I don’t bother hiding a yawn as I pull up a screen on my computer. I see how it’s impossible to keep up on sleep while on tour. If I’m going to find time to work on my program without sacrificing my sleep, I need to stop playing chess and start eking out time.
“Babysitter.”
Jax’s voice has me glancing up from the board at the booth in the Air Canada Centre.
Today he’s wearing a blue T-shirt that sets off his amber eyes and jeans over white sneakers. His hair’s tucked under an Astros cap.
I don’t like baseball. Or hats.
I like both on him.
“Where’s Jerry?”
I nod toward the aisle. “Talking with one of the venue guys. I’m on setup.”
If there’s pride in my voice, it’s because I am proud.
Jerry let me lead on organizing for the night ahead. Of course he’ll fix all the stuff I screw up, but I get the chance to do it.
Instead of leaving, Jax moves closer, leaning his elbows on the half wall between us and running his gaze over me. I’m suddenly self-conscious in my black tank top and jeans.
“I bet you’ve never gotten in trouble a day in your life. At least not since the finger painting incident.”
I fold my arms over my chest “Untrue. I was suspended in high school.”
His eyes glint. “For what?”
“Our math teacher used to post our grades after tests. So, I started taking pictures of them. Then wrote a program correlating them with whether the students were on varsity athletic teams.”
“And?”
“And—shocker—if you could kick a football, you were also a god at factoring quadratic equations.” I wrinkle my nose. “But the principal seemed more concerned with my hypothesis than the findings.”
“How did they find out?”
“I hacked the school’s webpage and posted it there.”
I dust my hands on my jeans, looking up from the board to find Jax giving me that look again. Amusement mixed with curiosity.
“You do have a little rebel in you.”
Maybe he’s making fun of me. Or maybe he thinks I’m cool after all.
I give myself the benefit of the doubt and a mental fist bump to boot.
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing press?” I ask. “Nina will kill you if she finds you down here.”
“I’m done. Media piranhas have been fed for the day, and Neen’s off flirting with Brick somewhere.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking about the last part.
“I bet they love talking about your music.”
“No. They love asking if I take it up the ass.” He replies so easily I’m sure I’ve misheard him. “Most interviewers care less about the music and more about my lifestyle.” He cocks his head, a smirk on handsome face as he leans in. “In case you’re curious, I told them only from my label.”
I can’t believe how supremely comfortable he is with everything. As if he could strip naked right here and walk up on that stage wearing nothing but the smirk and be completely self-possessed.
After last night, I’d promised to take Lita’s advice and keep things strictly business. Because I lost a night’s sleep imagining him with those women. I need to stay focused on my work.
But I didn’t promise I wouldn’t talk to him.
“I want to talk about music,” I blurt.
He recovers from the flicker of surprise almost immediately, spreading his hands. “Ask away.”
“Last night, you were going to tell me about seeing Leonard Cohen.”
“So I was.”
He does.
I hang on every word as he describes the concert, and the way he talks about it, I can picture myself there.
Then we go through our favorite concerts of all time, trading stories. I can’t believe how many shows he’s been to.
“I would’ve thought you’d never get to any shows.”
“On tour it’s hard,” Jax admits. “But sometimes it’s all that keeps you sane.”
An alert beeps on my phone, reminding me of my task. “Shit. I need to get this finished.”
With a moment’s hesitation, he rounds the half wall and comes to stand next to me. He takes one look at the setup I’m doing and reaches for the board, flicking switches like he’s playing an arcade game.
My jaw drops. “What are you doing?”
“Array configuration’s different here than Pittsburgh.” He bends over, checking a connection under the board before straightening. All of his focus is on the dials as his hands move over them. “You need to accommodate for that in the mix.”
He realizes I’ve gone still, and mute, and stops, sighing. “The array’s the speakers stacked by the stage—”
“I know what an array is,” I mumble.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is that Jax Jamieson knows how to do my job.
He just got fifty per cent hotter. Which is a statistical impossibility, because the man’s already on par with the sun.
Stay professional. He’s basically your boss.
Who’s eight years older and has a sleeve of tattoos and who you have a poster of in your room like you’re twelve instead of twenty.
He finishes what he was doing, then shifts a hip against the board as he turns to face me.
“So, the app you built,” he says casually, cutting into my daydreams. “It tells you how to mix better songs.”
Get a grip. I shake myself. “Um. In theory.”
“To make money.”
“Sort of. But also for science.” I click into competent mode and out of “drooling on the floor” mode. “It tells us things about our brains and how we relate to music. Some people would say that’s even more interesting.”
“People like you.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“How does it decide what’s ‘good’?”
“It’s based on a database of hit songs from the last fifty years. Including yours.”
“Mine?” He cocks his head. “How many of them.”
“All of them,” I confess. “I couldn’t decide what to leave off. ‘Redline’ has this guitar hook that won’t quit. ‘Inside’ is this acoustic exploration that guts you, then resolves right when you’d swear it won’t.” I swallow, feeling hot all of a sudden. Maybe it’s because his stare has intensified or because it feels like I’m spilling my guts. “In case no one’s told you, you’re kind of a genius,” I finish.
That hangs between us for a good five seconds, and I’m cursing myself for going too fangirl.
“People probably tell you that every day. I can stop.”
His jaw works, but there’s a glint of something in his eyes.
“Jax! You want in on sound check?” someone calls from the stage.
He stares at me a second longer before pulling something from his pocket and setting it on the board.
Then Jax jogs up to the front and plugs in his guitar. He grabs a stool and pulls it up to the mic.
He starts to play, and I glance down to realize he’s left me his phone.
Again.
Like the last three shows.
What did he do with it before this?
Is it weird that I don’t really care?
I lift the phone in my hand, turning it over. It’s warm from his pocket. The smooth surface is marred by scratches, and I wonder how they got there.
“Strange.” I turn to find Jerry at my back, setting his bag gently down on the chair.
“What’s that?” I stare at the board, wondering which of my settings I’ve gotten wrong.
“He hasn’t done sound check in weeks.”
My gaze follows Jerry’s toward the stage.
And now I’m thinking dirty thoughts about a rock star.
It should be innocent, but it’s not. Not when I know he has a girlfriend. Not when I’m here to do a job.
The fact that I have zero chance with him doesn’t matter in the slightest. It’s the principle of it.
The phone burns a hole in my pocket through the final sound check. After, Jax vanishes from stage to get ready.
The rise of the curtain. The opening act. The main event.
The next hours fly by working with Jerry. He’s so competent, and he always knows what to do.
Except at one point he stops, staring at the board.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“I don’t…”
I’ve noticed that before, what’s possibly the reason Cross assigned me here. Jerry has lapses. He’ll remember everything about the venue, the acoustics, the tech, but he’ll forget people he’s supposed to meet or what time he’s supposed to be on-site.
I open my notes from earlier, check, and point at the setting he’d told me about. “Is it this one?”
He nods, and we finish the show.
Eight encores.
I’ve never seen a band play eight encores, but Jax, Brick, Kyle, and Mace do it as if it’s the last night of their lives.
At the ninth encore, my pocket buzzes.
I don’t want to look at it. Don’t want to be pulled out of this.
But when it buzzes again with a text from Annie, I do.
Call me back
Please
Something bad happened
Fear streaks down my spine as I lean over Jerry. “I have to go.”
I cut through the halls, finding my way to backstage and flashing my pass to get through. The ninth encore is the last, and Jax comes off the stage, the building nearly falling down from the roar of the crowd. Sweat’s running down his forehead as he chugs water next to the stage.
His gaze lands on me.
“It’s Annie,” I pant. “Something’s wrong.”
His body goes stiff as if he’s been shot. Then he grabs the phone from my hand and stalks toward the dressing rooms.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to follow him, but I can’t not.
“Annie. What is it, baby?” I hear him say.
My chest tightens. I realize I’ve followed him right into his dressing room, but I can’t leave. I’m rooted to the spot.
He listens, and I’m desperate to know what’s happening, but I can’t hear the voice on the other end.
After a moment, though, Jax’s shoulders slump. “Division? Yeah, that sucks. Okay. It’s late. I’ll call you in the morning.” I start to duck out, but he crooks a finger, telling me to stay. “We’ll do all the math you want.”
When Jax hangs up, he crosses to the old-fashioned wooden dressing table at the far end and reaches for a towel to wipe his face. He braces his hands on the wood, still breathing heavily from the show as he meets my gaze in the mirror. “She lives for social studies, but math is the devil. Ten-year-olds’ drama.”
“Ten years old?” I’m still struggling to catch up with the wry twist in his mouth.
“Annie’s my niece.”
I drop onto the couch, the fake leather smooth on my bare shoulders as my eyes fall closed.
“Who’d you think she was?” There’s curiosity in his tone, and an odd edge.
“I don’t know. You have pictures of a woman in your bus. Your arm’s around her.”
He hesitates barely a second. “My little sister, Grace.”
I don’t normally get wrapped up in other people’s lives, but I couldn’t have predicted the cascade of emotions that follows. It’s like dominos, shock chasing understanding chasing anticipation chasing hope, until one crashes into the next and leaves me a bundle of humming nerves.
Part of me’s filled with dread and the rest wants to jump for joy.
The fact that you’re alone with Jax Jamieson in his dressing room and he’s single changes nothing.
He’s not a sex symbol. He’s an artist, a business person, a…
My rambling thought train comes to a screeching halt when I blink my eyes open. A sensory spectacle on the other side of the room accosts me in slow motion.
Jax Jamieson is stripping his shirt over his head. His back muscles ripple, and my eyes trace the tattoos over his arm, across his shoulder, to where they end midway down his back.
This is so much more than the poster. It’s surround sound Dolby hotness, and as he turns, showing off equally sexy chest, all I can think about is what it would be like to trace those lines with—
“You thought I had a girlfriend. And that bothered you.” He totally caught me staring.
My lips move, but nothing comes out. “Yes,” I manage finally. “Because you go to that room to party. Not for any other reason.”
He stares me down like he can see every dirty thought in my twisted head. “You don’t need to save my soul, Hales.” The nickname sends prickles through me. “But I like that you want to.”
I have a long moment to soak in the effect of his gorgeous body from under my half-lowered lashes before he reaches for a T-shirt. Then drags a black hoodie over that.
I bet you wouldn’t take a bath after he touched you. The random thought invades my brain.
He crosses to the couch, and when his gaze drops to my bare arms, any trace of a smirk vanishes. “You’re shivering.”
“It’s fine.”
“Where’s your jacket.”
I swallow. “I lost it.”
And holy shit, it must be my birthday because he’s reaching for the hem of his shirt again.
Scratch that. His sweatshirt.
He strips it over his head in a way that tugs his T-shirt up a few tantalizing inches before dropping it down again.
He holds it out to me.
“You’re loaning me your sweatshirt?”
“Keep it.”
“Oh. I couldn’t.”
“You have a problem with accepting help, don’t you?”
My brows pull together. “No! I mean… only if I haven’t earned it. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me.”
Just when I’m about to reach for it, he seems to reconsider. Before I can protest, he grabs a sharpie off a table across the room and scrawls something on the fabric. I lift my hands fast enough to catch the shirt he tosses at my head. “There. Now it’s personalized. You can’t give it back.”
My fingers dig into the soft fabric.
“Thank you.” I want to tell him I love it. Instead, I hold the sweater up by the shoulders. “I can’t see what you wrote.”
“Just as well.” I’m totally imagining the teasing note in his voice as he drops onto the couch next to me.
The shirt smells like laundry soap and him, and until he smirks, I don’t realize I’m smelling it.
Shit.
I don’t know why I’m still here, or why he is, but I’m afraid to change a thing.
“Why do people feel sorry for you.”
I blow out a breath. “My mom died last year. In a car accident. She’d come home from a work trip to take me to a concert for my birthday. On the way back, it was raining. She had to hit her brakes to stop from running into a car in front of her. The eighteen wheeler behind her couldn’t stop in time.”
His nostrils flare. “Your dad?”
I shake my head. “He’s never been in my life. I don’t know who he is.”
The way his mouth twists at the corner is dark. “Hope it was a good concert.”
Death makes most people squirm. His response should make me angry, or indignant.
It’s satisfying somehow because I know he’s not laughing at my mom or the terrible thing that happened to her.
He’s laughing at life. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you can’t laugh at life’s coincidences—the good things and the bad things and the horrible ones—you might as well be dead.
“It was,” I say finally.
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
I’m used to seeing shock on people’s faces when they hear what happened, but Jax recovers quickly.
“Your mom died coming back from my concert and now you’re on my tour. That’s twisted.” I half expect him to walk out but he just studies me. “Is this some kind of retribution thing?”
“No. Not even a little.” I shift forward, bringing our faces close enough I can see the dark flecks in his gold eyes.
“See, I put on your music—Inside actually—and played it on repeat for weeks. My friend Serena says she doesn’t know how I was so strong. The thing is I wasn’t. You were. You were there for me, and you didn’t even know it.”
I take a breath because now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop.
“That’s what made me start building this program. It’s also my biggest problem. Computers can analyze pitch and frequency and levels and what’s pleasing to the human ear. Machine learning algorithms can predict hits on the basis of what’s come before. But what none of it can do is tell you what kind of person creates those songs. What they’re thinking, feeling, when they do.
“I want to know that,” I say, breathless. “I want to know you.”
Silence stretches between us. Except it’s not really. I can hear sounds of metal on metal in the hallway. Of footsteps.
Neither of us looks toward the door.
Jax looks like he’s turning something over in his mind. He smells like sandalwood and sweat. Like he came back from battle.
“I wrote ‘Inside’ when I thought I was going to die. When I was out of control. I don’t play it, I don’t even let anyone cover it, because it takes me back there.”
I swallow the sudden thickness in my throat. “I heard about your parents. I never heard you had a sister.”
“I don’t like paparazzi harassing what family I have left. I left Dallas to make a better life for my family. But my little sister got knocked around by this guy while I was recording. She married him when I was on tour. Now they’re raising Annie together. If I’d been there instead of here, this wouldn’t have happened.”
My chest squeezes, hard. I see why he carries so much around with him, but there’s something wrong about what he’s saying.
“How do you know it wouldn’t have happened if you were there?”
His jaw tightens. “I just do. It’s why I count down every show in this damned tour until I can go home and make up for all of it.”
Jax looks as if he’s going to say something, but his intake of breath has me looking down.
“Jax, your fingers are bleeding.” I frown, resisting the urge to grab his hands to take a better look. “I used to bite my nails.”
He scoffs. “From playing guitar.” But he holds my gaze for a beat. Two. “How’d you stop?”
“I glued peanuts on them.”
His brows shoot up into his hairline. “Holy shit, really?”
“No, not really.”
Laughter starts somewhere deep inside him, warm and full and incredulous.
And like that, the whole world is me and him, the dimple in his cheek I’ve somehow never noticed, the light in his eyes as our bodies rock.
“Well?” Jax asks finally, his gaze dropping to the sweatshirt clutched in my hands. “You gonna put it on or just cuddle?”
The fabric bunches in my fingers. I don’t take my gaze from his as I shift on the couch, tugging his sweatshirt over my head.
I didn’t expect it to be warm and comforting, but more than that…
God it smells like him. It’s all fabric softener and man, and if fame had a scent I know it would be this.
I shove the hood back, resisting the temptation to fix my hair.
“There,” he says, a hint of satisfaction in his voice as his amber eyes darken.
“What?”
“It’s like I’m touching you everywhere.”
Words like “boss” and “distance” and “older” fall away because they can’t compete with that.
When the biggest rock star on the planet says “I’m touching you everywhere” because you put on his hoodie, it’s the biggest tease in the world.
But Jax looks completely relaxed when he shoves at the hair falling over his forehead, sliding a tattooed arm along the back of the couch. Curiosity edges into his expression. “So the whole hating it when strangers touch you thing… that’s only strangers, right? It doesn’t stop you from doing other stuff.”
“What kind of other stuff.” My ears are ringing.
He lifts a brow. “Like sex.”
I stare him down but the only thing in his expression is concern. It’s as if he appointed himself my personal therapist without telling me, or asking permission.
“Right,” I manage. “Yeah, I have sex. But I don’t like to drag it out. You know. It’s better if it’s fast.”
Dark brows draw together on his face as if maybe I’m speaking another language. “Shit,” he says finally. “That’s a damned crime, Hales, because the best sex?” Jax’s eyes glint as he stretches out his legs, dragging my gaze down his hard, perfect body without permission. “The best sex is slow.”
I think I stop breathing when he says it.
He looks as if he’s not aware of the effect he’s having. I think he likes having someone to talk to who’s not interested in him.
If only that were true, I think as I sneak a look at him from under my lashes.
The first time I met him, I was beyond intimidated.
When he’s like this, he doesn’t seem older or different or scary.
Jax Jamieson is timeless.
He’s perfect.
The door opens, and Mace sticks his head in. “Jax, Nina’s asking if you can do an appearance tomorrow at…”
He trails off as he sees us. “Am I interrupting?”
“No.” He hesitates, and for a second, I want him to say yes. Yes, you’re interrupting. Please go away and come back in an hour.
Or never.
“Let’s get out of here.” Jax shifts out from under me and follows his bandmate out the door.
I stare after him.
Until this moment, I wasn’t sure why I’m on this tour.
Jax Jamieson has saved me more times than I can count.
Maybe it’s my turn to save him.