by Milly Taiden
She nodded fast, her heart drumming in her chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”
He stalked off, slamming his bedroom door behind him.
Rhiannon glanced at Jonas, whose green eyes were wide with shock. “I was going to bawl him out for straining his throat.”
Rhiannon’s eyes burned, stinging with the salt of tears. She had screwed it all up.
Tryp patted her on the shoulder. “He gets uptight. Don’t take it personally.”
Cadell nodded. “He’s never had to cancel a concert before. I’m surprised that he didn’t set up a stage in the middle of the Strip today for a surprise free concert, just to prove that he could do it.”
Rade snorted. “And to suck down some fan love like the adoration vampire that he is.”
Her hands shook so hard that she fluttered.
Tryp added, “He’s threatened to put all of us on a plane back to L.A. at one time or another.”
Yeah, but none of them had three-month, provisional contracts.
Rhiannon blinked, trying not to let the tears fall.
“He’s tightly wound,” Tryp said. “Don’t be mad at him.”
“I never get mad,” Rhiannon said. “Never.”
This time, she caught Jonas watching her as she said it, and wariness haunted his eyes. Rhiannon shivered as if a gust of ice had frosted her back.
Jonas took her arm and steered her out of Xan’s suite and down the hall to his room, a one-bedroom version of Xan’s gilded set-up. He held her elbow gently. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, but she sank into a miserable ball on the floor.
Jonas picked her up and turned her over in his arms as easily as if she were a frightened kitten. “It’s okay. He wouldn’t have hit you. He gets mad, but I’ve never seen him get violent with anyone, and I would have flattened him if he had tried.”
“I’m okay,” she said, burying her face in his shoulder.
Jonas sat down on the bed with her in his lap. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay?” She couldn’t even make it sound convincing, damn it. Visions of walls rushing up to her and slapping her in the face, the sharp crags of drywall scraping her little-girl cheeks like a cheese grater, ran behind her eyes.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” She sounded steadier that time because she didn’t ever want to talk about it.
“Okay.” He bent his head to look at her. “Rhiannon, listen to me. No matter what happens between us personally, I will always be there for you. Like I told you the day you were hired, I will not let any of these assholes hurt you, even Xan. If he had so much as lifted his hand, I’d have ripped his arm off.”
Her arms tightened around his neck, and her eyes hurt. “Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear about people being hurt.”
“It’s an exaggeration. I would have stopped him. No one will get hurt. I can stop any of these guys from hurting you or anyone else, okay?” His burly shoulder twitched under her cheek. “I will not let anyone lay a hand on you, ever.”
Elevator
After dealing with the juvenile behavior of the Terrible Threesome all night long and dragging a stoned Grayson out of yet another titty bar at ten o’clock that morning, Jonas had gone back to his room, walked past the room service cart with the cold omelet on it, and crashed for a few hours until two in the afternoon, then hauled his exhausted ass out of bed to deal with yet another monster of a day. Rhiannon had slept in her own room when Jonas had admitted that he had no hope of going to bed while the moon was up, and he blamed the Terrible Threesome for that missed opportunity, too.
However, his first order of business was to wake Tryp for his radio interview.
Though Jonas toyed with the bucket of half-melted ice on the dresser as Tryp’s drunken snore buzzed under the bedspread, he shook Tryp’s shoulder and said his name progressively louder until Tryp woke up, cursing and swinging at him.
Jonas blocked the drunken attempt at a punch and refrained from clocking him. Knocking him senseless would be counter-productive when he was trying to roust Tryp’s skinny butt out of bed for his daily phone interview.
He set the interview cell phone by the bed—they didn’t hand out the band’s personal phone numbers to every DJ who wanted to fill some air time—and told him that his breakfast would be delivered in a half an hour, band meeting was in an hour, and they would be leaving for the sound check right after that.
Tryp muttered something with his face buried in the pillow that sounded like, “Fuck off.”
Tryp’s petty act of rebellion was becoming a daily irritation. Maybe Jonas could get some roadies to barge in there and haul him out of the king-sized bed instead. They would probably use the ice water without worrying about pneumonia.
Jonas went down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee because he needed to get away from the whole lot of them for a few minutes. He sat at the cafe, drinking a mercifully over-sweetened latte, watching the normal people as they scurried to have some fun on their vacations before they went home to their houses and families.
Still trying not to scowl, he ate a cookie or something.
Jesus, an 18,000-seat theater, and it had been sold out for weeks. Killer Valentine was breaking through just in time for these overaged adolescents to explode in brilliant self-immolation.
After this tour, Xan had plans to throw them all back in the studio to record a new album the day after the tour’s last stop. He said that he had six songs already worked up and ready to commit to tape.
Jonas wanted to send them all to rehab: the Terrible Threesome for the usual substance abuse problems, Cadell for video poker addiction, and Xan for workaholism. Maybe they would strap him to a chair and force him to watch rom-com movies while he screamed for his laptop to refresh his Twitter feed to see how many new people were following @XanHimself or to check the hourly-fluctuating sales rankings on all their albums over and over.
Jonas grinned around the last bite of his cookie but let his smile drop. He was ready to snap, and he needed to check himself. The guys were all fraying hard, trying to survive and succeed in a business that could only be described as thrashing in piranha-infested waters. Swarms of people tried to take their bites out of Killer Valentine. A thousand other bands would tear them down in interviews, trying to make their own way up the charts. Record company execs were throwing contracts at the band, trying to get them to sign away rights and revenue with documents that non-lawyers couldn’t understand and even good attorneys couldn’t agree on the ramifications. Groupies tried to get pregnant every night. One of Jonas’s previous platinum-selling clients had gone bankrupt from child support payments.
Jonas was supposed to protect them from all that and from themselves and make sure that the shows went on, but he was only one man.
On the way back up to his room, the elevator stopped at the twentieth floor where the executive gym was, and the doors parted to reveal Rhiannon. Her damp curls bounced as she smiled at Jonas, and he struggled to reset his emotions around her.
She tugged on a white towel hugging her neck, her smile brightening further. “Hey! I didn’t get to the gym at noon, obviously. Were you there?”
So sunny, so sweet. He didn’t know how she did it. “I didn’t make it, either,” Jonas said. “Tomorrow, hopefully.”
The heavy doors grated closed, and they were alone in the elevator.
Jonas grabbed her soft hand and yanked. His body slammed hers, pushing her softness up against the wall of the elevator. He scrambled for her arms and pinned them above her head as his mouth found hers, open and willing, all his built-up fury pouring into his arms and hips and he pressed against her.
Rhiannon wrapped her leg around his ass, pulling him harder against her pliant body. Her light sweat mixed with the watermelon of her shampoo and vanilla of her perfume and drove him wild.
He groaned, deepening the kiss and working his tongue over hers as she gasped. One of her arms got free, and she grabbe
d him around the neck. He twisted his fingers in her hair, not pulling, just feeling the comforting softness in his palm.
The elevator slowed, bobbing to level itself with the floor outside the door.
Jonas broke off from her and straightened. Her breath warmed his lips. He said, “There might be someone out there.”
“Okay.” Her sweet blue eyes were dazed. She stroked the back of his neck, and he almost scooped her up in his arms and dashed to his room.
“Tonight,” he said, resting his forehead against hers. Her lips tantalized him, so close to his.
She nodded. “Tonight.”
The elevator doors parted, and by the time the doors revealed Cadell standing outside, Jonas and Rhiannon stood on opposite sides of the elevator, though they were still breathing hard.
Band Meeting
Rhiannon had stayed out of Xan’s way the rest of the day after the webcast and the next morning, which was pretty easy because Xan had locked himself in his bedroom, Cadell reported, and was obsessively listening to classical music, mostly violin concertos.
The show that night was scheduled at the Grand Garden Arena at the MGM Grand Casino, and all 18,000 tickets had been sold out.
That afternoon, at the band meeting in his suite, Xan handed out the set list.
Rhiannon huddled in an overstuffed chair, trying not to piss Xan off with her very presence and to look like the meek supporting singer she was. She had a lot of practice with being invisible.
The names of the songs for that night were scrawled in brown marker and copied in color, and she noted that Xan had added two songs to the second set, both of which were ambitious as hell and in total made the show over three hours long.
She tried not to imagine that wretched slum house in L.A., her old car with the floorboards rusted though in places, and crawling back to it all.
She tried harder not to recall her life before that.
Jonas stood over at the side, not interrupting but not leaving the band to their own devices, either. When she caught his eye, he smiled, and his smile turned sultry, like he was thinking about the elevator.
Her skin popped a hot sweat.
Jonas was always on the road, to the point where he had given up his apartment and just lived in a hotel between tour legs, and Killer Valentine was going to record the next album in New Jersey to get the Terrible Threesome away from their dealers.
If she got fired, she would never see him again.
Her whole body tried to heave, but Rhiannon breathed deeply to quell it. She sipped from her water bottle to moisten her dry mouth.
When Xan gave her a tight smile and a nod at the end of the meeting, she almost swooned with relief, but she didn’t want to look like a damn groupie, either.
She just wanted to crawl in Jonas’s arms and beg him to tell her that it would be all right.
Las Vegas
At the band meeting backstage right before the show, even though the Grand Garden Arena had good facilities, the band decided to pull a runner because they didn’t want to hang around the venue all night, because, well, Vegas.
They took the stage in darkness, finding the green-glowing strips of tape for their marks, and at Tryp’s downbeat, thousands of lamps and floodlights blazed to life, blinding Rhiannon for a moment before she saw the swarm of people beyond waving like wheat fields at night. Green lasers traced geometric shapes over the audience, warping with the swaying crowd. Giant screens were mounted above the stage near the cavernous ceiling and cast glowing light on the skeletal catwalks far above.
Onstage, Rhiannon dragged her mic stand a foot behind her mark so that when Xan looked back, she was not quite in the focus of the spotlight because she was just a little back-up singer and no one important, certainly not someone who might challenge him.
Two songs later, when Xan glanced back to check on her, he frowned and glanced at the light batten far above their heads.
Rhiannon didn’t want to get the lighting designer in trouble, so she scooted the stand back up a couple inches, to where it was less obvious that she was out of the light’s focus.
The first set went off without a hitch, mainly because Rhiannon didn’t get intimidated because she couldn’t see much of the 18,000 screamers beyond the fiery galaxy center of stage lights.
During the intermission, Xan waved her into his white privacy tent to run through hums and soft scales to keep their vocal cords limber but not strained, just like usual. He stood with one big hand on her shoulder as he tapped out notes on a piano app on his phone, and they sang together.
Maybe everything would be okay. Maybe she hadn’t entirely screwed this up.
Tears stung her eyes, but she shouldn’t smear her heavy stage make-up either, so she stared at the peaked white fabric above them to let her eyes suck the moisture back in. He side-hugged her before they went back out on the stage.
They ran onto the stage with follow spots for the second set. Tryp swung up into his drum kit like he could have flown over the audience if he had wanted to. Cadell’s guitar intro seemed especially sharp, and Xan’s voice rang over the rioting crowd beyond the supernovae of lights.
Rhiannon danced through the first five songs, singing her harmony lines at just the right volume to augment Xan’s clear tenor, and they reached “Standing on the Mountaintop” with no mishaps.
She tapped her foot on the pressed fiber floorboards, hoping that counted as knocking on wood, because they were on track for a perfect show.
The first verse went without a bobble, Xan singing like a blazing angel up there, like his long frock coat was hiding bright white wings. She came in on the refrain, singing her line just like a nice little harmonizing back-up girl.
The second line was a little more challenging, a little closer to the top of Xan’s range, and his voice streaming through her monitors wavered on the last syllable.
Rhiannon looked away from the dazzling stage lights that whirled like hot pink and orange cyclones and watched Xan.
At the third line, Shout it from the mountaintop, that powerful ascending crescendo, Xan reached for the notes. Just as he stomped his motorcycle boot and flung his fists to the side, blasting that last, held note of the line, his voice cracked, failed.
Rhiannon took his note and sang it hard.
This was different. This was a show.
If she had thought about it, she wouldn’t have usurped his line, not again, but she had just acted on instinct to finish the note. She quailed at what she had done, but she sang it loud, fully committed.
The follow spots moved away from the stage, whirling over the audience, and Xan spun toward her, his hand at his throat and panic in his eyes.
Rhiannon sang his line, and he nodded and held out his hand. She snatched up her unopened water bottle, wrenched her microphone off the stand, and sang as she trotted up to him, holding out the water.
He took the bottle and sipped it slowly as Rhiannon sang the melody line during the next verse. His throat contracted and he rubbed the side like it was spasming. His expression was utterly blank, impassive.
Rhiannon looked over the enormous audience, 18,000 strong, swarming over the floor and walls of the arena, and much, much closer than when she was way at the back of the stage. A bunch of teenagers at the front were dancing hard, the girls trying to get Xan’s attention with their undulating bodies, and the guys were trying to get the girls’ attention by grinding against their stomachs and butt cheeks and turning their chins away from the stage.
She kept singing as Xan sipped, and he took a deep breath, relief in his brown eyes. He made a rolling motion with his finger, signaling for her to continue, and he held his glittering microphone close to his mouth and came in softly, singing her lower harmony line. He slipped his arm around her waist like they were two buddies up on stage, or lovers, singing together, instead of the rock star and the anonymous back-up singer from the shadows.
Over in the wings, Rhiannon saw Jonas frantically scrolling through his phone, th
en talking fast to someone.
They sang the last two songs up in front of the crowd, with Rhiannon taking the higher, more challenging line and Xan singing harmony.
After the curtain call where Xan applauded her and she applauded him, they all jogged off-stage to pretend that the show was over, but of course the audience would demand encores.
Jonas grabbed Xan’s arm as he came off the stage. “No talking. I called Leena and got her out of bed. She said that she’ll be on the first flight here tomorrow morning. It gets in at one o’clock. She said to do warm-downs, starting now, and that you need to cancel tomorrow’s show.”
“I can’t cancel another blasted show,” Xan said, his British accent becoming more clipped. “All those people came here tonight! They deserve their encores.”
“No talking! Leena said no talking!” Jonas yelled over the audience’s stomping and rhythmic clapping.
“I’m not canceling the fucking show!” Xan yelled over the racket. He grabbed Rhiannon by the hand and hauled her out on stage, telling Cadell, “We’ll just do ‘Be the Night,’ all right? Not ‘Rock the World.’ Just ‘Night.’”
Cadell nodded and lifted his guitar strap over his head.
Xan pulled Rhiannon out to center stage again, and the bright spotlights hit them as she took a deep breath to steady herself. He leaned down and whispered to her, “Take the melody line.”
She nodded, shocked.
They sang the moderate ballad together with Rhiannon on the top notes. Man, she did not know how he did this every night, belting out hours of songs near the top of his range, all at full voice.
After that song, they jogged off the stage again, but the audience started stomping and clapping in unison before they had even left the stage because they all knew that Xan Valentine always came out for one final solo. The other band members all dashed for the SUVs, pulling the runner, ready to waste the night in Vegas.
