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“He’s going to use Grey’s studio to rehearse, maybe record some demos,” Faith said. “So it’s not an immediate issue.”
“Still, it might take some juggling. We’re booked pretty solid up until CloudFest.” She had another thought. “I take it he wants a CloudFest slot too?”
Faith nodded. “Yep. Haven’t promised him anything yet though. I don’t need a repeat of last year.”
“Sensible,” Leah agreed. She took a brownie from the box. Bit into soft squidgy chocolate deliciousness. Faith was sensible not to trust Zach right away, but she had a feeling Zach would get his way if he played his cards right. The guy was way too charming for his own good. Even Faith, pissed as she was, wasn’t going to be able to resist him forever if he set out to prove he was reforming his ways.
Zach Harper on a mission to win someone over was a force of nature.
Which just meant that, now that she knew why he was here and what that might mean for her, she was going to have to give him absolutely no reason to want to charm her. Her hormones, if they decided to get stupid over him all over again, were just going to have to suck it up.
Chapter Three
It took a night of tossing and turning, and a day of being unable to shake the idea, for Leah to work up the determination to go find Zach and sound him out about producing. She couldn’t wait too long. If he got some big name to agree to take him on then that would be that, even if he brought them to work here on Lansing.
Worse, a big-name producer might even want to bring their own sound engineer, and she’d be locked out of any involvement at all.
She’d spent the day obsessively making a list of the arguments in her favor, drinking too much coffee, and fighting the urge to bite her nails to the quick. Nessa Lewis, Faith’s first foundation-grant recipient, had been in the studio but she and her band were rehearsing, not recording, and the other group wrapping up a recording stint had declared a day off while they worked out an issue with their last song. Which left Leah with just enough extra time on her hands to drive herself crazy.
When she’d found herself scrubbing the toilets in the studio, she’d known she was only going to drive herself crazy if she put off asking Zach for even another day. She’d chased Nessa and her bandmates out right at five o’clock.
So now, here she was, walking down from the studio to the guesthouse, taking the long way through the gardens around Faith’s house in the hope that maybe she wouldn’t be spotted.
The days were growing longer, the heat of the day starting to linger into late afternoon. It was still technically spring, but the approaching summer was starting to make itself felt. She took a breath of warm air, let it soothe some of her nerves. Lansing’s climate was hardly freezing through the winter, but Leah was a summer girl. She liked the beach and wearing silly flirty sundresses and flip-flops and drinking cool beers on warm nights. Liked the heat of the sun on her skin.
Maybe it was the Italian side of her. Born for the Mediterranean climate or something.
She’d been to Italy twice and had loved it both times, but it wasn’t home. No, she wanted sea air and surf with her sunshine, not the weight of history and culture, as fascinating as that was.
The breeze flowing through the garden was full of salt and the tang of the ocean, ruffling through her hair. She’d tied it back in a ponytail after a day of running her fingers through it as she tried to figure out how to talk to Zach had turned her curls into a tangled mess. Wild-eyed Medusa wasn’t the look she was going for, so the ponytail seemed safer. Along with her favorite long red cardigan over the black T-shirt and skinny jeans that formed the basis of her studio uniform most days in the colder months.
The edge of the garden came faster than she would have liked, and her stupid heartbeat picked up a little when she spotted the guesthouse.
They had history, she and Zach and that guesthouse.
She’d been inside it since, of course. The guesthouses were most often used by Grey’s rock-star friends or clients of the studio who were famous enough to require the security the Harper estate offered while they worked.
That had happened more often when Grey had been alive. These days, any of the big names that came to the studio were just as likely to use one of the Blacklight guys’ houses. Danny and Billy and Shane were infrequent residents of Lansing now, all busy with the projects they’d taken up after Grey’s death.
It had been hard on all of them, losing Grey. Leah had watched Faith and Mina battle the grief close up. She’d shared it with them—having grown up with Grey, pretty much the most fascinating of her uncles even if he was an uncle in name not blood. She’d envied the guys, Zach included, who’d all been able to leave the place that held the hardest of the memories behind them, who hadn’t had to face them every day.
It was harder to forget when you couldn’t leave.
And now, staring at the guesthouse and wondering why her feet had suddenly frozen and left her rooted in place, she knew there were other memories that she thought she’d dealt with a long time ago, just waiting to pounce on her once she stepped through the white door.
So. Keep her head. Keep her cool. Keep her mind firmly in the moment.
She was here for business.
Nothing more.
Zach could be a client. He might even be a friend again if he could prove that he hadn’t turned into just another self-obsessed rock star chasing the dream. He hadn’t done much in the last year or so to make her think he hadn’t. Not with the way he’d neglected his family, let alone the stunt he’d pulled with CloudFest.
So a friendly acquaintance perhaps. She wanted to hold out a small shred of hope that somewhere in there was the Zach she’d known. But part of her thought there wasn’t. Not the laughing older boy who’d been part of the landscape of her life for eighteen years. Definitely not the man who’d been the first to break her heart.
That Zach Harper belonged in her memories. Locked away in the deep recesses of her brain where she rarely dared to think about him.
He had no place in real life. Real life, where he’d be leaving and she’d be staying right here on Lansing.
