“Goddamit!” I yell, leaping out of bed. “Why do they have to be in the middle of every single opportunity we get? They’ve played the fucking Super Bowl before, doesn’t the NFL want some fresh faces?”
“The NFL wants whoever will be best for business, you know that.”
She’s right, I do know it, and I also know that it doesn’t do any good to bitch about it.
“Right. What can we do to lobby? How do we give ourselves the best chance at nailing it?”
“They’re going to be watching the West Fest carefully. It gives them the chance to see both bands up close and right next to one another. If this were last year I’d say you’ve got an advantage because you have more instruments; a bigger sound, which is important, but since Lush added that girl on keyboards they’re able to match you in that regard.”
Fuck. That girl—Tully. It figures, she’s the hottest thing I’ve seen in months, and not only is she off limits because she’s from the enemy camp, but now she might be the reason we don’t get one of the biggest gigs a band can get. One that I want so badly I can taste it. Because while the old man might be able to ignore the concerts in arenas, and the Grammy nominations, and songs on radio stations from coast to coast, he can’t ignore the Super Bowl. He attends it religiously, watches it with a scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other, from the comfort of his sponsor’s box. He’ll have a damn hard time denying that I’ve succeeded if I’m onstage at the Super Bowl.
“Okay, so what else then?”
“Well, with all the bad publicity the NFL has been getting from their players—the gang rape trial in Florida, the domestic abuse allegations against the California QB—the league is very serious about family image this time around.”
Oh hell. I’m the dude who just got out of rehab for a cocaine addiction. Hardly Sesame Street time.
“But don’t panic,” she cautions, like she can read my mind. “You’ve done a rehab stint, but so has Walsh Clark. When it comes to that you’re on even footing. And the important thing is that you’ve both been to rehab. You’re supposedly ‘cured’ and all that.”
I snort. What a load of crap.
“I know, I know,” she says, “but putting the addiction issue aside, they’ve got wives, kids, babies on the way. That’s where you’re at a disadvantage.”
“So, I should elope with a girl from the church youth group?” I joke. Sort of. I’d probably be willing to do it if Shannon said it’d get us the gig.
“No.” She knows I’d do it too. “You should keep Garrett in check, make sure no one gets photographed drunk, fighting or fucking, and then play your hearts out and may the best band win.”
The trouble is, I’m not sure if even Shannon really has a fix on which is the best band.
“Okay, I’ll make sure Garrett keeps it in his pants when he’s in public, and we’ll let our music show them that we’re by far the better choice.”
“Good.” I hear someone else talking to her. “I’ve got to get to a meeting, but I’ll check in next week.”
I disconnect the call and stare at the wall in front of me for a moment. This isn’t the first time we’ve been in a tight situation like this. Music is a tough industry, and we’re often competing against similar bands for a prize like the Super Bowl slot. In the past, I’ve done anything necessary to give us a fighting chance at winning.
I’ve anonymously sent Rhapsody swag to Grammy judges, paid managers to get their bands to pull out of competitions, and hired the daughter of a big movie producer as my assistant to give us a better chance at being asked to score the movie. Most of the time those things have worked, and I’m not against doing something to give us a leg up against Lush now. In fact, I think I know exactly what secret weapon I need, so I scroll through the numbers on my phone and make the call.
After hanging up, I pull on a pair of boxers and open the door to the balcony, stepping outside into the warm San Diego sun. My room is directly over the swimming pool three floors below. I lean over the railing and look down at the turquoise water, as a form flows under the surface. It’s a woman, and though the water distorts her image, I can see that she’s wearing a red bikini and has dark hair. She swims laps, doing flip turns and pushing off underwater each time she reaches the end of the pool. There’s a rhythm to it, and I find my tired mind lulled by the motion and the repetitiveness of her routine.
When she’s done more laps than I care to count, she finally pulls up to the shallow end of the pool and lays her arms along the edge, catching her breath for a moment. I’m about to go back inside when she walks up the steps and out of the water. My heart freaking stops in my chest. I don’t even have to see her face to know it’s Tully, because that body. Fuck. Me.
She’s pint-sized, but not anywhere that counts, her tits are full and round, the tiny red triangles of her bikini stretched tight across the alabaster flesh. Her long hair streams down her back and she bends over to squeeze the excess water out of it, giving me a perfect view from behind. The swimsuit barely covers anything and I’m treated to the sight of most of her beautiful ass.
My dick strains against the boxers and I swallow around my dry throat. Then she shifts and I see it—a tattoo, full of vibrant colors and beautiful lines, right on her left ass cheek. It’s the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell what it is from up here, but just the fact that she had it stamped on her gorgeous ass makes me love it already.
“Nice tat,” I call out before I can think. She stands straight and turns around, shading her eyes with her hand as she looks up to see who’s talking to her.
I wave and she flips me off. It’s more than okay though because then she walks to a lounge chair and picks up a pair of sunglasses. I get to watch her the whole way, and it’s worth any grief she throws at me without a doubt. She’s poetry in motion, all bouncing soft parts and smooth skin.
“So what is it?” I call out again.
“None of your damn business,” she answers without looking up at me.
“I think I’ll make it my business to find out now. I like nothing more than a challenge, short stack.”
She flips me off again before going inside, and I chuckle. I’m wide awake now, and as I make my way to the shower I know I’ve got great spank bank material—the image of Tully O’Roark and her pretty tattooed ass should get me through the next thirty minutes just fine.
Each band on the tour is assigned two-hour rehearsal slots while we’re in a location, we all have full-on dress rehearsals the day before a show, then we perform before moving on to the next city. Today our rehearsal slot is at four p.m., and Garrett is already fifteen minutes late. Granted, we can warm up and play the songs without a lead singer, but we look like idiots, and everyone in the place can see that our most visible member is MIA.
“From now on one of us brings him with us to every rehearsal and performance,” I caution the other guys. “That means tracking him down an hour ahead of time and keeping tabs on him until it’s time to leave the hotel.”
“He’ll be here soon, I’m sure,” Dez counsels. “I saw him at midnight and he was sober, so I’m sure it’s just a chick, not a hangover.”
“I don’t give a shit if he’s in bed with the goddamn president, there’s no excuse for being—” I check my watch, “twenty minutes late to our first rehearsal of the tour.”
“I’d totally do the president,” Topher says, as if that’s the point of this conversation. His lanky frame is wrapped around his bass, and he strokes the neck as if it’s his dick in his hand. “She’s hot, and all those buttoned-up blouses and pencil skirts? It’s the whole librarian fantasy thing.” He gets a dreamy look on his face and Dez chokes trying not to laugh.
Before I can lay into Topher for losing focus, Garrett comes sauntering out onto the stage, his auburn hair mussed, and a lollipop dangling from between his goatee-framed lips.
“Nice of you to join us,” I snap. “Rehearsal started twenty-five minutes ago, asshole.”
“
Aw, fuuuck,” he groans as he wipes a hand on his vintage Rolling Stones concert t-shirt. “Not now, Blaze. I just had to talk some chick’s idiot boyfriend down after he found us shacked up in my suite. Guy was a monster, and he was ready to beat the crap out of me. I ended up having to call the hotel security to drag him out. Why don’t we have security at our rooms?”
I raise an eyebrow at him as I strap my guitar back on and walk to my mic, ready to finally run through our set. “Because the tour is giving us security at the venues, on the buses, and in the hotel lobbies. It’s a huge waste of money to hire extra guys to stand outside our hotel room doors.”
“Dude,” Carson intones from his drums at the back of the stage. “We’ve got more money than most of us could spend in the next decade, what difference does it make? If it keeps Garrett from getting the shit kicked out of him maybe it’s worth the extra change.”
“What’ll keep Garrett from getting the shit kicked out of him is if he quits screwing other men’s girlfriends. Now can we get started?”
The rest of the guys nod their heads and Garrett salutes me, because he’s an asshole like that. The stress is rolling through me, and I feel the jonesing coming on, but luckily I’m in the perfect place to handle it this time. I raise my right arm in the air and hold up a fist.
“From the top, Sand Castles. One, two, three, four!” I play the opening bars to our first song and for the next ninety minutes I lose myself in the one thing that holds the demons at bay—music.
Rehearsal ends up going well, and I’m feeling some actual bliss when we finish and pack up our gear. The promoters have a regular fleet of hired cars going back and forth between the hotel and the venue all day, so Topher, Carson, and Garrett have already left when Dez and I finally roll out of the dressing room where we’ve been screwing around with some new songs and head toward the parking lot.
We’ve turned the corner from one hall into another when I hear her. If you could hear someone’s teeth gritting from ten feet away, that’s the sound that would be echoing around us.
“Somebody’s not too happy,” Dez murmurs as he lopes along next to me.
“It’s Tully,” I say, then clarify when he looks at me askance, “the new Lush girl.”
We get abreast of the open door to a dressing room and there she is, leaning against the door frame, one hand wrapped around a phone like she wants to strangle it, and the other dug into her thick curls, pulling so tightly I’m afraid she’s going to yank hunks out.
“Mom,” she hisses, “he’s a total asshole to me, why should I get him tickets to the show?” She pauses, obviously listening to her mother on the other end. Then Dez clears his throat, nudging me to keep moving, and she spins to look at us.
She glares at me.
I grin. “Nice to see you too, short stack,” I snark before we move on down the hall.
Behind us I hear her talking again. “Yeah, I know, he’s my brother. Okay…Yep…You’re right, if I’m going to waste all my time playing the piano at least the family should get something out of it. He can pick up the tickets at will-call…Yep…Tomorrow. Show starts at four.”
As we exit into the parking lot Dez shakes his head. “Damn, that sounds like one dysfunctional family.”
I snort. He doesn’t know shit from dysfunction. Dez’s parents are both artists, they fully support his music and couldn’t be prouder of him. But her conversation sounds far too familiar to me, and suddenly I need to go back inside, check up on her, make sure she’s okay, because I know that if you have enough conversations like the one I just overheard, the outcome is never good—for you or anyone around you.
“Hey,” I tell him as we reach one of the hired cars and the driver opens the back door for us. “I forgot my notebook, I want to work on some of the chorus for the new song we’re hashing out. Go on without me. I’ll meet you in an hour and we can grab some dinner before you guys go clubbing.”
He examines me for a moment in that way he does—all ancient Japanese wisdom and patient analysis. Seeming satisfied with what he sees, he gives me a nod, and climbs into the car. Before the door closes he says, “Try not to screw it up—you’re supposed to make her feel better.”
Before I can answer him the driver closes the door. I gape at the tinted window. How the hell does he do that? It’s weird ju-ju. I shiver as the car starts up and drives away. Then, I take a deep breath, and steel myself to face Tully, because I’m sure talking about dysfunctional families is the very last thing she wants to do with me.
Tully
I stare at my reflection in the mirror of the dressing room. I take in the big sad eyes, sloppy curls, freckles, and pale-as-a-ghost skin. I wonder if I’d been born tall and blonde my family would have liked me more? Or maybe if I’d had a dick. That seems to be a guarantee to an easy road in that group. My sister only survived by doing exactly what was asked, when it was asked, the way it was asked.
I tried, I really did. I used to try to bake things for them all—cookies, biscuits, soda bread—thinking that if I could master even one skill of the good Irish woman they wanted me to be they’d like me more. I’d spend hours with my grandmother’s recipes strewn all over the countertops, flour everywhere, my hands covered in batter and dough.
But it never failed that I would get distracted by the way the eggs looked as they slid around in the bowl, or the way the dough felt on my fingers. It would make music to me. The sliding eggs became a run up and down the keyboard, the sticky dough a staccato chord that followed the smooth run of notes. It was something I couldn’t control, but it meant that I ruined every recipe I ever attempted because I’d get distracted.
A knock sounds at the door and I’m jolted out of my moment of self-pity. I turn to find Blaze staring at me from the doorway, his gaze a little more perceptive than I want right now.
“You done with your call?” he asks as he slowly saunters in.
I turn back to the mirror, hoping he doesn’t see my embarrassment. A conversation like I was having with my mother is the last thing I want other people hearing. Especially big, hot, Viking male people.
He comes over to the makeup counter where I’m sitting and plants his very firm denim-clad ass on the counter so he can face me while I look at the mirror.
“When I was seventeen I quit the football team to join a band,” he says, with no preamble.
I stare at him, wondering where this is going.
“Were you any good? At football, I mean.”
He nods. “All-State quarterback three years running, two State Championships, and offers from D-1 colleges before my junior year.”
I raise an eyebrow, because I don’t know shit about football, so everything he said is kind of meaningless to me. He seems to understand that. “I was really fucking good,” he clarifies.
“But you liked guitar better?”
He nods. “I liked guitar better. Football was fine, I liked the conditioning, and being part of a team, but it was almost too easy. Almost like I already had it all worked out. It never made my blood race or pushed me to reach for things I wasn’t sure I could achieve. I’m not a natural at music.” He looks at me and his eyes are so laser-focused on me that I squirm in my seat. I drop my gaze but I meet up with his broad shoulders and chest, his pecs and abs rippling beneath that plain white t-shirt he always wears. The cotton is thin, and tight, and he is one hell of a specimen.
I’m uncomfortable by how attracted I am to him. I shouldn’t feel this way—he’s the enemy—so I do what I always do, and cover it with snark.
“Is there a point to this info dump?”
He chuckles, not put off by me at all. That’s a first.
“Yes, the point is that my old man went ballistic. He’d raised me to be a football player, not a guitarist, and he lost his shit totally and completely.”
“Oh,” I answer quietly. My family has always known I’ve got a problem with music, so there were never any big blowouts, just the steady disappointment over a couple of decades.
“He belted me a couple of times, then he tried locking me up in my room, but after a few weeks he realized that wasn’t going to do it.”
I swallow, my stomach twisting. He’s telling me stuff that goes far beyond the disapproval I get from my family—this sounds like a story of abuse.
“After that it was a succession of removing things—my car, my allowance, my bank account. Eventually, he ran out of things to deny me, and took the only thing left—he disowned me and threw me out of the house.” Blaze stands and stretches, his t-shirt lifting a couple of inches and giving me a view of smooth skin and a soft trail of blonde hair leading to the button fly of his jeans. Lord help me. Blood pounds through my veins a little faster and harder than it does normally.
“I’ve been on my own since I was seventeen. I’ve heard every insulting thing about music that a parent can say to a kid, and I know what it does to you, in here—” he puts a fist to his chest, right over his heart, “when the people who are supposed to love you most in the world can’t accept you for who you are.”
I nod, because now he’s speaking my language. That pain is unique, and not everyone understands it.
“So I just wanted you to know that if you ever need someone to talk to—about your family or whatever—I’m around. I get it.”
He gives me a twisted little smile, and a piece of me does a funny flip inside my chest. He’s really beautiful. From the top of his blonde head to the tips of his Converse-clad toes. And as he says, he gets it, gets what it’s like when you feel that you can’t do anything right, that your family will never really love you the way you love them. Everything in me is turning sort of gooey.
“Thank you for that—”
A voice sounds from outside in the hall.
“Hey, you seen Tully? We need to make sure she gets back to the hotel safe. I don’t think the security staff realized that she was still here.”
A Lush Rhapsody: A Rhapsody Novel Page 4
