CHAPTER TEN
There I sat, face all red and puffy, snot running down my nose, eyes bloodshot.
And Ryan freaking De Luna looked like a fallen angel sent to tempt all earthbound women to fall desperately in love with him.
“Are you okay?”
Oh yes, Ryan, I’m totally fine. That’s why I’m curled up in the fetal position wailing like a banshee.
I tried to say something, but the words stuck in my throat.
“Do you want me to get your brothers?”
That was the last thing I needed. I shook my head violently. “It’s . . . it’s a really long story.”
He crouched down on the floor next to me so that we were eye level. “I’d like to hear it if you want to talk about it.”
An overwhelming need to do just that filled me. I did want to talk about it. I wanted to tell him.
I didn’t know why.
So I nodded.
“Do you want to come in?” He pointed behind him with his thumb.
Still not trusting myself to speak, I nodded again. It probably wasn’t a good idea to go into his hotel room, but I didn’t want to take the chance, however slight, that someone might stumble upon us. Especially somebody who shared my DNA.
Ryan stood up and offered me his hand. After a moment of reluctance, I let out a big sigh and accepted. And remembered why I hadn’t wanted to shake hands with him that night at the diner. Because everything I thought would happen did. As his warm hand wrapped around mine and our palms pressed together, every nerve ending in my hand lit up like the Las Vegas Strip at night. That electrical explosion traveled through my entire body, stealing my breath, forcing my heart into overdrive.
I wanted to touch him. For him to touch me. To be held by him.
That one action made everything a million times worse. He made me want things I shouldn’t want.
Not shouldn’t. Didn’t. He made me want things I didn’t want.
Shaking, I tugged my hand away from his and folded my arms against my chest. As he unlocked his door, I wondered if he could sense the way I trembled. Which was not due to my emotional upheaval but just from standing this close. Ryan went inside and held the door open, allowing me to enter first.
His room was about five times the size of mine, and it was decorated in a modern European way in grays, burgundies, and blinding whites. I noted he had a huge balcony with trees and furniture before he led me over to the couch. I sat and felt surprised when he plopped down right next to me, considering there were roughly four hundred other places to sit in this one room.
“Tell me.” He put his arm around the back of the couch, and I fought the desire to snuggle in close to him and let him soothe away my hurt.
What was wrong with me?
I cleared my throat. “I may cry a lot.” It always made my siblings supremely uncomfortable when I cried, which was why I usually tried to keep my tears to myself.
At that, he leaned forward, grabbed a box of tissues off the coffee table, and handed it to me. “I can handle it.”
I took two tissues. I used one to blow my nose and the other to wipe my eyes. Despite my warning, it felt like I had dried myself out. There were no more tears to cry. “My mom met my father when she was nineteen. He was ten years older, and the piano player in a jazz band. She fell hard and fast. She had planned to become a neurosurgeon, but she dropped out of college and followed my father around the country. Until she got pregnant with Fitz. She wanted to get married and start a family, but my father said he was too much of a free spirit to settle down. So my mom went back to California and bought herself a home with her inheritance.”
I had to blow my nose again, and I thought about how gross Ryan probably thought I was now. “My father kept touring with his band, but whenever he came to Los Angeles, he stayed with us. He got my mom pregnant with Parker and then with me. She didn’t know it at the time, but he was cheating on her constantly. He had dozens of women just like my mom stashed around the country. She found out, though.”
A concerned look crossed his features. “What happened when she found out?”
“The first time? Nothing. The doctor had just told her she was pregnant with me, and my father brought Cole home. Cole’s mother had died giving birth to him, and my father got on an airplane with a newborn and flew from New York to California to see if my mom would take him.” I couldn’t help but smile as I remembered the way my mother described that moment. “She took one look at Cole and fell head over heels in love with him. Because we were so close in age, he and I were always in the same grade. Some people assumed we were twins or that my mom must have cheated on my father. She didn’t care what people thought and ignored the rumors. Sometimes I felt like Cole was her favorite. Like she had to make up for how he’d started out in life by loving him even more.”
Ryan shifted beside me, and I couldn’t tell, but it felt like he’d moved a bit closer. “She sounds like a great woman.”
“She was.”
“Was?”
Ryan had already asked me whether my mother had passed away. A legitimate question, considering that his own had and that I spoke about my mom in the past tense. “Later she found out there were more women and more children. It broke her.” My voice caught, and I held my breath.
“What is your dad like? He must have some good qualities for your mom to put up with his cheating.” It was like Ryan sensed how close I was to falling apart and changed the subject so I could pull myself back together.
My parents’ relationship had been hard for me to understand growing up; it didn’t surprise me that other people wouldn’t get it, either. “He was not a great guy. I don’t really remember ever spending time with him or even talking to him. It was like we were nonentities in the household. What I do remember is how he smelled. Like a club. Cigarettes and booze. And that he drank coffee constantly. To this day I loathe those smells because they make me think about him.”
“That must really work out well for you, given that you’ve been playing in clubs.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at his wry observation. “That was our lives. My father didn’t contribute to our care in any way. He didn’t pay child support, didn’t really interact with us. Showed up when he wanted and left when he was done. When I was fifteen, he did something that ruined my entire life.”
My voice broke again, and even though there were no more tears, I still wanted to cry. “He came home for another short visit. At the end of it, he went into the kitchen, where she was making dinner, and told her he wouldn’t ever be coming back. That he had impregnated his nineteen-year-old girlfriend with their second child and, as even more of a slap in the face, that he planned on marrying her. I didn’t know it then, but the women in our family have always dealt with severe anxiety and depression issues. My mother just . . . snapped. Something happened to her as he explained all the affairs and all the children. Like her mind couldn’t handle it, and she had a total mental breakdown. She started throwing things at him and screaming. Fitz was twenty-one at the time and happened to be home that weekend from college. He physically removed my father from the house. Then my mom locked herself in her bedroom for hours.”
I had to swallow down the knot that had formed in my throat. “When she came out, she made us her famous brownies. Then she called all of us into the kitchen.” The memory of that night was so clear that if I closed my eyes, I was fifteen years old again, sitting at that kitchen table. I could hear how her voice sounded different. How she wore a wild expression I’d never seen. The combined aroma of burned food and the coffeepot still brewing on the counter. The taste of chocolate in my mouth. “She said she would be going out for a little while. She made Fitz promise to take care of us. She told Parker to always be happy and bright. She reminded Cole that he was her best kitchen helper and to never let anyone else’s words affect him. She told all three of my brothers that they had to keep me safe. Then she said I should never fall in love with a musician and always be a good g
irl. She said she loved us and that someday we were going to change the world with our music. She hugged us and left.”
My chest hurt, like it was being squeezed by a vise. “I didn’t realize at the time that she was saying goodbye. That night she got into a horrible accident. Head-on collision with a telephone pole. She sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. She was in a coma for weeks. When she woke up, she thought she was eighteen years old again. The doctors assured us it would be temporary and she’d regain her memory. She never did. Now they think it might be something psychological combined with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She has to stay in an assisted-living facility. I go and visit her every week, and she has no idea who I am.”
“That’s why you talk about her in the past. Because she’s not really there anymore.”
I nodded, my throat aching. “I found out later that there weren’t any skid marks near the pole. She ran into it deliberately. Because of the accident, everything she said that night has taken on these mythical proportions with us. If she’d said something stupid, like ‘Figure out a way to naturally turn your skin purple,’ we’d all still be working on a way to make that happen. It’s why Cole works as a baker, why they’re so crazily overprotective of me. Why we decided to form a band and have stuck with our dream of making it. Why Fitz, even though he’s almost twenty-eight, still lives at home instead of moving on with his life.”
“And it’s why you don’t date musicians.”
“That’s part of it,” I agreed. “It’s also because of the type of man my father is. Not only was he a terrible father, but he’s just an awful person. He uses women like these tissues. He seems to really enjoy getting them pregnant and then abandoning him. Other families have family trees; my father’s on a personal quest to create his own family vineyard.”
Ryan seemed to consider that for a moment. “Where is he now?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t keep track of him. Last I heard he was in Europe trying to single-handedly solve their depopulation issues by impregnating every woman he meets. He’s obviously succeeding, given that my brothers just told me he announced yet another baby. I’m not even sure what number that is. Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”
He let out a whistle. “That is a ton of kids.”
“I know I shouldn’t hate him. But he left. He gets to go out and make whole new families and forget we exist. He destroyed my mom. He destroyed my family. And he doesn’t have to care or be held responsible. He just walked away.”
“That’s . . . you’re dealing with a lot.”
I knew it was a lot. But Ryan had said he could handle it. “All I know is I don’t ever want to be my mom. I don’t ever want to end up with a man like that.”
“Not all musicians are like your dad. Not every guy you meet is going to be a bad guy.”
I wanted so badly to believe that. But everything I’d ever witnessed, every musician I’d ever met, had been a player like my father. Breaking hearts in one city and then just moving on to the next.
Not wanting to consider Ryan’s statement, I went back to telling him why I was upset. “In addition to finding out about the new baby, my brothers also surprised me with the fact that they’d failed to mention we were three months behind in paying for my mom’s room and board. Fitz told me a little while ago that we’d probably have to sell our house to continue paying for her medical care. Which I shouldn’t care about. It’s just four walls and a roof, right? But I can’t bear the thought of selling it. If we sell it, then we’re admitting she’s never coming home. Logically, I know that’s true, but I don’t want to have to give up hope, you know?” I sighed again, pulling out a new tissue just to shred it apart and give my hands something to do. “Anyway, if we don’t come up with the overdue money by next Friday, they’re going to kick her out, and I don’t know what we’ll do then. I hate to ask you, but I was hoping we could get an advance or something.”
“I wish it were up to me. But the record label’s involved with the payouts, and they’d never allow it. How much do you need?”
I told him, and he immediately got out his phone and called a man named Arthur. He told Arthur to get him a check in that amount.
When he hung up, I said, “You can’t. I can’t just take money from you. It’s too much.”
Ryan put his phone on the table, and it made me uneasy that he wouldn’t look at me. “There’s a way you can earn it, if you’re interested.”
“Honestly? I’d do just about anything.”
He raised his eyebrows slightly at that. “Anything?”
“Obviously, there’re exceptions. Given the way you’re looking at me, I feel an exception coming on right now.”
Why were his little smirks so endearing? “For the last few years, I’ve wanted to change my sound. I want my music to reflect what I listen to. What I love. Which is hard because my fans, much as I adore them, don’t want me to change. It’s like they want to stick me in some time capsule where I’m fourteen forever, singing the same songs over and over. Which I get, because when you’re at a concert to see your favorite band, the most disappointing words in the English language are ‘Here’s something from our new album!’ But I do consider myself to be an artist. I want to grow. Try new things. Adding you guys to the tour was the first step in moving in that direction. I wanted my audience to hear you, like your music, and then maybe it wouldn’t be such a leap for me to change things up a bit.”
So far this all sounded okay. Why was my heart beating so hard? And why did he look so uneasy? “Okay. And?”
“The other thing I need to change is my image. You’re not the only one who thinks I’m a manwhore. My label thinks I’m immature and not to be trusted. When I said I wanted to make my next album more rock, they said I had to prove myself first. That I take myself and my career seriously. My publicist suggested I accomplish that by having a girlfriend. A fake one so there wouldn’t be any public blowups and so it wouldn’t end badly.” He gave me a pointed look, and all the puzzle pieces fell into place.
Was I understanding this right? “You want to pay me to pretend to be your girlfriend? Why? You can just go downstairs and pick one. They’ll all say yes.”
“Why? Because I don’t need a groupie or someone potentially crazy. I need someone like you. Smart, talented, beautiful, and relatively normal. You need the money, and I need a woman who can be discreet. Plus, you’re very convenient.”
“Just what every girl longs to hear. That she’s convenient.” Even though his compliments thrilled me in a way I didn’t know was possible, something still felt icky about the whole thing. “But if you pay me to be your girlfriend, doesn’t that basically make me a prostitute?”
“Only if we sleep together.”
Whoa. “That is not happening.”
His smile let me know he’d been trying to make a joke. “I know. Notching is out of the question. We’ll obviously take sex off the table.”
“Let’s take it off all the surfaces because it isn’t going to happen.” Even if my girlie parts thought it sounded like an interesting idea. “You think you’re going to prove that you’re more mature and responsible by having a fake girlfriend?”
“They won’t know you’re fake. Nobody will. We’ll have to make everyone else think it’s real.”
I was a musician, not an actress. But here I was again with Ryan De Luna offering me an opportunity I couldn’t say no to. “I’ll have to tell my brothers so they don’t punch you. But they can keep a secret. A relationship? Not so much. But they can stay quiet.”
There was a knock at the door. Ryan got up to answer it, and I did not admire how nice his jeans looked on him as he walked away. Not even a little.
I heard Piper’s voice and was glad she couldn’t see me. Ryan thanked her and then stopped at a desk to grab a pen. He wrote something and then handed me a check that was about twice the size of normal checks. “Just so you know, I’ve never done something like this before. I don’t have to pay for women.”
It might even mean we’d get to keep the house.
“Be careful with that,” he joked, sitting down on the couch next to me. His knee touched mine and sent a jolt through me. “It’s pretty much all the money I have in the world right now.”
“I don’t understand. Don’t you make millions of dollars a year?”
An alarm sounded on his phone, and he picked it up. “I’ll explain later tonight. At the after-party. Which would be a good time to show everyone we’re together.”
Despite Ashley’s warning, now I would have to go to the after-party. Which I wasn’t excited about. At all.
“I really can’t take it if this is all your money.” I tried to give him back the check.
He put his hand on mine, and that explosive, Vegas-lights, shimmery feeling returned. “This is an investment in my future. Keep it.”
I didn’t argue. I couldn’t. My mom needed it.
“So is that a yes? Will you be my fake girlfriend?”
Fake yeah! my body said. “I guess I have to be.”
“That’s the spirit,” Ryan said with just a hint of sarcasm. “I have to get to sound check, so I can walk you out.”
He grabbed a bag, his phone, and a key card, and I followed him out of his suite. “I thought that wasn’t for a couple more hours.”
“I get to do sound check first. One of the perks of being the headliner.”
We walked into the main hallway, and I saw Fox waiting near the elevators.
“This is my room.” I came to a stop, and so did Ryan. “So I guess I’ll see you later.”
“Yep.” He shifted his bag from one shoulder to the other. “I feel like we should do something to make this relationship of ours official. Like seal it with a kiss.”
At that one word, my entire body melted, throbbing with the need to have Ryan kiss me and screw the consequences.
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