Page 4 of #Moonstruck

Ryan De Luna had entered the room.

He’d been in the middle of putting on a new shirt while walking around the curtain farthest from us to join everybody. He pulled the white jersey material down over some lightly tanned abs. Despite my telling Angie not two days ago that they must have been airbrushed on for photos, I could now see that those hard bumps and ridges were very real.

No airbrushes of any kind were harmed in the forming of that deliciousness.

Then Ryan De Luna winked at me with a little smile, letting me know he understood exactly what I’d just been looking at. I forced myself to turn away from him. I would not worship him with excessive adulation.

I wouldn’t.

Even if every part of me wanted to. Which was kind of a problem, given that I planned on staying abstinent until marriage. I couldn’t let myself think these kinds of things.

The air-conditioning must have been on high, as the room was extremely cold. At least that’s what I told myself to explain my shivers.

“I’m going to say hi,” Angie announced, apparently unaware of my inability to form coherent thoughts. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”

“So sure,” I finally managed. Even if my bad opinion of Ryan had slightly bettered after seeing him perform, he still represented everything I hated about the industry. Mass-produced, soulless, tuneless, synthesized dreck.

Ab ogling aside, I really wasn’t interested.

Really.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged and went over to introduce herself to Ryan. He’d better be nice to her, or else.

When she left, I wasn’t sure what to do. The surgically enhanced women wearing Band-Aid–size “clothes” flocked around him, cooing at him like presenting peacocks. They literally draped themselves all over him like overgrown leeches. Plastic peacock leeches. Pleeches.

Ryan grabbed what looked suspiciously like the Martin custom acoustic guitar made of Honduran rosewood that I’d been lusting over last month online. I could never afford it, and he had one just lying around. He took the beautiful instrument to a couch and sat down. He held it ... weirdly. Something felt off.

Through some kind of mental code, his flock of pleeches established a pecking order about who got to sit where. They gathered around him—one on each side, a few sitting on the back of the couch behind him, and the others around his feet. Like he was the Lord Master of Music and would dispense all his worldly knowledge to them.

Poor Angie circled around the group, unable to find a way in.

If she didn’t find one soon, I was going to help by shooing them away. Or pulling some hair. Whatever worked.

I rolled my eyes so hard over his groupies that I saw the inside of my skull. I sat down next to a guy who strummed what looked like another custom Martin guitar. Were they breeding them or something?

“Not a fan?” he asked, surprising me. Because normally I hung out with my brothers, and they wanted to cut off the air supply of any male who looked twice at me.

“What? Oh. Not really.”

“Of me?”

“I don’t know who you are.” I’d probably just seriously insulted the guy. While I could tell you the name and preferred instrument of almost every rock guitarist on the planet, I was not up on the pop scene.

I’d abandoned that when I was fifteen.

Right after my father left us.

“I don’t know who you are, either,” the guitar player shot back.

Fair enough. “Maisy Harrison,” I said, offering him my hand. It wasn’t really a shaking-hands kind of place (it had more of an air kisses/fist bumps vibe), but my mother had been deeply committed to proper manners. He gave me an amused smile and shook it. His fingers were calloused on the pads, letting me know he really played.

“Diego.” He paused as if he didn’t want to continue, and I realized why. “De Luna.”

They were family? Brothers? Cousins? I couldn’t help it. I compared the two men. Diego had a darker skin tone, black hair, and the darkest-brown eyes I’d ever seen. He had the same cut jawline as Ryan, maybe the same nose. Diego was cute but not in the ground-beneath-me-has-turned-soggy-due-to-inadvertent-drooling Ryan kind of way.

“Basically you’re living proof that nepotism works.”

That made Diego grin at me, and the similarity to Ryan was even more apparent now. “So if you don’t know who I am, you’re saying you’re not a fan of my cousin?”

---