Page 1 of Dedicated

Chapter 1

I’d always thought there was something poetic about moments of certainty: the way someone kept their gaze riveted to yours, the hand that lingered a little too long passing a napkin, a lighter, a beer. That moment I knew it was going to happen, that it was a sure thing. Whatever else may have come before didn’t matter. The starting line moved.Thiswas the new beginning.

There were lyrics in that, maybe a whole song, but I was too busy riding a nice buzz and capitalizing on one of those very moments to chase after the words—which I realized was ironic considering I was a lyricist with no fewer than eight number one ballads to my name. I should work on that, probably, but right then I was taking advantage of the nice smile the guy next to me kept feeding me like loose change into a slot machine.

He wanted it.

I wanted it, too.

We’d spent the last two hours in the cramped hotel bar trading small talk back and forth like playing cards, dealing out hometown stories, anteing up with dumb escapades, raising the stakes with a few bedroom scorchers until we were both primed and ready to cash in the chips elsewhere.

I’d always been slightly pickier with men than women, and earlier I’d had my eye on a curvy redhead down the bar who still had her attention trained on us. But there was something about this guy, Jamie, when he walked in that hit me in just the right spot. He’d draped over the bar like his jacket was made of long days and disappointment, yet when he’d smiled at me it was so ineffably bright and resilient that I kept looking back. He wasn’t searching for love, and neither was I. I’d planted that seed before, and it still lived in me somewhere I guess—hibernating, rotting, or maybe frozen in some state of suspended animation.

Jamie was taking off tomorrow for Pennsylvania on the last leg of some business-related trip with details too boring for me to bother remembering, while Evan and I were set to play another show at a smaller venue in Cleveland.Intimate, our manager Byron had said.Let’s getyou guys off the pedestals and back to your roots. Which I thought was a diplomatic way of saying,You assholes aren’t booking the big gigs anymore. Fix it.

We had a couple of shows left on the tour before a much-needed four-day break, and then we’d reconvene at the East Tennessee cabin where we’d written all our albums. So I was planning on getting while the getting was good. And Jamie, with his quirky charm and sexy smile, definitely fit the bill.

“Nightcap upstairs?” I asked him.

He grinned and tipped his head back to finish off his beer. “Sure thing.”

We flung money at the bartender and headed for the elevators. There would be no nightcap upstairs; we both knew that.

Jamie wasn’t a starstruck groupie like some others. He’d played it regular-guy cool all night, and I liked that. But the way his steps hastened the closer we got to the elevators was telling. It was gonna be a good night.

As soon asthe elevator doors shut, I hooked him by a belt loop and pulled him toward me, running my hands over the T-shirt beneath his jacket for a tactile preview of his rib cage and abs, imagining the way they’d look when that shirt was on my floor and he was on my bed beneath me. The vision was a promising one.

Jamie planted a palm against my shoulder and shoved me backward against the brushed-metal wall, his mouth dropping to sweep a kiss over the hollow of my throat, tongue caressing a slow burn that radiated in a wave toward my groin.

By the tenth floor, I was as hard as a fucking rock. We were in safe territory, though: four short floors left and not many people went up on the elevator. At least at this time of night.

Right as I was thinking that, with the backs of my knuckles skimming over his strained fly, the fucking elevator dinged and stopped. Jamie took a breathless half step aside, and I wrapped my arm loosely around his waist.Nothing to see here besides the bulges in our pants.

I just wished it wasn’t Evan standing there to witness our flustered rearranging. Because there he was when the doors slid open, the heel of his hand smoothing over the bridge of his nose in a way I knew meant he was frustrated or tired. My bandmate, my friend. My ultimate secret crush. It was one of the few times I wished the body next to me was a woman’s. Or better yet, not there at all. That dormant little seed inside of me, the traitor, rattled around in my chest.

Fuck.

Chapter 2

Iwas tired. I was thinking of my place in Nashville where I’d missed the spring—my favorite season—rising up from the ground in green shoots that made the Midwest tundra we’d been cycling through feel that much colder. I was thinking of the call time tomorrow, the set list, the balls of fast-food wrappers piling up on the bus, how I felt like I was wearing a second skin of road dust and smog. Whether this tour had been successful or not. Sleeping in my own bed—a novel concept since I couldn’t even remember what color my sheets were at this point. And also, about a couple of weeks from now when Les and I would seal ourselves in a cabin and try to recreate the success of our second album after our utter bomb of a third.

But mostly I was thinking about crashing hard in my hotel room as I came down the hall from drinking a few beers with some of our roadies. Leigh, my girlfriend, was up there waiting to curl around me. Or should be. And I knew she’d smell good. Like home. Like coffee and Southern sunshine.

So I was caught off guard when the elevator opened and there stood Les, his dark hair mussed, a heated flush across his neck, his arm wound loosely around a dirty blond who faintly resembled me. Maybe it was ridiculous. Maybe I was just being a jerk. But it got to me a little, and I could feel it in my expression, in the way I had to fight the automatic downturn of my mouth.

“Leigh here yet?” Les asked as I stepped into the elevator. It reeked of booze, and his tone struck me as self-conscious. But when I looked up from the columns of buttons, he had a half-cocked smirk on his face like he was already high on the post-fuck endorphins of the sure thing beside him—who I was trying to pretend didn’t exist.

“Should be. She said some time around midnight.”

And then it got quiet. I eyed his blond prize up and down and waited for Les to fill in the gap with an introduction.Something. But he didn’t. There was just more of that thick, heavy silence. The kind you could dent with the poke of a finger. After another couple of seconds, I couldn’t take it any longer. “The guys want IHOP tomorrow. You in?”

“Fat stack of pancakes and endless coffee? You know you don’t even have to ask.”

My gaze flicked up to meet Les’s. Brilliant green set within olivine skin, that leonine-lazy curl of his mouth so damn confident and desire-flushed. I knew that look. I wished I didn’t.

I blinked away and focused on the display above the doors that flickered as we rose, but in my periphery I could still see Les’s thumb moving in slow sweeps low on the other guy’s hip, pushing up his T-shirt just an inch to expose his skin.

I couldn’t get off that elevator fast enough. When the doors opened, I launched forward down the hall, calling over my shoulder, “See you at eight.” Then, before I could stop myself, I tacked on, “Be safe.”