Musician's Monsoon Page 6

She looked up into his green eyes and saw only sincerity and a hint of desperation.

  “I know Matt was being an idiot. He’s always being an idiot. He doesn’t know when to shut up.”

  She waved her hand. “Matt isn’t an issue. He’s a child. I deal with those every day. What’s disconcerting to me is the fact that, sure, okay, I know how to play the bass and I have done so in public and at home and would probably be fine so long as I was given ample time to rehearse the set list, but, Zane, I don’t know the first thing about being a rock star. About being a performer.”

  He chuckled and cradled her face in his hands. “Sophie, if you harness a fraction of the passion you displayed in that hotel room, you’ll knock everybody’s socks off. Just pretend everyone in the audience really pissed you off.”

  She laughed in spite of herself, but a wave of unease washed over her. “But I don’t look remotely close to how a rock star is supposed to look. I’m just me. Just―”

  “Don’t you dare say boring. Rhonda can help you with your wardrobe if you want to look a bit more edgy. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. You’re so much more beautiful than you give yourself credit for.”

  Her heart melted and surrendered even while her rational mind was still screaming that she was the world’s biggest idiot for considering this insane thing. She heaved a sigh. Apparently, her “one night of adventure” was like a runaway train with no tracks and no emergency brake. “I have to call the school. I have some personal time I can take.”

  His eyes lit up. “So, you’ll do it?”

  She fixed him with a stern expression. “Two shows.” She held up her first two fingers for emphasis. “Just until your guitar tech is better. That’s all.”

  He let out a whoop of elation and wrapped her up in his arms. “Thank you, Sophie. You have no idea what this means to me.”

  She closed her eyes and let his warmth permeate her. His arms were strong and steady, keeping her stable, but gentle, offering comfort. Oh man. She was so totally screwed.

  “I have to take Lorraine’s car back to her. This is going to be fun to try and explain.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  She smiled up at him. “Thanks. When is this first show I have to do?”

  “Tomorrow night. In San Diego. We leave tonight.”

  She nodded. “As soon as we get back from this little chore, I’m going to need the set list, and I’m going to have you go over some of the songs with me so I know for sure what I’m doing.”

  “Of course.” He started to open the hotel room door again, but then stopped and turned back to her with an arched eyebrow and a smirk. “All instruments at once, huh?”

  A horrible wave of heat, worse than any she’d experienced since meeting him—and there had been a lot—spread over her face and neck, but to her credit, she didn’t look down like she wanted to. She stood her ground and lifted her chin a notch. “Oh, you have no idea.”

  His eyebrows shot up so high they almost touched his hairline. He chuckled and slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her up against him and lowering his lips to hers. “You know that storm we watched last night?” he whispered. At her breathless nod, he nuzzled his lips against her neck and nipped at her earlobe. “That monsoon has nothing on you, baby.”

  She grinned. That may be the best thing anyone had ever said to her. When he pulled back, his eyes were full of warmth that set every part of her on fire. She could get used to him looking at her like that. Just like she could get used to him kissing her. She could get used to a lot of things…

  Yeah, she was totally, totally screwed.

  Chapter Six

  Sophie stared at her reflection in the mirror for so long she started to lose concept of time. She kept thinking that, if she stared hard enough, she would see traces of herself, but she didn’t. Like, not even one.

  “Do you like it?” Rhonda asked as she finished with her hair.

  The hair wasn’t so bad. She could deal with the hair. All Rhonda had done was flat-iron it, put in some mud, or wax, or paste, whatever it was, and tousle it all up like she had a stylish case of bedhead. That was fine. It was the outfit she had picked for her and the makeup that was making her feel woozy. She’d stuck her in a black miniskirt, of all things, with red and black-striped tights and black combat boots. On top she was wearing a black tank top with a tight black fishnet shirt over it. Sophie could see Rhonda getting away with wearing it, but she felt completely exposed and completely ridiculous. Not to mention the heavy black eyeliner Rhonda had caked around her eyes and the bright red lipstick.

  But Rhonda had been exceedingly nice to her, so she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She forced a meager smile. “I don’t even look like me.”

  Rhonda grinned. “You’ll be fine tonight, Sophie. Don’t worry about it. You did awesome during sound check.”

  Sophie glanced at herself in the mirror again, and her chest started to feel really tight. She swallowed hard and fought a wave of dizziness.

  Rhonda must have sensed her distress, because she put her hands on her shoulders in a gesture of comfort. “Do you want me to go get Zane?”

  Sophie bobbed her head and felt tears burning her eyes. What was she doing here? This was ten kinds of crazy. In the last forty-eight hours, she had randomly accosted her favorite rock star, had run away with him into the night, made out with him in the back of a car and decided to play substitute bass player for two nights at two sold-out heavy metal shows! She’d had to break that news to her cousin, which had been nothing short of WWIII, then get on a bus with a bunch of strangers and go to San Diego, where she’d been given a crash course in Shadows Rising songs. She’d practiced until her fingers were raw and she felt okay about the music, but this sudden disappearance of her own self was highly unsettling. This wasn’t her. She didn’t do things like this. She didn’t wear things like this. She felt as if she had lost all traces of her personality in a matter of moments and had been replaced with some other version.

  Zane entered the dressing room at that moment and she stood, then turned to face him.

  “Whoa, look at you,” he murmured, but it wasn’t necessarily an enthusiastic response.

  She tried to say something, but all that came out of her mouth was a shaky, wheezy sounding exhale. Her chest tightened even more, and the tears hovered right on her eyelashes.

  Zane looked at her in confusion and concern and took her hands in his. “Are you all right?”

  Again, she tried to speak, and again, all that came out was the same strangled sound. Her heart started to pound, and she could feel the blood thrumming in her ears.

  “Sophie, I think maybe you need to inhale,” Zane said.

  She shook her head and sucked in a gasping breath of air. It hurt, and didn’t feel like it was enough.

  “Are you going to pass out?” he asked, his face etched with worry. “You gonna puke?”

  She looked at what he was wearing. He looked gorgeous. Surprise, surprise. He always looked gorgeous. He was in a gray shirt with some skulls and whatnot all over it and a pair of black jeans with chains hanging from his left pocket. He looked normal, like himself. She, on the other hand…

  “I don’t even know who I am right now,” she finally managed to rasp out. “What am I doing here?”

  He frowned. “What do you mean? Sophie…”

  “Look at me!” she shouted. “I look like some kind of whacked-out pirate! This is not me! Who is this person? I can’t handle this! I don’t belong here!” She noted the hysteria in her voice and wondered where her rational mind had gone.

  “Sophie!” Zane reached up and took her face in his hands. “Calm down, look at me.”

  She did so, and his lovely green eyes gave her a small measure of peace.

  “This is you, Sophie. Just a different version of you.”

  She shook her head. “No! This is not me!” She indicated her abhorrent wardrobe. “Seriously, I feel like a doll. How am I supposed to go out on stage and do anything
productive if I feel like a stranger in my own body? I’m not supposed to be edgy. I’ve never been edgy.” The tears that had been threatening succeeded in cascading down her cheeks. “I’m boring, remember? I’m plain! I’m uninteresting and average. What am I even doing here? I’m going to have a heart attack!” She dissolved into soft sobs, hating her tirade of girlish insanity, but she felt more out of her element and out of control in that moment than she had in her entire life.

  Zane’s arms came around her, and he enveloped her in his comforting embrace. “How many times do I have to tell you that you are not boring?” he whispered, feathering kisses across the top of her head. “You’ve never been boring and you’re never going to be. Although, I agree with you on the outfit. It’s terrible.” He took her by the shoulders and pulled away enough to wipe her tears away. “You look like some kind of Gothic sailor vampire.”

  Sophie gave a watery laugh and wiped at her eyes.

  Zane chuckled. “I love Rhonda like my own sister, and she means well, but she doesn’t always realize that what she can wear, not everyone else can wear. Do you have your suitcase with you?”

  “I don’t have a suitcase, Zane. I was only driving down for one day to see the concert. All I brought was a backpack with a few essentials just in case. I need to hit a freaking store at some point. At any rate, it’s over there.” She pointed to the corner of the room.

  He went over to her bag, rummaged through it for a minute, then came back with her jeans. “Put these on. I won’t look.” He winked at her and went back to her bag.

  She smiled at his gentlemanly gesture, yanked off the combat boots and the hideous tights, then discarded the miniskirt and tugged on her faded pair of jeans. She sighed in relief at the familiar comfort. “Well, I feel half like myself,” she stated.

  He came back with a black shirt in his hand that he set aside. Then he reached out and lifted the black fishnet over her head. Her breath caught at the subtly intimate action, and when his hands came back down to toy with the hem of the tank top as well, electricity arced between them and made the room feel sweltering.

  “You want me to turn around again?” he murmured.

  She licked her suddenly dry lips, loving the green fire burning in his eyes. She shook her head. “It’s okay, I have a bra on. Just like a bikini, right?”

  Something dangerous flashed over his features, but he said nothing else. With painful slowness, he pulled the tank top off also. He flung it on the floor, and his fingers brushed across the bare skin of her torso for a moment. She sucked in her breath at the velvet-soft contact. His eyes grazed her in a heated way before he reached over to grab the shirt he had chosen for her to wear.

  When he had pulled it over her head, she glanced down to see it was an old Pantera T-shirt she sometimes slept in. She frowned. “Are you serious? Just a plain old T-shirt?”

  He smiled as he freed her hair from the collar of the shirt. “Rock and roll is all about music and attitude. It shouldn’t be about fashion or frills. There is nothing more rock and roll than a band shirt and a faded pair of blue jeans.” His gaze softened. “Maybe that was what caught my attention from the stage. Seeing you was like looking at my roots. Just plain ol’ rock and roll, before all the hoopla.” He stepped back to look her over and grinned. “There’s my girl.”

  Tingles fizzled throughout her body at being called his girl, and she turned to look at herself. She sighed in relief at the more familiar reflection. She wiped off the lipstick but decided the eyeliner could stay, and she messed her hair up a little bit more. That was better. Rocker Sophie. Slightly edgy Sophie. But still Sophie. Some normalcy seeped back into her, more of her methodical mind and less of the crazed, panic-attack-waiting-to-happen side.

  She turned back to Zane, who was smiling softly at her. He was all confident poise and beauty. All raw talent and bad-boy rock star. But he had such a gentle, kind heart. She could understand how the rock-star life had taken over to the point where he hadn’t been able to create anymore. In only a matter of a few short moments, she felt like she had been robbed of her identity by a bad choice of clothing. How much worse must it be to have all the pressures of stardom slowly creep in and suffocate all the parts of the life that you had originally fallen in love with? No wonder Zane had started to feel so out of control. He had lost touch with himself, with the whole reason he loved to do what he did.

  She sighed and slipped her arms around his waist. He held her tight and she closed her eyes, resting her cheek on his chest and listening to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

  “You’ll do fine, Sophie,” he murmured.

  She looked up at him and shook her head. “I’m not worried about that. I’ll muddle through somehow.”

  A small frown creased his brow. “Then what is it?”

  She slid her palms up his chest and across his shoulders, smoothing the fabric of his shirt and studying the texture of his muscles. “Zane, what was it that originally made you love music so much? What made you want to do this so badly?”

  “It’s always been in me, the sounds and the notes, even before I knew what they were. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if it wasn’t there… It’s who I am. Without it, I would be lost. I was lost.”

  She smiled softly. “Then maybe you need to take off the black miniskirt and the red lipstick too.” She giggled at his expression. “Get back to your roots, like you said. Put on a pair of blue jeans and a band shirt, metaphorically speaking.”

  He stared at her for several seconds with a look of contemplation on his face before a soft smile curved his lips. “Find myself and just forget all the rest.”

  She nodded and studied his wonderful face. She’d never in her wildest dreams imagined she’d be here right now, with him, about to do what she was about to do. She still kept expecting to roll over and wake up.

  She couldn’t quite describe the look he gave her. But it was full of sincere warmth, gentleness, and something smoldering that made her heart flop around in her chest. He took her hand and raised it to press a tender kiss to the inside of her wrist. He continued up her arm until he got to her elbow. Then he placed it around his neck and aligned his body with hers. Something passed between them. Something more intense and more intimate than anything they had shared thus far.

  Sophie lost herself in his eyes and raised her lips to meet his. His kiss was soft and slow, and when his tongue delved in her mouth to deepen it, she felt her knees grow weak, as cliché as that was. She surrendered to the kiss, handing herself over to him, allowing him to do what he would. Never in her life had anyone kissed her the way Zane did, and she knew it was going to ruin her for any other man. That was only one of the many dilemmas she had discovered since meeting him.

  He kissed her like she was the only woman who had ever existed in the world, or at least in his world. It was one of her weaknesses when it came to Zane. He didn’t make her feel like a groupie, or like one of the many. He made her feel special, like he cherished her just for being who she was. He was the only person who had ever made her feel that way.

  She didn’t know if it was hero worship or what. All she knew was that she liked it. It was nice to feel like something extraordinary for a change, instead of just like “Sophie.”

  He reached up to tangle his fingers in her hair, monopolizing her mouth, claiming her in a way that made her dizzy. Zane was the type of person who went after what he wanted, and it sure seemed like he wanted a lot of her lately.

  He backed her up against the makeup counter, then reached down to take hold of her hips, never breaking contact with her mouth. He lifted her so that she was sitting on the counter and wrapped her legs around his waist. A small groan escaped Sophie before she could sensor it, and she felt him smile against her lips.

  She pulled him close, and he trailed hot kisses along her jaw and neck before returning to her mouth. He tugged on her hair enough to make her suck her breath in, and his chuckle was low, wicked and wonderful.

  “Guys, we go o
n in ten…oh, my bad.”

  Rhonda’s voice yanked them from their passion-induced personal moment, and Zane expelled a slow breath, resting his forehead against Sophie’s. Sophie gave a soft, breathy laugh and played with the ends of his hair for a second, trying to get her heartbeat under control. When she had succeeded, she met his gaze, smiled and touched his face tenderly. She loved the hard line of his jaw, his straight nose, full lips and searing green eyes. She loved the feel of his skin against hers, and she particularly loved the way he touched her—assertive, yet gentle, and every caress left her aching for more of him. Not just out of lust, but because every time he showed her a little more of his heart, it blinded her with its radiant light. He was more than a performer, more even than a musician. He was addictive.

  She sighed softly. “What do you say, music man? Wanna go put on a show?”

  His grin dazzled her and he nodded, then kissed her one more time. He moved back enough for her to be able to get down off the counter, and she glanced at Rhonda, who was pretending to be invisible, she imagined.

  When Rhonda felt it was safe to look at them again, she frowned, and her expression reflected disappointment. “Oh, you changed. You didn’t like my outfit?”

  “There’s only one front woman in this band,” Zane said before Sophie could formulate a response. “Why would you want to upstage yourself, beautiful? You’re the only one who should be commanding such attention.” He kissed her chastely on the forehead, and Rhonda smiled up at him in adoration.

  Sophie smothered her grin and followed Zane and Rhonda out the door. Her stomach did somersaults in anticipation of what she was about to do. Oh well—now or never.

  Sophie Gilkins—teacher, musician…rock star. Why not?

  Here went nothing.

  Chapter Seven

  As he took his place at his keyboard and waited while their intro music played, Zane wondered if he was actually more nervous than Sophie. She was a no-nonsense, get-the-job-done type of person. His stomach felt like it had decided to buy out real estate in his windpipe. He hadn’t had jitters this bad since the first time he’d performed in front of an audience.