Page 15 of Stuck With My Rockstar Boss (Soul Sounds Brothers #4)

Lucas

I’m up and at ‘em with only five hours of sleep. Last night with Mika was… incredible. Not just because of the sex. I mean, the sex was great. But the fact she keeps choosing me, even with the risk. Makes it even better.

I know I pay her to spend time with me. Maybe that’s all this is to her. A transaction. After all, she told me how she needs the extra money.

I shake off the thought. That’s dark. And after last night, there’s no way she’s just doing any of this because she feels she has to.

Coffee’s already brewing when I head out to the common area. Dylan’s lounging around, scrolling on his phone.

“Yo,” I say.

“Sup,” he says back. It’s just a greeting. I don’t think he actually wants to know “what’s up.”

I pour myself a cup of coffee and immediately head out to see Mika.

We’ve got a full day planned: Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, driving down Lombard Street.

The list goes on and it’s much longer than we can accomplish, but whatever we get up to, I know it’ll be fun.

I knock on the door of the girls’ bus and wait.

A moment later, Crystal appears. She looks frantic, her usually luscious caramel locks tucked into a headscarf.

“Hey, is –”

“Mika’s not here. If you’re looking for her.”

I frown. “Huh?”

“She’s not here. We don’t know where she is. We’ve literally turned this place upside down.”

I blink. I’m not sure I’m processing what she’s saying. Mika’s not there. Where the hell would she be? “Can I come in?”

Crystal leads me inside. The place truly has been turned upside down. Even couch cushions, as if she could have been hiding under them. “She’s not in her bunk, she’s not in the bathroom– “

“Crys, her suitcase is gone,” Lee calls out from the back of the bus.

Now, I’m on edge. I push past Crystal to the storage locker at the back of the bus where Lee is standing. “What?”

Lee steps aside and I look; two suitcases. Not three.

Tightness. In my chest. It hasn’t happened in a couple weeks now. Because I’ve been with her all the time. And now she’s gone. Fuck.

“Do you think she left?” Crystal asks innocently.

“No fucking way, there’s no way,” I say in a strained voice.

Lee and Crystal are quiet. I don’t have enough wherewithal to pretend like I don’t care a little too much. Too much for a friend.

“You didn’t hear her leave?”

“No, we were asleep,” Lee says sheepishly.

I push past the girls, unhearing of their questions and clamoring and head back to the bus.

All the guys are up now with their cups of coffee, shooting the shit.

It’s just noise to me, garbled nonsense underneath the sound of the blood coursing through my veins.

I’m having trouble breathing. I blow past them to find my phone in my bunk.

“Lucas, you good?” Jay calls after me.

I want to say no. No, I’m not good. And I haven’t been good. But I can’t. I’d have to explain so much. I pick up my phone. No messages from Mika. Some missed calls and texts from Ken and Amy and–not Mika. “Fuck.”

“Lucas?” Jay calls again.

I go back to the common area. All of them stare at me expectantly. “One of the backup singers left,” I say. “Mika. She left.”

“Oh, shit,” Chase murmurs. “You sure?”

“I just went over to–we were going to–we were supposed to hang out today and go–” I can’t seem to finish a sentence without taking a breath, a record skipping on a turntable. “Her suitcase is gone.”

Jay stands and starts to come toward me. “Hey, man, it’s okay. I’m sure if we let management know, they’ll send someone pronto.”

“That’s not the point!” I yell. “I can’t…” I can’t do this without her. I can’t do “Vicky” without her. I can’t exist on this tour without her.

And now I realize.

I can’t exist without her. Period.

“Lucas.” Dylan says my name with a concern screaming in his tone.

“What?!” I ask with venom.

He sucks in his upper lip, and I feel bad.

He doesn’t deserve my ire. He’s been trying to get through to me this whole tour and all I’ve done is push him away.

He holds up his phone and tosses it to me.

I know the code and login. It opens to an article in People magazine.

The words blend together, but it doesn’t matter.

The picture below is truly worth a thousand words.

Mika in my arms. Kissing me. Last night.

“ Fuck ,” I say. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“What? What is it?” Jay eagerly asks, trying to peer at the phone over my shoulder. I hand it over to him. It’s no use protecting this secret anymore.

As Chase and Jay find out the truth, the truth I abjectly lied about yesterday, I can feel Dylan’s gaze searing through me. His disappointment is clear. I don’t blame him. “What the hell, man?”

“I can explain.”

“That does us a whole lot of good now. After you lied to all of our faces just a few days ago.”

“I know you’re mad,” I say, my voice growing quieter. I clutch my chest to try and ground myself. “You have every right –”

Dylan gets to his feet and comes to me. He’s a guy of few words. “Man, we’re brothers. You lied to us just to get some? With Mika? And why did you lie? You know we would have your back either way.”

I know they would. My jaw tightens. But they don’t know the whole story.

“That’s not what happened. That’s not why…”

Dylan’s eyes show his hurt and disappointment. I’m not going to fight anymore.

“Can I explain myself?” I say quietly.

Inside me, he recognizes the fourteen-year-old boy I used to be. The one who’d trade CDs with him and go on bike rides late at night. We’re brothers. Through and through.

Dylan’s lack of response is an affirmative answer. “Could you all sit?” I ask.

They all return to where they were seated before I walked in. I turn away from them and try to steady myself on the breakfast table.

“Lucas, what’s going on, man?” Jay asks, his voice full of encouragement.

I take a deep breath and then turn to face them. I’ve forgotten how safe these guys are. They’re my people. “Something happened last tour. I don’t want to get into it. It was… something that’s made it really hard to be around people. Traumatic.”

Their faces all soften.

“And now I’m just anxious all the time. The crowds, the fans, even being in a grocery store gets my heart racing. It gets hard to breathe. And the only time I don’t feel that is when I’m onstage.” I stop and then decide to say it. “Or when I’m with Mika.”

The silence is deafening. I see Jay’s lips start to move, unsure if he should speak, eyeing the other guys. “So… she’s your girlfriend?”

There’s a pang in my chest. “No… I mean… it didn’t start that way.

It isn’t that way. I…” I’m starting to feel hot and start pulling my shirt away from my chest to get some air.

“She’s really good at making people fuck off and at the beginning of the tour she got me out of a situation where I was starting to have a panic attack, so I hired her to be like my chaperone and go with me places and get me out of bad situations.

And it wasn’t–” I swallow. “It wasn’t sexual or romantic. ”

“At first,” Dylan says, understanding.

“Right,” I concede. “Right, at first. But then we were spending all this time together, learning about each other, enjoying each other. She made me feel so safe. And I honestly haven’t felt that way in a long time.”

Dylan’s face breaks the slightest bit. It hurts to hear it, but I know the cogs are turning in his brain, wondering where he went wrong.

“And, yeah, then we started screwing around. And we knew we shouldn’t, but–” My throat freezes up as the thought bubbles up. “The way she makes me feel is the closest thing to love I think I’ve ever known. Safe and capable.”

Chase sniffs.

“You crying, man?” Jay asks and rubs Chase’s back.

“It’s just beautiful,” Chase says, rubbing tears out of his eyes.

I smile softly and then look Dylan right in the eye. “I need her here. If we’re going to keep going.”

Dylan narrows his eyes in the way I know so well. He’s ready to cause some trouble. “Alright, guys. I know what we’re going to do.”

And suddenly, the bus becomes a war room. Jay and Chase start calling Mika nonstop, but it keeps going right to voicemail. I send off a few texts to her as well. Dylan, though, is leading the charge and immediately goes to the source.

“Ken. Putting you on speaker,” Dylan says into his phone and then holds it out for all of us.

“Uh, okay.”

“So, what’s the deal with Mika, man?” Dylan asks with a clipped cadence. He’s always been good at the business side of things.

Ken starts to chuckle out of nervousness. “Is Lucas with you?”

“Yep,” I say.

“You know, I was just about to call you. How about we move this to a private conversation and–”

“No time for that,” Dylan interrupts. “We need Mika back, alright. She’s just as much a part of this tour as the rest of us.”

There’s a hesitation. “Well, I’m sorry, Dylan, but she was in breach of contract. I couldn’t do anything, even if I wanted to.”

“I was just as much a part of it as she was,” I say hurriedly. “And I’m saying it’s okay. So, why does it matter what her contract says?”

“It’s the label, kid. They don’t want you mixing business and pleasure more than they know you already will, you pick up what I’m putting down?”

I glance at the guys with desperation. “Ken, we need her. Who will do ‘Vicky’?”

“Crystal or Lee. Or the new girl. Cut it from tonight’s show and then we arrange some rehearsals.”

“We’re not performing without her,” Dylan says suddenly. He looks to Chase and Jay. “Right, guys?”

My jaw drops.

Jay crosses his arms. “No way.”

“Yeah, we’re not going on without Mika,” Chase agrees.

I lower my voice so the phone doesn’t pick it up as clearly. “Guys, you don’t have to do this.”

“Of course, we do,” Dylan says stalwartly. I swear, there’s the littlest smile on his face.

Ken sighs. “Guys, please don’t make my job harder than it already is.”

“Sorry, Ken. This is what you get for working with rockstars,” Jay says cheekily.