* * *
“No way. She’ll ruin it,” Rudd predictably proclaims a few hours later.
I shoulder him aside as I carry in the flat screen that will go in the front of the bus. The new tile is down. The cabinets are up and now we’re installing the finishing touches.
“It’s not up for negotiation, Rudd,” I tell him, dropping the television onto the bench seat.
“Unless she’s a troll, we’re going to hook up, but we all know I don’t do relationships. When I’m done hitting that, she’ll be angry every time I bring some other chick back to the bus.”
The thought of Rudd sleeping with Landry makes me want to choke him, so I keep my mouth shut.
“Why would she want to fuck you?” Ian pulls the wires through the wall and threads them around the frame of the bracket that’ll hold the TV.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Because she has actual taste and doesn’t want to get syphilis?”
“Those were warts, man,” Rudd yells. “I’ve told you a million times, that’s a genetic condition.”
Ian and I exchange a smirk.
“Why can’t he just go to jail?” Rudd whines.
I grab the screwdriver from the seat cushion and attach the anchor plate for the TV.
“He was in jail,” I reply. “He served three months of an eighteen-month sentence.” When Davis told me all the gritty details, I wanted to string this Marrow guy up—not just because he was messing with my plans, but because it wasn’t right that the dude only served a fraction of his sentence. What was the frigging point?
“But if he screwed up again, can’t he just go back?”
“They don’t have any solid evidence that he was there, and he’s got douchebag friends backing up a fake alibi.”
“How do we know it was fake?” Rudd asks with an arch of his eyebrow.
I twist the last screw in and toss the screwdriver onto the counter. “Davis believes his sister, and I believe Davis. You got a problem with that, take it up with him. I know it’s not ideal, but we’ve got the space here.”
“Where’s she gonna sleep?” he demands.
“In the back.”
“The big space? Thought you would take that.”
I hoist the screen and fit it onto the wall anchors while Rudd sips on his beer. He’s the laziest son of a bitch. “Like I said, we’ve got the room.”
“What’s she going to do on the road? Make us sandwiches?”
Davis appears at the door. “You guys talking about Landry?”
Rudd scowls. “Yeah, man. I don’t like it. Women only mess bands up.”
“Ian’s married,” Davis points out.
“So? Ian’s wife isn’t coming on the road with us.” Rudd’s growing belligerent, and Davis’s face is getting red.
“She’s only coming for two months,” Davis tells our bassist.
“Two?” I ask, feeling strangely disappointed. “The tour’s for five.”
“My parents will be back in two.”
That changes my timeline a bit but will help to appease Rudd, I hope. “It’s two months. Learn to love it. Davis is our lead singer. He wants his sister to come. End of story,” I say tersely. To Davis, I ask, “What can your sister do? We don’t need someone to run the merch tables. Hollister is going to handle that.” He’s also taking a ten percent cut, but if the tour is as profitable as he thinks it’s going to be, then his manager fee will be well worth it.
Davis shrugs. “What do you want her to do?”
“I’ve got some ideas,” Rudd says slyly.
Davis stiffens. “She’s off-limits. No one here touches her.”
I don’t immediately stake my claim. I haven’t figured out how to break it to him that his sister and I are going to be a thing. He’s understandably protective of her, and during the short time he’s played with the band, he’s likely developed a few misconceptions about my attitude toward relationships.
Davis clears his throat.
Ian raises both hands, palms up. “I’m married, dude.”
Rudd petulantly crosses his arms. “What? All I’m saying is if we’re going to have a single, attractive female on the tour with us, she might as well sleep with me.”
Davis scowls. “She can clean, get the food, do whatever it is that needs to be done. Take care of the books, track the per diem, that sort of shit.”
Rudd looks like he wants to protest, which Davis won’t like, and soon the two of them will be rolling around on the new flooring. That’s not the best way to build band camaraderie. Besides, they’ll both find out soon enough that the only guy who’ll be sleeping with Landry is me.
I clap my hands together. “Great. Now that that’s solved, let’s get the rest of this shit on the bus and get ready to go. We’ve got a tour date to make.”
Mention of the tour predictably cheers everyone up. Everyone but Davis, that is. Ian and Rudd tumble off the bus to help Finn carry in the rest of the gear. Davis lingers behind.
“Need something?” I ask, trying for a light tone even though part of me wants to bust Davis’s chops for making this more difficult than it should be.
“You need to keep Rudd away from Landry. She’s had enough to deal with. I don’t want some poon hound sniffing around her twenty-four seven.”
“Rudd will keep his hands to himself.”
“He better,” Davis says darkly. “Because anyone touches her and I’m gone.”
“She’s a grown woman. Let her make her own decisions.”
Davis grabs my arm. “Adam, I really need you to help me on this. She’s vulnerable. It makes no sense for me to bring her on this tour to keep her away from Marrow if all I’m doing is exposing her to a different kind of danger.”
“Maybe she falls for one of the guys on tour and they live happily ever after,” I suggest.
He snorts. “Pigs will fly before then. We both know that bands are mostly made up of horny shits who will sleep with anyone who offers herself up. I’m no choirboy and neither are you. That’s not what I want for Landry. She’s my sister.”
“I think you need to let her make up her own mind.” How protective is he?
His jaw hardens. He releases me and straightens. “If you won’t help me, then I’m not going.”
My jaw drops. “Are you kidding me?”
“No. Promise me that you’ll make sure no one touches her while she’s on tour.”
I scrape a hand across my chin. I can’t make this promise because I have all kinds of plans to touch her.
“Adam?” he presses.
“I’ll back you on this unless she pursues someone. I’m not going to babysit a twenty-four-year-old woman.”
After a fraught minute of silence, Davis gives an abrupt nod. “Fair enough.”
Then we shake on it, which means I’ve given my word not to seduce the one woman I can’t get out of my head.
Perfect. Just fucking perfect.
Chapter Six
Adam
A week later, all the reno is done and we’re ready to roll out. Ian and Rudd are playing with Ian’s new baby when Hollister shows up with a bunch of paperwork. Davis and his sister haven’t arrived yet. I hope that doesn’t mean they’re backing out.
“Sweet wheels, man. This your dad’s?” Hollister jerks his head toward the bus.
“Yeah. From The Crows tour.” Dad’s last album was an homage to Hitchcock. The cover was a bunch of black crows, and the band’s stage costumes had more feathers than a pillow factory. We were finding feathers in shit months later.
My stage costume is a version of what I’m wearing now—jeans, T-shirt, boots. I shake my head ruefully. Music in the 80s and 90s was a lot different for bands than it is now. We can’t all be Daft Punk and wear helmets nonstop, although I think Ian would love that.
He breaks the crazy drummer mold. He can bang the rack with the best of them, but partying isn’t his scene. He’s got a few deviant tastes—ones that he shares with his wife, though. Voyeurism do
esn’t make much sense to me. I like doing, not watching. And exhibitionism gets old after a while.
I grew up watching people fuck. I’m too jaded to be titillated by that shit. But Ian and Berry are big fans of it and that’s how their marriage works. Given that they’ve been tied together since high school, I can’t judge it.
“Mind if I go in?” Hollister asks with bright eyes, handing me a sheaf of papers.
I nod, scanning the info sheet. Our first stop is Kansas City. They have amazing barbecue and the crowds aren’t half bad. It’s a bigger city, so the bar will attract a variety of folks, not just college students.
As Hollister pokes his head inside, I call out a warning in case he’s hoping to catch a glimpse of how Dad traveled years ago. “We renovated it. There isn’t much of anything original left in there.”
He doesn’t appear to care. The interior turned out great. It helps that Finn builds for a living. He could probably construct a bus from the wheels up. I doubt that any of the bands are going to have digs as nice as ours. The downside is that everyone and their fucking cousins will want to party in our bus every damn night.
By the time we make it out of Kansas, the place will be trashed. I wonder what Landry will make of the bus, the partying, the whole degenerate scene. Some girls are really caught up in it. Even for the no-name bands, there are folks—mostly female—who will do just about anything for a guy with a guitar.
I didn’t get the sense that was Landry. Our short encounter felt more personal…or I could be spinning fantasies out of nothing. No, I shake my head. Girls have pursued me all my life—mostly because I play a guitar and have a fat wallet. There was no materialistic vibe coming from her. It was lust. One that I returned in full.
This morning, I woke up with my hand around my dick and the image of a naked, trembling Landry grinding down on my face. And my hand is the only thing that’s going to be around my dick for a long while unless I can persuade both Davis and Landry to my way of thinking.
Like I told Ian, Davis is the key to FMK’s success. Bands have broken up over smaller things than one bandmate screwing the wrong woman.
Hollister reappears. “Nice digs,” he says, coming over to join me. “You’re lucky because Threat Alert’s new label is springing for a tour bus, too. If yours had been the only one on the tour, every sucker would be squatting in here. Still, TA’s bus is half the size, so I suspect yours will be party central. Make sure you get rid of all the weed and shit before you get on.”
“I know the drill.” Bands are a magnet for police. They get an instant hard-on seeing us motor down the road and can’t wait to pull us over. Drug use is acceptable only at the venues, not while the wheels are turning. “Nice locations you’ve got here.” I jiggle the sheet. There’s a surprising number of untraditional venues designed to hold a couple thousand rather than the bars that max out at a few hundred. Hollister has come through.
He grins. “We do well for the first two months, I can see extending this into the summer. Maybe Europe.”
My eyes snag on a weird detail under a number of the clubs. As with most tour itineraries, this one has the dates, location details, and check-in times, but several have the name of a female in bold lettering. The music scene is still a sausage fest, so this is a surprising number of female promoters.
“Who are these?” I point to the first name: Anna Cairns.
“The promoters’ girlfriends. Don’t touch them.” He pins me with an accusing stare.
“Dude, that was years ago, and I had no idea who she was.”
“You should’ve.”
I grind the back of my teeth together. Not because Hollister is wrong, but because he’s absolutely right. Fucking the promoter’s woman is a huge no-no. Sometimes fucking their ex is just as bad. I learned this lesson the hard way.
When I was twenty-one, I had a band made up of guys from college. We did a small regional tour with bars no bigger than the one we played the night Landry walked in. On an extended Chicago stay, I hooked up with a Mrs. Robinson-type—a thirty-something yoga instructor who could fold her body in half like Gumby.
The next afternoon, I showed up for the gig and was told to go home. We were booted off the rest of the tour because Mrs. Robinson was the promoter’s longtime girlfriend, and he’d planned on asking her to marry him. Worse, he told all his buddies, and I ended up blacklisted from the Chicago music scene for years.
Turns out that my old man had dicked over a friend of this guy, and the two of them decided to repay a decade-old grievance by freezing me out. Since I didn’t have the same star power as my dad, I couldn’t flex any muscle. The band folded soon after.
I’m fairly certain that is part of what’s driving Davis’s fear for his sister. Sex can ruin a good thing fast.
“Yeah, I know. Look, I’m not new to this. We’re not going to tote around drugs on the bus, and we’re not going to screw any ladies who the promoters have their eyes on.” I tear off the bottom corner of the itinerary. “Got a pen?” I ask.
He produces one from his shirt pocket.
“Speaking of off-limits ladies, put this on your list.” I scribble Landry’s name on the list. I know I can’t fuck her right now, but that doesn’t mean anyone else should be either. For Davis’s sake.
Hollister takes my slip of paper. “Landry Olsen? Who the hell is she?”
“Davis’s sister.” I return to the bus. My phone’s here, and I want to see where the hell the Olsens are.
Hollister’s hot on my heels. “You’re bringing your front man’s sister on tour with you?” He begins shaking his head. “No. No. No. No.”
“You sound like Rudd.” I duck inside and check my messages. There’re two from Davis.
We’re running late.
And then fifteen minutes later.
JFC she’s trying to bring the entire house.
Hollister’s not done. He follows me, complaints still spilling out. “Jesus. I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Rudd of all people. You know what the rules are. No one who’s not part of the band goes on tour with you.”
“My band. My bus. My rules.”
He snatches the paper back from me. “Five bands. Five bands—twenty-some horny guys—and one chick? This is a recipe for disaster. Please tell me she’s ugly.”
I run my tongue across my teeth thinking about the perfection of her tight body and how likely it is that I’m going to plant my fist in someone’s face for looking at her wrong. The probability is high.
“Guys will have to learn a little self-control. It builds character.”
Hollister’s not amused. “It only takes two of you wrestling over her like a bone for this whole thing to go into the shitter.”
“You disinviting us?”
He glances over at Ian and Rudd, who are playing with Ian’s three-month-old kid, then back to me. We both know he’s not doing that. Part of the reason we’re being invited, despite only being together for a few months, is because I’m Sydney Rees’s son. The name still carries weight with promoters. I’d bet my left nut that we wouldn’t have gotten some of these venues if the Rees name weren’t on the press kit.
Right as Hollister opens his mouth, Davis’s Passat rolls down the long driveway. Everyone stops what they’re doing to watch Davis and his sister exit the car. Okay, to be fair, we only care about Landry. Everyone here knows Davis. Landry’s the mystery.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Hollister’s jaw drop open. He sighs in defeat, slapping the crumpled tour list against my chest. “She’s your problem. Don’t screw up.”
Rudd races over, beaming. “I’m in love. Seriously, madly, deeply in love. I take back everything I said about Davis’s sister not being welcome on the bus. She’s so welcome, I’m going to let her sleep in my bunk.”
“And where are you sleeping?” Ian mocks.
“In the same bunk, of course. Hollister, man, you’re welcome to crash in the extra space,” Rudd says generously. “Just don’t open my curtain. We
’ll be busy inside.”
The promoter glares at him, but Rudd’s already moving off, down to introduce himself to Landry.
“Hey, beautiful. Let me carry that for you.” He rips the bag off her shoulder and practically knocks Davis down in an effort to grab Landry’s other bag.
“This going to be a problem?” Ian murmurs in my ear. I reach over to grab the little one, propping Jack against my shoulder.
“Depends on her response. If she shuts him down, then no. If they end up sleeping together, then yeah. It’ll be a big fucking problem.”
Chapter Seven
Landry
May gave me three rules for this trip.
Do not sleep with any guy who plays an instrument.
Suck up to the bandmates.
Be open to new experiences.
I told her that these rules sort of contradict each other, but she waved the snake head at me until I capitulated. She was right, though. Screwing around with a guy I’ll have to see every day for the next two months is a disaster waiting to happen. I’d catch feelings when all he wanted was sex.
Case in point, my brother. I love him and he’s a genuinely decent guy, but he could sleep with a dozen girls in the span of a week and not care one iota about them. Whereas I sleep with one guy and think we’re going to get married.
That’s what happened when I was in college. I did have one hookup after college, but then Marrow happened so who knows. Maybe I am capable of emotional-free sex, but I’m not counting on it. It’s probably best that I keep my attraction to Adam under wraps so I don’t spend the next two months miserable as he samples the female population from here to California.
“The bus looks nice,” I chirp. Nice is an understatement. This thing looks like it could be on the front cover of some magazine, if there are magazines about buses. It’s all shiny lacquered wood and black leather. Tiny lights on the floor form a pathway down the center.
Davis unpacks a grocery bag of stuff I bought last night. At the bottom, he finds a pan of brownies, which he hands to Rudd. “Pot brownies, Landry? Really?”
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