Page 2 of Betsy
Good riddance.
I grabbed the can of disinfectant from under the bathroom sink and marched toward the sound booth like an armed assailant. Maybe I’d douse myself while I was at it. I did feel rather germy.
I retrieved my wireless earbuds from my pocket and placed the speakers in my ears. I needed a reset. A reminder of why I was in this industry in the first place.
I needed the music. Unadulterated. Pure.
A few swipes of my phone and a solo guitar alternating the arpeggiated chords of C major and A minor—the intro of “Hallelujah”—tunneled its way through my ear canal to that place deep within me that music alone could touch. Everything calmed. The air, my breath. My eyes slid shut and my lungs expanded. Everything that had felt wrong suddenly felt right.
No one was in the studio, so it was safe. To not hold back. To let the music in. To let it fill me and then release it back into the world again on the strands of my vocal cords. I let the music move me. Feel me. Change me. Then I put all the emotion and heart the composition had collected into each of the lyrics. Into every rise and every fall. Until I felt equally spent and revived by the lasthallelujah.
The silence cracked with the sound of applause. I whipped around, my pulse pounding like a taiko drum, the reverberation ripples of adrenaline coursing through my system. I held the can of Lysol out in front of me, my finger on the trigger.
A man stood just inside the door. He’d been smiling when I first turned, but now his face froze as he eyed me and my germophobic weapon.
That’s right. Be afraid. I have an aerosol spray can, and I’ll use it in a heartbeat.
“Who are you and what do you want?” I closed one eye and peered down the barrel of the jet stream.
He looked dangerous. Not in theI’m robbing you, give me all your moneysense, but in the way his grin lifted slightly higher on the left, the lopsidedness instantly disarming. Or the way his eyes had a calmness about them. They could easily lure an unsuspecting woman in and then convince her of anything.
My grip on the can tightened.
“My name is Asher North.” His voice reached across the room and enveloped me like a warm blanket.
One I immediately shrugged off.
If I’d had spidey-sense, it would have been tingling right then. All my intuition said to stay on guard. This guy was hazardous, to me specifically. Not my physical person—I lowered the Lysol can—but he could hurt me in ways that sometimes never healed.
“If you’re selling something, I’m not buying.” I gave him a look that had sent more-hardened guys running the other direction.
“You have a beautiful singing voice,” he said like I wasn’t glaring a hole in the middle of his chest. He shook his head in amazement. “I’ve never heard anything like it. The way you…” His voice trailed off, his head shaking again like he couldn’t come up with a few adjectives to describe how I sounded.
I stared at him. I was sure he expected me to thank him for the compliment, but it was more likely we’d see snow here in Southern California in July before that happened.
He lowered his hands slowly, and I noticed the closely trimmed nails and calluses on his fingertips. A guitarist.
“Do you sing in a band?” His voice was doing that reaching thing again.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “No.”
“Solo artist?”
“No.”
“But you are a professional singer.” He said it so matter-of-factly. As if any other conclusion would be out of the question.
I smiled. “No.”
He stilled. Not that he’d been moving in the first place. This was different. I wasn’t sure I would have even noticed except for his sudden change. There was an energy about him. Maybe how his voice seemed to move the air particles in the room. How the timbre could reach inside a person and stir something deep within them too. Probably what made me wary about him in the first place. But now that the energy wasn’t moving, a desperation began to claw at my center. The stillness was almost more than I could take.
Then he blinked. His grin returned.
I let out a long exhale. Just as I’d known what Tate would say before he said it, I knew what the next words out of this Asher North’s mouth would be.
“No.” I cut him off.
His brows furrowed. “But I haven’t even said anything.”
