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“No, man. I haven’t touched that stuff in years. Don’t plan on ever touching it again.” I leaned back in my chair and gave him a weary grin. “Now, what were you saying about Thursday’s show?”
I’d found Jace in Bristol, Tennessee, seven months ago. He and his band had been playing some seedy bar downtown and I’d happened to hear them playing. I’d offered them all a contract to play at First Bass once a week for a year with the promise that they would have either a manager contract or a record deal at the end of that year. They had come out, skeptical of my offer. But the first week that they had played, Emmie Armstrong had been sitting in the back with her husband and my parents. By the end of the night Emmie had offered Jace and his entire band a contract that would take effect as soon as their year was up at First Bass.
In the four months that they had been playing here every Thursday night, Tainted Knights had made their own following along with attracting offers from other managerial firms that they’d had to turn down. Tainted Knights was a smart band. They knew that having Emmie Armstrong as their manager would be their best option. Hell¸ she was my dad’s manager and she had done a kick ass job for OtherWorld’s career.
Jace and I talked business for another twenty minutes before I finally forced myself up and out of my office. It was only eight thirty but I needed to make the rounds. Jace flanked me as I took my private elevator up to the VIP floor. As soon as we stepped off, people started tossing greetings at us both.
I shook hands, made sure that the big-wigs who thought they were hot shit because they were in my VIP lounge were having a good time, and started toward the bar.
Seeing me, Nate left two chicks at the other end of the bar and brought me over my usual beer before pouring a glass of whisky for Jace. “Jenna’s looking bad, boss. And she’s been making friends with angels.”
I grimaced. “So she’s here?” Nate nodded his head across the room and I turned to look for my friend and roommate. The place was filling up so I didn’t see her immediately. “Is she high?”
“She’s in an entire different galaxy, she’s so high, man. I gave her one glass of champagne, but told her that was all she was getting.” Nate gave me an apologetic look when I turned to glare at him. I’d told him that Jenna wasn’t allowed any booze when she came in. After the last time she’d gotten drunk and nearly fallen over the banister onto the first floor, I’d put my foot down about her drinking. I wasn’t going to be responsible for her killing herself while in my club. “Sorry, boss. She was making an ass of herself and I didn’t want someone going out to tell the paps that Jenna Stevenson was in here Lindsey Lohan-ing it up.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face in aggravation. “Yeah, okay. I understand. I’m going to go put her in a cab. After tonight I’m not letting her in here until she gets her shit together. So if you see her, I want to know immediately.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Jace tossed back the rest of his drink and set the tumbler on the bar top. “Let’s get this over with,” he grumbled and I pushed my barely touched beer toward the bartender before turning to follow my friend. “You need to talk to Natalie about her, Harris. She’s falling deeper into Tessa’s bullshit more and more every day.”
My eyes roamed around the room, trying to spot Jenna and whatever new friends she was making. What had Nate said? She was with angels? Knowing Jenna, that could mean about anything. “Tessa said that she wasn’t touching coke anymore. She doesn’t know how Jenna keeps getting it.”
Jace made a disbelieving sound but didn’t say anything else as he helped me look. Jace hated Jenna’s girlfriend, Tessa. I wasn’t a big fan of her either—fuck, I hated her—but if she made my friend happy, I wasn’t going to alienate her and give Jenna a reason to think I didn’t support her.
“I think I see her over there.” Jace pushed past a few girls who were just standing in the middle of the room talking.
I offered them a smile and a wink as I excused us and followed after him. The two chicks giggled and lowered their eyes to look at me flirtingly through their fake lashes. I recognized them as the new Victoria Secret models and I might have stopped to talk to them if I wasn’t in such a rush to find Jenna and get her out of the club.
My eyes were still on the two models as I followed after Jace. The tightening of my jeans reminded me that I hadn’t gotten laid in weeks because I’d been so busy with work. After I got Jenna in a cab, I was definitely going to have to rectify that.
“Jenna, close your fucking legs,” I heard Jace snap and my head snapped around to find my friend sprawled out on a couch with her eyes half closed and the glass of champagne tipped at an angle so that it was dripping onto the expensive piece of leather furniture.
I raked my hands through my short dark hair, mussing it up. She looked like what she was turning into: a drug addict. My gut clenched as I stared down at the girl who had been my friend for so many years. She hadn’t always been so broken, and really she wasn’t now. She didn’t have a hard life; the biggest thing she really had to deal with was her judgmental mother who called every so often. Jenna was just bored and that made her growing addiction even worse in my eyes.
With her thick makeup smeared all over her face, it was hard to see the beautiful girl underneath. The hooker clothes she was wearing exposed a body that would have had most men hard in a second at just one look, but the way she was spread-eagle for the world to see made her beautiful body just look cheap and used.
“Yeah, I told her to do that five times already. She’s so out of it that I don’t think she heard me,” a voice that was achingly familiar bit out and my eyes slowly lifted from Jenna in disbelief.
But there she was, in the flesh, and I realized exactly what Nate had been talking about when he’d said Jenna was with angels. I wouldn’t have called Lucy an angel, however. Her sister Lana was nicknamed angel by her husband and that was what the paps called her in most of the tabloids when they printed their shit about her.
No, there was nothing angelic about Lucy Thornton. She was too fiery to be such a creature. She was an entity in and of herself, her beauty surpassing any mythical being. That wild, curly, dark hair that fell down her back and those nearly black eyes in a face like porcelain made a man want to fall to his knees and spout poetry. I’d never seen another girl as beautiful as Lucy. Believe me, there probably wasn’t one out there, because I’d been looking.
I hadn’t seen her except in random pictures in tabloids for years now, and they hadn’t done her justice. Tonight she was dressed in a Demon’s Wings shirt with black leggings and boots that did nothing to hide the fact that she was only five foot four. She had on just a little makeup that made her lips look swollen and her eyes even darker than I remembered.
Without looking at me, she spoke to Jace. “So, is she like this a lot?”
Jace shrugged. “More often than not, lately.”
“Is he into it?” she asked, nodding her head in my direction. I stiffened at the tone of her voice. It was full of anger and disgust and I thrust my hands into my front pockets. She couldn’t ask me or—oh, I don’t know—look at me? There had been a time when she would have asked me anything, but that was another lifetime ago.
The sudden thrill that I’d felt at seeing her vanished in a puff of smoke. The stab of hurt that felt like it cut me in half quickly changed to anger as I glared down at the girl who had once known my every secret. Someone’s turned into a total bitch over the years. When had things changed so much? I’d been wondering that a lot lately. When had I lost my best friend and, more to the point, why had I lost her? But mostly, I wanted to know how I could get her back.
In that moment I was too pissed off to care if I ever did. “If you answered an email ever or actually called me every now and then you would know that I’m not into drugs. But it’s nice to know that you care enough to immediately think I would do something like that, princess.”
Brown eyes turned pitch black as she took two steps closer to me. I towered over her by twelve and a half inches, outweighed her by at least ninety pounds, but that didn’t seem to matter as she met my glare boldly. “Call me princess again, I dare you.”
Lowering my head, I smirked at her. “Princess.” Even in the dim lighting I saw the fire that sparked in her eyes. I knew I was being a dick, knew that the paps had hurtfully labeled her the over-privileged rock princess who thought she was too good for her dad’s world, but I was too pissed to care. “If I’d known you were coming I would have rolled out the red carpets and—”
