by Nalini Singh
"Kit, hold up."
Turning, she smiled at Terrence. Tall, with shaggy black hair against olive skin and bright hazel eyes behind silver-rimmed frames, the writer was one of her favorite people in the industry. "You don't have to give me the hard sell, Terrence. I'm convinced."
"Excellent." Putting his hand on her back, he smiled down at her, his features fine-boned and his camouflage green T-shirt sitting easily on a body lean with muscle. "In which case I can put my efforts into convincing you to have dinner with me tonight."
"With Jade?"
Terrence shook his head. "Just you and me." His expression softened. "What do you think?"
"Oh." She fiddled with the bound copy of the script she held in order to give herself time to think. She'd always liked Terrence, but she'd never thought of him in a romantic way, mostly because she'd been hung up on Noah. She had to get over that. Why not with a man she respected and admired?
"Okay," she said. "But not anyplace celebrity--I'd rather we go somewhere we can actually eat and talk." As opposed to see and be seen.
"Us poor writers can't even get into those celebrity places." Terrence's smile was wry as he thrust his hands into the pockets of his buff-colored cargo pants. "The maitre d's look at me like I'm some hobo who crawled in off the street." A grin that reached his eyes. "I know a nice neighborhood Italian place."
"Sounds good. Shall I meet you there?"
"I can pick you up if you don't mind."
She knew what he was asking. If he came through her gates, the paparazzi would start salivating and snapping; if not immediately, then soon enough. "That'd be lovely," she said, her breath tight in her chest. "Six thirty?"
"Yeah." Smile deep, he offered her his arm. "I'll walk you out."
"No, go back to Jade--I'm sure you two have tons to discuss. I'm heading next door to pick up Becca so we can grab a coffee together." Her friend was working on makeup designs for her next gig. "I'll see you tonight."
As she left, she was aware of her heart thundering, her blood a roar in her ears. Terrence was a nice guy--a good-looking, smart, funny guy--but he wasn't the one who'd provoked the raw emotional response. It was only Noah who got to her that deep. But Noah wasn't for her.
Moving on from him, really moving on, was terrifying and freeing... and heartbreaking. She'd dated since that ugly night, but part of her had held back, secretly hopeful. No more. It was time to erase that hope, walk away from it forever.
Ducking into a restroom on the way to the makeup trailer where Becca was working, Kit locked the door and tried to stifle the sobs that threatened to break out of her. Her chest hurt, her body ached, her eyes burned, and her breath had turned choppy. Two tears rolled down her face, but she managed to swallow the rest, managed to learn to breathe again after five minutes of trying.
After washing her face at the sink and patting it dry with tissues from the dispenser, she dug around in her purse for her compact and lipstick and repaired the damage. She was good at hiding it, had learned all about makeup from her mother. Adreina had taken her in hand for two weeks after she turned fifteen, given her lessons.
Kit planned to teach her own daughter too--if that daughter wanted it. At fifteen, Kit had still been in the fugly stage and sitting in front of a mirror with a supermodel by her side had only highlighted her flaws. Despite that, she'd loved those hours with her mom, just the two of them for once--and Adreina had never once put her down. Rather, her gorgeous, confident mother had told her to look bullies in the eye and say fuck you.
Those memories were some of the most cherished of Kit's childhood.
Checking her face afterward, she caught her own eyes in the mirror. The camera apparently loved her eyes--the critics raved about how expressive they were, how much she could communicate with just those two amber orbs.
Today her eyes revealed bruised pain and a searing sense of loss.
Becca would take one look at her and know something was wrong, regardless of the stellar job Kit had done on her face. Kit couldn't handle her friend's perceptive mind right now, so she did what she tried very hard never to do with her closest friends: she put on a mask.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and thought of a bit part she'd played right when she'd started out in the industry. It had been of a "girl next door" whose only job had been to smile and flirt with the coffee guy who was the heartthrob, thus giving the heroine a reason to act jealous. It hadn't been the greatest script, but it had paid her rent that month.
It was also perfect for today. Her eyes filled with cheerful joy, her lips curved, and suddenly she wasn't Kit anymore but that happy, uncomplicated girl next door. If only the transformation wasn't simply skin deep.
Noah picked Abe up around seven, the two of them having decided to grab a bite together after the keyboard player got into the city. "Any preferences?"
His mahogany skin gleaming with health after his camping and hiking vacation, Abe rubbed his hand over his clean-shaven skull. It was a very conservative look for the other man; he usually rocked color, with patterns razored into his close-cut and tightly curled hair. Noah hadn't seen this look since soon after they first arrived in Los Angeles as eighteen-year-olds full of dreams.
"Remember that Italian place your bud Esteban showed us last time he was in the city?" Abe said after a second's thought.
"Yeah." Noah had enjoyed that restaurant too. It was run by a family of six who all seemed genuinely happy to be part of a family business. No hidden surliness or frustrated ambitions.
The eldest son, Luca, worked the door and took care of the guests. The father was the head chef, with the only daughter in the family his apprentice. The mother was a pastry chef in charge of desserts, and the two younger sons waited tables. One was studying management, the other human relations, both in preparation for opening a second family-run place.
Noah knew all that because Luca had sat down with him, Esteban, and the guys during their first visit. They'd ended up being the last people in the place that night, but rather than hurrying them out, the kitchen had sent out extra platters full of delicious bites, and the younger sons had kept topping up their drinks.
Needless to say, the five of them had left a gigantic tip.
"Here." He passed Abe his phone. "Give them a call while I drive. They might be full up--it was a popular place the last time we were there. Number's under Meluchi."
Abe made the call, and from what Noah heard, it appeared the person on the other end well remembered their table. "We in?" he asked Abe after the other man hung up with a laugh.
"Yeah." Abe put the phone in the cup holder. "They're setting up an extra table for us on the patio. Apparently it won't have a view, but fuck the view, I want the food."
Noah grinned. "Yeah." He glanced reflexively at his phone when it vibrated, but it wasn't Kit's face that filled the screen, the shot one he'd taken back before he'd destroyed them. She was laughing in that photo, her eyes crinkled at the corners and her hair coming loose from the careless bun in which she'd knotted it.
"I'll grab it." Abe picked up the phone. "David, what do you want?" he asked with the casual rudeness that was only acceptable among men who'd been friends for so long that politeness would be considered a sign of trouble. "When? Yeah, I'll tell Noah. We're going to that Italian place."
A pause.
"Fuck you, man." Abe laughed and hung up. "He's bragging about not needing to date us now he has Thea."
"If ever a man deserved to win his woman," Noah said, "it's David." The drummer had been crazy in love with the band's tough-as-nails publicist since forever. One look and boom, he'd been a goner. Noah, Abe, and Fox had all watched that love grow deeper and more indelible day by day and had winced silently when Thea appeared oblivious.
Turned out she wasn't. The way she looked at David... Noah would've never believed Molly's sister had such tenderness in her. It was obvious she thought David hung the moon. "What did he want?"
"To invite us over on Sunday after
noon for a barbeque. He and Thea are talking wedding stuff and they want to torture us." Abe folded his arms across his chest, his muscles bulging. "Me, I'm running off to Vegas if I'm ever stupid enough to walk down the aisle again."
Noah snorted. "Your mom would scalp you, and you'd whimper like a baby."
Abe was silent for a while. "Actually, I think she'd be fine with it. Sarah and I had the big wedding, and you know what my mom asked me the day of my wedding?" The keyboard player stared through the windshield. "If Sarah was a woman I'd run off with if given the chance." He shook his head. "I laughed back then, but she was serious. She wanted to know if I loved Sarah enough that I'd do that, just take off with her."
Noah didn't know how to react. Abe's marriage and divorce were treacherous waters. The divorce had led him back into the cocaine habit he'd managed to quit six months earlier, then later into alcohol. The marriage, on the other hand, had seemed happy enough. Sarah had never quite meshed with the band, but they'd all accepted her because she was Abe's.
"Would you? Have run off with her?" he finally asked, knowing he'd be no kind of friend if he didn't step through this unexpectedly open door.
Even as he asked the question, Noah knew his own answer when it came to Kit. If he'd been normal, if he hadn't been so ugly inside, he'd have sweet-talked her to Vegas in a heartbeat. He'd have lied and cheated and charmed just so she'd be his. And he'd have woken every morning feeling like the king of the fucking world.
Chapter 11
Abe's own answer took a long time in coming. "I don't know," he said at last. "No secret that I wasn't in a good headspace when I married Sarah." Grief thickened his voice. "Not that it matters. She didn't exactly hang around when I wasn't the perfect rock-star trophy husband anymore."
Noah knew Abe was referring to his problems with drug addiction. "You know I have your back, man, but living with a cocaine addict can't have been easy." Abe had once punched Noah while in the fog of drugs; Noah had no idea what had gone on behind closed doors between Abe and Sarah, but he did know that she'd changed from a hopeful, somewhat shy twenty-one-year-old to a brittle, angry twenty-four-year-old by the time of their divorce.
"Yeah well, she landed on her feet." The furious undertone to Abe's voice made Noah's instincts prickle. Until right then, he hadn't believed Abe was hung up on Sarah; they'd parted in too much anger, their divorce a battleground of lawyers and bitter demands.
Sarah had asked for Abe's keyboard collection even though she didn't play. Abe in turn, had accused her of cheating when Sarah just wasn't the cheating kind. In the end, he'd kept his keyboards and Sarah had suddenly caved and accepted a settlement after months of refusing to sign the divorce papers.
At the time, David had wondered if the two were drawing things out because they didn't actually want to be divorced. Noah had disagreed, especially since Sarah had been pregnant with another man's baby by then, but now...
"I don't know," he said. "Her fiance's a bit of an asshole who keeps her on a short leash from what I've heard."
Abe went very, very still. "He hurting her?"
"No signs of that--all I heard is that the guy's a control freak," Noah said evenly, suddenly dead certain Abe's feelings for Sarah ran far deeper than the other man had ever admitted. Maybe his marriage had simply become collateral damage in the devastating loss that had scarred Abe the same year he married.
"He's a smug fuck too." Abe's words were dark. "You should grab that parking spot up ahead. We're not likely to get anything closer."
Noah parked, and the two of them got out to walk the rest of the way. They hadn't bothered to disguise themselves since the worst that would likely happen in this low-key neighborhood would be a teenager or two asking for an autograph. A minute later, they passed a lanky boy strumming his guitar as he sat on the stoop in front of a small, neatly kept apartment building.
The kid's double take was funny enough that Noah walked up to him and, taking the guitar, strummed a few bars. "Here's where you're faltering." He'd heard it as they walked. "This is what you do to fix it." Putting his fingers on the strings, he showed the kid how to compensate for the fact he had a pinky that was missing its top half.
The kid's eyes locked on his fingers, deep grooves between his eyebrows. Taking the guitar from Noah when he held it out, the boy did exactly what Noah had demonstrated. The smile that bloomed on his face was worth all the shit that came with fame. "I didn't think I could do that," he said, repeating the riff before he looked up, hope incandescent in his deep brown eyes. "You think I could be like you? Go all the way to the top?"
Noah wasn't sure he should be encouraging a sweet, normal kid to join his world, but dreams were dreams. "Don't see why not." He tapped a finger against the boy's temple. "Trick is not to try to do what everyone else says you should do--you have to figure out your own unique style. That's what I did."
Flexing his left hand, he held it out so the boy could see the fine scars that spider-webbed it. "It had the hell crushed out of it when I was about your age." A car accident after he stole his father's Beemer following an argument during a rare vacation week when Fox wasn't with him. His friend had been forced to stay an extra week at school as punishment for an infraction Noah couldn't now remember.
"It's never going to be as strong as my right hand." It throbbed at night sometimes, a bone-deep ache.
"Wow." The kid touched his fingers to Noah's hand. "I never knew that."
"Most folks don't."
He and Abe spent a few more minutes with the kid, and Noah gave the teen his number before they left. It wasn't something he did often--kids tended to brag, and he had no intention of dealing with thousands of messages. But he didn't think this kid would boast. Having the number would be enough for him. And if he did ever call, it'd be because he couldn't figure something out.
Heading back down the street afterward, they made it to the restaurant right on time.
"This is bad." Abe glanced at his watch with a scowl. "We're being way too well behaved. What's next? No shenanigans on tour? No raising hell? Punctuality is a slippery slope, my friend."
Noah snorted. "Screw bad behavior. I want to eat."
"Noah, Abe." Luca Meluchi came over and shook their hands, his grip that of a man who spent his off time fixing up and flipping houses. "Like I told Abe, I squeezed in a table for you on the patio, but it's kind of stuck in a corner."
"Every seat here is the best in the house." Noah grinned. "And forget about taking our orders. Just feed us."
"Done," Luca said with a laugh, and led them out the side door and onto the patio.
Seeing the soft semi-darkness of it, the tables romantically small and lit only with candles, Noah glanced at Abe. "Don't try anything."
"You should be so lucky," the bigger man said as they were shown to their shadowy and tight corner, the table right up against the back wall of the restaurant. "You're not my type." With that, Abe grabbed the seat that put his back to the rest of the people out here, which meant Noah ended up with his to the restaurant wall, his view of the other tables uninterrupted.
It was the seat he'd have chosen given first pick--and he knew full well Abe was aware of that.
Luca came out right then with a loaded antipasto platter and they dug in.
"I swear this is the only place I actually eat eggplant," Noah said, reaching for more.
"I'm all about the olives, man. And those weird pickled pepper things."
"Those are goo--" Noah froze, his eyes on the woman who'd just stepped out onto the patio.
Never would he mistake Kit's profile for someone else's. About to raise his hand, alert her to his and Abe's presence, his brain finally caught on to the fact that she had a male hand on her lower back. That hand was attached to a man who looked vaguely familiar.
"What's so interesting?" Abe looked over his shoulder, blew out a breath. "Dude works with Kit, doesn't he? I remember him from that awards ceremony."
Noah's brain clicked. "He wrote the scrip
t for Last Flight--she liked working with him." All at once, he could remember every good thing Kit had said about her date. "Terrence Gates."
"Maybe they're working together again." Abe returned his attention to the platter.
"Yeah, Kit mentioned a new project," Noah said, but from the way the guy had just reached out to touch Kit's hand across the table, it was obvious this was a date. He knew he should stop looking, stop watching, but he couldn't help himself. The candlelight caressed Kit's face, made her skin glow and her eyes sparkle. Or maybe the glow was because of Gates.
They hadn't sparkled for Noah in a long time.
"Shit man, we can leave, eat somewhere else."
He jerked his attention to Abe's keen gaze. "No. If we do, we'll only draw attention to ourselves." Right now, their position made them all but invisible to Kit and her date.
Abe leaned in close, the candlelight throwing shadows on his face. "Then stop staring at her." A grim order. "I don't know what you did to mess it up with Kit, but you did. Now live with it." Pausing to take a drink of the ice-cold water one of Luca's brothers had placed on the table as they took their seats, he said, "She looks happy. You want to change that?"
Noah's hand clenched around his own glass. "No." Forcing his gaze off Kit, he tried to keep it on the food. He knew it was delicious, but he couldn't taste a bite because he was trying so hard not to look at the only woman who had ever been his friend.
Leaving ten minutes after Kit and her date finally headed out, Noah and Abe didn't speak much. When he would've dropped the other man off at his place, Abe shook his head. "You know what I learned when I ended up drinking myself into the hospital?"
"I don't need secondhand therapy." Noah's hand flexed and tightened on the steering wheel.
"Yeah, well, you're going to get it. You can't be alone tonight, Noah. You're going to go do something stupid."
"I won't." He swallowed. "I promised Kit."
"There are plenty of kinds of stupid, and I bet you can find a loophole of stupidity."
Noah wanted to disagree, couldn't. "What do you want to do?"
"Go do something stupid together." Stretching out in the passenger seat, Abe grinned. "Let's go have an impromptu party at Fox and Molly's. We'll shanghai David and Thea along the way."