by Desiree Holt
“There’s just so much competition out there,” she told him. “For everyone who makes it, there are a thousand who don’t.”
“But that was just the beginning, right?” Caleb asked.
She nodded. “The audience can be very fickle if you somehow piss them off, although country music audiences are probably the most faithful and the most forgiving. I worked my ass off doing my best to make sure I didn’t trip over my own feet.”
“So, right now, you’re getting ready for this tour your manager has put together,” he confirmed. “But he wants you in the studio first. Why?”
“The label wants to release the CD just before the tour so they can get the most whammy from it.”
He drank some of his soft drink, and her eyes fixed on the play of muscles in his throat as he swallowed. She bit down on her lip to corral her mind.
“Who decides how the dates line up? I’m asking just because all of this could play into your situation and I want to be prepared.”
“This tour is kind of a mixture.” She crunched a last potato chip. “At the smaller venues, I’ll be the sole performer, with my band. At the larger ones, I’ll be opening for Sweet Dixie again.”
He nodded. Jasmine could almost see the wheels in his brain whirring.
“Carson can get me the figures on projected attendance for each one? And a map of each venue?”
“Yes.” She brushed a few stray strands of hair back from her face. “I hope you know this won’t be easy.”
He snorted. “You know what the SEALs say? The only easy day was yesterday.”
“Sometimes that applies to the entertainment business.” She picked up their plates and glasses and carried them to the sink. “I’m not going to be stupid about this, Caleb. On the one hand, I’m not sure Cobra Mattice is as dangerous as everyone is making him out to be.” She held up her hand when he opened his mouth to say something. “But, on the other, I still have bad dreams about that night in the hotel. That makes me think he could do anything.”
“Especially if he’s angry,” Caleb agreed. “He’s obviously not that stable to begin with, and this could have flipped his switch.”
“Agreed. So I’m going to be a good girl and do whatever y’all tell me.” She rinsed the dishes and stuck them in the dishwasher. “This tour and the album are too important to me not to. Besides, Carson has worked his butt off getting me to this point. I don’t want to do something to ruin it.”
Caleb was quiet for a moment, looking at her as if trying to decide how to ask his next questions.
“What?” she asked. “Whatever it is, out with it. You can ask me anything.”
“Okay. Any significant others hanging around who might get in the way of something? I don’t want to have to get into a pissing contest with some guy.”
Jasmine would have smacked him for his insulting words if the whole thing wasn’t so laughable.
“Every minute of my life for the past eight years has been focused on building my career and writing my music. I don’t have time for anyone in my life.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Not even any dates?”
“Sure, I’ve dated.” She leaned on her elbows and faced him across the island counter. “I like sex as much as the next woman. Is that what you wanted to know? I’m a healthy female. But, right now, I’m too focused on my career for anything else. And meaningless sex doesn’t appeal to me anymore.” She held up a hand, palm outward. “And that’s the end of that topic of conversation. No one for you to tangle with. Next?”
“Okay.” He pushed himself out of his chair to his feet.
Jasmine noticed how he tried to minimize his injured leg. She’d worried about that when Aron told her about him, but she’d been assured he was better than most men with two good legs. She had to trust family.
“Listen.” She rubbed her hands against the legs of her jeans. “I’m going to be working on the material for the new CD this afternoon. I already had a lot of it, but I need at least two or three more songs.”
“Is that common? To have a contract without all the material?”
“Sometimes. If you have a good manager and your label believes in you. But that means I have a lot of work to do in a very short period of time.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he told her. “I’ll keep myself busy.”
“The satellite is all hooked up. If you’re so inclined, you can watch in your bedroom or out here in the great room.”
Good lord. She sounded like she was giving a tour to a paying guest.
“I told you, no sweat. Go on. You need to do your thing.”
“Okay, then. I’m going into my room. I’ll see you later.”
Jasmine wasn’t always tense about having someone around while she wrote, but Caleb Branam put her on edge. When he’d asked her earlier about men in her life, she’d wanted to tell him that with one look, he’d ruined her for anyone else.
And how on earth had that happened? She didn’t fall over her feet for men—she rarely dated anymore, as busy as she was. It figured the first man in a long time to push her buttons would be a surly loner. According to what Aron had told her, their conversation over coffee was the longest he’d had in, well, maybe forever.
She tried to figure out how to handle this unexpected attraction to him. Oh, wait. It was more than an attraction. She couldn’t afford that, especially with a man who was such a loner. Good thing she’d be shut up in her room for the rest of the day.
She left him to his devices, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed for her bedroom. She had all her stuff set up in there anyway—her Martin acoustic guitar, her baby that had been with her forever waiting on the huge bed, her notepads, her iPad with the piano app. And the large windows let in the sunlight, which always inspired her. She was good to go.
*****
Caleb stood in the middle of the great room, hands in his pockets, just taking in his surroundings. The sun blazing in through the abundance of windows gave a warm, honey look to the polished hardwood floor. The furniture was upholstered in cream and maroon, the dining table an unusual slab of granite on a pedestal. One wall had built-in bookshelves and an office area with her computer and printer. The walls were still bare, but he chalked that up to the newness of the place. Between the tension of knowing some asshole was out there waiting to disrupt her life and starting the preparations for the album and the tour, she probably didn’t have a lot of free time for shopping.
He wondered at her choice of locations, buying a house on six acres out in the middle of the Hill Country. She was pretty isolated out here. As someone who liked his solitude, however, he could relate to it. He knew what demons he was running away from. Did Jasmine have her own, or did she just want her privacy? He suspected the latter was pretty hard to come by in her situation.
Carson Wagner had been very specific about vetting anyone who got close to her. He had the list of acceptable people, a very small list. Anyone else was his decision. He knew he’d better be damn careful about it.
Taking a bottle of water from the fridge, he headed outside to walk the property. He always felt better when he knew every square inch of territory for which he was responsible. This property was still pretty wild and untamed. He wondered why someone with all her money hadn’t yet gotten around to having at least part of it mowed. All that tall grass and scatterings of trees made great cover for someone to sneak up on the house.
The land was on three levels, and hiking it put a strain on his leg, but he pushed on. He’d accepted this job, albeit under pressure, so he’d better man up and stop treating himself like a cripple. If he fucked up this job, he might just as well shoot himself and save anyone else the trouble.
Wild animals wandered everywhere—deer, raccoons, jackrabbits, even a porcupine crossed his field of vision. It all reminded him of where his cabin was a few miles away.
By the time he’d checked every bit of the property, he was sweating from the sun, his leg ached like a son of a bitch, and he’d co
nsumed the bottle of water and needed more. He fetched one from the fridge and settled himself on the screened porch in the padded lounge they’d been carrying in when he arrived. Hydrated again, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a moment.
The images he still lived with, that plagued him, danced in his head. The hostage had been held in an industrial warehouse. He and his men had figured out how to get in without being detected, and they’d discovered the hostage in an office up an open flight of stairs. There was nothing for it but to wait until the few people inside were gathered at the other end of the warehouse, breach the door, and Caleb would go up after the hostage.
Then everything went to hell. Even after all this time, he wasn’t sure exactly how and why. Before it was over, they’d secured the hostage, but two of his men were dead and he’d suffered a badly broken leg and burns from a chemical fire the guards set. During all the months in the hospital, he’d refused to see anyone, including the Omega partners, Athena Madero and his longtime friend, Grey Holden.
“I’m not cutting you loose,” Grey said the last time he’d seen him, just before Caleb was discharged from the hospital. “Your job and your salary will be waiting for you when you come back because I’m going to make sure that happens.”
Now, more than a year later, he still hadn’t reconnected with Grey or anyone else from that time in his life. He opened his eyes and looked around. It all seemed so incongruous, acting as a bodyguard for a female performer. Watching for some nutcase obsessed with her. So much puff pastry compared to what he’d done before.
He knew Aron was trying to get him out of his self-imposed isolation. He’d given in because he’d gotten tired of arguing with him. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He’d limit his contact to those people necessary and focus on Jasmine Grey. If the stalker showed up, he’d put him in a headlock and hand him over to the cops. Then he’d be done. Why didn’t he think it would be that easy?
Because for the first time in more than a year you want a woman, and in a bad way.
His biggest problem was going to be his self-control. His dick didn’t seem to know from rules and regulations. Whenever he looked at Jasmine, it wanted up and out. And in. Preferably in, into her tempting body with her slick flesh squeezing around him—
Shit!
He sat upright and rubbed his face. Dreams like that would get him in big trouble. He pushed himself out of the lounger and went back inside. In the kitchen, he grabbed another bottle of water, and while he stood there uncapping it, he could hear the faint strains of a guitar coming from the master suite. An uneven sound, a few chords, then stop, then a few more, then stop, then repeating the first ones.
He’d never thought about the process of writing a song. Why would he, anyway? But, drawn by some inexplicable force, he strained his ears to listen to the sounds coming from Jasmine’s room. Even listening to the same few chords over and over didn’t bore him. There was something about her music that, if he were a man who thought in flowery words, he’d call magical.
He sat down in the big armchair, put his feet up on the ottoman, and let his brain tune into what she was doing. If she left the door open, he’d hear a lot better, but he didn’t want to intrude on her privacy. In a moment, he heard the same musical phrase only, this time, something else had been added. He sat there for a long time, listening to the starts and stops, the bits and pieces, and decided to download some of Jasmine Grey’s music to his phone. He should have done it before so he’d know what kind of artist she was. Too bad he’d retired from society and shut all of that out.
But, the more he thought about it, the more he decided magical really was the word to describe her sound. She had a gift. She was so far from the snotty piece of glitz he’d expected he mentally smacked himself for preconceived notions. He realized with great reluctance he would need his famous self-control in spades to spend time as Jasmine Grey’s bodyguard. He didn’t want her to need a protector from him.
Chapter Four
The first week went by without incident. Jasmine thought it a good omen. Believing Cobra wouldn’t be able to find her here made her relax. Her writing was coming along better than she could ever have expected. Carson would flip when he heard the new tunes.
Things weren’t so quiet on another front, though. That electricity still snapped and popped between them, but they both did their best not to acknowledge it. Caleb gave a good imitation of a stone sphinx although, on occasion, when he appeared not to be thinking about it, he even smiled at her. Not much of a smile, but more like a painful contortion of his facial muscles. And she always smiled back. She’d never been in a situation like this before, and she was working hard to handle it.
They had fallen into a daily routine. Both were early risers, neither of them fans of breakfast. He didn’t believe in talking until his third cup of coffee any more than she did, so the morning pattern was established. They fixed their coffee and carried it out to the patio where they sat in a not uncomfortable silence drinking that first infusion of the hot liquid. By the third cup, Caleb carried both drinks, and Jasmine brought a plate with two sticky buns on it. They had actually shared a chuckle over the fact they were both addicted to the very sweet pastry.
After coffee, she would head back to her room to work on her music and Caleb did, well, whatever he did. Through the windows in her bedroom, she’d see him walking the entire perimeter of the property, sometimes twice. She had a feeling he was trying to strengthen his leg as well as checking the security. Although the idea Cobra would try to see her here was ridiculous. No one but those with a need to know had her address, she had no landline, and she stayed away from social media. Still, the thought of him made her uneasy. She’d stay hidden away for as long as she could. Maybe he’d moved on to some other poor soul.
Lunch and dinner were also accomplished without much conversation, and somehow they fell into a pattern where she cooked and he cleaned up. It amazed Jasmine how they could spend an entire day with little conversation at all.
Sometimes, when she took a break and came out of her room for a cold drink, she’d catch sight of Caleb on the patio exercising his leg. Other times, she had no idea where he was. Under other circumstances, she’d want to satisfy her curiosity, but, at the moment, her head was too full of the songs she needed to finish.
In the evening, just so she didn’t spend all her time locked in her room, she often watched television in the great room. Sometimes Caleb would watch a little with her, although he never suggested a program or asked her what else was on. Most of the time, though, he retreated to his own room and every so often she’d catch the faint sound of the television in there. She was torn between wanting him to sit out there with her and knowing she’d be better off in her bedroom. Alone.
But one thing never changed—the voltage sparking between them, the sexual undercurrent she did her best to ignore. If she wasn’t so focused on her music at the moment, she knew she’d be tempted to see where that sizzle took them. Because, oh yeah, it was still there. She felt it whenever they accidentally brushed against each other. There were moments when she saw heat burning in his eyes and a hunger she wanted to feed. And sometimes, at night, lying in her bed, she wondered what he’d look like naked. What would he taste like, and how would it feel when he was buried deep inside her body. Her nipples would harden and her sex would tingle and pulse. Going to sleep was not always easy. But anything between them remained off limits, and she did her best to ignore it.
By the end of the second week, she’d finished all the new songs for the album and polished the ones she’d had waiting. These songs excited her even more than her earlier material. She’d been able to lose herself in them and, for the most part, not think about the man who she kept trying not to picture naked. She put the emotion into the music, and it worked in spectacular fashion. At dinnertime, she came out of her room, ecstatic, waving a fistful of pages.
“I just called Carson,” she told Caleb, who sat in the armchair watching tel
evision. “I told him the songs are finished and ready for the studio. I’m going to fax them to him right now.”
Caleb lifted an eyebrow. “Can the musicians just read what you wrote on those sheets of paper and know what to play?”
Jasmine laughed. “That would be nice. But, no. Carson has someone who turns these into sheet music for them.”
“And he can do it all by tomorrow?” Skepticism edged his voice.
“He can. We won’t start until about the middle of the afternoon, so we should be good to go by then. And I have everything on a little recorder they can listen to.”
“I guess there’s more to writing a song than I know.” He paused. “Question.” Caleb gave her a quizzical look. “Aren’t you missing a musician, though?”
“Carson’s been auditioning them and says he’s found a perfect match.”
“Don’t you get to approve whoever it is?”
Jasmine shrugged. “He’s got a better ear than I do. He’s the one who put the band together in the first place.”
“It’s a wonder,” Caleb drawled, “a man as sharp as he is let a nut like Cobra pass muster.”
“Sometimes they don’t show their colors right away.” She sighed. “And that’s unfortunate. I do wonder, however, about all the people who gave him references.”
“Something I’m thinking of looking into.” He pushed himself out of the chair. “Just so you know, I called Grey Holden and asked him to run deep background checks on the other three guys.”
Jasmine felt a flash of anger, but she pushed it away as fast as it came. His job was to protect her, and part of that was knowing everything he could find out about the people in her group.
“We’ll be meeting him tomorrow,” she told Caleb. “Carson’s rented a studio for us to rehearse in. We’ve got two weeks to get ready.”
He frowned. “Is that enough time?”
“Oh, yes. These guys are all seasoned musicians. He said to tell you he’ll have the final schedule tomorrow, also, and he’ll go over it with you.”