One More Night (Backstage Pass Book 1)

by Ali Parker

  Alicia cocked her head and raised a brow. “You mean last night after you were drinking all afternoon? Newsflash, Larsen, I scroll through all of your social media accounts every single day. I keep track of the trending hashtags, and I have my finger on the pulse of the media.”

  “Then you should know as well as I do that we should strike while the fans are practically panting for something.”

  “They’re not panting yet. Trust me. Think about this Jared, what if we drop the single and it lands as a dud because we haven’t got things built up all the way yet? That would hurt your reputation and destroy all the work that we’ve already done.”

  “You haven’t even heard the new stuff we’ve got. We could drop any one of those songs, and they would explode. There’s no way any of them would be a dud.”

  Caleb backed me up on that by adding, “The songs that we have recorded are dynamite. Jared’s right. That shit would light up brighter than Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”

  Dom shook his head, the tattoos on his arms flexing as he uncrossed and crossed them again. “We’ve got good stuff, but what we’re working on is even better. Besides, I agree with Alicia that if we drop and fail, we’re fucked.”

  “The operative word there being if,” I said. “If we fail. We haven’t failed once since we took off, and we won’t fail now.” I stared at one of my oldest friends. I knew the look that was in Dom’s eyes as well as I knew the one in mine. We really were on opposite sides of the fence with this argument.

  At thirty, Dom was the oldest of our merry band of lost boys, and he never let us forget it. I’d met him when I was six and Caleb was only three. He lived on our block and was the one who’d introduced me to rock music. He was raised by a single father who blasted the classics while he got blasted every night.

  I looked over to Matt, then Nick. Both were sitting stoically, uncharacteristically quiet. “What do you guys think?”

  Matt shrugged, his fingers tapping out a steady beat on his knee. “I don’t know, man. I’m dying to drop, too. The sooner we do, the sooner we get back up on stage, and you know how much I love playing live. We read the audience though, brother. And as fucking amazing as you are at that, it’s Alicia’s job to read the public as a whole. If she doesn’t think that they’re ready, what’s the rush?”

  Well, that didn’t help at all. Nick cracked his neck and threw his palms up. “Don’t look at me. I’m just here to jam. Let’s just go do our fucking jobs, and let Alicia and Gerry do theirs.”

  I couldn’t fucking believe them. “This is a part of our jobs, asshole. Don’t you remember back in the day, when we were still handling all of this ourselves? We know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before. We used to go with our guts, and look how far that’s taken us. We don’t need PR people to tell us what to do.”

  “Jared, be reasonable,” Gerry said. “No one’s saying that you don’t know what you’re doing, and no one’s denying that you did a good job before you had people handling all of this for you. But you’ve also never been this big before, and you have people to handle it for you. Why don’t you head off into the studio and let us deal with the business end of things?”

  Condescending prick. If he thought for one second that his patronizing tone or his bullshit soothing of my ego was at all going to get me to back down, he had another thing coming. “I’m not going fucking anywhere until this is settled.”

  Alicia sat up a bit straighter and looked me right in the eye. “Look, Jared. This isn’t about you. I don’t care who did what, where, and when in the past. This is now, and while I accept that you’ve had a look through your social media, I can assure you that now is not the time. This is my job, and I’m damn good at my job, so believe me when I say that if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we will get to the point where the time is right, but it’s not now.”

  “It might be your job, sweetheart, but I’ve been in this industry a lot longer than you. They don’t call me the Emperor of Rock for nothing. In fact—”

  “For fuck’s sake,” she said. “Enough with the Emperor of Rock stuff. Everyone gets it. You’re good. Great, even. There’s no doubt that you’re one of the best singers and songwriters out there at the moment, but has it ever occurred to you that even Emperors had advisers that they listened to? They had advisers because they accepted that they didn’t know everything about everything. As your adviser, I won’t be ignored, and I won’t be steamrolled. I am strenuously advising against dropping a single right now.”

  Gerry leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I agree with Alicia.”

  My leg started jumping. The annoyance building up inside needed some kind of outlet before I fucking punched someone. Caleb had his arms crossed, glaring at a Dom, while Matt and Nick’s eyes were darting between the two camps like they were watching a tennis match, but they kept quiet.

  Alicia’s eyes were still locked on me, passion for her job and her belief radiating from them and making them look like the Caribbean churning before a storm rolled in. I actually liked that. I hadn’t seen this side of her before, but I could now see that she was truly passionate about what she did.

  And it was kind of awesome that she was doing it for us, pouring all of that passion and belief into our music.

  My music.

  With a heavy sigh, I nudged Caleb’s shoulder with mine to tell him to stand down, and I grumbled, “Fine.”

  For the first time in my life, I was walking away from the battle, but I was more determined than ever to win the war. Even if I couldn’t quite figure out what I was fighting for yet.

  CHAPTER 10

  ALICIA

  I looked up from my computer when a soft knock sounded at the door to my office. I didn’t have any appointments scheduled, but I assumed that it was Gerry checking in on the new ad campaign I was putting together for the album. “Come in.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to deal with Gerry, but it was a necessary evil, and I was bracing myself for his abrasive comments about the band when the deep breath I was sucking in caught as the door to my office swung open to reveal Jared. Not Gerry.

  I was surprised to see him. As far as I knew, the band was supposed to be in the studio all day recording, practicing, and working on their new stuff.

  I’d been working with them for just about a month now, and I still wasn’t used to the physical effect that Jared had on me whenever I saw him. I’d thought that the attraction I had to him would fade over time, but if anything, I was only becoming more attracted to his arrogant ass.

  No matter how annoyed I was with the man, being in the same room as him never failed to get to me. I always walked away with an intense battle raging, the sides warring between wanting to kiss him and wanting to kick him.

  He’d been very resistant to my suggestions so far, and while he was slowly, but surely, coming around, I’d definitely underestimated his arrogance, as surely as I’d underestimated how attracted I would be to him.

  Sauntering into my office, he closed the door behind him, and it felt like he’d sealed off any air that might have been coming into the office. Being around Jared was like that.

  He had this larger-than-life presence that seemed to take up the whole room and draw me in like we were opposite poles of a magnet. How was it possible that someone who looked so much like an angel could be such a devil?

  A dark angel to be sure, but surely, only divine creatures could, or should, look as good as he did. Good enough to eat. And lick. And suck.

  His tight, black leather pants revealed the outline of an impressive bulge that I wouldn’t have minded falling to my knees for and doing all of the above to, but that wasn’t an option. Dark eyes bored into mine, intense and unwavering, but his expression and body language were nothing but casual, even bored. I didn’t know why I would have expected anything else from him.

  “What are you doing here?” I finally asked, ignoring the dry mouth that he induced every time that he walked into a room with me.

 
; Jared shrugged his broad shoulders and dropped into a seat across the desk from me without waiting to be invited to do so. “Technical difficulties at the studio. We practiced for a couple of hours and then decided to call it quits for the day.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry to hear that. But it still doesn’t answer my question. Why are you here? As in, here in my office?”

  It was imperative to me that I never showed him what he did to me, or let him know that something as simple as the way he was twisting one of his big silver rings around his finger turned me all the way on. He couldn’t know the effect his scent, musky and masculine, had on me.

  Jared’s eyes found mine, his delicious looking lips curling up into a lazy, sexy smile as he shrugged again. “Do I need a reason to come talk to my favorite PR agent?”

  I rolled my eyes and tried my very best not to think about what it might feel like to kiss the corners of that smile or to be held by those arms. My fingers itched to trace the lines of the dark tattoos on his arms and those on his chest, hidden by his shirt at the moment. I drummed them on my desk to keep from reaching out and letting myself feel whether the shaded cross on his forearm really had ridges or whether the tattoo artist was just so good at his job that he’d managed to make it look that way.

  Instead, I replied to his question with a dry comment. “I’m your only PR agent, which means that I’m not only your favorite, but also your least favorite.”

  Jared’s smile widened, and his eyes filled with laughter, along with what I was sure was a good couple of snarky thoughts about my statement. “Nah, even when you’re my least favorite, you’re still my most favorite, too.”

  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” I told him, shaking my head, leaning back in my chair, and giving him a pointed look. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re really doing here? Is it about the marketing campaign? Those shots of you guys in the studio the other day look great. “

  I’d arranged for a photographer to go down to the studio while they were practicing to take some shots of the band to be included in our online campaign, and I’d be lying if I said they were great. They were better than that. They were fantastic.

  There was one of Jared that I seriously considered keeping for myself. In it, his eyes were closed, his mouth open as he no doubt belted out his lyrics. His fingers were twined on the microphone, gripping it like he was about to come, and the almost tortured look on his face matched.

  He’d lost his shirt by that point, and it was stuck into his back pocket, revealing miles of lean, muscled abdomen. In the print the photographer had given me, he’d managed to capture the fine layer of sweat that covered Jared’s skin, and he’d altered the lighting in a way that made the shot seem private.

  It made me want to keep it that way, which was the very reason why it was going to be the first shot released for the new campaign. If it made me feel that way, knowing what an ass he really was, the fans were going to go wild for it. For him. But I was trying not to think about that.

  The Jared sitting across from my desk was every bit as dangerously sexy as the one in that photo, shaking his head in answer to my question. “No, I didn’t come about the campaign. I saw some of the pictures, though. That photographer was halfway decent.”

  “Halfway decent?” I couldn’t believe him.

  Jared’s lips pressed together, and I could see that he was battling a smile, probably only keeping it back because agreeing with me on anything so easily was against his religion or something.

  “I think the shots’ll be good for your precious hype,” he said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

  My eyes narrowed on his. I was honestly confused about the way that he was acting, and confused about why he was here if it wasn’t about the campaign or the pictures. “My precious hype is doing great things for you. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you dropping that single with no build-up a couple of weeks ago was a mistake. The hype is growing by the day.”

  He waved off what I was saying, looking completely disinterested. “You don’t hate saying that you told me so, but whatever. I don’t care. I actually find all of this campaigning and shit boring as hell.”

  Sighing, I reached my hand up to massage the back of my neck. A couple of weeks ago, it looked like he wanted to launch himself at me, and not in a good way. Now, he was completely nonchalant about it and finding it boring.

  “Well, what is it then, Jared? You might find it boring, but it is still my job, and I’d like to get back to it if the only reason you’re here is to waste my time and chat about nothing.”

  “I’m not here to chat about nothing, actually,” he said, the intensity from when he’d walked into my office returning to his eyes. “I’m here to find out when I can take you out.”

  My hand stilled on my neck, and my eyes popped wide open. Before I could stop it—or even knew what was happening—I was laughing right in his face. “Are you kidding me? You’re not the first rock star to hit on me, and you’re probably not going to be the last. Just because you’re bored and I’m the only woman who’s a constant in your life doesn’t mean that you have to try get with me.”

  Jared’s head tilted, and he ran his forefinger and thumb over his goatee as he shifted forward slightly in his seat. “That’s not what this is, Alicia. I didn’t come here because I was bored or because you’re the only woman who happens to be a constant in my life. That’s also not why I’m trying to get with you. You’re hot.”

  I’d seen pictures of the women he was seen out with, and inevitably probably got with. There was no way he found me hot. “Stop messing with me, Jared. How many times do I have to tell you that I’m busy and that I have to get back to work?”

  He muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t hear, then something about him changed. I hadn’t seen him move, but it was like his shoulders were wider, his back straighter, and the blatant sexuality he possessed started rolling from him in waves that hit me with the force of a tsunami. That, combined with the way that he was looking at me, eyes dark and wanting, almost hungry, suddenly made each and every single one of my nerve endings come to life.

  As if there were actual waves rolling over me, my skin sparked to life from the tips of my fingers and toes to filter through my limbs and down my spine, before settling right between my legs. It was incredible that he could dominate my body without even touching me.

  My thighs pressed together in an attempt to provide some relief for my throbbing clit, but it only made it worse. Although I was trying my best to hide my arousal, I was sure that Jared knew.

  He was watching me carefully, continuing before I could put a stop to this madness.

  “You don’t believe me that I think you’re hot and that I want you? Just look at me. I know you can see I’m not lying right now or messing with you. How could I not want you? Your body has been tempting me from day one, and whether you realize it or not, sometimes when you look at me, I can see you begging me to fuck you. I’m dying to get my hands on that ass, and my lips on those perfectly round breasts. I need to see what those beautiful eyes look like when you come all over my cock.”

  Holy. Shit. Holyshitholyshitholyshit. If he kept talking like that, while looking at me like he was already deep inside of me, he was going to see what I looked like while coming all over my chair.

  But there was no way I was letting that happen. I tore my eyes away from his and looked out over the ocean for a second to compose myself. “Flattery will get you nowhere with me, Jared. The answer is still no.”

  I was surprised to find that my voice was only slightly breathy. I doubted Jared would pick up on it. I actually managed to sound almost completely normal, and I gave myself a mental high-five for the successful effort.

  There was a slight twitch in Jared’s jaw, but that was the only sign that he’d even heard what I said, or that he’d been at all affected by whatever the hell had just passed between us. “How about a bet?”

  This time, I couldn’t stop myself fro
m gaping at him. “What?”

  “You heard me. I said, let’s make a bet. If I win, you have to go out with me. If you win, I’ll never bother you with anything like this again. “

  “What would we even bet on?” I asked him, beyond confused about where all of this was coming from. “I have nothing you want, and you have nothing I want.”

  It wasn’t entirely true, but he definitely didn’t need to know that. Jared waggled his eyebrows at me and sat back with a satisfied smirk. “Au contraire, favorite PR agent of mine. There is something I can give you that I know you want. What about a month without any incidents?”

  That was something that I would be interested in. Damn. He had my number, but surprisingly, it had been a relatively quiet month, and the guys hadn’t gotten into anything newsworthy. I hadn’t had to clean up one mess so far. “That might have gotten me to agree, but you haven’t gotten yourself into anything lately.”

  “You mean, I haven’t gotten myself into anything that you know about,” he said, looking mildly amused again. “I’ve gotten into a lot. It just hasn’t gotten out.”

  Irritation that I’d been kept out of the loop simmered in me, mercifully wiping away the last lingering traces of arousal. “Why haven’t you been keeping me up to date?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t see a reason to give you a headache about stuff that I could deal with by myself. Most of the incidents have been related to some of my more questionable extracurricular activities. Trust me, no one has had any complaints about those. Well, no complaints that my PR agent would’ve been of any use to the complainant whatsoever.”

  “The size of your ego astonishes me.” Crap. I’d walked straight into whatever thought was putting that arrogant, cocky smirk on his face.

  “Then you should see the size of my—”

  “You’re impossible! And getting predictable, just so you know. You know what, I agree to the terms of your stupid bet, because there’s no way that a guy as arrogant as you is going to be able to go without incident for much longer, and this way, as soon as there’s any incident of any nature whatsoever, you’ll be out of my hair.”