by Ally Blake
“Which one?”
“Gray snout. Jagger?”
“He’s eaten far worse. He’ll live.” Then, “I thought you were asleep.”
“I was. I can’t remember the last time I slept so late.” She bowed her head in acknowledgement of his part in that, and got…nothing. Not a smile, a wink. His eyes never once slid to her bare legs, her mussed hair, her mouth.
A dog barked in the distance. A plane roared miles overhead. An odd sensation skittered down her spine. “When I couldn’t find you I went exploring. Found your garage. How many cars does one man need?”
“How many pairs of shoes does one woman need?” Dash moved away from the bench to prowl around her in a semi-circle.
“My opinion? As many as she damn well wants.” Twisting to follow, a cluster of nerves began vibrating uneasily deep in her belly.
He stopped next to the doorway—light from outside creating a halo around his huge form. It took her a moment to realize he was herding her out. And the sense that something was very off became a blaring siren inside her head.
It wasn’t as if she’d expected the night before to have changed anything between them—well, not in any consequential way—but neither was she going to be dismissed. Swept under a tarp and forgotten.
“What is this place?” she asked, turning her back on him to move deeper inside, taking care to avoid standing on any stray bits of sharp wood.
She glanced back. A muscle ticked in his jaw before he lowered a hand, grabbing rag from a nearby bench to run it over and through his fingers. Long fingers, the creases a deep brown, the beds ragged, the tips dark with…probably whatever secret men’s business he got up to in here.
“Did you make this?” she asked, when he didn’t answer her. She patted a stool with a square masculine back and softly rounded seat.
She stared at him long enough that he finally nodded.
Oh. He had? Well, wow. Her trepidation mellowed as she paid closer attention to the workmanship in the room. She knew design. And while some of Dash’s ideas clearly hadn’t paid off, others were stunning, with a sense of movement in the graceful curvature.
“To sell?” she asked.
“Give away. Mostly. The pieces that are any good.”
“Where does a world class guitarist find time to learn how to do this?”
With an outshot of breath that told Lori Dash realized she wasn’t going anywhere, he rolled the rag into a ball and tossed it across the room. He straddled a stool—old, chipped, and laced with varnish—gripping the front, his big thighs bunched, his expression shuttered as he stared into the middle-distance. “My uncle was a carpenter.”
Disquieted by the thought of laid-back Dash Mills and profound loss in the same universe, Lori let the ‘was’ slide. She perched her backside against the edge of a table, and said, “And?”
“You really want to know about this stuff?” he said, a warning note edging his deep voice. “You, who usually can’t wait to get out of here?”
That was because she was a busy woman. Okay, also partly because she’d been trying to avoid what had happened the night before. Now that was moot, it was a Saturday and without the usual party invites and fashion shows that filled every inch of her calendar, for once she had nowhere else to be.
“Your uncle,” she persisted, crossing her feet at her ankles, and finally drawing his gaze to her bare legs.
The fingers gripping his stool tightened. “It’s not a story you want to hear.”
“Don’t presume to understand what I want to hear, Dash. I’m a complicated woman.”
At that, his mouth flickered. Just a fraction.
“I…I grew up in Melbourne,” he said, his words tight.
“You’re Australian?”
A nod.
So that explained the accent and the tripping cadences that snuck through every now and then. He was Australian. If possible, it only made him hotter. Maybe that was what he was aiming to tell her—he was the long lost Hemsworth brother.
“Bright, sunny, happy childhood,” he went on. “Till my parents died in a car accident when I was eleven. My dad’s Uncle Peter was my only living family. He agreed to take me in. Even though he lived over here, in Sausalito actually, and there were issues of immigration and adoption at play, he took me on. Even though he was in his fifties, a quiet man, a long-time bachelor, or so I’d thought. Even while I was a mess, belligerent, hell on two legs, he let me get it out of my system till the time came he decided enough was enough, then he gave me my first hammer. And my first guitar.”
Silence stretched between them as Lori found herself lost in thoughts of Dash as an eleven-year-old boy, no doubt adorable with his shaggy blond hair and puppy dog brown eyes. No parents. Then no family at all.
She crossed her arms under her breasts, as if that might tie up the knot of empathy that grew, and twisted, and bloomed inside her. “Did he play? Your uncle?”
Dash sniffed out a laugh. “No. But he knew Jake did. And Jake was the only kid from school I’d ever talked to him about. Mostly to complain he was a little shit. Used to try to rough me up any chance he got, probably because he saw the wild in me that he had in himself. Jake was gonna be the biggest rock star in the world and I’d taken piano lessons since I was a toddler, was kind of always able to pick up any instrument and just figure it out. The day Jake learned I had a guitar, he found me. Once I had him convinced he could be the poster boy, as all I wanted to do was play, that was it. Paisanos. Best mates ever since. As for the hammer? This guff is amateur hour compared to what Pete could do.” Dash flicked at a piece of lint on the thigh of his jeans when he said, “This old shed was Pete’s atelier, in fact. I had it moved here piece by piece after he died.”
If the room had felt airless before, now it felt positively stifling.
Despite the fact that his laid-back attitude drove her mad, a part of her secretly envied him; not having to live by a clock, not having to spend every waking hour focused on where the next dollar came from, the fact that he only had himself to think of. But no matter how inextricably her life was tied to Callie’s—ups and downs, successes, and strings of horrendous luck—Callie was her heart. Without that cornerstone, that reason to strive, she’d be adrift.
With the business floundering, and Callie spending more and more time with Jake, Dash’s isolation suddenly felt like a mirror held up to her possible future. The floor beneath her feet seemed to tip and sway.
“When did he die?” she asked, no longer able to ignore the ghost in the room.
A humorless smile tugged at his mouth, and she knew. Like a piece of the Dash puzzle sliding into place with a sigh.
“A little over four years ago,” she said in her head a fraction of a second before the words left his lips. When he’d famously left the band. Oh, Dash.
“That information is not for public consumption,” he added, lifting a hand as if trying to rein the words back. “Any of this, in fact.”
Lori felt a moment of pure panic. The song… But when Dash’s eyes cut to the workshop, she realized he was talking about his uncle, his story, and about the fact that he was dabbling in carpentry.
“Of course,” she said, swallowing hard. And while he didn’t mention the song, neither did she, telling herself that if it meant that much to him he’d tell her so explicitly. Because she needed the whole world to know that Dash Mills had written it. And soon.
“I’m serious about this.”
“I get that.”
“Are you sure? Because I know about the reporter.”
Lori shook her head fast. The what? Then a glimmer of understanding bled through and willful heat rose up her throat. “You mean Lita?”
He nodded. “I hear she’s heading to town. At your behest.”
He heard? Jake. She was going to strangle him. Slowly. “Rosalita Matthews is a friend of mine.”
“The band doesn’t have the best history with her.”
“Really?” she said, crossing her arms. �
�Well lucky then you’re not in the band, as you’ve taken great pains to remind me.”
“And yet here I am again. All tangled up in the thing.”
He spat the last part out like it tasted bitter. Like it was her fault.
“I’m not quite sure what you’re intimating, Dash, but I asked Lita to do a story because she’s a highly respected entertainment journalist with a lifelong pedigree in the subject. The fact that she’s agreed is the best luck I’ve had in months.”
A muscle clenched in his cheek. The guy looked intractable, and once again Lori felt the ground shift beneath her feet.
She didn’t like it. Didn’t like not being the one in control. She’d worked too hard to get all her ducks in a row to just sit there and watch them get picked off one by one.
“Look,” she said, pressing herself to standing, feigning nonchalance she certainly didn’t feel. In fact, her knees shook and a hard, cold knot coiled in her belly. “I’m going to go.”
“Lori—” he growled holding out a hand before drawing it back and running it through his hair.
“It’s fine. I’m fine. You’ve clearly got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. Probably because I was in it. So, I’ll see you Tuesday morning. For rehearsal. As per the original schedule.”
She didn’t say good-bye and he didn’t try to stop her.
She wrapped her arms about her shirt, holding it tight as she walked out into the dappled sunshine beating through the canopy of trees. Only it was his shirt, and it smelled like him; all warm, and sleepy, like eau de lumber. And yet it did nothing to stave the chills that had seeped deeper inside.
Stupid, stupid Lori. Just because he didn’t look like the men she usually dated, or act like them, or live like them, didn’t mean he didn’t have the same exact instinct to find any excuse to dump and run.
Taking two wrong turns in Dash’s rabbit warren of a house, she found her way back through the lounge room where she gathered up her haphazardly discarded clothes, found her way to the kitchen and up the ridiculous ladder to his loft bedroom, with its mussed up sheets and memories that still made her feel flushed all over, despite the anti-climax.
She gathered her remaining clothes, or at least those she could actually find. And cursed herself as the endorphins faded and she was left feeling ridiculous. Because she’d known he’d pull away. The man was as much of an island as any she’d ever known. And yet it still stung.
She’d known, and she’d let it happen, because it made the moments when he smiled, when he touched her, when his breaths slowed, and his eyes darkened all the more thrilling. Like that moment at the top of a roller coaster when your breath leaves your body, gravity starts to pull, and you feel like you can see the whole world. That moment before you rush head first toward the ground.
Lori understood the thrill of a business risk. How charged she felt when it all paid off.
But an emotional risk? That was a whole other beast. After watching her mother fall prey to the ups and downs of that kind of thing day in and day out until it left her a shell of a woman, it was more than Lori was willing to bear.
…
Dash’s feet pressed into his boots as Lori’s footsteps faded beneath the rush of blood in his ears. It was either that or follow.
But then what?
He’d gotten what he’d wanted. Space in which to think. Quiet in which to regroup. Because, as he now knew all too well, every choice he made had consequences.
Sleeping with Saffron had had consequences. Trusting the record company had his interests at heart had had consequences. Taking his sweet time getting home from school, even while knowing his parents were worriers had had consequences. It was up to him to define the boundaries in which he could live with his life. Live with himself.
His gaze snagged on the consequences of having retired at the age of twenty-seven and being good with his hands.
A half dozen guitar bodies in various stages of completion hung from custom built hooks on the wall. Lori hadn’t seen them, or at least hadn’t known what the bits and pieces could one day become, or there’s no way she wouldn’t have pressed him on them. Though he had no idea what he would have told her. For they’d started out as therapy a la Reg, days spent honing his skills bending, carving, polishing, varnishing.
Except one. The rosewood and spruce; locked up safe from dust in the lone glass cabinet. The lacquer nearly two weeks into the drying, she’d soon be ready for the final cut and polish. And while the thought of actually playing her, testing her for volume, pitch, and creep made his palms sweat, the terror of holding a guitar and playing it had lessened a little every day since Lori’s first lesson.
Dammit.
It wasn’t her fault. It was his. She’d done nothing but give him a good time. And rather than taking it, rather than giving himself a break for once and letting himself enjoy his life rather than finding new and improved ways to atone for past sins, he’d called Rocky looking for trouble.
Dash knew he’d struggled with forgiveness at times, and had always found it difficult to let people in—but until that moment he could safely say he’d never been gutless.
He heard a door shut in the house somewhere. Lori. Leaving.
And with a shot of clarity that had been eluding him, he knew that no matter what, he couldn’t leave things like that.
Dash grabbed the T-shirt hanging over the back of a stool and, whipping it on, jogged across the grass and through the back door, hastening his pace when he could no longer hear her.
He took the ladder two rungs at a time to find her in his loft bedroom.
Sitting on the far edge of his unmade bed in her skirt and bra, holding one of her shoes—the shoes she’d left on as she’d fallen apart in his arms.
She stood to drag her top back on, the sweet mole on her right shoulder blade winking out of existence.
“Lori.”
She spun around, her expression wounded. Though she instantly tried to hide it—lifting her chin, flattening her lips, looking down her nose. But she couldn’t hide the pink flushing her lovely face. Or the damage in her intense green eyes. Not now that he’d felt her unwind and soften and let go.
She held up a high heel, black and sharp. “I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I find my other shoe.”
“Don’t go,” he found himself saying.
She snorted. Somehow on her it was sexy. Hell, a potato sack on her would be sexy. As was the way she locked her teeth around some kind of pin as shoved her shoe under her arm and twisted her hair into a roll before shoving the pin into place. “Are we going to keep having this same conversation, Dash? Where you seduce me, then have second thoughts, then realize that means you’re not going to get any so you track me down looking all hot and raw and frustrated, in your sexy crushed shirt and your faded jeans that fit just so and make me feel all—?”
Lori growled at the ceiling, then she jabbed another pin into her hair with a ferocity that made his stomach knot.
“I’m just saying, some women might find the hot and cold thing enthralling, Dash, but that’s not me.”
“Never thought it was.”
“My mother was like that,” she went on, then swore when she began buttoning her frothy little shirt and her fingers got lost in the ruffles. “My father was a great charmer who did many bad things. He’d disappear for days and whether he was in a ditch somewhere after losing all his pay on a poker game or sleeping it off in another woman’s house, we never knew. And every time she’d take him back.”
“Lori,” Dash said, moving to cup her elbow, and simply touching her dissolved the tension he’d been wrapped in all morning. “I’m sorry.”
Her elbow sank into his palm before she twisted lightly and moved an inch away, pulling her dagger heel out from under her arm and brandishing it at him. “For what, exactly? Intimating I’d called the tabloids on you, when I’ve managed to contain myself so far? You can’t just walk in here looking like that—” she fluttered her spare hand in his
direction— “and get some.”
She glanced down at the twisted sheets, her chest rising and falling, before she glared up at him, all sweet lips, and tousled hair, and pride.
Hell.
“I’m sorry that I was such a horse’s ass.”
She crossed her arms, and didn’t deny he was spot on.
“It wasn’t your fault I went into shutdown. It’s…what I do. Retreat to the shed when I need to sort things out. Only time it doesn’t do the job is when whatever’s making me itch is inside my own head. And you are Lori. All the time.”
He moved closer, and while her eyelashes fluttered manically, her feet didn’t budge. With the tangle of sheets as a backdrop, and the scent of their night together wafting under his tongue, lust rose up inside of him, fierce and fast, streaming out to his extremities and back to his core with a pulsing thud.
“Your taste is on my tongue, like honey and cream. I can feel your skin against my palm, soft, warm, and tight. And your mouth—” His eyes landed there to find her lips had parted, her breaths coming short and sharp. And those plump pink lips beckoned him, like the pathway to heaven.
Her eyes flickered between his, indecision and desire warring in their depths. Until finally she said, “What do you want from me?”
This was virgin territory. He had no choice but to follow his gut instincts, damaged as they were. And his instincts told him to touch her again.
He moved in, ran his hands over her hips, drew her close. Unable to help the smile building inside as she let him. Everything clenching, hard, as one hand fluttered to rest on his chest, the other—holding the shoe—landed with the point of a heel aimed at his heart. “I remember something about a lesson next Tuesday.”
Her gaze traced the column of his throat before landing on his mouth. “So you want me to go, and come back then, ready to learn?”
He hummed his agreement. Then the shoe in her hand traced his ribs. When the heel caught on his shirt she sucked in a sharp breath through parted lips, and lust coiled in his gut.
Then her eyes became twin storms, warning of hail and thunder and all out destruction as she said, “Or maybe it’s my turn to teach you a thing or two.”
