“In one breath?” Jason asked. “Poor guy.”
“Yeah, I hate it when strange girls stick my fingers in their mouths.” Brian rolled his eyes. “And that shit just happens to him all the time.”
Bear and Jason both stared at him as if he’d slipped a gear. “How many times has Logan been caught in a tight spot like that?” Brian demanded.
Jason shrugged. “It happens.”
“You know who she caught him with, don’t you? Gillian Blue Sky.”
“Gillian?” Bear dropped his drumstick. “You’re kidding. Who told you that?”
“Yes Brian, who told you that?” Jason narrowed his eyes at Brian.
“I got an email from Duke.” Of the thirty or so he’d sent out. Some of the people he’d tried hadn’t been at the party. Hell, SendDown was touring Europe. They hadn’t even heard and asked him for information.
“And?” Bear scooped up his stick. “Don’t hold out.”
“He just said Suzi wasn’t feeling good and went hunting for Logan and found him with Gillian. I’m a little disappointed in his taste. Gillian’s a skanky whore, and he had Suzi at home.” Had being the operative word.
“True, but Bear would know more about that than I would.” Jason smirked at Bear.
Bear pointed his drumstick at Jason. “That was a long time ago, and she wasn’t as skanky then. I am a happily married man now, and I don’t need those kind of petty distractions.”
“Are we done here?” Brian scowled. Standing around yammering wasn’t the best use of his time. He needed to get back online and check his email. There might have been new developments, or Suzi might have returned one of the half dozen emails he’d sent since the day before yesterday.
“I’m not surprised she ran out without ID or anything.” Jason started strumming randomly. “She’s known for that.”
“Yeah, but she ran with Brett Cherney. If you want to talk about questionable taste.” Bear made a wobbly hand gesture.
Brian walked away. If they weren’t done with sound check, they could come find him. He had better things to do than stand around rehashing Suzi and Logan’s break-up. None of his friends were thinking about Suzi with Brett Cherney, who was twenty-four, at the beginning of what appeared to be a long-running career, and carried a reputation for being wild. Brian didn’t want to think about that.
Ditching his bass in the rack, Brian headed down to the dressing room, surprising the caterers in the act of setting up. They bowed, giggling. He bowed back. They bowed again. He decided it was a losing battle and grabbed his laptop off the coffee table. Suzi lived most of her life online. For her to be off for more than twenty-four hours was unthinkable.
But nothing was updated. Not Facebook. Not Twitter. Not her blog or her website. All of them had comments from her friends and fans asking where she was and if she was okay. Checking to make sure no one could see him, he logged onto the writing forum she belonged to. There was a thread at the top that already spanned several pages, but no one had heard anything. He logged off and erased the history. Following Suzi to her forum always made him feel like a stalker. Dipping into Savitar’s forum, he found a discussion raging about her there, too. Not as nice as the one on her writing forum. The girls there were all singing “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” and making guesses about whether or not she’d died, gone into rehab, or been committed. Suzi deserved to be committed for leaving Logan, they had decided. He logged out before he posted something unfortunate. The Touchstone forum had a mention of her. They’d tossed around a few rumors, but most were nicer, less invested, and talked about her books and times she’d been sighted with the band. A couple had posted pictures of her with Touchstone, but he already had those squirreled away on his hard drive. They did reveal that Cherney hadn’t been seen around either. Wherever Suzi had gone to ground, Cherney had gone with her.
Chapter 6
Five years ago
Logan shook his hand, trying to make it work. His fingers flapped like ribbons.
“Come on, Fitzpatrick. What are you waiting for? Quit fucking around.”
He peered through the studio window. Jason was sitting at the soundboard and Suzi was naked on his lap. She had her legs draped over one arm of the chair, her head curled on Jason’s shoulder, and was teasing her hand through Jason’s chest hair.
“I’m having trouble with the guitar. Let Greg do his part first,” Logan snapped. He shook his hand again, and his fingers tangled together.
“No way, buddy. You’re up. Now quit fucking around and play. You have work to do.” Jason lifted Suzi’s face to his and kissed her. Suzi responded eagerly. She buried her hand in his hair.
Logan tore his gaze away from the spectacle to stare at his fingers. They’d knotted together. He looked back at the pair on the chair. Jason was sucking Suzi’s pink nipples, his eyes closed in appreciation. Suzi had her head thrown back. Through the com, he could hear her moaning, “Oh Jason, you’re so good. I had no idea.”
* * * *
Logan balanced his beer on his knee and stared at the trees. Trees. What the fuck? He was a city boy. What was he doing here? Suzi loved it, though. Every morning for the past two weeks, she’d gone out for her run and spent her afternoons exploring the woods. Not much else for her to do, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was still convinced Jason and Brian didn’t like her, so she stayed away from the studio.
John and Toby had driven up to Pittsburgh for the night. Charity had flown back to LA. The backwoods charm didn’t work for her. Cassie had taken the baby down to visit her parents overnight. Logan and Greg had seized the opportunity to hang out with their heroes.
Even if he was having nightmares about one of his heroes screwing his girlfriend.
“Where’s your girl tonight?” Jason asked.
Woman-stealing bastard. “Out communing with the trees, probably.”
“Trees?” Jason paused with his beer bottle halfway to his mouth.
“She likes to go walking in the woods. She grew up out in the sticks.” A cornfield. That’s what was across the street from her parents’ house. That’s all he remembered from the day he helped her pack her stuff so she could move to LA with him. Right after her father had told her if she left, she couldn’t come home.
“She wrote that one about the woods,” Brian said. “Bats With Baby Faces. Is she still working on the one about the sex demon? I keep seeing her with her computer.”
“She finished it the other day. She said something about wanting to do a romance.”
“Romance!” Brian made a face. “I think I’ll skip that one.”
“Unless it’s going to be one of those dirty ones.” Jason leaned across the table. “Those aren’t all bad. And if she wrote it, it would be hot. She’s a scorching lady. I wish I’d met her before you. I wouldn’t have minded taking her for a turn.”
“Cassie might object,” Brian pointed out.
“Well obviously before Cassie.” Jason leaned back in his chair, smiling. “She has a shotgun.”
“And after Stella.”
“Shut up.”
Logan studied the tabletop. Would a wife really keep Jason away from Suzi if he decided he wanted her? Cassie might be flexible about that kind of stuff, and Jason sure as hell could do more for Suzi’s career than Logan could. Jason could single-handedly finance one of those little indie film projects her friends wanted to make of her books.
“Wouldn’t have happened.” Greg announced. “She was a virgin when she met Logan.”
Brian shook his head. “I’ve read her books. She couldn’t have been.”
“She was,” Logan said. There had to be a way to get out of this conversation. With any other woman, he’d have bragged about taking her virginity and the sex life they’d had since. Suzi was making up for twenty years of virginity with zeal, but it felt wrong to brag about her.
“You should have seen his back that first morning. Looked like he’d been in a fight with a t
iger.” Greg took a deep draft of the dark European beer Jason stocked and immediately regretted it by the expression on his face. Logan regretted that Greg hadn’t taken a drink before he’d opened his big mouth.
“She’s really smart, too. And funny,” Logan said. If they’d asked him to list the reasons he was with her, sex would have been near the bottom. Yeah, the sex was incredible, but so was everything else.
“Too bad she doesn’t hang out much,” Brian said. “I’d love to get to know her.”
“In the biblical sense,” Jason added. He pulled another bottle out of the cooler beside him. His fourth. “You would. Not me. My wife has a shotgun. Yours just has the Visa.”
“No, I’d just like to talk to her. I love her books. They’re like puzzles. I’ve read a couple of them three or four times and figured out new things every time.”
Jason snorted. “You’ll just get tongue-tied like you did when we met Paul McCartney.”
“Yeah, because you’ve done such a great job talking to her,” Brian snapped.
Greg raised one eyebrow at Logan. Logan was too busy reeling with the idea to respond. Savitar had been here for six weeks, awed to be working with their heroes. Since Suzi arrived two weeks ago, she’d been too nervous to talk to Jason and Brian much because she’d been a fan of them since she was a little kid. Logan had assumed the idol worship only went one way. But if they had her on the same level with Paul McCartney…
“Not to piss you off, Logan, but your girl is the only one I want to curl up with that my wife will let me, if you know what I mean.” Jason winked and glanced away.
“Some of her books are hot,” Brian said, staring at his bottle and beginning to blush. “Nothing dirty in ‘em, but sometimes…wow.”
“She wrote Logan a porno,” Greg said.
Jason focused on Logan. Brian peered into his bottle, blushing harder.
“It was…nothing,” Logan said helplessly. He didn’t think Suzi would be happy to know he was talking about her like this. But Suzi was probably on the other side of the mountain. She didn’t need to know.
“Nothing! Shit man, it was hot. It’s the next book, isn’t it? The one she just finished?” Greg seemed to have scented the advantage, too.
“So she’s just as hot as she seems,” Jason encouraged.
Logan remembered idolizing these guys when Trigger Finger came out. He’d wanted to be them. He’d tried to duplicate their stage clothes and worn their tour T-shirt until it fell apart. When Savitar’s first album came out, he’d wanted to impress them. He still did. It was like being back in high school, trying to get in with the cool guys. If he couldn’t do it with his music, then he sure could with his girlfriend. “In bed, Suzi is a demon. In bed, on the floor, against the wall. Anyplace we can get a little leverage.” He grinned. Then he saw Greg’s eyes flicker over his head.
Logan turned around to his worst nightmare. Suzi stood three feet behind his chair, frozen in mid-step, face pale against her dark hair. A smile still melting off her face. “Hey sugar,” he croaked.
The words brought her back to life. She spun around and sprinted toward the woods. Logan lunged after her. If they thought he was whipped, then fine. He could handle being whipped by Suzi. A tree branch slashed him across the face.
For a small chick, she was fast. All that jogging was paying off. She was halfway up the trail before his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He set off after her at a flat run, watching in amazement as she vaulted a downed tree. How did she move so fast? And where the hell did she plan to go? Jumping over the tree, he caught up to her. He grabbed her arm, only hoping to stop her, but she swung around and slapped him so hard his eyes watered.
“How dare you?” she snarled.
“Look, I was stupid. I didn’t mean—”
“You were discussing our sex life with strangers.”
“They’re not really strangers, and I wasn’t discussing—”
“How am I supposed to trust you now?”
She hadn’t raised her voice, and she didn’t sound as if she was about to cry. Relief accompanied that realization, but guilt followed the relief. He hated when women cried. “I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, but I didn’t think you’d ever know.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“Well, no, but it’s just the way guys talk.”
Suzi bared her teeth, sucking a breath through them, making her face an unnaturally ugly mask. Then she closed her eyes. All the expression melted away. Somehow, that was worse than the fury. “I’m going home.”
“You’re leaving me?” Logan asked. She couldn’t leave him. He needed her too much to let her go now.
“No, I’m going back to the guest house.” She scowled at him. “Where else would I go?”
“Home to LA?”
“That’s your house.”
“But it’s yours, too.”
“Ms. Bazian!”
Logan turned to the voice. Jason was jogging along the path. A few paces behind him were Brian and Greg. He wanted them all to go away. He needed to talk to Suzi alone. There was something seriously weird happening in this conversation, and he needed to figure out what so he could fix it.
“It’s my fault, Ms. Bazian,” Jason said. “I am a total fucking jerk.”
“It’s all right,” Suzi said coolly. “I shouldn’t have shown up uninvited.”
“But you’re always welcome, Ms. Bazian,” Brian said.
She put up a placating hand and backed up a step. “Please, call me Suzi.”
“Come on back, Suzi. We’ll get you a drink.” Greg reached out as if to put his arm around her shoulders, but stopped short. Even he could sense the glacial chill surrounding her.
“Thank you, no. I’m going to take a walk. Good night.” She turned and walked away.
“Sorry man,” Jason muttered. “Thought I could make it better. Come on back. You can sleep at my house tonight.”
“No. I think I better talk to her. Thanks.” Logan touched his cheek, which was now stinging. Her nails had scratched when she slapped him. He started up the mountain after her. Up the mountain. She couldn’t have picked a nice walk around. No. Up.
“Suzi…sugar, if I knew how much it was going to hurt you, I wouldn’t have said anything.” Liar. He’d known, and he’d said, anyway. He’d just thought he could get away with it. Note to self: you can’t get away with it, whatever it is.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Suzi.” He caught up to her, but she veered off the path, crunching through fallen sticks and last year’s leaves. “Sugar, please listen to me.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve already apologized and been forgiven.”
“I don’t feel forgiven.”
She leaned against a tree. “Then maybe you have more guilt than I can forgive. I can’t leave you. Isn’t that enough?”
“What do you mean you can’t leave me?”
“I’m here. I picked you. I abandoned everything for you. I have nowhere else to go.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I moved out of my parents’ house and stopped speaking to them because of you. I transferred to UCLA to be with you. I gave up everything I knew for you, and all you can do is brag to your friends about what a good lay I am.”
“It was a mistake. You didn’t hear the whole conversation.” Hopefully.
“Suzi is a demon in bed. In bed, on the floor, anywhere we can get a little leverage.”
“They wanted to know what you were like. They were asking me questions.”
“So you told them I was a nymphomaniac?”
Logan scratched his head. This tack was not working. “They like you Suzi.”
“I’m sure they do.”
“No, I’m serious. They were talking about you like you’re Paul McCartney. Brian’s been trying to figure out what to say to you.”
She frowned and dropped her gaze to the ground. “
Don’t tease me.”
Logan stepped forward and cupped her cheek. She didn’t deck him, so he thought he might have a chance. “I’m not.”
“They always act so strange when I stop in. Brian Ellis hasn’t said ten words to me the entire time.”
“He said he’s read your books three times.”
She stared up through her lashes. “He has?”
“Or more. He mentioned the one about bats.”
“Bats With Baby Faces?”
He eased closer, letting his body brush along hers. Sex always worked with her. If he could just keep her drugged with sex, he’d be able to hang onto her. “Yeah, Bats With Baby Faces. They really like you and I was—I was trying to impress them with the fact that you like me. You missed the part where I was telling them how smart and funny you are.” Logan kissed the corner of her mouth. Telling her they liked her books meant she’d be more likely to hang around the studio. It was a risk he had to take. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to brag about my sugar a little. You’re just so great. So smart and beautiful and hot.”
Suzi turned into his lips. “You told them I was smart and funny?”
“They can see that you’re beautiful.”
She was going to forgive him. He was going to pull this one out of the fire. Logan slipped his hand under her shirt to cup her breast. “Come on, sugar. Let’s go back to the cabin, and I’ll show you how sorry I am. Unless you want me to show you right now.”
“Right now?” Her eyes were hazy.
“Yes, right now.” He licked her lips and unbuttoned her jeans with his free hand. His fingers strayed inside the waistband, touching the soft skin of her belly. “You are beautiful and smart and talented. Every man in the world wants to take you away from me.”
“I only want you.” Suzi laced her fingers through his hair as she kicked away her jeans.
Logan fumbled with his own zipper. Every time he was with her, everything went out the window. All he ever wanted to do was drown in her. “I’m supposed to be begging your forgiveness.”
“I’ll always forgive you, Logan.” She hoisted herself up his body, shoving his jeans down with her feet.
Let Me Be the One Page 6
