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She was the absolute last person on earth I should have a hard-on for.
She was part of the band now.
Part of the machine that was Onyx Knight.
We were co-workers, so to speak, and intra-band relationships rarely worked out. There were always exceptions, but there was too much money involved for me to fuck her and move on. Which meant I had to get my head out of my pants and focus on the big picture.
The one where we put out the next platinum album and took off on a two- or three-year tour that made us hundreds of millions of dollars.
Devyn probably wasn’t completely clear on the amount of money a full-scale tour would bring in. The big money wasn’t usually in album sales; it was in touring. Between ticket sales and merchandise, we made a killing. Devyn was going to see a check that was more than her yearly salary when we finished our eight-week tour, and I was excited for her.
“Tell me about your family,” I said when the song came to an end.
“My dad took off when my mom told him she was pregnant. My mom left when I was six. She decided being a single parent wasn’t what she wanted.”
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
She shrugged. “I have. She came to my high school graduation with her new husband and a couple of tow-headed kids, thinking we’d have some big happy reunion and I’d be excited about my half-siblings.”
“I take it you weren’t.”
“Well, the kids are cute. The husband is a buttoned-up banker kind of guy, and he’s okay, but I honestly have nothing to say to her. She literally got up one morning, told me she was going on a trip, and never came back. Who does that?”
“I’m sorry.” There had been pain in her eyes as she spoke. “That must have been hard as a little kid.”
“Yes and no. I had Grandmama and Greatty, who were far more invested in me than my mom had ever been. It wasn’t until I got a little older, probably about fifteen, that the enormity of what my mother had done hit me. She came to Grandmama’s funeral, and sent checks for my birthdays, but I never cashed a single one. Greatty might have, since we needed the money. I never took a dime for myself, though.” She shuddered. “It felt like blood money or something. It’s hard to explain.”
“I get it.” I nodded, gently resting one of my hands on top of hers. “I felt abandoned by my dad too. He sent tons of money, and that supported us well, but we had zero relationship when he died. And of course, then we found out he had a girlfriend in New York and was raising her kids.”
“That’s shitty.”
“Yup.”
“Let’s talk about something else.” She glanced down to where our hands were still touching but she didn’t move hers. Instead, we just sat there, my hand on hers, the sides of our arms touching, our thighs a fraction of an inch apart.
I didn’t know what the hell to do next.
Because she wanted me as much as I wanted her.
10
Devyn
What the hell was going on?
He’d touched my hand as a show of support, but we’d changed the subject and he was still touching me. Still sitting close enough I could feel the heat of his body. And neither of us seemed willing to move.
Finally, because I wasn’t sure what else to do, I started to play another song.
Kingston didn’t miss a beat, grinning when he recognized it.
“Home Sweet Home,” he said, referring to Motley Crue’s anthem ballad.
“I love the intro,” I said. “I’ve seen videos from their 1985 Theater of Pain tour, where the drummer starts out on the piano, then his drum tech takes over while he scoots over to his drum set. Then at the end, they do that in reverse. You wouldn’t know it in the studio version, obviously, but it’s so cool live.”
“You play drums?” he asked, watching me.
“A little. Not like Tommy, of course, but enough to get by.”
