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Ryder snuggled next to Talia. “Oh yeah?” He glanced around, his gaze finally settling on me. “Well, hello.”
Talia rolled her eyes. “Summer, this is Ryder, my fiancé.”
“Nice to meet you.” I took a big sip of champagne.
He sat up. “Summer? As in, Knox’s Summer?”
Talia slapped him in the chest. “You know about her?”
“Uh, yeah.” Ryder looked uncomfortable. “Knox said you weren’t coming tonight, but that you two were back together. Um, I don’t think he knows you’re here.”
“That’s because she decided to come at the last minute and surprise him,” Kaylie answered.
My eyes narrowed. The alcohol was giving me some liquid courage. “Imagine my surprise when I showed up and Scotty the roadie turned out to be Knox, a guitarist in a freaking rock band.”
Ryder winced. “He was supposed to tell you first.”
Talia turned to him. “How do you know all this?”
Ryder took Talia’s glass and finished the rest of her champagne. “He told us after they broke up or whatever happened. She wasn’t answering his texts, and he was trying to figure out how to win her back. We gave him advice.”
“Oh, damn.” Lacey snorted. “No wonder it all went to shit.”
Kaylie held out her empty glass for Lacey to refill. “So, what was with the fake name and job? Why did he tell her that?”
“Shouldn’t you be asking him all this?” He pulled out his phone and read a text. “Yep, Sid is pissed.”
I was feeling tipsy and watching the girls grill him was proving insightful. “Tell me, Ryder. I want to know why.”
Kaylie nodded her agreement. “We’re asking you because you came into the girl limo. We analyze shit over here. So spill.”
Ryder sighed. “I don’t remember it all exactly. It started off just pretending they were dating. And then when things evolved, which Knox wasn’t expecting, he had trouble coming clean about it. I think he liked being Scotty with Summer.”
“Why?” I prodded.
“It was his way to weed out gold diggers and celebrity chasers.” He paused for a moment. “He wanted to make sure that Summer liked him as a person and not for his fame or his money.”
“When did he ever care about that?” Talia asked.
“The bigger we got as a band, that stuff started affecting us all. Did you ever notice that the bigger we got as a band, the smaller our circle of friends got?” Ryder looked around at all of us. The girls were nodding their heads.
“I see it a lot in the industry.” Lacey turned to me. “I’m not saying that Knox misleading you was okay, but it makes more sense to me now.”
My head was spinning. “I didn’t know. I’m not a big follower of your band. Are you saying that you’re famous? Like actual celebrities? When we were in Idaho, nobody recognized Scotty. I mean, Knox. Do people recognize you on the streets?”
“It depends.” Ryder put his arm around Talia. “Ghost is recognized everywhere. Here in L.A., Ghost and Knox get recognized all the time. They always travel with security. Hell, even Bash does on occasion. Outside of a tour and outside of L.A., it’s hit and miss.”
“That’s so strange.” I screwed up my face. “You’re famous. Wait...” Something else hit me. “Are you saying he’s rich, too? Oh my God!”
Ryder looked taken aback. “Why do you look so upset?”
“I didn’t know about any of this.” I pulled at the hole in my ripped jeans.
Ryder shrugged. “He’s rich, but he lives like a pauper. No wonder you didn’t know — his apartment is shit. We’ve been telling him to move to a better place for years now.”
I rubbed my temples. “This is too much.”
Ryder pulled Talia onto his lap. “Can we stop all this girl analyzing now? If I knew we’d be talking about all these girly feelings over here, I wouldn’t have come. Let’s pull over and make a swap. I’ll ditch and send over Knox and Sidney.”
