Page 9 of Dedicated

The way he’d said my name right then, it sounded like some kind of confession he didn’t want to make. I braced myself.Rip the fucking Band-Aid off, already, I thought. My jaw tightened as he studied my face. Then, he exhaled loudly through his nose and passed the set list over to me. “You think this looks all right?”

I studied him a beat longer, until he blinked and looked away and it was evident he wasn’t going to say anything else, then I glanced at the song order he’d written down. It was one we’d done before, but this was Cleveland, and Cleveland loved some of our B-sides and bonus tracks from the first album. I touched the tip of my tongue to the point of my canine, thinking. “We should skip ‘Blunder,’ ‘Siren,’ and ‘You Expect,’ and do ‘Disorder,’ ‘You Were Mine’ and ummm…”

“‘Chanteuse’?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, warming to the idea and relieved to have moved on to a language we rarely had trouble conversing in. “Good call.”

“I think so. End with ‘I’m Leaving You,’ still, and encore with ‘Blue’?”

My stomach clenched up again, the way it did every time someone mentioned that damn song, but especially when it was Evan. “We kind of have to,” I mumbled. “Remind people that at least one thing they like came out of that last album. Keep them from giving up on us.”

“They’re not going to give up on us,” Evan said, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

By the timethe house lights went down that night, my hands were steady again. The buzz of the crowd settled into an anticipatory lull that lasted a span of seconds, and then burst with applause that swelled and surrounded us. The venue was new to us and smaller, maybe five hundred people at most, but I could tell just from the applause ricocheting off the walls that the acoustics were stellar.

“You good?” Evan had to speak up to be heard over the rowdy crowd. He had his guitar slung across his back and raked a hand through his hair one last time to make sure it was settled. I licked my parched lips, nodded, and grinned. “Never better.”

He wanted to frown—I could see a line trying to etch itself between his brows—but, like me, he still got high off a crowd, and he ended up quirking a quick smile back. “Good. Let’s do it.”

Jared, our instrument tech, handed me my guitar, and we walked onstage. Cheers and catcalls rushed us like a wave breaking against the shoreline, engulfing us in a cocoon of wild energy. It had amplitude and emotion and was as addictive as anything I’d ever put into my body. It was energy exchange back and forth, an intimate conversation on another level between my soul and the hundreds in the crowd before us. I loved the feeling of connection, and I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of this moment. And I’d never get tired of sharing it with the man beside me. I hoped Evan was right about the fans not giving up on us. But more than that, I hoped Evan didn’t give up on me.

Chapter 8

Six months ago

Iwas drunk. Not outright hammered, not glaze-eyed blitzed, but definitely drunk. A few tequila shots and a lot of beer cartwheeled through my veins. Also known as a recipe for a class B hangover. Better than class A, which would have me out for a day. A class B just made for a shitty morning. Unless I slept through it. I didn’t care, though. Evan was drunk, too, and after being holed up in the cabin for so long, I enjoyed watching him cut loose. He wasn’t out of control or like a different person or anything. He was still Evan Porter—a guy born with his skin wrapping him just a little too tightly, an ounce more tension in his spine than most people had. He relaxed when he was playing or on stage. And also when he drank—which he didn’t do to excess often.

I liked seeing him cut loose in any way, shape, or form. How the corners of his mouth went a little lax, and when he smiled there’d be a crooked wobble in it that drove me crazy. I wasn’t the only one. Any time a pap captured it, our fan page went crazy posting about it. It was something of a rarity. If I saw it between the pages of one of the tabloids, I always tried to guess what it was that caused it. There were times I knew it was me. A pic of him coming out of Ralph’s with his cell to his ear—I was on the other end of that call telling him about the jackhead roadie who’d clogged up the tour bus toilet. Evan had thought it was hilarious that I was so worked up because I was usually pretty laid-back about everything. But getting hit by a wall cloud of someone else’s shit stench when I opened the door of the bus, knowing we were about to settle in for a ten-hour haul, pissed me off. So I was ranting in the phone about Rick’s traitor asshole and how he was banned not only from Taco Bell, but from stepping more than five feet into our bus until he’d detoxed his colon.

After spending halfthe night barhopping, we ended up taking two waitresses back to the cabin. Evan didn’t seem as interested in Mandy as I was in Ella, but he’d been a good sport about it. We hung out on the back porch for a while playing drinking games and doing a dumb version of karaoke, even though my fingers were getting numb to the point where they slipped over the strings and had trouble holding a note. When we needed another round, I dragged Ella inside with me into the kitchen where I pushed her up against the fridge and kissed her. I’d been stuck in a cabin for days, and she was cute and horny and we’d been flirting all night, so making good on it was overdue.

At some point, I registered a faucet running, which was weird because we hadn’t moved from in front of the fridge. I had my hand in Ella’s panties, and she was moaning with her eyes screwed shut when I turned my head to the side and caught Evan at the sink, filling a water glass as he stared out the kitchen window. I guess he’d gotten used to ignoring me.

“What happened to Mandy?”

Ella cracked her eyelids open as I spoke, registering Evan’s presence with a sharp intake of breath.

Evan shrugged. “She had to work early tomorrow.”

“So? Since when does that preclude slipping a chick the D?”

“Maybe I didn’t want to slip her the D.” He tipped the glass up to his lips, swallowing the water all in one go, then refilled it.

“Why the fuck not?” She’d clearly been into Evan.

Evan paused with his glass midway through its arc to his mouth. “If you’re going to keep interrogating me, you think you could take your hand out of her drawers?”

“Drawers,” Ella echoed with a snicker, as if she didn’t have the same Southern twang. “That’s so cute.”

But I complied, sliding my hand free and wiggling my fingers at him.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head with something close to exasperation, then addressed Ella. “This guy’s a barbarian. You like that?”

“I don’t hate it,” she purred, one shoulder rising and falling. She had on some kind of slouchy knit dress that exposed her shoulder and bladelike collarbones with the motion. It was careless and sexy and part of her whole allure, but I found my attention riveted to Evan again as his gaze swept her figure and then swerved toward me. After her reply, he seemed uncertain of what to say next. Guess he’d been expecting her to say something different.

“Do a shot with us,” she said, and extended her hand to him.

Warmth began to spread through my stomach, because it was quickly apparent to me exactly what Ella was aiming for. And holy shit was I into it. Evan’s mysterious sex life was like the lost gospels to my promiscuous Bible. You couldn’t turn a page in the tabloids without running into one of my sexual exploits. Evan, on the other hand, was hardly ever mentioned. He had girlfriends off and on, but I had no idea what went on behind closed doors. He kept a low profile and didn’t talk about it, not even with me.