The quick tensing of her mouth told him he’d said exactly the wrong thing. “By quitting my job? I know it may not seem important to you, rock star, but this is my life! And what do you mean, make this work? This was never even supposed to happen!” She was making a lunge for her sweater when he caught her around the waist. She strained against his grip, but he refused to let go. He landed a soft kiss on her tensed shoulder blade and spoke to her softly.
“Yes, but it did,” he said, moving her hair to one side so he could kiss the back of her neck. “Kiki, listen. If you want to leave because you don’t want to be with me, you never have to set foot in this bus again. But if it’s just because of what you’re worried other people will think? Life is too short.”
“Easy for you to say when the whole world loves you,” she said hotly, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Funny, that’s what Alex always says to me. Only it’s not that simple.”
When she didn’t respond, he took her arms and gently uncrossed them, and then he slid his hands down to entwine them with hers. “When I was younger, I used to stress out a lot about my career. My mother was still alive back then, and she used to quote me this old saying, that I could please all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time. I tried going with option two because to me my fans and my managers were all the people I thought I needed. It worked for a while, until I discovered that the one person I wasn’t pleasing was maybe the most important.”
“And who was that?” Kiki asked, her voice still edgy.
“Myself.”
“Oh, yeah? So what did you do about it?”
Dev shook his head. “I’m still working on it. Money might buy me a new bed in three hours, but it doesn’t solve most problems in life that really matter.”
Kiki was silent for a moment. “So why weren’t you pleased with yourself?”
Dev took a slow breath, metering his response. He certainly wasn’t about to tell her the whole truth, but for the first time in his life, the idea of sharing his burden with someone was profoundly tempting. Not just someone—with her, the person he’d come to trust in a terrifyingly short amount of time. “I made some compromises to have the career I wanted,” he began carefully. “When I first started out, being up onstage wasn’t what I thought it would be. I’d loved performing since I was a kid. I used to put on shows for my friends—you know, get up on my bed and pretend it was my stage. When I finally got the chance in real life I thought I’d kill it, but I was scared shitless. So I turned to some calming methods I shouldn’t have.”
“You mean drugs,” Kiki clarified.
“Yes. And way too much bourbon.”
“But that was a long time ago, right? You own that stage now.”
His gut clenched. If she only knew. “Sure, but it still comes at a price. And I’ve gone through my whole life feeling like I never had license to verbalize any of it, because I knew I was the luckiest bastard alive. Most people have to starve for years before they make it big, and my dream came true at twenty. So a few years ago I started talking about it. Doing interviews that brought the image of the infallible, glamorous rock star down to earth. I wanted people to know that we have just as many problems as anyone else, they’re just a different variety. That was more important to me than public adoration.” Except that he still hadn’t admitted the worst of it, hadn’t exposed the true depth of his weakness to the world—and he never could.
“I guess that’s why you hate it when I call you that,” Kiki said. Her back was still to him, but there was a hint of a smile in her voice. “Rock star.”
“Sure, but you know what I love about you? That you know none of this about me. You haven’t read a single article or watched a single interview with Dev Stone. I don’t impress you, and that’s exactly what I need.”
She finally looked over her shoulder to meet his eyes. “Need for what?”
Too much. Too soon.
Dev kissed her shoulder one more time, scooted to the end of the bed and tugged his boxer shorts on. “You know what would be good for us?”
“You mean besides the obvious?”
He grinned, relieved to see that her sense of humor had returned. He trailed a hand up her thigh. “Don’t get me started.”
Kiki batted his hand away. “Tell me. What do we need?”
Dev grabbed a navy robe from a hook on the wall and tied it around himself. “Say you’ll stay with me tonight and I’ll tell you.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“You’re absolutely right. Will you stay?”
She hesitated a moment, and then she nodded. Relief filled his chest. He placed his hands on the bed, leaned toward her and kissed her. “What we need is our first proper date.”
She snorted. “On a tour? How do you think that’s going to happen?”
“We have tomorrow off, in case you’ve forgotten. Now, no more questions.”
Dev stood up again and made his way to the front of the bus. He was about to do something he could have done with a hundred women over the years, and yet he’d never had the urge to—and suddenly he knew exactly why. Allowing his cock or his ego to choose a woman meant the fun was over the minute the orgasm was. But with Kiki, he got the feeling it was just beginning.
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