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He hooked his arm around her neck. “That’s very true. However, dirty and long is even better.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” She grunted as he leaned in on her. He looked like one big skinny dude, when in fact he was full of muscle. He was definitely more lethal than he looked, even if tonight he hadn’t come out victorious.
But he was still alive. That was a victory all its own.
She slung her arm around his back and his untucked shirt rode up. More skin, hot and smooth. So different from the Italian men that—
She shook that thought off. No need to think about that right now. The past could stay there, where it belonged.
At a break in traffic, they staggered forward. Heat came off him in waves. Add in the dense air of the July evening and the baked-in heat in the pavement and the whole world was getting a bit too shimmery for her taste.
They weaved to the left and she steered him back to the center of the sidewalk. A crush of teens came barreling down the street. New York City never slept. By some miracle, no one recognized Ryan. It helped that he was even more rumpled than usual.
His scruffy face was heading toward beard. His peach-fuzz curls were normally closely cropped, but they’d grown out until he looked more like a disheveled troll doll minus the pink hair.
Yet he was still super hot, and somehow even more so now that he was all roughed up and dangerous looking. Not that she wanted to view him that way, but some truths were impossible to deny.
“You owe me,” she muttered, groaning under his weight. It almost seemed like the jerk was intentionally leaning more on her than necessary. “Like the never-going-to-let-it-go kind of owe me, buddy.”
“Since when did we keep score?”
“Since you started disappearing like a petulant teen.” And he’d scared the holy shit out of her.
He merely grunted.
She knew something was up with him, but she couldn’t begin to figure it out. He was getting crazier onstage. Almost as crazy as West. To the point that the guys were starting to talk about him in whispers.
Well, in between their own issues. Between the heart eyes coming off West and his girlfriend Lauren, the eternal nighttime Skype sessions with Michael and his wife Chloe, and the dirty talk between Juliet and her duo of delicious boys, there wasn’t a lot of room for the other band members to worry about Ryan.
So, she did the worrying.
And while everything inside of her told Denver to bring him back to the bus, there was a niggling part of her that knew he was right. If the band saw him like this, there’d be more questions than answers.
More arguments especially.
Because Ryan wasn’t ready to talk. While he was usually the most easygoing of the group, when he dug his heels in, it was pretty much impossible to move him.
And only part of it was because he was well over six feet tall and surprisingly sturdy.
“All right, you need to pull yourself together. It might be a hotel that porn is probably filmed in, but they can turn us away for public intoxication.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“No? Then why are you leaning on me?”
“Because you smell good and I kinda like the way your boobs squish against me.”
“Pig.” Why the hell was he talking about her boobs? “And let me tell ya, buddy, I can’t say the same about how you smell.”
He straightened up and sniffed at his collar. He turned away with a grimace.
“Yeah, it ain’t pretty.” She wrinkled her nose at the alcohol coming out of his pores and the less-than-stellar status of his shirt.
July had been a brutal bitch since they’d pulled in yesterday. The air conditioning unit was working overtime on the bus and there were too many bodies crammed into the space.
Not one, but two stowaways were onboard right now. Okay, Lauren Bryant, West’s significant other, wasn’t exactly a hanger-on, but she was one more body. And there was a lot of action going on in that bunk.
Lauren’s sexual revolution was a work-in-progress.
