Two officers came walking out of the building as I was walking in, their hats underneath their arms as they spoke to someone walking behind them. Defenses on high alert, I walked right up to them. "Whatever you think we've done, we haven't."
One of the officers, an older man with a shock of surprisingly thick white hair, frowned and came to a stop. "I'm sure there's been a mistake, son. Who hasn't done what?"
I was about to answer when the person who was walking behind them pushed through from between the two officers and smiled up at me, shaking her head. Alicia.
A soft sigh of relief puffed from my lungs, and then I realized that the police were here and talking to Alicia. My blood turned to ice as I conjured up a million different possibilities about what might have happened to her to make her call the police.
Not giving a fuck that we were outside her office, I pulled her into my arms, my heart pounding against my ribs. "What happened? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She pushed me away gently, her hand lingering on my chest before she stepped out of the circle of my arms. "Remember all that stuff that happened to my car a while back?"
I nodded, keeping an eye on the officers. "Why are there only here for that now?"
All that shit happened weeks ago. Alicia smiled politely at the officers and shot me a warning look. "They're not here for that specifically. After everything happened, I reviewed some of the building's security measures, and I asked for a thorough security check to be done. These nice officers were helping with that."
I searched her expression and posture for any sign there was something wrong and came up satisfied she was okay. Worry over Alicia dissipating, I flashed the officers my famous grin. "Sorry about that. Usually, the police come because we've done something, and just this once, I knew we were completely innocent."
The older man was still frowning, but his much younger partner looked a little starstruck. Attempting to smooth over my assumption that either they were here wrongly accusing us of something or they'd only shown up weeks after being called out, since it never hurt to have the police not pissed at you, I trained my gaze on the younger officer.
"If you want, I can run inside and fetch you an autographed copy of one of our official pictures for the new album," I offered, keeping the cocky smirk on my face like I didn't have a care in the world. "Or, if you'd like to give me your name, we can arrange to have some copies sent over to the station."
"Oh. That would be—" the younger guy stammered, silenced when his partner gave him a look as subtle as if he'd stomped on the guy’s toe.
"That won't be necessary, Mr. Larsen. We're only doing our jobs," the older guy said. So he did know who I was. I bit back the urge to ask if he'd come here before to arrest one of us, choosing to stay out of trouble for once.
The officers and Alicia said goodbye, exchanging some final thoughts on what I assumed they'd been talking about before I arrived. Once Alicia wrapped up with them, she turned to me. "Must be weird seeing the police and not having them looking for someone in the band."
I laughed, throwing my head back. "I'd say. I was about to punch one of them just on the assumption that one of the guys needed protection from them."
Alicia rolled her eyes, giggling as she walked into her office beside me. "Did you ever think that maybe one of them had done something and deserved to be arrested?"
"No," I said firmly. "Even if they had done something, I'm sure there would have been a different way to make up for it other than for them to be arrested."
"What if one of them murdered someone?" Alicia asked, amusement in her eyes.
I grimaced and shook my head. "I would have known whoever is accused was being framed. For all the fights we get into, none of us are big fans of blood."
"There are so many questions I want to ask about that, but I won't." She laughed, pushing through the double glass doors separating the lobby from the staircases that led to the officers upstairs. "Let's just forget the cops were here, shall we?"
"We shall," I agreed, relieved I'd gotten out of that conversation with only one hypothetical question. If she'd asked about all the things the police had been here about before, she wouldn't still have been laughing.
She knew about a lot of the shit we'd gotten into in the past but not all of it. For good reason. She would have run for the hills screaming if she knew the kind of pranks we pulled when we first started out.
"I'm glad you're here. I wanted to talk to you about the tour," she said, ascending the stairs a few steps ahead of me.
"I thought we had a big meeting scheduled about the tour next week?" I only remembered it because she'd mentioned it before leaving my house this morning. We'd spent the last couple of nights together, and though I was still beating myself up over what happened after our date, I still hated knowing there were so many things unsaid between us when she was for sure going to go home to her house tonight.
A part of me kept convincing myself we'd only hit pause on that conversation until later, but it was now so much later that I couldn't think of an excuse to keep her around for another night, and still, I couldn't think of what or how to tell her.
"We still have that meeting," Alicia was saying as we reached the landing and turned to her office. "But I've been putting out some feelers, and I have confirmation now of a few performance dates before the official tour starts in a few months."
"Like teaser performances?"
"Exactly like that." She grinned, pulling down on her door handle and letting us both into her office. "I know how much you like to tease, so I thought you might enjoy trying your teasing game on a larger scale."
Catching her wrist, I spun her to my chest and grinned down at her. "I'm always up for a challenge."
"I was hoping you might say that." Humor danced in her bright blue eyes, the color of the sky outside on a cloudless day like today. "I didn't want to say anything in case nothing came of it, but I hope you're ready to go."
I bumped her nose with mine, a surprisingly intimate gesture I'd never tried before and found I liked, so I did it again. "I'm always ready to go. I thought you knew that by now."
Leaning back to create a few inches of space between us, she swatted my bicep and pressed her lips together. "Good. I hope you're ready to go in the actual sense of the word as well since you have a concert in Seattle on Saturday."
"Wow." It was already Wednesday. Luckily, I really was ready to go in every sense of the word. "That's soon, but I'm ready to leave. I'm sure the others are too. We're used to keeping go bags packed for album promo after we finish recording."
"Good to hear it. I thought you might want to talk to the others about the set list. You're slated to play three songs. At least one of them has to be from your new album. All three of them could be, but I thought I would leave that up to you."
"I'll talk to Dom about it, but there's no way he agrees to drop three new tracks on one preconcert. None of us will."
"That's why I left it up to you." She pressed a soft kiss to the underside of my jaw and then let go of me, sashaying to her desk. For a moment, I was transfixed by her back as she walked away from me.
She was wearing a pale pink dress that showcased her porcelain skin. Her blond hair hung in loose waves to her waist, the ends pointing like an arrow to her delectable ass.
Turning to face me, she placed her palms flat on her desk, and my mind went straight to the gutter. It would be so easy to round the desk and go stand behind her, bending her over and lifting that dress to—
Alicia snapped her fingers repeatedly right in front of my face. "Earth to Jared. What are you daydreaming about?"
"You," I told her honestly, but she rolled her eyes.
"Did you hear the part where I told you that you're not only performing in Seattle?"
I didn't, but I'd been doing this long enough to know that a performance like the one she scheduled usually went hand-in-hand with an interview. "We're sitting down with someone too."
"Yes. There’s a ma
gazine that’s going to be doing an article on the band pre-tour."
"Have they sent over their list of topics to discuss yet?" That was my favorite thing about print interviews. They were much easier to prepare for and much easier to clean up a little after.
Alicia dug through a stack of papers on her desk and clearly found what she was looking for when she pulled an email out from the stack and slid it over to me. "They want to talk about everything that happened with Caleb. It doesn't look like they know any more than what was published in that one speculative article, but they're going to ask about his hospitalization, so we have to be ready for that."
It didn't come as a surprise that they wanted to discuss my brother being admitted to the hospital. It would have been naive to think we would have gotten away with the whole thing scot-free. We were just going to have to very carefully construct the way in which we spoke about the reasons for his hospitalization.
"We'll be ready for it. Anything else?"
"The usual. The band's image right now, your new album, tour stops." Alicia rattled off the list, looking as bored about the topics as I was, but both of us knew every interview we did right now counted.
"Okay, so the usual spiel. Got it."
"I can cancel the interview if you don't want to talk about Caleb, you know," she said after a brief pause, understanding in her eyes.
"Don't worry about it." Caleb's stint in the hospital had happened. It didn't matter whether we got out of this interview. There would always be a next one.
Eventually, we were going to have to deal with the questions. As much as I appreciated Alicia's offer, it would be easier to just get the first interview since over and done with. "Don't cancel. It will help with the sales."
I could see she still wanted to talk about it, but I didn't. All I wanted to do was to kiss her for genuinely being more concerned about whether we were ready to talk about Caleb's hospitalization than about the publicity an article that finally revealed what it had been about would bring.
Planting a hand on each of her chair's armrests, I lowered my head and did just that.
CHAPTER 62
ALICIA
The plane's engines whirred as they cooled down. Seattle was gray and foggy with fine rain drizzling down. It was my first time in the city, but unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to see absolutely anything from the air.
Snowcapped mountains were barely visible through the fog in the distance as I stared out my window, the dark silhouettes of the city’s buildings rising up against it. I only wished I could see more.
Stepping off the plane, my heels hit the tarmac around the same time the narrow steps leading from the aircraft shook as Matt ran down them. Apparently, he wasn’t the biggest fan of flying, and I was learning that he was like a ball of uncontained energy as soon as we touched down.
“I’ll meet you at the car,” he called out, jogging backward before taking off for … somewhere. I sighed, running my hand through my rapidly frizzing hair as the weather won out over my straightening efforts from that morning.
A black umbrella popped up over my head, a stoic-looking steward appearing at my elbow. “Thanks,” I told the man, who nodded but didn’t acknowledge me otherwise.
Jared was next off the plane, grabbing the umbrella from the man with a smirk. “I got it.”
He didn’t put an arm around me or anything, but it was thrilling to know he just wanted to walk by my side. Angling my body slightly toward his, I peeked over my shoulder to make sure Jared’s gesture wasn’t being noticed by Gerry or any of the others. Relieved to see no one but Caleb looking twice at us, I fell into step with Jared.
Nick and Dom were behind us, talking to Gerry as they got handed their own umbrellas and hurried to catch up. Caleb brought up the rear, listening as Gerry lectured the guys on what he expected from them this weekend.
“Remember,” he said firmly. “This is your first live gig since the incident, and you have the interview after. You absolutely cannot show up drunk, hungover, or even appear to be slightly tipsy.”
“That’ll get the rumor mill going that Destitute has an alcohol abuse problem,” I added, hating to become part of Gerry’s lecture, but the band’s reputation was more important, and they needed to know what was at stake. “All of you know how quickly a rumor, true or not, can catch fire. The last thing we need is people obsessing about your partying when we want them saving their obsession for your music.”
“Obsession is such ugly word,” Dom mused. “Can we call it focus instead?”
Nick laughed, jumping right into a puddle in front of him to splash water over Dom’s pants. “Lighten up, Captain Logophile. We just want people talking about the music. That’s it.”
Dom’s cursed, jumping out of Nick’s way. “Logophile? When did you swallow a dictionary?”
“When I was eight,” Nick deadpanned. “It means someone who’s obsessed with words.”
“Loves words, actually,” Dom corrected, dodging Nick’s fist as it swung at his shoulder. “Someone who loves words.”
“You two are the worst,” Matt complained, clearly having gotten bored running off doing whatever and was now back with the group, looking considerably calmer for having had a minute to stretch his legs. “Assuming we weren’t talking about which one of them was the most annoying, what did I miss?”
“Best behavior until after the interview,” Caleb summarized Gerry’s speech perfectly.
Matt’s eyes narrowed as he studied Caleb. “Obviously. We’re not idiots.”
“You hide it well,” Jared joked from beside me, keeping as close to my side as he could without arousing suspicion.
Matt flipped him the bird, glancing at Nick. “We already said we’d hold off on partying until tomorrow night.”
“Good,” Gerry intervened. “Concentrate on delivering a stellar performance first and then an interview that will make our dear Alicia proud, and after that, you can go off and sow your wild oats or whatever you kids are calling it these days.”
“Deliver a stellar performance?” Nick echoed, his lips twitching up into a grin. “Talk about swallowing a dictionary, but you got it, boss. Best behavior.”
“Thank you.” Gerry’s relief clung to his words. He looked tired again this morning, his complexion pasty and his skin clammy. Worse than he looked at his house that morning Jared and I went to get him back to the band.
I was getting worried about him, but he waved me off when I asked if he was okay. Remembering my earlier concern, I slowed to ask him again since he seemed to be falling behind. Dom was walking next to him, and as I turned, I saw Gerry’s step falter.
Before he could fall, Dom noticed, and his arm shot out to steady Gerry. “You doing okay there?”
“I’m fine.” He repeated what he’d told me earlier, jaw sharpening as his shoulders squared, and he marched ahead.
Dom’s gray eyes met mine, a thin, worried crease between his eyebrows. He cocked his head as if to ask, “What’s wrong with him?”
I shrugged, shaking my head. I didn’t know what was going on either.
Jared’s eyes darkened as he watched the quick exchange between Dom and me, and he put his hand on my elbow to guide me forward. A small gesture, but one that made me smile into an eye roll. Leaning my head closer to his shoulder, I whispered, “Possessive much?”
“It’s not …” He trailed off, sighed, and then perked up, winking at me. “It wasn’t just that, but consider yourself warned. You make eyes at other men, the monster comes out to play.”
“So many questions come to mind,” I muttered, enjoying our private ribbing. “But first, does that mean you can’t make eyes at other women, and second, what monster?”
“I promised you exclusivity, didn’t I? Haven’t made eyes at other women since,” he replied, squeezing my elbow lightly. We were both wearing coats, which I hoped would make enough cover that no one would see his hand on me.
“And if you have to make eyes at other men,” he said, dra
wing my attention back to him, “could it not be my drummer? We have a show tomorrow night, you know. It would be a pity to have to replace him at the last second. He’s kind of good.”
“Is that where the monster comes in? In the answer to the ‘Why would Dom need replacing’ question?”
“Yup,” Jared answered cheerfully but didn’t give me anything more. We walked in silence with the others to the waiting car where our bags were already being loaded.
How was I ever going to travel by myself again after getting used to this kind of treatment with Destitute?
I sighed, shuddering as I remembered the last trip I took with Kelly. Jared gave me a questioning look as we waited to get into the car. “Cold?”
“No. I was just thinking about the unprecedented disaster my last trip with Kelly was and wondering how I’m going to face stuff like that again when I’m not traveling with you guys.”
“Oooh, I’m sensing a good story here.” Nick rubbed his palms together, blowing into them to warm his hands. “What happened?”
We piled into the limo. Gerry got in first and scooted all the way to the edge of one of the bench seats, letting his head fall back against the leather seat and closing his eyes. My earlier pang of worry returned, but for Gerry’s sake, I wouldn’t ask him again in front of everyone.
Instead, I kept them focused on me as I told them about how every stroke of bad luck that could hit on a trip, had hit the Diamond sisters on our last attempt at a vacation. Everything that could go wrong had happened to us, from our car breaking down while we were still on the way to the airport, which should’ve been a sign, to our flight being delayed for six hours and our luggage being lost, to both of us getting food poisoning while we waited hours for our transfer.
The guys cracked up as I told my story. Gerry smiled faintly but didn’t interject with questions as the others did. When I was done, the band revived the argument they’d been having on the plane over the best songs to play at their concert tomorrow night.
My One and Only: A Bad Boy Secret Baby Second Chance Romance Page 94
