by Zoe York
He nodded. “Okay. You’re a control freak. I can work with that.”
“I haven’t hired you.”
“No,” he said, pointing out to where Hope was sitting on the deck, reading. “She did. Makes it harder for you to fire me in a fit of rage.”
“I’m not going to fire you. I might use you as a coffee gopher, though.”
“Good plan.” He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. He laced his fingers together, drawing her attention to his hands. Long, blunt, thick fingers. Like he knew hard work. Like he might squeeze a little too hard if he didn’t like the person whose hand he was shaking. “Is that all I’ll be doing? Fetching you coffee?”
The blast of unexpected heat that surged through her at the perfectly innocent question was definitely dangerous. It was worsened by the fact that Liana didn’t really drink coffee. She fidgeted in her seat and opted not to answer, because she wasn’t sure what would come out of her mouth.
“What else could I maybe do to help you out? Maybe on the fourth of July?”
“Right. That.” He wasn’t wrong. She needed a barrier of sorts, and this six-foot-plus solid, steady, unflappable man would work in that regard.
“Are you thinking about not going to the concert?”
That was the million-dollar question. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
He laughed, and it worked its way into her chest, loosening some of the tightness there.
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “No. Not really. Of course I need to go.”
“But…”
“But I can’t bring myself to book a ticket.”
“Ah.” He shrugged. “Can I do that for you? Sounds like a gopher task.”
A flippant no was on the tip of her tongue, but then she stopped herself.
He raised one eyebrow. “The look on your face right now is pretty entertaining. You really don’t want my help, do you?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
He nodded. “I know the feeling.” He exhaled and leaned in, his eyes glinting. “Look, I’m coming with you because Hope wants me to. So I might as well book the tickets for both of us. What you do with me when we get there can be decided later.”
He needed to stop saying it like that. She could feel her cheeks heating up and she ducked her head to hide them. “Okay.”
Hope came back inside while Dean was booking flights, and she gave Liana a searching look. All good?
Liana nodded in response to the silent question. Her stomach was a jumble of nerves right now, but she wasn’t freaking out.
“I’m going to head back into town, then, if you’ve got this,” Hope said to Dean. “And there’s lots of food in the fridge if you run into dinner.”
He slid a sideways glance at Liana before shaking his head. “I don’t think we’ll be that long. I’ll be back at the BBQ before too long.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Good. She didn’t know how much more she could take, although she understood there had to be some…briefing, or something.
It was the or something that was distracting her.
She knew she used sex as a coping strategy. Not frequently, and not unsafely, but like the other day when she’d hit on him because she was scared, she knew there was a solid chance here that she was turning her nerves into an overblown attraction to the cop.
That was dangerous, and not just because he’d already turned her down before he knew she was a hot mess.
“Email address?” Dean asked, yanking her back to the present task.
She gave it to him, and her phone dinged a moment later with a confirmation email for the flight from Toronto to Washington, D.C.
He gave her a long look, then leaned back in his chair. “What else do I need to know?”
Good Lord, where to begin? “I assume ‘nothing’ is not an acceptable answer.”
“Probably not a helpful one, anyway.”
“Mmm.” She screwed up her face and thought about what happened in Savannah. He’d find out eventually, and if he knew now, it would be better. “My ex is hyper-critical of me.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “And?”
“We had a run in at my last show. About my next album. He showed up unexpectedly and…And then…I don’t know. Something happened. I’m afraid it might happen again in front of Track and that terrifies me.”
“What happened?”
The words caught in her throat and she shook her head.
His eyes softened.
Damn it. She didn’t want his sympathy. “I freaked out. It was…weird.” The words were hard to say.
He just nodded. “Can you describe it?”
Did she have to? “I don’t want to make a bigger deal about it than it is.”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
“Maybe it was a small panic attack? Something like that. I couldn’t think about anything other than escaping, which is crazy, because my tour is…fine.”
He nodded. “Has anything like this happened before?”
“Not on tour.”
“But at other times?”
“Once or twice.” She was understating it, but she didn’t want to dig into the uncomfortable memories that had only really resurfaced in the last few days. Overwhelming freak-outs around the breakup. Not being able to breathe at the first award show she had to attend where she knew Track would be there, too.
His frown deepened when she didn’t elaborate.
“It’s just that it’s really not that big a deal. Most of the time I’m totally fine. You asked me what I needed you to do. Honestly? I just need someone to stand between me and the noise on the fourth. I don’t need—” She thought of Hope and her family. “The rest of the time, it would be pretty light bodyguard duties.”
“I can do that. And anything you tell me is strictly between us. I won’t even tell Hope. You can trust me—and you don’t need to take my word on that. I’ll do my best to prove it to you as we go forward.”
He was so earnest. And all she could think was, yeah, I trust you, you’re obviously a nice guy…but I don’t need this. She swallowed hard around that thought. Because she did need him—at least for one day. “I don’t know how it’s worked with other clients, but I’m looking for a very limited level of protection.”
“Against Track.” He said that like it was reasonable, like she wasn’t crazy to fear such a beloved personality, and unexpected hope sparked in her chest.
“I guess…although I don’t even know what that would look like. He’s…”
“You need someone to run interference with your ex, and everyone who orbits around him, oblivious to how much of a jackass he is because he looks good in a Stetson and can pack arenas.”
Nailed it almost in one. “Exactly. Except he wears a baseball hat.”
He made a face. “How modern.”
That made her laugh, and with the warm, rolling chuckle, more of the tension she’d been holding tight inside her fell away.
“We’ve got a day and a half before we need to leave for Washington. Let’s use them wisely. Teach me everything I need to know about managing bro-country’s biggest star. And what I’ll find on tour, other things that might be stressing you out…we’ve got this, Liana. It’s going to be fine.”
A day and a half of that spark of hope. She’d take it, even if she wasn’t sure it would be enough. “I still reserve the right to fire you.”
He shrugged, his eyes calm, deep pools of understanding as he looked right at her. “We’ll fight over that when the time comes.”
* * *
— —
* * *
As soon as she’d agreed to give him a chance, he pulled out a small notebook and started asking her detailed, focused questions that quickly proved he had a better-than-decent understanding of large event security and managing VIP personalities. He asked her about her band—her lead guitarist, Jackie Billings, West Jackson on drums, and her bass player, Andrew Yoa
st—which was just the start of an easy warm-up conversation. The guy had pretty slick interviewing skills.
“Take me through a typical performance day,” he asked.
“We’re often on the road for the first half of the morning. Depends how far apart the shows are. I try to write every day, just a little bit. Lyric ideas, maybe pulling one or more of my band members in for a bit of work. But the time on the bus is really our down time, other than catching up on social media.”
“And when you get to a concert venue?”
“Almost always there are local radio station winners, and sometimes an in-person media event. But I’m more likely to do the call-ahead interview from the bus, talk to the morning show in the town where we’re headed.”
“Ever have anyone demand too much of your time? Get too close?”
“Not really. The tour manager and roadies are pretty good about that. There’s always on-site security, too.”
“I’ll want to connect with them at each stop.”
She frowned. Was that really necessary? But she didn’t question him out loud. Hope wanted her to play along.
He tapped his notebook. “Look, I know you don't really need a bodyguard.” He was a mind-reader. “But you’re stressed about something, and maybe having me run interference on some of that stuff—or even just fetching you coffee—can help with that. So I’m going to go through the motions, just in case it makes a difference.”
“Fair enough.”
“And when it comes to Track…”
She made a face.
“At some point, I’ll want to know more specifics about how he gets under your skin.” He looked at her carefully, examining her reaction as he spoke. “It doesn’t need to be today.”
“I’m not going to like talking about that at any point. Might as well rip the band-aid off now.”
“Sure. Your call. And you can stop, change the subject, whatever.”
“Part of it is about the music I play. That’s what probably freaked me out the other night. I switched up the playlist and added a song he’d tried to get taken off my last record. And we argued, which isn’t new…”
When she didn’t continue, he said softly, “I think that’s the thing about triggers. They’re often weird and unexpected.”
She scrunched up her face. “Yeah. Unexpected. It was that.”
“What song did you argue about?” He looked down at the notepad, and she was grateful for the bit of privacy as she talked.
“It’s called ‘Cravings’. It’s a darker, earthier song than my earlier stuff.”
His pen paused for a minute, then he kept chicken scratching away.
She hesitated. “What I’m about to tell you can never leave this room.”
He jerked his head up, frowning at her. “Of course.”
The instant trust she felt for this man was probably misplaced. She didn’t know him. The last man she’d trusted had turned out to be a bully of the worst sort.
“Let’s come back to that,” he said when her silence stretched on. He turned over a page in his notebook. “I was just asking so I’d have some context should it happen again.”
She shook her head. She could do this. “There’s a song called ‘Forget Me Not’ on my second album. I hate it. It’s a stupid, insipid, gross song about a woman waiting for a philandering man, and I regret that it’s on my album.” The truth burst out of her, leaving her shaking.
Hindsight was a fucking bitch.
Dean just nodded, slowly, his gaze sure and steady. “Philandering man?”
The memory turned her stomach as she nodded. “Yeah. We were still together then, but I’d started…questioning him. About our relationship, and what he did when we were apart. He pushed it onto the album. Used the producers to wear me down, and threatened not to publish the album at all if there weren’t enough singles on it, he said. They bought the rights to that song in an auction, they told me at the time, but I’ve since learned that the other people supposedly interested had been approached by the songwriter, not the other way around.” The manipulation and deceit still enraged her.
“Can you think of other instances where he’s tried to control your music like that?”
She barked out a laugh. “How much time do we have?”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “As much time as you need.”
It was cathartic, detailing the steady and subtle derision she’d faced over the last eight years. She got mad, too, because saying out loud all the ways Track had used other people to control her framed it in a new way for herself.
A real way.
Her eyes got hot, scratchy. “So yeah. All of that. And then he drops the bomb that they’re covering ‘Forget Me Not’, and I just lost it. That’s the sum of it, I guess.”
He let the silence between them stretch a little long, then double-clicked his pen on the table. “Okay. Tell me more about being on the road.”
She licked her lips, a quick swipe. Back in control. Back to safe ground. “I don’t talk a lot later in the day of a show. Sometimes I need to do a second interview, and that’s fine, but I prefer to keep them short. Save my voice for the concert.”
“Anyone give you grief about that?”
“Not really.”
He nodded. “So Savannah was your last show, right? And we’ll hook up with the tour again in Washington. Tell me what I need to know about the remaining dates.”
She got up and gestured for him to follow her. She pulled her iPad out of her purse in the living room and sat down on the couch. He sat next to her with enough space for her to notice that he wasn’t close, but not so far away that she couldn’t show him the tour dates.
“We’ll take the buses for these…six dates, until Tulsa. There’s a break in Nashville in there. And then we’ll fly north and have a few days off before Bozeman, an outdoor festival outside Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City.” She shifted closer. “And then another break before we hit the west coast. So three legs of a bus tour. Some nights we’ll get hotels, but other nights we’ll sleep on the bus.”
He twisted, his arm brushing hers as he looked at her. His eyes were hazel, brown flecked with green and gold, and shadowed at the moment with concern. “What are the sleeping arrangements?”
“I share a bus with my band. I’ve got a bedroom at the back, they sleep on enclosed bunks. There are four bunks and I only have three band members, so once we clear all the instruments out of the fourth pod, you can have that.”
“How will your band react to me joining the tour?”
“They’re super chill, it’ll be fine.”
“Well, that’s something.” A muscle relaxed in his cheek, but worry lingered in his eyes. He was so serious, and it suited him. Like he’d been born to be a cop and a bodyguard, at the ready to fight the good fight.
“Thank you for asking,” she said softly.
“Just doing my job.” He clenched his jaw, then nodded. “Okay. So what would your preference be in between those legs of the tour? Do you want to fly home to Nashville? Stay in the same time zone? Get away from the tour?”
She usually went home. Or, when a dark, unseen panic gripped her, ran away to her best friend’s house. “No preference,” she lied.
He clearly didn’t buy it for a second. “Really?”
“I’d rather not stay with the tour, I guess.”
His eyes danced a little as he gave her an amused look. “Was that so hard?”
“What?”
“Saying what you want.”
Had he already forgotten that she’d locked him out of the house when she didn’t want to talk to him? “I promise you I don’t have any problem saying what I want.”
“How about admitting how you really feel?”
“Now that’s a lot harder,” she said, an unexpected laugh following the admission.
“So you can play the diva, but you do it in a carefully constructed way?” He turned a bit more, his knee lifting onto the couch between them. She kept noticing how
he took up a lot of space. Broad shoulders, stretching the confines of a dark red plaid cotton shirt. Long arms that burst beyond his personal space, often bent at right angles. Long, muscular legs.
If she’d met him in any other context, her first instinct would be to flirt with him. And even now, there was that urge inside her to use her soft, feminine ways to play off his big, brute strength, make him feel manly and distract him from his question. Because she really didn’t want to admit to him that, yeah, a lot of her persona was carefully constructed. Right down to when she played the diva card.
Instead of dropping her hand and running it along the golden hair that dusted his thick, corded forearm, revealed where his shirt sleeve was rolled up, she shoved her fingers into her hair instead. “I don’t know that I’ve thought about it exactly like that. That’s an interesting observation.”
He gave her a bland look that screamed, nice try. “Is it?”
“You’re tough.”
“That’s my job.”
“Awfully sure of yourself for a newbie.”
“Really not that different from my old job.”
“So why’d you leave it?”
“Now who’s asking the tough questions?” One corner of his mouth lifted up. “But I guess that’s fair. I’m asking a lot of you. Trust is a two-way street.”
“I don’t trust anyone. No offense.”
“None taken.” He gave her a curious look. “Not even Hope?”
She paused, then shook her head. It made her an awful friend, but it was the truth.
His gaze turned thoughtful as he set his feet wider on the floor. She hadn’t realized how controlled he was until he started moving restlessly. He shifted next to her, finally leaning forward and lacing his fingers again as he braced his forearms on his knees.
“It’s not—”
“I’m not judging,” he quietly interrupted. His jaw flexed as he looked down at the floor. “My mom died of cancer when I was twelve. My youngest brother was two, just a baby really, and he needed her. It’s not her fault, you know? Of course not. But trust…it’s more of an abstract notion for me. The last time I trusted anything or anyone, I was just a kid.”
