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Or maybe she’d chosen him.
“Hey, I have a rule,” he said.
“I don’t usually follow rules made by random men I’ve just met,” Isabella said, tilting her head to one side.
The man chuckled, then leaned in closer, almost all the way to her ear. “I don’t usually drink with people whose names I don’t know.”
Isabella sucked in a breath. “Oh.”
“I’m Rex,” he said, lifting his glass.
Isabella lifted her glass too. “Isabella.”
He smiled. Smug. Charming. “Nice to meet you, Isabella.”
“Nice to meet you, Rex,” she replied.
From the second their glasses clinked together, everyone in the bar, whether they were watching or not, knew the earth had just shifted on its axis.
Chapter 5
Rex
Four days in this wretched hospital. And I’ve only gotten to see Isabella the one time she walked into my hospital room. I’ve been taking walks around my floor, rolling my IV along with me, hoping I might run into her which is a fruitless endeavor considering I’m in recovery and she spends all her time down in the ER.
Still… it’s all I can do right now without begging a nurse or Amina to get her to come back and see me. I already got her there under the guise of saying “thank you”. I haven’t yet come up with another brilliant reason to get her to come back.
The thing is, I don’t blame her for keeping her distance. I was hasty and overeager. I thought that’s what made me charming back in the day.
Not to mention, the way we left things was definitive. Never again. A relationship lost to time.
I can’t account for serendipity, though, can I?
I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, hey, hey, slow down, champ.”
I shoot an annoyed glare at my manager, Mickey, who has taken Blaise’s place as my support system. Mickey’s the band’s manager to be clear which means though he has my best interest at heart, it’s really the band’s best interest he’s most concerned with. Which means he wants me better ASAP. “I’m fine, Mickey.”
“I know, I’m glad you’re walking, but you know, just… take it easy. You’re not running a race, huh?” He lets out a loud “ha!” and while I don’t laugh, I’m fond of the old guy’s dad jokes. “You know, you’ve got a world tour to get ready for.”
I grimace. “Right… about that…”
“You’re gonna be better,” he says, sticking his hands in the pockets of his tweed pants. “They’ve assured me you’re going to be running across that stage and doing cartwheels in no time.”
I’ve never done a cartwheel onstage. I mean, how can I with a guitar slung around my neck? “I’m not worried about recovering, I just think…” How do I explain I want to stick around the sleepy desert town of Ocotillo Valley and try and get a second crack at Isabella? It’s not logical, but then again, I’ve never been the most logical person. I play music for a living and trash hotel rooms to keep up the rockstar myth. Yeah, my brain doesn’t work like other people’s.
“What is it? Hm? You want us to hire a doctor on tour? We can make that happen. Although we should check in when we’re actually getting ready to leave in a couple of weeks. But you know, we won’t spare any expense at making you feel –”
“Can’t we just delay things a little? Just a bit?” I ask.
Mickey’s bushy caterpillar eyebrows shoot upward. “D-delay?
The dreaded “d” word. Rain delay. Flight delay. Delay delay. “You know… just another week. Where are we going first? Canada? We can go back there any time to make up the dates. Toronto loves us. It’s –”
“Hey, hey, hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Rex. We’ve got a little bit of rehabilitation that needs to happen on this tour.”
The high stress of the situations I get myself into sometimes makes me temperamental and then my temper gets me into high stress situations. It’s a vicious cycle. “What rehabilitation are you talking about?”
“You know, we gotta make up for the whole altercation you had with the Canadian press last time we were there.”
