Musician's Monsoon Read online

  Zane made a strange growling noise in his throat that brought Sophie out of her thoughts long enough to frown and question his actions as he pushed the passenger door open and got out of the car. “Where are you going?” she called. He ignored her, but she saw him pull out his cell phone and stab in a number, mumble something, then stab in another number.

  He strode around the car and she heard him mutter, “I need a cab at the Marquee Theatre, please. Now.”

  Her heart fell even more. He was done with her. He’d probably finally realized that what Lorraine said was true. He shouldn’t be wasting his time with her.

  She jumped when her door opened and he held his hand out to her. With a frown, she looked up at him in confusion.

  He smiled softly, stuffed his phone back in his pocket, and waited.

  Slowly, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else, she slid her hand into his. He eased her back out of the car and said nothing, but placed the sweetest kiss to her cheek before turning and heading back toward her cousin.

  “Hey!” he called.

  Lorraine spun so fast she almost fell over. “Zane!” she shouted. She ambled over to him, giggling ridiculously, and Zane reached out to grasp her shoulders and stop her from crashing into him. “Hey, sexy.” She went for a purr, but it came out a slur. “That’s a record for Sophie. Usually guys get bored with her after only three minutes instead of five.”

  Sophie saw tension coil through Zane’s broad shoulders, and he snatched Lorraine’s wrist before she could roam her questing hand across his chest. “Look,” he spat out. “I’m only going to say this to you once, so it would be in your best interests if you paid attention.” He turned and started to stride back toward the theater, dragging Lorraine along behind him. “I have no desire to be in the company of a trashy drunk woman with more plastic parts than flesh and blood ones. However, I also don’t feel right letting my date’s cousin wander the street a hot mess, so here’s the way it’s going to go down. I called you a cab. You’re going to get in it. I’m putting you in a nice room at the Marriott. Sleep it off and get over yourself.”

  With impeccable timing, the taxi showed up right as Zane reached the front entrance. Sophie followed behind at a safe distance.

  “Wait, what?” Lorraine grumbled. Then her blurry eyes lit up. “Oh, we’re going straight to the hotel then? You move fast.”

  She tried to grope him again, but he restrained her. “We are not going anywhere. You are going to the hotel by yourself. Sophie and I are going to go enjoy our date.” He opened up the back door of the cab.

  “You and Sophie?” she hollered. “This really is some kind of joke, isn’t it?”

  He sneered at her, his disgust more than apparent. “The only joke I see around here is you.” He all but pushed her into the cab and slammed the door, then told the driver where to take her and handed him some money.

  Sophie stared, shocked, as the cab drove off with her inebriated and obnoxious cousin. She slid her gaze over to Zane, who had his back to her. He stood tall, strong, his blond hair cascading down to his mid-back. Stick him in some medieval attire, put a sword in his hand, and he really would have looked like a warrior of old. She swallowed hard, and her heart skipped a beat as he looked at her over his shoulder.

  She saw his shoulders move in a sigh before he walked back over to stand in front of her.

  “I apologize for all of that,” he murmured.

  She blinked in bewilderment. “Why did you do that?” Her voice came out in a breathy wisp of sound.

  His brilliant green eyes met hers. “I told you it bothered me when you said negative things about yourself. It apparently bothers me worse when other people say negative things about you.”

  “B-But why? You don’t even know me.” Her mind was spinning wildly out of control, and she was having difficulty processing anything that was currently happening.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I just…I’m pretty used to defending myself most of the time.”

  He shrugged. “Everyone needs a champion once in a while.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, long enough that he arched an eyebrow and started to look self-conscious. Then, she did something so out of character she wondered what kind of weird magic was in the air tonight. She slid her palms up his chest and linked her fingers behind his neck, all but attacking his lips with hers in a fervent kiss.

  He responded instantly, slipping his arms around her to pull her tight and close against him. He dominated her mouth until she was dizzy and gasping. When she pulled away, she buried her face against his shoulder and closed her eyes, relishing his warmth and his strength, wanting to soak it into herself so she’d always remember.

  His chuckle vibrated through her as he stroked his hands down her hair. “Now, you see, Sophie, that was anything but boring.”

  She felt her face flame, so she snuggled closer to him in order to hide her complete embarrassment at her forwardness. He didn’t seem to mind. “This kind of stuff never happens to me,” she mumbled into his shirt.

  “That’s the third time you’ve said that tonight.”

  She finally pulled away to look up at him. “Well, it keeps getting weirder!”

  A mischievous smile played around his lips. “Well, I’m not the one who put out my eye, karate chopped me in the neck, and then attacked my mouth right now. That’s all you. I’m just trying to go with the flow. Your cousin has to be smoking something, because this is, by far, the least boring night I’ve ever had.”

  Sophie’s heart did something funny at his words, something dangerous. The last thing she needed to do was become attached to a famous musician. That had disaster written all over it. But regardless of what her common sense told her, if Zane kept saying such nice things to her, she was going to be in trouble.

  She didn’t have much time to contemplate this because he nuzzled his lips against the side of her neck and her ear and she lost all rational thought. “You smell like cherry blossoms,” he murmured. “It’s driving me insane.”

  Her face burned for, what, the ten-millionth time that night? She pulled back slightly and looked up at him. “Courtesy of Bath and Body Works.”

  He raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Just an FYI, a boring woman wouldn’t wear such sexy fragrances.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, would you stop it with that? I’m going to blush myself into the ground.”

  He laughed softly and slipped an arm around her waist so she couldn’t get away. “I’m just trying to tell you…” He pushed back some rogue strands of her sandy hair and gazed down into her eyes, all traces of teasing vanishing. He sighed. “Sophie, I don’t know what you’ve been led to believe you’re whole life, or who’s told you that you were boring, but it’s BS. All of it.” He smiled and traced the line of her jaw and the column of her throat with his fingers. “If you’re not too tired of me yet, I think there may still be some storm for us to chase. You still up for it?”

  “Of course I am.” She didn’t recognize the sensual, breathy tone of her own voice, and she definitely didn’t recognize this new impulsive part of her that had been dormant for the first thirty years of her life. But, for some reason, she didn’t hate it. In all reality, it was kind of exhilarating.

  Zane’s grin should have illuminated the entire parking lot. He reached down and took her hand. “All right, let’s go. I’m hungry. Are you?” At her nod, he squeezed her fingers and led her back to Lorraine’s car. “I’m pretty sure the only thing open right now is Jack in the Box, and if we’re going to catch up to the storm, we’d better get it to go. Is that okay? I know it’s not romantic, but…”

  Sophie giggled. “Zane, I’m a teacher, and I’m single. Do you know how many nights a week I eat takeout? It’s not a big deal, I promise.”

  He laughed, stopped in his tracks, then turned to take her face in his hands and kiss her again. Thoroughly. Sophie thought her lungs were going to burst from want of breathing but lack of remembering ho
w. She was beginning to get used to the feeling of his lips on hers. It was both invigorating and petrifying.

  When he released her, his grin was wolfish and wonderful. “Come on. We have a storm to catch up to, I’m starving, and I’m having an issue with my ailment.”

  She frowned as she followed after him. “Your ailment?”

  He threw a smile back at her over his shoulder that should have been outlawed. “Yes. I’m running a fever. I think I’m totally ‘hot for teacher.’”

  She rolled her eyes at the complete cheesiness of his quoting the Van Halen song title, but her face betrayed her by flushing warm…again.

  Chapter Four

  Sophie never got tired of the Arizona lightning. It was power and grace rolled into one. It really was as Zane had said―nature’s rock concert.

  They had followed the storm sixty or so miles out of Phoenix to Roosevelt Lake. It was on the other side of the Superstition Mountains, roughly in the middle of nowhere. They had pulled off in a turnout by a bridge overlooking the lake, and for the longest time, neither one of them spoke. They just watched the lightning play across the sky while the thunder rolled from one end of the dark expanse to the other.

  “Where are you from originally?” Sophie asked, finally breaking the silence. As a fan of the band, she should have known that, but she wasn’t the stalker variety.

  “Los Angeles,” he replied. “But I hate it there. I live in Scottsdale when I’m not on tour.”

  She blinked rapidly, not having expected that he lived so close to her. “Do you really?”

  He nodded and glanced over at her. “I love how it’s warm here all year round, and I love the storms. I would have stayed at my condo while I was here, but we only had the one show. It’s easier if I stay with the band.”

  “I live in Flagstaff.”

  “Beautiful place,” he commented. “I ski there in the winter. Maybe I’ve seen you before and we passed right by one another.”

  “I think I probably would have remembered seeing you,” she muttered.

  He chuckled and reached for her hand. She continued to stare out at the light show while he toyed with her fingers. “Sophie, did you mean what you said earlier?” he asked. “That my music sounds how you feel inside?”

  She looked over at him as he traced the lines in her palm. He didn’t look up, and seemed almost self-conscious and vulnerable at that moment. She shifted so she was facing him. “Of course I meant it. Your music is amazing.”

  “What is it exactly? That you feel? What emotions does my music represent in you?”

  Sophie smiled as she remembered the first time she’d ever heard a Shadows Rising song. It had been their first album, almost ten years ago. She’d been in college. “The first time I heard your band, I was studying for finals. I was burned out like never before. My roommate was into metal music. I wasn’t so much at the time. I was studying classical, you know? But while I sat there, wracking my brain, trying to remember the square root of who knows what, questioning why I was putting myself through the torture at all, I heard this song. It was melodious and symphonic, with all the elements of beautiful music that I was in love with, but with this power behind it. Pounding drums, screaming guitar. It sounded how I felt. Chaotic, like I was losing control of everything in my world. For whatever reason, it made me feel better. I felt like, whoever had written that song must have felt the same insane, frazzled thing I was feeling, and that made it not so bad.”

  “That’s the beauty of music. It’s a universal language. A way of communicating with people you never meet. It touches people and lets them know that, no matter what they’re feeling, they aren’t alone. Someone else feels or has felt the same way. Even if the musician is a complete stranger, at that moment, to that person, he or she is a friend and a confidant, a companion. So no one, no matter how lonely, is ever truly alone.”

  She nodded in agreement and shifted to lean back against the car door, stretching her legs out across Zane’s lap. He smiled and rested his hands on her knees. “I realized something else, though. After I was finished with finals and feeling like I was losing my mind, I still had this all-consuming desire to lose myself in your music, or in metal music in general. It had awakened this part of me I had never been allowed to be, and sometimes I like to let that side of myself play when no one is looking.”

  He glanced at her and frowned. “What do you mean, you weren’t allowed to be?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve always been the practical one, the responsible one. I’ve never been prone to fanciful daydreams. That was always my little sister’s place. She was fanciful enough for a hundred of me. She’s a ballet dancer and was always very creative, almost to a fault. She was wild and carefree and never thought anything through before she did it. My poor parents. They spent so much time pulling her out of the clouds and putting her back on firm ground. I didn’t want them worrying about me, too. So I never did that rebellious thing most teenagers do. I was a good student. I studied hard. I had to show my sister a good example. Someone in the family needed to be level-headed.

  “It was okay because I never had a desire to have crazy adventures like my sister did. I just wanted to teach. I wanted to inspire people, help people. And music has always been my passion, in any form.”

  “But there was always a rebel locked inside of you, dying to come out?” he teased.

  Sophie smirked. “I’m not sure if I’d put it that way necessarily, but after I let myself be carried away by your music, it seemed like a good escape plan. Sometimes, work is stressful, and after a day of being inundated in Brahms and Handel, I just want to come home, drink a couple beers, lose myself in thundering metal, trade in my upright bass for a bass guitar and jam away like I’m part of the band.” She felt color creep into her cheeks at her admission. She’d never told anyone that. It had always been her little secret getaway.

  Zane arched an eyebrow. “You play bass?”

  “I play an upright bass. At home, by myself, I mess around with a bass guitar.” She shrugged. “It’s how I de-stress.”

  A slow, wicked grin curved his lips. “So it makes total sense that your smile made me hear a sexy bass line. That’s amazing. I feel like I had a premonition. Do you know how to play all our songs?”

  “Of course.” She laughed, and he joined her.

  He reached over and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Sophie, there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of a wild side. You don’t need to hide it like it’s a bad secret.”

  “But there’s no place for it in my life. There’s no point to it. I like my life. Maybe it seems boring to everyone else, but it’s stable. It’s safe.”

  “You can’t always be afraid to take a risk every now and then, to taste and savor life instead of only doing what you need to survive. Life shouldn’t be about survival, Sophie. Life should be about living.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and fixed him with a pointed look. “Oh, yeah? Well, tell me, how come you, being someone who is constantly ‘tasting’ life, became so overwhelmed by it that you lost the line between musician and celebrity and suddenly couldn’t create anymore?” All traces of teasing left his face and he frowned, averting his eyes. “Because it was too much, right? Too much stimuli. Too much life. There was no stability. And how come you, someone who is surrounded by beauty and creative freedom, somehow found me―grounded, stable, boring me―fascinating from the stage? What was it about me that caught your attention?”

  He sighed. “Everywhere I looked, people were rocking out, head banging, moshing, crowd-surfing, the way they always do. Women were dressed sexy or Gothic, doing their best to get the attention of anything male that was onstage or off. It was the same thing I see every night. And then there was you. You were in jeans and a T-shirt. You weren’t waving your arms or screaming at the top of your lungs. Not that I don’t appreciate my fans’ enthusiasm. I do. But, it all starts to blur together after awhile. With you, there was this subtle, gentle light
, like I said before. You were stripped down. Like an acoustic version of a metal song. And I felt like, in that ocean of people, you were really appreciating my music. Not just enjoying the sound and the beat, but you somehow heard all aspects of it. And when I looked at you, all the chaos, the stuff that was bombarding my mind, fell away and I could hear my music again.” He absently trailed one hand up and down the length of her shin.

  The corner of Sophie’s lips lifted in a wry smile. “So, the simple woman escapes into metal music so she can feel wild and free in the confines of her own home, and the metal musician seeks the company of a simple woman so all of the noise surrounding him disappears for awhile. That’s what I call an interesting conundrum.”

  He met her gaze, his eyes soft and warm. “I don’t call that a conundrum, Sophie.”

  “What do you call it then?”

  He reached over and cupped her cheek in his hand, feathering his thumb back and forth over her skin. “I call that perfect balance.” He leaned closer, invading her space in the most intoxicating way.

  Sophie let out a soft sigh, and her eyelids fluttered closed as his lips descended to hers. She found absolutely no reason why she should try and push him away, or stop him from kissing her. Maybe it was foolish considering their worlds would never again collide after tonight, but what he said about them balancing one another seemed strangely true―at least it did at that moment. That squelched wild side that only came out in her living room during the evening hours was closer to the surface around him. She found herself wanting to let go a little, wanting to sample his rootless abandon. How many other opportunities would she get to run off into the night and kiss a rock star?

  Maybe he was right about one thing. Safe wasn’t always the only option. She was entitled to at least one adventure. So this would be hers. She couldn’t let that side of herself out around anyone else. Everyone else in her life would think she’d lost her mind. But Zane was different. Everything about him and his life was the complete opposite of hers. But in this little window of time that they were together, he craved her stability and she craved his spontaneity. And she craved his touch and his kisses. For now, that was fine with her.