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“Good,” Zach said. “We talked about starting work on the songs he’s producing.”
The sting intensified. But she ignored it. “I’ll check the schedule. I’m sure there’ll be something we can squeeze in later next week. Faith was talking about looking for another weekend gig for Nessa and the guys.”
“Thanks.”
His smile almost made her feel better about the prospect of letting Eli take the reins on some songs. Almost. Her hand curled into a fist and she made herself relax.
Zach, at least, didn’t seem to notice. “But you didn’t come here to talk shop. How was dinner? Did Sal and Caterina have a good time?”
“They did.” She forced a smile. She wasn’t going to explain her evening to him. That was her own personal mess to deal with. She and Zach weren’t at the dealing-with-each-other’s-baggage stage. They were never going to be. “Dinner was great.”
“You sure about that?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“Yet you’re back here with me?” His tone was almost … concerned. And she’d had enough concern for one night.
“What can I say? It’s that sex god thing you’ve got going on.” She moved a little closer, toeing off her shoes. She’d come here to forget, not to talk. So she was going to have to move things along.
“Can’t resist me, huh?” Zach said, eyes following the path of her hands as she toyed with the buttons at the front of her dress.
“Something like that,” she said. “Want to remind me why?”
Chapter Eleven
Leah watched Eli and Zach laughing in the recording booth and tried not to grit her teeth. The two of them had been horsing around for nearly ten minutes, since Zach had finished his first run-through of “Air and Breath” and Eli had left the board, supposedly to talk to Zach about the setup. Instead they’d been trading inside jokes like a pair of fourteen-year-olds, leaving Leah twiddling her thumbs at the board, awaiting instructions.
After the last week with Zach, knowing the producer’s seat was all hers, for some reason, sitting meekly at the soundboard now, waiting for Eli to call the shots, wasn’t sitting well.
She leaned forward and pressed the intercom button. “You guys about ready? We only have two days here.” The studio was becoming busier in the lead-up to CloudFest. Every year some of the acts performing at the festival decided to try out the studio Blacklight had made famous. They’d come for a few days, then release a version of an old song—or a whole new song—recorded on the island to go with their appearance. She’d managed to block out chunks of time here and there in the schedule for her and Zach to keep working over the next six weeks or so, but this was going to be the longest continuous block they’d have for some time. And it was Eli who was getting to use it instead of her.
Eli turned to face her. “Hang on a second,” he said, and then leaned in and said something to Zach too low for Leah to catch. Zach laughed in response and Eli turned back to face the booth window. “Okay, got it. I’m going to change the set up in here a little.” He started to reel off a list of gear he wanted.
Leah’s jaw tightened again. Zach was using the same guitar he’d been using for the songs she’d worked on with him. The studio was perfectly set up for it.
“Got that?” Eli said.
“Yes.” She turned the intercom off. Neither Zach nor Eli had made any move to leave the booth. So apparently she was the one who was expected to go get all the stuff Eli wanted.
Normally that wouldn’t bother her. After all, it was part of her job. But Zach and Eli both knew the Harper studio well. They’d spent chunks of their childhood here just as she had. They knew where the damn storage cabinets were.
But they don’t know how everything is organized. She tried to push down her irritation as she walked into the gear room and started pulling things out of cabinets, working methodically. She might be irritated, but there was no point taking it out on expensive equipment. She lifted out the last mic and then made herself take three deep breaths, still feeling twitchy. Stupid, really. She’d known that Eli was going to be at the studio eventually. Zach hadn’t pretended otherwise. He’d told her from the beginning he still wanted Eli to work on a couple of songs. So why was it bugging her that today was the first of those days? After all, they were on the same team. Trying to make Zach’s album as good as it could possibly be.
And she had no place getting possessive.
The deep breaths didn’t help much, not even when she took three more and then stretched, taking a final three. Still didn’t help. She glared at the pile of gear as though it was the cause of all her troubles. Maybe that was it. She was just being territorial about the studio. After all, she and Zach had been working with the set up she’d worked out for almost a week now, and it was sounding great. But Eli, almost as soon as he walked through the door, had started wanting to change things. She didn’t know if he’d even heard what she and Zach had done. Maybe Zach had played him the tapes, but if he had, he hadn’t told Leah.
Or maybe it was the way that Eli just kept asking her to do things for him, as though she was some little helper monkey at his beck and call. Not so easy to just slip back into the sound engineer role, perhaps. Not after a week of being producer.
The sensible thing to do, of course, would be to march back in there and tell Eli, ever so politely, that he didn’t get to order her around. The guy was only a couple of years older than her after all. Sure he had a few more producing credits under his belt than she did. But she’d known him when he’d been a scruffy kid and then a scrawny pimply teenager. So he didn’t get to lord it over her.
In fact, maybe she should just take an extended coffee break now. Let Lord Eli do some of the work. She got that he was used to having his orders obeyed. He traveled with Billy on the road, sometimes stepping in as tour manager, so he was used to being a boss. But this was her studio, and really this was partly her album too now, so Eli needed to give her some respect.
She gathered the mics and other bits and pieces, carried them back into the booth, and shoved them into Eli’s hands. “Here, all yours.” She turned on her heel, and marched back out toward the kitchen. She was halfway through making a cup of coffee before it hit her that the thing that was really bugging her was that Zach wasn’t stepping in to call Eli on any of his bullshit.
When they had been working alone, he’d been polite and considerate. Sure they had a few clashes about particular sections of the song, but that was part of the biz. But now, with Eli here, he seemed to have reverted into some weird dude-bro mode that set her teeth on edge.
And while, yes, it was his album, and ultimately he got to call the shots about how things were done. That didn’t mean that she needed to take any crap. It was, after all, her studio. She knew what she was doing, and Zach bloody well knew it after the time they’d spent on his songs. As for Eli, well, she didn’t remember him having this kind of attitude before. Maybe he’d been running around the world with his dad a little too long.
