George nodded enthusiastically and held both of his thumbs up, the relief evident in his wide smile. “Will do. If we’ve got anything that shows who did this, I will find it.”
“Thanks, George. I’m going to take my car to get detailed. Call me if you find anything.”
Leaving George to do his job, I headed out, and after calling ahead to inform the professional detailer that I used that I was on my way, I started playing back the footage in my mind. There was no doubting that the figure who’d vandalized my car was around Jared’s height, and while I wasn’t sure exactly why he would’ve done it, a guy like him might do something like that just for shits and giggles. Maybe he’d gotten bored at the studio or something and decided to prank me.
The traffic light at the end of the street turned red as I considered Jared’s possible motives, and once I came to a complete stop, I pulled out my phone and called up his number. My thumb hovered over the green button for a second, but then I punched down on it.
A couple of rings later, Jared answered, and his slurry voice flowed through the speakers in my car. He was quite obviously drunk.
“Alicia, this is a surprise. What can I do for you, baby?”
“I’m not your baby. That was real mature, what you did today.” My voice dripped with sarcasm, and it was a couple of octaves louder than it should have been. “What were you thinking?”
Jared paused for a beat, but he seemed beyond confused when he finally answered my question. “What do you mean, what was I thinking? And what was so immature this time?”
“Cut the crap, Jared. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“No. I really don’t. I’m wracking my brain over here, but I honestly don’t know why you’re yelling at me right now.” Genuine confusion marred his tone, but I knew what I’d seen.
“My car got egged.”
“Okay, sucks for you, but what the fuck does that have to do with me?” He sounded even more confused now, but it very well might have been an act.
“I went back to the security footage, and a hooded figure wearing a ski mask was responsible for egging it. Said figure also just so happened to be about your height, and since we just talked about your lack of maturity a couple of days ago, I have no doubt that you would be capable of doing something like this.”
Jared had the audacity to chuckle, and it ramped up my irritation about a hundred notches, but his response gave me pause. “I admit that I’m immature sometimes, and that I’m right about in the middle of getting lit right now, but even I realize that I’m not the only person who frequents that building who is my height. Hell, all the guys in the band are just about my height.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t just have an argument about their maturity with them, now did I?”
“How would I know? Point is, it wasn’t me. If I wanted to mess with you, or anyone else for that matter, I wouldn’t hide my identity.”
His confusion had given way to amusement, and the more he talked, the more his amusement was stroking the irritation in my belly. “I don’t know why you do half the things you do, so maybe you just hid your identity to annoy me even further.”
If that had been his intention, he’d definitely achieved his objective. His chuckles were turning into laughter, tightening the knots in my stomach. “I’m the Emperor—”
I cut him off immediately. “Spare me the Emperor of Rock bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit,” he whined, still laughing. “But since you’ve had an unfortunate afternoon, I’ll save it for now. What I was trying to say anyway was that if I want to annoy people, I annoy them openly. If you don’t believe me, look me up on YouTube. There are thousands of videos posted of the pranks I’ve pulled over the years, and you won’t find one where I’ve even attempted to hide who I was.”
“If it wasn’t you, who was it then?”
“It was probably just some stupid kid,” he suggested, his flippant arrogance so complete that I was actually starting to believe him.
“Fine, you’re off the hook for now, but I’m telling you, Jared, if I find out this was you, they’re going to hear about it all the way to Timbuktu.”
Booming laughter flowed through the speakers, and despite my best efforts and extremely high levels of irritation, the corners of my lips were desperately trying to twitch up at the sound of it.
“Bring it on. I’m not afraid of anything, definitely not of a tiny little slip of a thing like you, and since I know that I didn’t do this, there really is nothing for you to yell at me about. I can think of much better ways to get you screaming—”
I groaned out loud and interrupted him. “That’s enough. I’m pulling up to the detailer’s now so I need to get off the phone.”
“But there are so many more fun ways to get off than that.”
“Oh my God, Jared. I’m hanging up now.” I didn’t wait for a response before I did exactly what I’d told him I was going to do.
After I’d explained to the lady checking the cars in what had happened, I handed over my keys and settled in for the wait, still thinking about what Jared said about the videos of his pranks on YouTube. Without really thinking about it, I opened the app on my phone and typed in “Jared Larsen prank.”
He was right. There were thousands of videos of him getting up to all sorts of things, and as I watched him doing stupid things and causing trouble, I couldn’t help but laugh every once in a while. There were videos where he was sneaking everything from a plastic snake to a donkey into people’s dressing rooms, usually things it was public knowledge they were afraid of.
I watched as he talked a popular talk show host into starting a water balloon fight with him at a festival, but he’d filled his with paint. He called out several interviewers by asking them such personal questions about things that had recently leaked about them that my cheeks heated just watching it.
He spray painted “Always #2” on a rival band’s tour bus and got in a fight over switching out a tape of a new music video that was being premiered with a sex tape of the same artist. Some of the videos were funny, while others made me cringe, but they all had one thing in common: Jared never hid his face. Not when he was messing with celebrities or band mates or fans. He certainly wouldn’t bother to hide it from me.
CHAPTER 11
JARED
We were due to step into another recording session soon, but we had to get through this meeting first. Gerry and Alicia had come down to the studio to meet with us on the progress of the new album and to check-in on the hype we were meant to be creating for it. We’d followed Alicia’s advice and posted some stuff from time to time after our first meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the fans were eating it up.
I was riding high off the buzz, and I thought it was time to take things up a notch, but Alicia didn’t agree with me. I didn’t know whether it was because she still thought I’d egged her car yesterday or if she really didn’t think that it was a good idea. Either way, we were sure going toe to toe on this one.
We were all piled into a cramped lounge at the back of the studio, and the lines that were being drawn in the sand were all the clearer because of the positions we’d inadvertently taken up. I was seated on an uncomfortable couch on one side of the room and had to actively keep my butt from sliding off the white slippery material. Caleb was sprawled out beside me, and his leg kept knocking into mine from his own efforts to get comfortable.
Alicia and Gerry were on the couch directly opposite from us, with Dom leaning on the wall behind them. Matt and Nick were in the single seaters on either side of the small coffee table between us, which seemed fitting since they weren’t saying much.
Alicia glowered at me, and her blue eyes, bright and shining like sapphires in the sun, lit up in irritation. Her toned arms were folded under her breasts, pushing them up in a way that was making it hard not to stare, but this wasn’t the time to get distracted by tits. Even if the creamy globes were covered only by sheer floral material and what looked like a ve
ry thin shirt underneath.
“We talked about this only a couple of weeks ago, Jared,” Alicia told me, the exasperation in her voice making it clear that she thought I was an idiot for not remembering the conversation we had. I did; I just thought that things had changed since then.
“I know. I didn’t forget, but then we were talking about releasing teasers for the singles, not about dropping our first single. The hype is huge right now. We can use that momentum to catapult us to space if we drop a single immediately. We already have a couple of songs recorded. I really think we should do this.”
“I agree that the hype is building, but I don’t think that it’s there yet,” Alicia argued. “The only reason it’s building so much is because of what we are doing. I really think we should just keep doing that. It’s obviously working.” Her expression was fierce. It was cute if she thought her ferocity would intimidate me.
“If we keep doing what we’re doing, people are going to get bored with the wait. I’m telling you, if we drop our single now, it’ll leave them salivating and wanting more.”
“And everyone knows that leaving them wanting more is always a good thing.” Caleb smirked beside me, on my side of an argument for once in our fucking lives.
Alicia’s eyes cut to him before locking back on mine. She waved her hand between Caleb and me. “You two are the worst. Can we please stay on point here?”
“We are staying on point. Because Caleb is right. Leaving them wanting more will always have them desperate for it by the time you give it.”
Alicia’s tiny fist slammed down on the arm of her couch. “I don’t care about your antics with the women you have sex with, or what state you leave them in, or what state you like to work them up to. Be serious for once in your lives. This isn’t a joke, and it isn’t about your sex life.”
Direct. Fucking. Hit. It felt like she’d punched me in the nuts, but I schooled my features, and outwardly, I knew my expression remained the same. “I am being serious. Trust me, this is the furthest thing from a joke to me. I was scrolling through my social media accounts last night, and the time is right.”
Alicia cocked her head and raised a brow. “You mean last night after you were drinking all afternoon? Newsflash, Larsen, I scroll through all of your social media accounts every single day. I keep track of the trending hashtags, and I have my finger on the pulse of the media.”
“Then you should know as well as I do that we should strike while the fans are practically panting for something.”
“They’re not panting yet. Trust me. Think about this Jared, what if we drop the single and it lands as a dud because we haven’t got things built up all the way yet? That would hurt your reputation and destroy all the work that we’ve already done.”
“You haven’t even heard the new stuff we’ve got. We could drop any one of those songs, and they would explode. There’s no way any of them would be a dud.”
Caleb backed me up on that by adding, “The songs that we have recorded are dynamite. Jared’s right. That shit would light up brighter than Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
Dom shook his head, the tattoos on his arms flexing as he uncrossed and crossed them again. “We’ve got good stuff, but what we’re working on is even better. Besides, I agree with Alicia that if we drop and fail, we’re fucked.”
“The operative word there being if,” I said. “If we fail. We haven’t failed once since we took off, and we won’t fail now.” I stared at one of my oldest friends. I knew the look that was in Dom’s eyes as well as I knew the one in mine. We really were on opposite sides of the fence with this argument.
At thirty, Dom was the oldest of our merry band of lost boys, and he never let us forget it. I’d met him when I was six and Caleb was only three. He lived on our block and was the one who’d introduced me to rock music. He was raised by a single father who blasted the classics while he got blasted every night.
I looked over to Matt, then Nick. Both were sitting stoically, uncharacteristically quiet. “What do you guys think?”
Matt shrugged, his fingers tapping out a steady beat on his knee. “I don’t know, man. I’m dying to drop, too. The sooner we do, the sooner we get back up on stage, and you know how much I love playing live. We read the audience though, brother. And as fucking amazing as you are at that, it’s Alicia’s job to read the public as a whole. If she doesn’t think that they’re ready, what’s the rush?”
Well, that didn’t help at all. Nick cracked his neck and threw his palms up. “Don’t look at me. I’m just here to jam. Let’s just go do our fucking jobs, and let Alicia and Gerry do theirs.”
I couldn’t fucking believe them. “This is a part of our jobs, asshole. Don’t you remember back in the day, when we were still handling all of this ourselves? We know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before. We used to go with our guts, and look how far that’s taken us. We don’t need PR people to tell us what to do.”
“Jared, be reasonable,” Gerry said. “No one’s saying that you don’t know what you’re doing, and no one’s denying that you did a good job before you had people handling all of this for you. But you’ve also never been this big before, and you have people to handle it for you. Why don’t you head off into the studio and let us deal with the business end of things?”
Condescending prick. If he thought for one second that his patronizing tone or his bullshit soothing of my ego was at all going to get me to back down, he had another thing coming. “I’m not going fucking anywhere until this is settled.”
Alicia sat up a bit straighter and looked me right in the eye. “Look, Jared. This isn’t about you. I don’t care who did what, where, and when in the past. This is now, and while I accept that you’ve had a look through your social media, I can assure you that now is not the time. This is my job, and I’m damn good at my job, so believe me when I say that if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we will get to the point where the time is right, but it’s not now.”
“It might be your job, sweetheart, but I’ve been in this industry a lot longer than you. They don’t call me the Emperor of Rock for nothing. In fact—”
“For fuck’s sake,” she said. “Enough with the Emperor of Rock stuff. Everyone gets it. You’re good. Great, even. There’s no doubt that you’re one of the best singers and songwriters out there at the moment, but has it ever occurred to you that even Emperors had advisers that they listened to? They had advisers because they accepted that they didn’t know everything about everything. As your adviser, I won’t be ignored, and I won’t be steamrolled. I am strenuously advising against dropping a single right now.”
Gerry leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I agree with Alicia.”
My leg started jumping. The annoyance building up inside needed some kind of outlet before I fucking punched someone. Caleb had his arms crossed, glaring at a Dom, while Matt and Nick’s eyes were darting between the two camps like they were watching a tennis match, but they kept quiet.
Alicia’s eyes were still locked on me, passion for her job and her belief radiating from them and making them look like the Caribbean churning before a storm rolled in. I actually liked that. I hadn’t seen this side of her before, but I could now see that she was truly passionate about what she did.
And it was kind of awesome that she was doing it for us, pouring all of that passion and belief into our music.
My music.
With a heavy sigh, I nudged Caleb’s shoulder with mine to tell him to stand down, and I grumbled, “Fine.”
For the first time in my life, I was walking away from the battle, but I was more determined than ever to win the war. Even if I couldn’t quite figure out what I was fighting for yet.
CHAPTER 12
ALICIA
I looked up from my computer when a soft knock sounded at the door to my office. I didn’t have any appointments scheduled, but I assumed that it was Gerry checking in on the new ad campaign I was putting together for the album. “Come in.”
I was surprised to see him. As far as I knew, the band was supposed to be in the studio all day recording, practicing, and working on their new stuff.
I’d been working with them for just about a month now, and I still wasn’t used to the physical effect that Jared had on me whenever I saw him. I’d thought that the attraction I had to him would fade over time, but if anything, I was only becoming more attracted to his arrogant ass.
No matter how annoyed I was with the man, being in the same room as him never failed to get to me. I always walked away with an intense battle raging, the sides warring between wanting to kiss him and wanting to kick him.
He’d been very resistant to my suggestions so far, and while he was slowly, but surely, coming around, I’d definitely underestimated his arrogance, as surely as I’d underestimated how attracted I would be to him.
Sauntering into my office, he closed the door behind him, and it felt like he’d sealed off any air that might have been coming into the office. Being around Jared was like that.
He had this larger-than-life presence that seemed to take up the whole room and draw me in like we were opposite poles of a magnet. How was it possible that someone who looked so much like an angel could be such a devil?
A dark angel to be sure, but surely, only divine creatures could, or should, look as good as he did. Good enough to eat. And lick. And suck.
His tight, black leather pants revealed the outline of an impressive bulge that I wouldn’t have minded falling to my knees for and doing all of the above to, but that wasn’t an option. Dark eyes bored into mine, intense and unwavering, but his expression and body language were nothing but casual, even bored. I didn’t know why I would have expected anything else from him.
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