by LJ Evans
When we got to the check-in counter, it finally hit me that I didn’t have a reservation. Not one that I knew of, anyway. But Derek just walked up, handed his credit card over, and the guy said he had two adjoining rooms ready for us. He handed Derek two keys, and then we rolled away while the other band members got checked in.
“Did you change your reservation for me?” I asked as we waited by the elevator.
“Well. Technically my manager did, but yes.” He shrugged.
“I can pay for my own room. I can pay my own way through all of this,” I told him.
“You’re helping me out. I told you my manager would pay you. It isn’t a paycheck or anything. Is room and board gonna be okay?”
“You’re kidding, right? I get to go on this crazy adventure with… your band, plus you’re putting me up? I really think I’m the one who should be paying you.”
And as soon as the words were out, I wanted to thunk my Pride and Prejudice against my forehead because Derek got that sexy grin on his face again. Before he could say anything though, I just waved my finger at him.
“Don’t even. I have to be really careful what I say around you.” But I had a smile on my face too.
“I’ve been telling you that!” he laughed.
We got to the hotel room doors and he handed me one of the keys.
“We’re gonna go down the street for food later. You’re coming, right?”
In so many ways, I wanted to say no. That I’d just spent an entire exhausting day in the car trying to ignore how strong his magnetic pull was on me. Plus, there was my two nights of no sleep. I wanted to say that I needed to rest if I was going to drive the Camaro tomorrow, but his eyes and his smile were really too darn irresistible. Yikes! I was so in trouble.
“Sure, just knock on the door when you’re ready to go.” I smiled weakly, and then headed into my room.
I could hear him through the adjoining door banging around and the shower start where his bathroom butted up against my own. I jumped in the shower too and tried to scrub away the tiredness. I looked in the mirror and decided that I needed to do something to make myself look better than I felt, so I straightened my long locks, which I didn’t do very often, and actually put on a light coat of make-up. But then when I went to my suitcase, I wasn’t sure what to put on. Should I just put on more shorts and a t-shirt?
I knocked on the adjoining door. Derek opened it so fast that it almost felt like he’d been on the other side waiting. He just stared at me. And it was suddenly awkward for the first time. Almost like he didn’t know who I was.
“Um. Sorry, to bother you. Was wondering where we were going. Are my shorts and flip flops going to be okay?”
He just stared some more.
“Hello?”
“Jesus Christ!” He ran a hand through his hair and closed his eyes.
“Okay. Sorry I bothered you.” I turned to close the door, but he grabbed my arm quick as a lightning bolt through a southern storm.
“God, sorry, stop. Don’t fly away,” it was all mumbled. “Give me a sec to catch my breath.”
I looked around him into his room. Was he working out? Was there another girl there? Ugh. What the hell was I doing?
“You seriously have no idea?” he said, and he moved till he was a breath away from me. The smell of him, that smell that was almost like honey and wood polish wafted over me making it hard to breathe.
I was looking at his chest. Really, that’s where my eyes naturally went when we stood next to each other. He tipped my chin up at him, and those gray eyes met mine in a way that wedged my toes into the hotel carpet.
“Miss Mia, my god, you stop my heart.”
I closed my eyes and laughed, trying to shake the nickname that had flown from his mouth. Trying to shake my reaction to his blurt.
“Stop it,” I breathed out because his intensity was too much.
He seemed to sense that he’d overwhelmed me, and he lightened the mood instead of persisting.
“You’re wearing a towel, Miss Mia. A damn towel!” he chuckled.
I looked down in disbelief. Holy potato peels! I’d gone to his hotel room in a towel! Idiot, idiot, idiot! I was surprised he didn’t think I was throwing myself at him like that long line of girls that people mentioned but he denied having. My body wanted me to throw myself at him. God, it did. But Good Girl Mia wasn’t that far gone. She was still there putting up the good fight. I blushed a deep red.
“Ugh. I’m so sorry, what a dork!”
And I backed away again, and he let me go, but he followed me into my room.
“How do you keep doing that?” he asked as I backed away towards the closet and my suitcase.
“What?” I said, rifling through the handful of clothes there.
“Surprising the shit out of me!”
I looked up at him, and he was grinning again. Thank God. “If it makes you feel any better, you keep surprising me too. Or maybe it’s more like I can’t believe the imprecated malarkey I do around you.”
“Did you just say imprecated and malarkey?”
And I had. Because who didn’t love a good word whether it was an old-time word or not? “Yes. Do my big words make you uncomfortable, pretty boy?”
He chuckled and moved towards me again so that I was now stuck up against the door of the closet. “You’d have to do a helluva lot more than that to make me uncomfortable.”
He caught a strand of my hair in his fingers and slowly began to twirl it. Straightened, my hair was mid-back in length, but he took that one strand and curled it until he had it wrapped so much that his finger could rest against my cheek.
“I’d like to see that,” he said with a voice so deep and sexy that I swear my body was instantly a pot of mush.
“See what?”
“You. Trying to make me uncomfortable.”
We stood there. His hand on my cheek, and me unable to move because of my imprisoned hair. Little did he know that while I’d read a lot about things that I could do that might make him uncomfortable, there was no way I’d ever be able to actually do anything like that. There was no way my brain would ever shut off long enough for that to happen.
Even right then, when I wanted so badly for him to kiss me, I couldn’t overcome all the walls and barriers and warning signs in my brain to take action on it. I waited to see if he’d make the move I couldn’t. But, again, I was a mixture of disappointment and relief when instead of easing towards me, he let go and backed away.
From my suitcase, he pulled a summer dress. I only had a couple, but I’d thrown them in because they weren’t business apparel. The one he chose was so girlie that it was almost too embarrassing to wear. It was all flowers and lace, but made of cool cotton which you needed in the summer in the South.
“Wear this,” he said. He put it in my hands and backed away. He sat down on the bed. He was waiting for me. I wasn’t sure I could move. I looked down at the material in my hands and down to my curled toes before I took a deep, calming breath and headed into the bathroom where I put on the dress and stared at the flushed, straight haired girl in the mirror. I didn’t even look like me to myself.
He knocked on the door of the bathroom. “You ready? The boys are getting hungry and believe me you don’t want to see Mitch when his blood sugar is low.”
I opened the door in response. He took me in again head to toe and whistled. “Damn, Miss Mia. Just damn.”
I smiled because who couldn’t smile at that. Some gorgeous BB talking to you in that way, with a nickname he had now called you three times in the span of five minutes. A nickname that sounded so sweet that it could make its own sweet tea. No one can resist that for long. No one.
I slipped on my flip flops again, grabbed my bag, and met him at the door. We walked to the elevators in silence.
Down in the lobby, the boys did their own whistling and Owen tried to put his arm around my shoulders, but Derek shoved him off. They all laughed and catcalled, but it only made me smile more. De
rek didn’t grab my hand, but that was okay. It was like I was Phillips again and not Miss Mia.
We walked down a few blocks to Wishbone’s Music and Chicken Joint. It sounded so authentically southern that I thought that was why Derek had picked it, but when we got there, I saw that they advertised live music on certain nights, so maybe he had played there before.
Tonight there was no live music. Instead, tonight was karaoke night.
Need I say more? Because karaoke, alcohol, and southern food are a combination made to be together, like chips and salsa. There were just a few things I was good at in life. The ones most people knew about were baking, reading, and being the serious girl. But the one thing not many knew about was that I was also good at karaoke.
In college, our business fraternity had a monthly karaoke night, and there was no way in any universe that I was going to embarrass myself in front of Hayden. So, I’d done a lot of practicing. I’d even taken a choir class just so that I wouldn’t sound like an idiot.
In any event, all it took was one single alcoholic beverage and a karaoke machine, and I was all over it. Derek leaned back in his chair, long legs splayed out in front of him, hands behind his head, and grinned like he’d won the lottery as I sang Sandra Dee on stage. Because if you do karaoke, then Grease music is a must.
Owen and Mitch joined me with more drinks in hand, and we picked some crazier and crazier songs to sing. And I knew I was smiling again. Smiling like I hadn’t until this BB and his boys had entered my life only three days ago. Derek didn’t sing, which surprised me. But he watched. And the more he watched, the more I wanted to sing for him.
Eventually, the boys picked some hair band song that I knew I could not, would not do, so I made my way back to the table, and sank down into the chair next to Derek. I gulped down some water hoping that emotional Mia, who usually came out to play when I drank, would stay away. But honestly, the way Derek was smiling at me was daring her to come out. So, I put my head down on my arms on the table and closed my eyes. Suddenly, I was exhausted again.
Derek put a hand on my hair and ruffled it. In a way Jake would do, but also in a way that wasn’t brotherly at all, and my eyes flashed opened again to meet his. “Miss Mia, you’re something else,” he stared at me for a long moment, “and you’re wiped. Let’s leave these boys here and head back.”
My stomach fell at the look in his eyes and his words that matched but I just nodded.
“Hey assholes, we’re leaving,” he shouted at them over their raucous singing. “See you at nine tomorrow. Don’t be late, Phillips here doesn’t like it!”
They all just gave him a one fingered wave from the stage. I grabbed my bag and we headed out into the night air that had cooled ever so slightly but still managed to feel like a shower curtain was wrapped around you. Derek grabbed my hand and we headed off. I was distracted by the hand holding. By the feeling of him so close as we walked, by the smell of him.
Finally, I looked up and saw scenery that I hadn’t seen before. “I think we went the wrong way.”
He frowned. “No.”
I pulled away to turn and look back the way we’d just come. “I think so. The hotel is that way.”
“Nah,” and he grabbed my hand again, and we kept walking even though I was ninety percent sure I was right. Pretty soon we hit a park by the river which had definitely not been on our way to the restaurant from the hotel.
I started laughing. “You don’t have a clue where we’re at.”
He looked like he wanted to deny it, but then he grinned and shrugged. “Seriously. No internal compass.”
“So, Blake teasing you about getting lost was true.”
“Hey, I’ve only gotten lost one time with him.”
I busted out laughing. He put his hand to his heart again. “You keep wounding me, Miss Mia.”
And then he reached for me, wrapped his arm around my waist, and pulled me onto the grass off the sidewalk. We started dancing in the moonlight under the stars by the river. There was no music, but Derek seemed to hear his own in his head. And I swear I could hear Ed Sheeran in mine. And Ed was telling me how he found a girl, beautiful and sweet. How he was dancing in the dark, with her between his arms, barefoot on the grass, listening to his favorite song, and how he thought she looked perfect tonight.
Derek twirled me and then pulled me up close to him. “What am I going to do with you, Miss Mia?”
It was the most romantic moment I’d ever had in my whole life. And my body was softening into his while I waited for him to kiss me. I’d wanted him to kiss me for what felt like a century already.
I was pretty sure that if he kissed me now, with a couple drinks in me, I’d be in his bed like I’d been in Hayden’s bed after a few drinks. Without the will-power to say no. With normal Mia sleeping under the intoxication’s power.
And even though Derek hadn’t batted an eye at letting me know he wanted me, and I suspected that I hadn’t been invited just to drive the Camaro, I wasn’t sure I could handle sleeping with him yet. Even though, it felt like it was inevitable. Even though I wanted these three weeks of freedom and passion so badly I could taste it.
I wasn’t ready yet to sleep with him and have him regret it so much that he wanted to leave but couldn’t because I was tagging along with him and not the other way around. So instead of waiting for him to kiss me, I pulled him back towards the street.
“Take me back to the hotel so I can get some rest, otherwise I’ll crash Jake’s car and Daddy will never forgive me,” I told him.
“Except it’s my car now, and I’d forgive you anything.”
That hit me in the gut all over again like he was so good at doing because no one had ever said that to me. Ever. That they forgave me. Or would forgive me. How could they when I couldn’t even forgive myself?
But because this Dangerous Derek was already so good at reading me, he sensed my seriousness like he had in the multiple times already and backed off again. “Come on, Miss Mia. Let’s get you back to the hotel. I promise I won’t tell the boys you got us lost.”
I punched him on the shoulder and we walked back the way we’d come.
LITTLE BIRD
Stop Two
“And I’ll owe it all to you. My little bird.”
-Ed Sheeran
WE WEREN’T ON THE road until nine-thirty. I guess the rest of the band wasn’t as punctual as Derek, and this seemed to drive him crazy while we waited for them in the lobby. While he paced, I had time to dart out and pick up Starbucks for us all after making Derek tell me their favorites.
The boys were happy as clams with the drinks and told Derek I was a keeper. Which made me flush and him grin like there was actually something going on between us more than heavy flirting and wishes that hadn’t become reality.
Sitting in the driver’s seat of the Camaro made me think of Jake again. It was easier when Derek drove to think of it as his car, but in the driver’s seat, it became Jake’s all over again.
I took a deep breath, put in the address of the hotel in Oklahoma City on my iPhone, and plugged it in to the stereo system that Daddy had had installed.
To get my mind off Jake, I teased Derek, “So, there’s this thing called Google Maps, and it’s surprisingly good at keeping you from getting lost. You don’t need an internal compass anymore. Just so you know.”
He grinned at me. “Smart ass.”
He reached for my bag and started digging in it.
“Excuse me?” I said.
He looked up, “Yeah?”
“Um. What are you doing in my bag?”
“Is that a problem for you?” He grinned again once he realized that it was. “Sorry. Years with the boys. We don’t have any personal boundaries.”
But he didn’t stop looking in my bag until he came out with my copy of Pride and Prejudice and waved it at me. “My turn to read.”
It was surprising that I didn’t keel over dead right there because this gorgeous man was going to read to me from my
favorite book? In that sexy as sin voice? I guess fairytales do come true.
I had to turn my focus to the road and our journey so that I didn’t faint and crash. Thankfully, it was only going to be a couple hours to the next hotel as the band had a practice session that afternoon at The Criterion where they were going to play the following night.
I’d done some research once I’d figured out their schedule. The Criterion was a Live Nation partner, and they had some pretty big bands come through. It made me realize for the first time that Derek and his band were really on the uptick. They’d been signed. I mean, I knew Blake had written the contract, but somehow it hadn’t really hit home to me that this group of almost adolescents was really going to be famous soon.
They were good. I’d heard them at the fundraiser but, again, I don’t know, it just hadn’t really penetrated my thick skull. Maybe it was because when he was hitting on little ol’ me from a little town in the middle of nowhere with nothing but size E’s to show the world, that it didn’t seem like it was something someone super famous would do.
In order to ignore all my doubts, I turned my brain back to Derek as he read from my favorite book.
Once we got close to Oklahoma City, Google Maps did a marvelous job navigating us through the maze of streets even though Derek kept telling the voice that she was sending us on a while goose chase. I was smiling by the time we reached the hotel. When he went to put my book back in my bag, a scrap of paper fell out. I saw it with a patter of my heart that wiped my smile away.
Derek, being the no-privacy-guy I had found him to be, read it aloud. “I’m sorry we weren’t what you imagined us to be. But I want to say thank you. Because you still care when it seems like no one else does, you comfort when it’s needed most, and you love even when it hurts.” He stared at it for a moment. “What’s this?”
I shrugged because I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t sure I could still drive into the parking garage.
“Is this a book quote?”