“What stuff?” What did a tutoring session at Devlin’s have to do with Leo’s old band?
“Well, just with how things ended. I know nobody really knows why Leo left the band, but the fact that everybody is so tight-lipped about it made me assume it wasn’t a mutually wanted separation.”
My still cloudy head didn’t understand the connection. I shook it.
“Because they’re in town recording at Devlin’s studio,” Clara said. “You didn’t know that?”
My jaw dropped. “The Burnouts are back in town? How did you know that and not me?” It was hurtful to think that Leo had shared that information with her but not me. I had imagined we’d created a sort of friendship...even if I was always getting him into predicaments and launching myself at him in fits of rage.
“You know, small towns. I found out from someone who heard from their cousin...yada yada.” She flipped her wrist out.
So Leo hadn’t told her. But it still didn’t explain why he would agree to work at Devlin’s studio. Anytime the band and his past were remotely mentioned, even in passing, Leo quickly changed the subject or got quiet. I knew he had been fired, and the NDA kept my lips tight, but he hadn’t gone into why. Was there bad blood with his former best friend? Vander wasn’t a part of his life now. Outside of Janice and the Bunco Broads, I don’t think he had friends.
And now he and his mom were at Devlin’s with the band?
“You could have stayed with me, you know. We are technically family,” Clara said gently.
I waved away her offer. She didn’t want someone like me around. “I wouldn’t have wanted to get you sick. Plus, I didn’t really have a choice. He just swooped me up to whisk me off to his country seat. I feel like Jane Bennet at Netherfield Park,” I said.
“Poor you and the hot man who’s taking care of you and tutoring your student.”
“When you put it like that, you make it sound like he’s doing it for me.” Heat burned up my neck to hear it put that plainly.
“Isn’t he?”
“Doubtful. Leo hates leaving this house,” I explained. “I bet his mom guilted him into it. She has superpowers greater than even my own.”
“Really? Is that what happened at the festival?”
“When I was so sick, he literally quarantined me in the car?”
“No, not that. The stuff with the performance band,” she said.
“What stuff?” I squinted my eyes, trying to put together the few memories I had from that day, but so much of it was a blur.
“He was everywhere. He was stomping through the whole place, shoulders hunched and on a mission. I was distracted...with my own stuff?—”
“What stuff?” I asked. “Can we use more nouns and verbs?”
“Later.” She waved away my question. I would be finding out what that was about. “Every time I looked up, there he was. He helped the kids set up their instruments and get them all tuned.”
“What?” I sat up straighter. “I just asked him to call the whole day off.”
“That’s not what happened.” She shrugged. “He even conducted them. Well, tried to. It was sort of a mess, but he did good enough. But afterward, that was nuts.”
“Oh, God.” My stomach tightened.
“All sorts of people from town went up to him and started asking him about how he was and all that. Then he was talking up several shop owners. I even saw him giving it to Ben Huntsford. He looked pissed. Leo. Not Ben. Ben looked like a kid caught pushing his sister.”
“Leo? Leonard Cooper?”
“Goofy, shy kid turned rock star, yep.”
I tilted my head and looked to the side. “Would we say goofy?”
“He was all limbs when I was in high school. I’ll admit he’s much more proportional these days.”
“He’s so hot. What are you talking about?”
