He leaned in, a grin blooming on his gorgeous lips. “But what if you kidnap me, instead?”
I snorted at that and took the chance to look him up and down once. “Are you kidding? What would we do with you? You’re too big to stuff in a duffel bag and smuggle out of here.”
I gulped at the reference to his size, knowing immediately that it was a rookie thing to say, but he shocked me by laughing at my stupid joke.
“Then I guess I’ll be safe enough. As long as you don’t have any really big duffel bags hidden in there. Where’s your room?”
“Right next door.” I gave him my most charming smile—the one that had always worked when I was in trouble with anyone—and turned to see Anna looking at me like I’d lost my fucking mind.
I cocked my head and looked right back at her, daring her to challenge me on this. So what if I was asking a rock star into our room for drinks? So what if we’d just met him? We’d also dropped everything at home to follow a tour on the off chance that we’d score a contract in the deal. We were far from home and gambling everything on this chance.
We were here to put our hearts on the line and take a leap of faith.
And he was Rivers Shine. If nothing else, we’d have a good story to tell when we got home. Besides, he might also be our key to getting in with Olivia Johns and Connor Wheating. We hadn’t met them yet or even figured out how we were supposedto audition for them, so having someone to ask sounded like it might actually be pretty smart.
This guy might give us a backstage pass right to our contract.
And PS, he was gorgeous enough to stop a girl’s heart and had me melting into something goo-like and squishy, and he didn’t seem to have eyes for anyone but me.
Even if nothing came of this, I was quite willing to bask in the dark glory that was Rivers Shine’s attention for as long as I had it.
4
RIVERS
These girls could drink, and I was shocked as hell at just how much they were willing to put back.
Look, I’d come into their room already full of half a bottle of Jack, but I was guessing that they still had a head start on me. They’d barely made it back to their room without stumbling all over each other, and there was plenty of giggling going on, even from the cranky one.
I was guessing that had at least a little bit to do with the fact that I was following them into their room, which was indeed right next to mine.
They were literally the trouble next door.
Except that I didn’t think Lila Potter had ever made trouble in her entire life. The girl was pure sunshine, and it wasn’t just her coloring. Her giggle was so infectious I felt it crawling right into my bloodstream and bubbling like champagne, and that smile of hers, which lit her whole face up…
I wasn’t the kind of guy who had an immediate response to other people. I’d spent too much of my life being handed from one manager to another and learning the hard way that I couldn’t really trust anyone. I hadn’t had a family to teach mehow to be kind or loving or any of that jazz, and I certainly hadn’t had anyone telling me that I was worth anything more than the money I could make for them.
In short, I’d learned early on how to protect my heart from other people. It usually looked like me pretending I didn’t have a heart in the first place.
But something about Lila, with her auburn hair and those laughing eyes of hers, the freckles across her nose and the sly, giggling sense of humor she’d already showed me…
Something about it had me following her right into her room, my heart opening up like a creature that had been kept in the dark too long and had just seen its very first sunbeam.
And fuck me, that might have been the cheesiest, most pathetic thing I’d ever thought in my entire life, and though I should maybe have been embarrassed about that, I found myself grinning instead. Bathing in the glow that was coming off the golden girl in front of me.
I cut my thoughts off abruptly, if only to keep myself from veering into a truly humiliating spiral, and glanced around the room. The girls had obviously only been here to drop their things off. Two bags sat on the two beds, still stuffed to bursting, and aside from a couple of cowboy hats on the side tables and a purse thrown on the table, there were no personal belongings in the room. I wondered at that. When people got to a hotel room they generally unpacked immediately, trying to make the place their own for the short time they’d be there. Trying to replicate something that looked like home.
At least that was what I did. I’d always assumed other people did the same thing. Enter a space and try to make it yours. Put your mark on it enough that when you walked in the room it embraced you with open arms. Make it familiar and comforting so that when you ran to it, trying to get away from the people outside?—
I cut that thought off as well. This room, with its girls who had probably been protected for their entire lives from anything that might try to do them harm, was no place to think about the bad things I’d run from in my life.
I returned to the question of what these girls were actually doing here—they hadn’t told me yet—and why they’d dropped their bags and run for food and drinks.
“So, what are you two doing in little old Bardstown?” I asked, eyeing the bags on the bed. “It doesn’t look like you’re packed for a long trip.”
And Bardstown wasn’t exactly a destination city. Sure, they had a thriving music scene here, which was why Olivia Johns and Connor Wheating had decided to start their tour here, but it was also a small town.
The other reason they’d decided to start here, if you asked me. Olivia and Connor had spent their first tour—the one they did with Atomic Records—stuck on their own in Missouri and playing from town to town trying to make enough money to get home to Nashville. At the time it had been a great publicity stunt, as far as the label was concerned, and a source of constant stress for Olivia and Connor. But it had also given them a taste for small-town performing, and when Avery Dawson’s label sent them out again, they’d insisted on at least some small towns so they could return to what they thought of as their performing roots.
