Red Hot Lovers: 18 Contemporary Romance Books of Love, Passion, and Sexy Heroes by Your Favorite Top-Selling Authors

by Milly Taiden

  “Then don’t,” she said.

  “You two had better behave like adults,” he said, glowering at her. “If you threaten the band, I will get rid of you both.” He straightened. “Tryp, up here with me.”

  Tryp followed Xan up to the front of the bus, where they conferred quietly in the captain’s chairs area that they called Barcoloungerland.

  Rhiannon’s legs gave out, and she fell backward onto the couch, clutching her chest. “Holy Christ on a cracker.”

  Jonas looked over at her, his green eyes unaccountably gleeful. “That went better than I expected.”

  “How?” she asked. “What on God’s green Earth was that better than?”

  “I would have dropped them, if they had cut you.”

  “You wouldn’t sabotage them?” she whispered, aghast.

  “Oh, God, no. I wouldn’t have to try to hurt them. When it became known that Killer Valentine was no longer associated with me, it would have crippled them.” He lowered himself to the couch and wrapped his arms around her. “It’s all right. It’s over.”

  She clutched his shirt, clinging to him, not crying but freaking out inside. “You almost got me fired.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  She told him, “This is my big chance. What was I thinking?”

  He stroked her hair, his big hand calming her. “You had at least three song hooks in that speech you gave Xan. You should write them down so we aren’t scrambling to write songs when you go solo.”

  “I would never have had a solo career. If Xan had blackballed me, I would have been sidelined.”

  Jonas pulled away and looked down at her. His eyebrows pinched in confusion, and his mouth even hung open. “How?”

  “Because I would have to start all over with new bands in L.A., assuming that anyone would even work with me after I got fired from my first real gig after less than three months. I’d be black death on a plate.”

  Jonas chuckled and pulled her back into his arms. “Rhiannon, you really don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “Jonas Hawkfeather Rees, manager extraordinaire and rocker wrangler.”

  “I don’t want to talk business right now. You’re still too raw to lead your own band like Xan does. You do need some more experience, but before we hit the bus yet again, we should sit down and sketch out a career path for you. By the time you’re ready to front a band, Killer Valentine will be established and another manager can take them over, probably within a year, maybe in six months.”

  “You’re going to abandon them?” Xan would freak, and then he would probably kill her for stealing their manager.

  Jonas shrugged. “They won’t need a starmaker like me anymore, and I would get bored. I like the climb, not the Red Queen’s Race, where a band has to work like hell to stay relevant. After a certain point, record company politics become more important than merit or sales.”

  “What did you call yourself?” Rhiannon asked, holding around his trim waist for dear life as the bus swayed around them.

  “A starmaker,” Jonas said. “Like Richard Neville during the War of the Roses in England called himself the kingmaker. I’ve taken three bands from nonexistence to major acts.” He named them, and Rhiannon’s jaw dropped. “That’s why I took on Xan and we put together Killer Valentine. My only miss was Prison Riot.”

  If Rhiannon had been standing up, her knees would have given out. She held onto the edge of the couch for balance because the world tipped under her, plus the bus rounded a long curve. “You managed all those guys?”

  Jonas’s wry smile suggested that Rhiannon should have known that he was a major player. “They were all my clients.” He slid one hand down to the small of her back. “You really didn’t know that?”

  Rhiannon bit her lip, embarrassed. “Um, no.”

  His pale green eyes sharpened, and Rhiannon could see the savvy businessman behind the guy who had slept so peacefully in bed with her. “We need to have some serious conversations about business realities,” he said, “but I promise you this: no matter what happens between us personally, I’ll build you a hell of a career. That’s a manager’s job, and I’m very, very good at it.”

  Advantages

  Working out the balance between her relationship with Jonas and her role in the band turned out to be easier than Rhiannon had expected.

  Rhiannon sang during the concerts, played her part as band member at meetings, and worked as a vocalist with Xan, who warmed up to her again within a week when his band did not summarily fall apart. After the shows, she stuck a little closer to Jonas, who didn’t threaten to kill any of the band members, even when they got physical, as musicians do.

  If anything, now that everyone knew, he was more relaxed about everything.

  There were other subtle shifts that she could have never predicted.

  In the white privacy tent, while she was warming up or warming down her throat with Xan, he told her small anecdotes about pivotal points in his career, like when he met Cadell at Juilliard in a guitar class.

  “That bloody bastard can play absolutely everything,” Xan said, still holding a blue ice pack wrapped in a towel to his throat and lying limply over a director’s chair, “from classical guitar pieces written centuries ago to the dirtiest rock solos, and he’s a brilliant composer. Bloody brilliant. Even back then, I knew that I wanted to put together a band, so I cultivated him even though he could barely talk to people. He’s so much an introvert that he’s rubbish for promotions or business work, but the man is Einstein on the ax. You can have one of those in the band, usually your lead guitar, but the others need to be able to interact with the crowd and work the music business people.”

  And about his first meeting with a record company.

  “You can’t go in and look like a professional,” Xan said. “Ozzy was doing that. Even though the man’s a complete lunatic, Sharon would sober him up and whip him into shape for meetings, but they were having problems with the record execs. The suits wanted a madman, especially from someone like Ozzy. They wanted to see the image. So I go in with the frock coat, expound upon Renaissance literature and absinthe, and act like a court musician plucked from Da Vinci’s Florence. Half the time, I sound like this, and the rest, I pull my French accent out of my arse. Jonas does all the negotiating, anyway. You’ll need a persona, too.”

  “Are you from France?” she asked before she had even thought about it, because he had said my French accent.

  Xan’s face smoothed until he looked like a marble-carved model in a photograph.

  “I’m sorry,” Rhiannon said. “Didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Do I have a French accent?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “British when you speak. American when you sing.”

  Xan looked beyond her, past the flap of the white tent to the roadies breaking down the set on the stage, and his dark eyes betrayed nothing more.

  Now that Jonas always seemed to have his hand on her back and his eye on her future, the other band members stopped insisting that she go to titty bars and talked more with her about music and their next album, even asked for her input.

  A few weeks later, when she was alone in an SUV with Tryp after a runner, he asked her to crit a drum solo he was working on, beating it out on the back of the car seat as the SUV sped through the darkness. The driver up front flinched every time a drumstick came too close to his head.

  “It’s good,” Rhiannon said. “Good arc and crescendo at the end, but I’m not a drummer.”

  “But you’re a musician,” Tryp said. “You’ve got a good sense of musicality.”

  “Can I ask you something?” she mused, watching the bright-blocked skyscrapers of downtown Dallas speed by outside the window.

  “Sure.” He drummed on the leather seat back and the doors some more, his black hair flipping in his eyes. He needed a haircut.

  “You guys have been treating me differently since I started dating Jonas.”

  “No,” he said, and when he looked at her,
his sharp stare showed that he meant what he said. “It doesn’t matter who you’re fucking. We started treating you differently after it became obvious that you’re not just another pretty-voice back-up singer. You’re Jonas Rees’s next client. That’s fucking huge. We may want you to open for us, or someday, we may need you to let us open. There are ups and downs in this industry. Sometimes you’re on top, sometimes you’re so fifteen minutes ago, and sometimes you have to climb your way back up from being a fucking joke.”

  “So it’s just Jonas,” she said. Disappointment wavered in her eyes.

  “Jonas said something first,” he said. “The rest of us were already noticing that you were improving, a lot, fast. You never went to a performing arts high school or anything, right?”

  She shook her head. She hadn’t even heard of such a thing until she was at auditions, competing against people who had gone to one.

  “I did. Some of these guys went to other performing arts high schools or conservatories like Juilliard or Berklee. You didn’t have any advantages like that, did you?”

  Her throat closed up, but she didn’t choke because she was a singer. She used her muscles to open her throat and say, “No. I didn’t.”

  “Don’t let Jonas see this.” Tryp wrapped her up in a hug and rubbed her arm as if she were cold. “It’s obvious that you can become a major player. People are treating you like an equal because you are one.”

  And then she did cry, and Tryp didn’t even tease her about it.

  Home

  For weeks, Jonas watched Rhiannon with a professional eye.

  Maintaining that professional distance was difficult because he wanted to gather her up in his arms, throw her over his shoulder, and take her to his bed every time he saw her, but he was very good at his job.

  Her voice developed a rich timbre, and her range lengthened. It strengthened, and after every show, she was a little less hoarse. Someday, she would be physically able to headline every night.

  Her stage presence grew until, when Xan motioned her down from her upstage perch for the more demanding songs, she could fill the whole theater. His attention was riveted on her as she sang under the burning stage lights.

  Professionally, he was an idiot if he let her slip away.

  Killer Valentine was almost complete as a project as far as Jonas was concerned. They were firmly established on the arena circuit. He had planned to stay with them for another year or so until they were properly cemented in the music industry. They should sign their first big contract soon and receive their first massive multi-million dollar advance. Their next album, their first professional one, would shake the industry. Xan had already played a couple songs for him, and every damn one of them made Jonas’s scalp tingle with his spidey sense for hit songs. Their next tour would probably require stadiums.

  Their June concert at Madison Square Garden would be the tipping point.

  Yep, Killer Valentine was poised for superstardom.

  Jonas wanted out.

  He wanted to start working with Rhiannon now.

  Xan would put out a contract on Jonas if he ditched Killer Valentine just yet.

  More concerts flew by, and as he held Rhiannon’s fingers before she dashed for the SUVs, or as he held her in his arms in all the different hotel beds at night, he found his thoughts drifting.

  Yes, he wanted to shape her career.

  Yes, he wanted to work with her until she shone like the sun, and he could bask in her light.

  But yet, for those weeks, every time Jonas looked at her, he lost himself.

  At night, when he finished rounding up the band and extricating them from all their problems, when he finally slipped into bed beside her, the softness of her skin exhilarated him. Almost every night, he thought he would be too tired or she would be, but as soon as his fingers slipped over her skin, lightning flashed through him.

  One night, and he wasn’t even sure what city they were in but they had driven south from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he found his way to their bed, his legs shaking from thwarted angry adrenaline after he had found Rade and Grayson shooting up at a bar, in public, and tying off a groupie whom Jonas suspected had a fake I.D. and wasn’t even twenty-one. They had shot her up with heroin, too, and she could have died right there on the floor, even though it was probably at her request and very probably at her insistence because they didn’t give up their shit easily.

  But then Rhiannon had rolled over and pillowed her head in his shoulder, nuzzling his arm, and all the irate tension fell away. He’d held her, which turned to kissing her, which turned to stroking her creamy skin, then pulling his Pink Floyd tee shirt off her and burying himself in her, pinning her to his bed, until she was panting his name in the early morning sunlight.

  He found every opportunity to be with her, and when he wasn’t, that nagging feeling that he had forgotten something dogged him. When they were together, when he could run his fingertips over her skin or hear her puttering in the other room of the suite, he felt an energy between them, a calmness, like he wasn’t alone.

  It took him a while to figure out what that meant, an embarrassingly long time, really, because he hadn’t had a family for more than twelve years.

  In Dallas, Rhiannon shimmied off the stage and threw herself into his arms for a quick kiss before she sprinted for the cars, and the image came to him that even though they were on the road, even though they were essentially sleeping on couches and living out of backpacks like he had been since he was fifteen, when Jonas was with her, he was home.

  New York City

  Five days off. Five whole days off. Five freaking days off in a row.

  No radio interview calls. No set list meetings. No stages or sound checks or screaming audiences.

  Nothing to do. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing to overcome or surmount or deal with.

  Rhiannon was going to explode.

  What could have caused such a travesty as a five-day break in Killer Valentine’s tour schedule?

  During the hard Southern Swing in late March, Xan’s voice had failed yet again in Atlanta, this time only halfway through the second set. The next two tour dates were small venues, so the rest of the band, including Rhiannon, ganged up on him to insist that he cancel them and rest his goddamn throat instead of making it worse with every damn show.

  The midnight fight on the bus raged for hours as the bus veered around pokey cars that were driving the goddamn speed limit. The band members clung to whatever they could—seat backs, the straphanger bar, Rhiannon hung her elbows over the back of the diner booth,—and argued like the world was ending.

  Xan argued with them all, threatened to put them all on planes back to L.A., and finally admitted defeat only because about three in the morning, every time he tried to threaten them, his voice emerged as a rasp, and he held his throat with pain lines creased around his eyes just before he turned away, his brown and blond hair swinging to cover his agony.

  Xan finally swallowed hard and ground out, “What the fuck. My cousin is getting married this weekend. I should go.”

  Afterward, Jonas cornered Rhiannon in the back of the bus. “I need to get away from these nutjobs for a few days,” he said, his exhausted eyes betraying what an understatement that was, “and so do you. Let’s go scout Madison Square Garden since KV will be playing there in June.”

  Jonas called a car to meet them when the bus pulled into the next city, and they went straight to the nearest airport and caught a plane to New York, where he rented a huge suite at The Plaza Hotel, right across from the green and flowered expanse of Central Park in the spring.

  The next morning, Jonas got them into MSG early, and Rhiannon strolled around the arena that echoed like an empty airplane hangar and that she had seen on television so many times during basketball games and major charity concerts, and she was going to sing there in just over two months. The audience’s seats weren’t raked as much as most arenas, but the rows stretched forever and packed to the rafters. The gorgeous green
rooms were under the main floor, lots of places to meet the guests that seemed to always have special access, whether by buying an exorbitantly priced ticket through the fan club or by influence, usually political but sometimes celebrities who watched the show from backstage because their agents knew Jonas, and even a nice catering area.

  No runner. Thank God.

  Afterward, Jonas seemed jumpy, like the tour of MSG had ignited all the worry again, so he went out by himself for the afternoon while Rhiannon sat in their suite, which was decorated in Beaux Arts silver and mirrors like the Jazz Age had splattered itself on the walls, and relaxed in silence and solitude with thousands of reflected images of herself on the walls and furniture until she was sure that she was going to lose her mind.

  Four more days of this madness.

  The iPad chiseled into the wall said that the hotel had a spa, so she got a facial and a mani-pedi and a massage until Jonas finally texted to ask if she was all right.

  She was better than all right. The tiny little spa girls had pounded on her until she was a boneless bag of greased-up jelly, and she slithered back up the elevator and down the hall to the Fitzgerald Suite like an octopus tentacling across the sea floor.

  After she showered the spa goop off of herself, she strapped a white, fluffy bathrobe around her body and flopped on the couch in the living room beside Jonas. He wore suit slacks and a white dress shirt open at the neck because he packed suits, workout gear, and pajamas in his suitcase and garment bag, and nothing else.

  She asked, “I’m paying for half of this room, right?”

  “No,” he scoffed.

  He scoffed! Rhiannon was less than pleased with scoffing, even in her current, gelatinized state. “Hey, I’ve got money from the tour. Let me spend some of it.”

  He glanced at her sideways, then shifted on the couch to face her. “We need to talk about some business realities.”

  “Oh, come on, we have four days before we have to go back to the tour. I don’t want to talk business. Let’s shag before we go down to supper.”