Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance

by Shelley Ann Clark

  She knew Dave and Guillermo like she’d know her own brother; they’d been playing together since college. She knew that Dave snored like a freight train and Guillermo had a pair of lucky boxer shorts with monkeys printed on them. She knew that Dave had majored in engineering just to please his father and that Mo got carsick every time he tried to ride in the backseat.

  She knew that Dave both needed someone to push him to play his best music, and that he resented her for pushing. She knew that Guillermo took everything more seriously than he seemed to, that he acted far more laid-back than he actually was.

  And they knew her, too. They knew she needed at least three cups of coffee before becoming coherent in the morning, that nothing made her more anxious than being off schedule, and that leaving her alone with the new band member might be dangerous, largely because of how much she wanted to know about him.

  Unfortunately for Dave and Guillermo, they had no choice. Dave owned the van and refused to let anyone else drive, and the one time Guillermo tried sitting with her in the back, they’d had to pull over after five minutes so he could vomit on the side of a Tennessee highway.

  The problem was that she’d been trying to fight herself all week, to leave Tom alone like she’d promised. But he seemed so intense, so tightly wound, and so talented. Handsome, too—she wasn’t about to pretend she hadn’t noticed.

  She wanted to know how to open him up, crack that hard shell that he wore on his outside like some kind of protective armor. She wanted to find out how to make him smile, how to make his shoulders relax for just a few minutes, at least.

  Emme studied her own reflection in the window as the lines of the interstate sped by. They’d left Memphis after a show; she hadn’t even changed out of her dress or taken off her makeup. Her eyeliner was smudged, lipstick wearing down from a bright red to a muted pink. Her garter belt dug into her thighs.

  She’d changed clothes in the van before, back when it was just her and Andy and Dave and Mo. None of them had even blinked, nor had they looked—at least, not that she could tell. If they’d peeked, it had been discreetly. She couldn’t be expected to ride all night in a dress and heels, could she?

  And if some deeply buried mean streak in her could get Tom’s attention away from his cell phone for just a minute, well, that would just be a nice bonus.

  It really wasn’t fair for him to be so hot, to have her so worked up while he barely seemed to notice her. He wore a plaid buttoned-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show his hair-dusted forearms. On his left arm, he had a tattoo of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and the picture moved as he played, muscles flexing and releasing. His jaw was perpetually shadowed with dark scruff, which just made the contrast with his bright blue eyes even sharper.

  He wasn’t big: about average height, but wiry. She’d seen him lift their heaviest amp with almost no effort, which had led to several nights trying to imagine what his shoulders must look like under his shirts. And when he smiled, which wasn’t often, he looked like a kid who’d gotten in trouble and learned how to charm his way out of it.

  She wanted to get him in trouble.

  She knew she shouldn’t. She had promised she wouldn’t. He was untouchable, a band member, a coworker. She’d been down that road before, and had crashed and burned brightly and spectacularly. But oh, what she knew she should do and what she wanted to do were not at all the same. She wanted to trace the lines of his tattoo with her tongue, feel his muscles flex beneath her. She wanted to bite that muscle that connected his shoulder to his collarbone. She wanted to make him as hard as he made her wet, constantly aware of every bump in the road, every time her thighs rubbed together. Every glance when his eyes met hers.

  Tom had his earbuds in, his phone in his hand as always. For once his thumbs were still. He was looking out his window, although Emme could tell from the reflection of his eyes that he was looking at her, not at the darkened highway or the shape of the hills in the night.

  Emme pulled her overnight bag out of the space behind her. With a quick glance up front to make sure Dave wasn’t looking in the rearview mirror, she toed off her heels and pulled her skirt up her thighs. Just the sensation of fabric sliding against her leg sent her body into overdrive, anticipating being watched. His eyes would feel almost as good on her as his fingers, she thought. When she got her skirt high enough to see the top of her stockings and her garter belt, she looked up at Tom.

  He was trying not to look; she could tell he was. His eyes darted between her reflection in the window and anywhere, everywhere else—down at his phone, up at the seat in front of him, through the glass at nothing. Seeing his frantic efforts not to look at her felt almost like she’d gotten him hard and forbidden him to touch her; he had to have edged over the cliff from interest into arousal to avoid her gaze so studiously. She bit back a smile as she unhooked the garter belt from her stockings.

  She rolled one stocking down her leg deliberately slowly, feeling the slide of her own hand over her skin as she went, and tossed it into her bag. Tom made a tiny sound, almost like he was clearing his throat, and Guillermo turned around to find her with one bare leg, skirt hiked up, Tom’s face sporting a wash of ruddy color over his cheekbones.

  “What the hell, Emily,” Guillermo said. “Tell Dave to pull over at a rest stop if you’re going to change.”

  Emme rolled her eyes, but she felt like the kid who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Thwarted lust pulsed hard in her clit. “I always change in the van.”

  “Not since this tour started, you don’t,” Dave said tightly.

  “It’s okay, guys. I’m not looking,” Tom said, and he covered his eyes like a kid watching a horror movie. “Go ahead if you need to.”

  Dave grunted a sound that might have been suspicion or might have been approval. Emme sighed, frustrated beyond reason, at Dave’s reaction and at herself. She had promised him. It had taken her all of a week to be willing to toss that promise out the window.

  Dave met her eyes in the mirror. “Really, Emily?”

  Emme felt the hot wash of shame rush over her. She had no self-control, apparently. Dave was right, and she ought to be grateful to Guillermo for saving her from herself.

  Emme held up her hands in surrender. “Okay! Jeez. Tom, don’t look.”

  She’d been planning to undress slowly, with something closer to grace than her usual awkward in-car dance, but since the game was up, she unsnapped, unhooked, and unrolled with one hand while pulling on yoga pants with the other. She pulled a T-shirt over her head before undoing the top of her dress; she’d hoped to look at least marginally seductive, but, she thought, she probably looked more like an emu attempting to disco dance while wearing a straightjacket. By the time she’d stashed all evidence of Emme back in her bag and restored herself to proper Emily, she was downright embarrassed that she’d even tried. An act that had felt so right just a few moments before now felt sordid and stupid.

  “You can uncover your eyes now,” she told Tom. “I’m decent again.”

  Tom lowered his hands, pulled out his earbuds, and looked at her. “Sorry about that.”

  Emme shrugged. “You didn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah, well. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  No, I wanted to make you uncomfortable, Emme thought. Instead, she gestured toward his phone. “No texts tonight?”

  Tom’s shoulders hunched. If he’d looked nonplussed before, now he seemed downright miserable. “Yeah. My sister … she texts when she needs something.” He cleared his throat. “But maybe she’s found someone else to talk to. That would be good. Maybe.”

  Well, guess that did it. Seems plenty uncomfortable now. Emme picked at the edges of her fingernails, looking for an opening that would smooth the giant conversational speed bump she’d inadvertently driven over. “So you learned to play guitar from J. R. Wilbur, huh? What was he like?”

  Tom smiled and tucked his phone into his pocket. “Yeah, he taught me. He was a good m
an, J.R. The best.” He laughed a little. “You have to wonder what made him take this scrawny little kid under his wing. It’s funny, since he was a pretty good drinker himself, but I don’t think he approved of a kid in a bar. He had this idea that if I learned to play guitar it would give me something constructive to do. Even gave me my first guitar—one he went out and bought at a pawnshop and just handed to me on Christmas Eve.”

  “Sounds like he was pretty important to you.”

  Tom nodded. “I’m pretty sure he kept me from going down a scary path. Once I had that guitar, no matter what was going on in my life, I could just … get lost in it. Practiced until my fingers actually bled when I first got it.”

  Emme winced. “How old were you?”

  Tom flushed. “Probably … about ten.”

  A moment passed while Emme thought about a ten-year-old boy in a bar, practicing chords until his fingers bled. Jesus. Such a sad and hopeful image—a kid with that kind of love of music, and that kind of obsessive passion, but no one to stop him when he needed it.

  Of course, she’d had plenty to stop her, and nothing much more than herself to tell her to keep going.

  Then Tom turned to her. “How about you? When did you start singing?”

  “I can’t remember not singing.” Emme fiddled with the drawstring on her sweatshirt. “I was in the children’s choir at church when I was seven? Maybe? I remember the director telling me over and over that my voice was too loud, to sing quietly so the other kids could be heard.”

  Guillermo guffawed from the front seat. “Loudmouthed even as a kid.”

  Emme kicked his seat. “Shut it. It makes you money now, doesn’t it?” She found herself tying the drawstring in little knots, then made herself stop. “It took a while for me to get comfortable with my voice. My grandmother—she’s the one who called me Emme. She pronounced it like ‘Em,’ short for Emily, but she spelled it with the extra ‘M’ and ‘E’ to make it seem French. She loved anything French. She said that Emily wasn’t glamorous enough. She’s the one who paid for voice lessons so I could get some control over it. And I’d spend the night at her house when my mom worked overnight, and we’d listen to all her blues records and she’d let me play dress-up in her jewelry box and I’d sing along.” Emme remembered, in a flash, the smell of her grandmother’s lipstick, the scratchy sound of a stylus on a record, the weight of a rope of fake pearls around her neck. “She never baked cookies and her bedtime stories were completely inappropriate. All about men she could have married but didn’t.”

  Tom grinned. “She sounds amazing.”

  “She was.” Emme smiled. “Mean as a snake to my mother. A terrible mom. But she believed in me.” More than my own mother does. “And it’s her house and her money that let me produce this album and go on this tour. And she’s the one who took me in after Indelible Lines.”

  Oh shit. She hadn’t meant to mention that. She was so tired of being defined by it.

  “Indelible Lines?”

  Dave chimed in from the front seat. “Emily sang backup for them. On their last tour. You know, the one where Jared and Christina completely melted down and broke up.”

  Emme fought the urge to lunge forward and cover Dave’s mouth with her hand. Thank God he stopped at that. She caught his eye in the rearview mirror and tried to send him telepathic messages. Thank you for stopping, maybe, or maybe shut up shut up shut up.

  “It sucked that they broke up. Great band,” Tom said.

  “Yeah,” Dave continued. “But you know. When things get too personal between band members … It doesn’t end well.” There was a definite warning in his voice.

  Emme hadn’t thought she could feel any more embarrassed. She’d been wrong. She wound the drawstring of her sweatshirt around her finger so tightly the tip turned purple. “Make me a playlist,” she blurted out. “Pick some songs. Ones that are your favorites, ones you’d like to cover.”

  Tom smiled slowly, his dimples emerging from hiding. “Yes ma’am. I’ve actually already got a few that reminded me of your voice.”

  At those words, Emme’s heart fell out of her chest and into her sex—the thought of him thinking about her voice, or the “ma’am,” she wasn’t sure which. Whatever the reason, all the warmth she thought she’d banished with her embarrassment came rushing back through her limbs. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He thumbed through a couple of screens on his phone. “Just let me add … okay. Here you go.”

  When Tom passed his phone over to Emme, earbuds still warm from his neck, his fingers brushed against hers, lightly. An accident, maybe. An accident that sent a shiver through her. He leaned toward her to drape the earbud cord around her own neck, and her skin bunched into goose bumps at his nearness and at the intimacy of touching something that had been against his skin just moments before. He pushed her ponytail out of the way as he pulled back, and all that nearness after a solid week of not-nearness felt like a blatant invitation.

  He looked up at her, caught her with the full force of those bright eyes. Then he smiled, all dimples and scruff and naughty-little-boy mischief, and all she could think was Lord have mercy.

  He couldn’t have been much older than her twenty-nine, but there was something about him that felt ageless. Timeless. Like he’d lived enough to know things she hadn’t even imagined yet.

  She slid the earbuds into her ears and hit play, turning away from Tom because it was a little too much to hear his feelings in the enclosed world created by the headphones and the darkened car and the night outside her window and look into his eyes. She curled into a ball in the seat, watching the darker shadows of the trees against the lighter darkness of the night, and fell asleep to the sound of Elmore James singing “It Hurts Me Too.”

  Chapter Four

  Tom stood at the back door to the venue, smoking. He never did in the van, and he never did in the clubs, even in bars where smoking was still legal. He told himself it was to protect Emme’s voice—no singer needed to breathe smoke every single night, but really, he knew that not everyone in a bar always chose to be there. It seemed cruel to subject a pregnant waitress or an asthmatic bartender to his secondhand smoke, just because he could.

  Even if no one had shown him that consideration when he was a kid.

  He leaned against the brick wall next to the trash cans. The night was warmer than most had been lately, although they were also moving farther south with each stop. He pulled out his phone and scrolled through the texts from Katie. So far, it looked like she’d kept her promise. The last he’d heard from her, she was going to thirty meetings in thirty days; apparently she hadn’t gotten to the ninth step again yet, since his voice mail wasn’t full of tearful apologies.

  He hated the ninth step. He hated it every time she got to it.

  It looked like she was turning to her sponsor for help instead of him, which was probably good.

  At least that’s what Tom told himself.

  Letting go and trusting her was hard; hard because he’d always been a big brother, reminded over and over by his mother that big brothers take care of their little sisters, right up to the point when she’d left in the middle of the night when Katie was two and he was eight, leaving him to take care of her indeed. Trust was harder, too, because of the number of times Katie had destroyed it—the shoplifting charge when she was twelve, the wasted tuition money to culinary school. The drinking, and quitting, and drinking. Again and again. Tom wrapped an arm around his middle, pulled the cigarette to his lips. Smoke filled his lungs, the fog of it softening all his emotions and sharpening his physical senses, just a bit, just for a little while. He exhaled into the humid night, and it felt like expelling something poisonous and infected from himself—a relief to let go.

  Tom took a last long inhale. He ought to quit. He’d thought about it. Never really tried, though. What if he failed at it? Would that make him as bad as his sister? His dad?

  Tom navigated the labyrinth of storage areas and narrow hallways back to the
front of the bar. They’d already sound-checked; just a few more minutes before they opened the set.

  The crowd didn’t look any different from most of their audiences—a combination of college kids in jeans and more serious music fans, but they had great energy. Audiences were a tricky beast, a balancing act between involved and rowdy that Emme always seemed to manage with a skill he’d rarely seen.

  She’d introduced a new song to the band the week before. “Lord Have Mercy,” it was called, and while it was still sultry and soulful, there were some country elements that were new for her music. Tom was afraid to hope that he’d had any influence on her work, but some deep-down part of his belly felt a hit of pride at the thought that this talented woman had written a new song right after listening to his playlist. And what a song it was—the first time he’d heard her voice sing out the first line, he’d gotten an instant hard-on. The melody wound around the instrumentation like smoke rising from a cigarette, just as seductive and addictive.

  She’d looked right in his eyes the entire time she’d sung it through, and although he’d heard the bass line for it thumping in his head, he’d felt it thumping in his cock. He wanted her to push him down and take him over and over and over again, preferably while she sang in that husky wet velvet voice.

  By the time the stage lights got brighter and Emme launched into their first song, Tom got lost again in the feel of performing. No matter how many nights they played the same set, none of the magic had gone out of playing for an audience. Not yet, anyway. And Emme just had presence. Even alone with him in the van she did, but up onstage in front of ten admiring fans—and seventy more people who would be admiring fans by the time she left the stage—she shimmered and glowed.