

'Why now, baby?' she asked softly, taking Maddie's hand and breathing an inward sigh of relief when she didn't pull it away. 'Why is this comin' out like this today? Yesterday you sat and had dinner with Luke, and Daphne and me, and I know you haven't talked to me much since all of this, but yesterday, the day before that, you seemed okay. What's happened today?'

'I heard them talking about you on the radio, about your wedding. They were saying how big it was going to be, how everyone important was going to be there. Everyone except Deacon.'

Rayna opened her arms and Maddie shuffled towards her, the pale pink covers crumpling. She seemed younger, vulnerable, and it hurt like hell.

'Deacon will always be a part of your life, Maddie,' Rayna said in a quiet voice, 'he'll always be a part of both our lives. I'm sorry this isn't how you would want it to be. I'm sorry it's so complicated. I wish it wasn't.'

'Wouldn't it be wonderful? If it wasn't so complicated? If we could wake up and eat breakfast together every morning, and sit and play songs together at night - you and me and Daphne and Deacon?'

It's Maddie, and Daphne, and you, and me. A family.

'Yeah, baby,' Rayna said, in barely more than a whisper, 'yeah it would.'