by Tamara Hogan
The song still cratered into her brain.
Calamity, draped at the foot of the bed like a sultan, yowled as she jostled the bed. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. “Deal with it.”
Clickity-click.
She peeked out from behind the heavy velvet panel and saw Lukas sitting at his desk in front of the open window. He wore battered jeans and a T-shirt despite the autumn chill, and scowled at something on his computer monitor.
When had Lukas come home?
Over a day had passed since they’d had sex; her body still hummed like a well-oiled machine. He’d been up and out of the apartment by the time she’d woken up. Despite his physical absence, his presence had been everywhere: in the scent of the full pot of coffee he’d left her, in the toast crumbs he hadn’t wiped off the counter, in the damp towel hanging alongside hers in the bathroom.
Stepping into the shower that morning, finding it already wet from his use, had felt unbelievably intimate. She’d spent too many minutes imagining him running his hand over his body as he washed. How long would it be until she could use the shower without remembering being pressed between the cool sage tiles and his big warm body, with nothing to hang on to but him?
A frisson of excitement snapped down low. At his desk, Lukas swore, closed his eyes, and slowly inhaled before returning focus to his work. When he idly pushed a hank of hair behind his ear, she saw the buds nestled in his ears. At least she didn’t have to worry about him overhearing her conversation with his sister—who still waited while Scarlett mooned over her brother.
She crawled back into bed, shivering a little as she snuggled back under the warm blankets. “Still there?” she asked Sasha as she clamped the phone to her ear.
“You drop a bomb like that and then walk away? Damn right I’m still here. You’ve actually decided to do this.” Sasha’s voice sounded disbelieving.
“Yes.” Scarlett heard water splashing in the background. Sasha must be doing the dishes, a task Scarlett knew she hated. “Sasha, why don’t you—I mean we—” she corrected carefully “—get a cleaning service?”
“Now that Annika isn’t here to keep things scrubbed up?”
The verbal gut punch drove the air from Scarlett’s lungs. On the other end of the phone, she heard the water shut off.
Sasha took a shaky breath. “Damn. Damn. I’m… sorry.”
She wasn’t the only person who’d had Annika’s death upend the ground beneath her feet. “It’s okay, Sasha,” she said, injecting every lick of comfort into her voice she could.
“No, it’s not. It was a horrible thing to say. I’m a terrible friend.”
“Sash—”
“Sometimes I forget she’s gone,” Sasha interrupted starkly. “I hear Jack move around in her bedroom at night, hear the water running in her bathroom… and for just a minute, I forget it’s not her. Then I remember she’s never coming back.”
Scarlett pinched the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger. Silence hummed on the line, a silence that said everything. “I miss her too, Sash.”
“Yeah.” Sasha cleared her throat. “I really want you to come home.”
“I want to come home too,” Scarlett responded, though she didn’t know if it was entirely true anymore.
“About the cleaning service. I don’t want strangers pawing through our stuff. And let’s get back to the matter at hand.” Sasha’s sigh transmitted clearly over the line. “Are you sure about the touring thing?”
“Yes.” This one thing, she was sure about. She settled back against Lukas’s big, king-sized pillows as Sasha immediately launched into all the reasons she shouldn’t do this. Couldn’t do this. Consider the fans. The roar of the crowd.
Hell, consider the money.
Scarlett just listened quietly as Sasha talked herself through the shock. “Sasha,” she finally said, “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to perform again, or record again. I just said I wasn’t going to tour.”
A pause. “Oh.”
“And guess where home base is going to be? Underbelly’s going to make a mint.”
Scarlett could almost hear Sasha mentally counting money over the line. “I can see where that might be beneficial, but I still don’t get—”
“Sasha, even without assuming Annika’s role as the Siren Second, I… have to stop. Running away to the road isn’t healthy for me. It’s way too easy to just blank out, to channel other people’s emotions instead of feeling my own.”
On the other end of the phone, Scarlett heard Sasha sigh. “It just seems like such a damn shame.”
“But it’s the right thing for me to do, Sash.”
They both sat in companionable silence, until Sasha said, “Did Garrett shit a brick?”
“Yes, but you know Garrett. Before the end of our conversation, he had eleventy-thousand different ideas to capitalize on the situation.”
“Thought so.” Through the phone line, Scarlett could hear Sasha pour a cup of coffee. Sip it. “So, are you and Lukas are shagging each other blind yet?”
Whoa. “Not exactly,” she finally managed—a vague non-denial which might fool some people, but probably not Sasha. For once Sasha didn’t call her on it, and the reason for her distraction quickly became apparent.
“Don’t you dare dirty up any more dishes. Drink it from the can. I’m not your maid.”
Speaking of shagging each other blind… “The tension sounds pretty thick over there,” Scarlett teased. “Why don’t you two just do it already?”
“What?” Sasha squawked. “In his dreams.”
Scarlett lay back against Lukas’s sinfully soft pillows as Sasha rattled off a litany of complaints about her current nighttime roommate. “Sasha, it sounds like you’re busy over there. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“You’ll see me tomorrow,” Sasha corrected.
“What?”
Sasha’s voice muffled momentarily as she covered the phone mouthpiece and said something to Jack before she responded. “Family dinner tomorrow night. Dad’s place. Didn’t Lukas tell you?”
Momentary pleasure streaked through her, but it was quickly overtaken by annoyance, and then anger. Of course Lukas hadn’t told her. “No, he didn’t mention it.”
“Hmm.” Scarlett heard four or five different opinions flit through Sasha’s single-syllable response. “Your mother talked to him yesterday, and he said you’d both be there. You’re getting sprung, girl—for one night, anyway.” A pot clanged in the sink. “You need to spend time with someone other than my crabby brother.”
Not that I’m spending a lot of time with him, either. Lukas could have said something, damn him, instead of ignoring her all day long. “I feel the need to give your brother a piece of my mind. Right now.”
“Give him hell.”
“Will do. See you tomorrow.” Scarlett hung up and took a fortifying breath before padding out of Lukas’s bedroom. Unfortunately giving Lukas a piece of her mind meant talking to him. Looking at him. How would she do it without staring at his lips? Without remembering what they felt like as they cruised over her wet body, waking up nerve cells she’d forgotten she had? Her steps faltered when she saw him sitting at his desk, listening intently to something on his computer. The expressions chasing over his face were impossible for her to interpret. What was he listening to that took him from concern to bliss in a mere ten seconds?
His nostrils suddenly flared. With a couple of lightning-fast moves, Lukas hid his desktop and tugged the buds out of his ears.
Was that a blush staining his cheekbones? “Did I bust you watching porn or something? Can’t it wait until after I go to sleep?”
“I am not watching porn,” he responded through clenched teeth. “There are all sorts of things on this computer that no one else should see.”
She gestured to herself with her thumb. “Siren Second, remember? We’re colleagues now.” One more thing tying them together, not that she’d learned anything about her new responsibilities yet. But yes, that was definitel
y a blush creeping up his cheekbones, and curiosity was killing her. “What is it? There’s no way you can embarrass me, you know,” she said with a laugh. “You can’t imagine some of the things I’ve seen on the road. If it’s not porn, what is it? Show me.”
His body stilled like a deer in the woods during hunting season. For some reason, her heart galloped faster in her chest. Slowly reaching for his keyboard, he made his desktop visible again.
Not really knowing what she’d find, she dragged her gaze away from his face and studied the wide, sleek monitor dominating the space on his desk. His music library. So what? Almost everyone had a few songs in their library that embarrassed the hell out of them. What music did Lukas listen to when no one could overhear?
Placing her hand on his tense shoulder, she leaned over and squinted. Stilled when she saw herself in an open window, a video clip paused in motion, a microphone clasped in her hand. Froze when she saw the name of his playlist, highlighted in tiny letters.
It was called, simply, “Scarlett.”
Her stomach took a loop-de-loop. Yes, it was her—and the band, of course. She snatched his mouse and scrolled, barely feeling her fingers. Song after song after song. The albums, the videos. The singles. Interviews. Her one official concert DVD, and a collection of audio and video bootlegs that would make her manager and webmistress weep. Amsterdam, Atlanta, Copenhagen, Detroit. Gstaad. Los Angeles. Mexico City, New York, Paris. Red Rocks, Rio. Sao Paulo. Zurich. The collection spanned her career and followed her around the world.
But the performance he’d been watching was a rough cut of her last show.
On the screen, she was frozen in position as she sang, pointing into the crowd, her eyes blazing and chock full of attitude. Unplugging the ear buds from the computer so she and Lukas could both listen, she clicked the Play button to resume the performance, wrapping her arms around his torso from behind and resting her chin on his shoulder. He relaxed slightly, but a quick look down into his lap revealed that at least one part of his anatomy was as hard as a rock.
She and the band were halfway through Queens of the Stone Age’s “I Never Came,” a slinky kiss-off song. Despite the sea of upraised arms from the crowd, the cameraman had a great angle, and hadn’t lost sight of her and the band. Her black T-shirt dress was damp with perspiration, and the camera faithfully documented how it clung to her unfettered breasts. The hand on her hip and the sneer in her voice shouted pissed-off sexuality.
“You sounded so angry, but I couldn’t look away, no matter how much I wanted to.” Lukas’s voice resonated in his chest, raising gooseflesh on her arms. As the song ended, she held her breath. If there was any justice in the world, the camera hadn’t caught her helpless, hungry reaction to the moment she’d seen Lukas standing stoically backstage, his jaw clenched and the front of his pants bulging.
Nope, no such luck. There she was, staring backstage, wetting her lips before blindly segueing into Pink’s “Fingers,” a wicked ode to solo pleasure.
“Jesus, you’re killing me,” he muttered under his breath, and before she knew what was happening, he picked her up and plunked her down on his lap, on top of his outrageous hard-on. She shuddered in delight, but instead of kissing her or gobbling her up like she wanted him to, he just settled her more firmly in his arms so they could watch the rest of the show.
The longer they watched, the more certain Scarlett became that her decision to stop touring was the right one, because damn—she was one hot mess. Her sweat-dampened hair whipped up a storm, and her eyes positively burned as she worked the crowd with frantic energy. Every now and again, she caught sight of Jack’s bright blond hair as he stood in the crowd at her feet, spreading his arms or jabbing an occasional elbow to hold back an overenthusiastic fan, his concern clearly etched on his face. She winced as she watched herself reach for her guitar and sling it over her body, as the homesickness, weariness, and loneliness all crashed in on her. The crowd quieted as the spotlight narrowed in, ruthlessly lighting her upper body as she strummed the opening chords of Stereophonics’ “Maybe Tomorrow.”
From this angle, she looked exceedingly frail and vulnerable.
She’d sung the entire song solo, accompanying herself with jangling, plaintive chords, her strumming propelling the sad, wistful song along to its oddly hopeful conclusion. As the last notes faded out, leaving her blinking in the spotlight, there was a hushed moment of silence—the ultimate performers’ compliment—and then applause filled the void. The enterprising cameraman had chosen that moment to zoom in on the VIP box, catching her mother with tears in her eyes, raising a shaky hand to her mouth.
As the show galloped to an end, Scarlett thought that maybe, someday, she might be glad to have this emotional train wreck recorded for posterity, but right now she felt positively stripped bare. A lifetime of events had happened in the handful of days since then: they’d lost Annika. They’d almost lost Stephen. The assailant was still at large. She’d been shot. She’d become the Siren Second.
And she’d realized she’d never be able to extricate herself from this man who sat, hard and aching, beneath her.
Lukas’s arms tightened. “Are you going to miss touring?”
He’d overheard her after all. “My touring days are over, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never perform again.” She rested her head back against his big shoulder. “I came home completely burned out. Absolutely wiped.” She gestured to the monitor, where she, Dave, and Tomas waved to the crowd. “The evidence is right there, in glorious Technicolor. I need to make some changes.”
Lukas wrapped his arms more tightly against her. “Ramping up as the Siren Second isn’t going to be a pleasure cruise.”
Were his lips brushing against her hair? “No,” she replied, “but I’ll have a home base, and more control over my day-to-day activities.” Her eyelids drifted closed. “No more wake-up calls. No more shuttling from event to event, from activity to activity, from car to bus to car, never breathing fresh air.” She paused. “No more putting my life on hold.”
Under her, Lukas’s big body tensed, but he didn’t respond. Lying quietly in his arms, she felt precious, protected. Like nothing could ever go wrong.
When Lukas’s playlist moved on to an acoustic performance of “Pisces” that she hadn’t played at the Underbelly show, her stomach dropped to her feet. Written mere days before she and Lukas had made love for the first time, her younger voice absolutely throbbed with longing and a desire she didn’t yet know how to satisfy. Scarlett closed her eyes as her younger self poured out hopes, dreams, and fantasies about a nameless man who was bigger than life.
The man who held her right now.
“What’s wrong?”
She cleared her throat. It took serious effort to not squirm against the hardness in his lap. “You’ve… got some video footage here that even Garrett doesn’t have.”
“It was the only part of you I could let myself have.”
Scarlett opened her mouth to shriek like a harpy that he’d been the one to walk away without a word. The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she choked them back. It wouldn’t help. He thought things through very carefully, and he had a sacrificial streak a mile wide. But in the case of their relationship, he’d based his decisions on faulty data, and damn it, his actions had cost them both dearly.
She twisted in his arms so she faced him, draping her legs over his thighs and her arms over his shoulders. “You’re so wrong, Lukas.”
His hands clutched convulsively at her hips. His jaw looked ready to shatter. “Wrong about…?”
Bringing her hands to his broad cheekbones, she leaned in until their lips almost touched. “About not being able to have me,” she breathed. “You can, you know. Have me. Any time, any way.” Her voice cracked. “You always could.”
His pupils dilated at her incendiary words, but he jerked his head back as far as the desk chair could allow. “I—”
“You what? Feel absolutely wonderful?” she interrupted with a ruth
less shift of her hips, stroking herself along the ridge jutting in his pants. “Know exactly how to touch me? Yeah.” Scarlett threaded her fingers through his hair, tugging his head so he had to look her in the eye. “Please don’t talk to me like I don’t know my own mind, my own body. Listen to the lyrics of this song, Lukas, listen very carefully. I knew exactly what I wanted from you, long before we slept together, and I certainly know now.”
In his expression, desire and duty battled for supremacy. She could tell he was trying to find the strength to deny himself—to deny her—and damn it, for what? She’d had enough of this martyr crap. “Just… love me, Lukas,” she whispered against his lips. “And let me love you.”
The seconds that ticked by felt like an eternity. Then Lukas closed his eyes, drew a ragged breath, and touched his lips to hers.
She surged against him, opened her mouth against his, bit at him in her frantic haste to taste him again. Dark and smoky, like the forest at night, and she’d never get enough of it. As their tongues stroked and twined, lyrics streaked through her head. His arms vised in, dragging her more tightly against his body. Had he read her mind, or had she gasped her demands aloud? It didn’t matter, because she finally felt that wild spark that had been missing when they’d made love yesterday.
For endless minutes, their mouths clashed and fought, nipped and gorged. Scarlett tasted blood. Hers? His? It didn’t really matter. Their hips rocked and surged against each other, but it wasn’t enough. Scarlett’s wet core clenched against a maddening emptiness that only he could fill. Delight shimmered through her when Lukas burrowed his hand under the waistband of her yoga pants and panties, hopelessly stretching them to get to her scalding heat. She raised herself up on her knees and shoved them down to give him more room, and was rewarded with a swirl of his big, calloused fingers before he plunged them into her body.
It was too much, and not enough. And Lukas must have either felt the same or read her mind, because he abruptly pulled his fingers from her clinging sheath, lifted her in one arm, and swiped the other across his desk, sending paper and files flying and the computer mouse and Pepto-Bismol bottle clattering to the hard wood floor. Plopping her on top of the chilly desk, he took his hands off her just long enough to tug off the yoga pants and panties, baring her from the waist down, and tear his jeans open at the fly.