Delaney
Hulking at the top of a steep driveway, Travis’s house was a contemporary behemoth. Beyond a pair of dark, oversized doors, the all-white decor served as a stark backdrop to the ridiculously beautiful people casually clumped in small groups everywhere I turned. My borrowed heels clicked on the marble floor as I tagged behind Piper, who entered the house like she owned it and was now making a beeline for the open doors leading to a back terrace and infinity pool.
More people were outside, including Travis, who was holding court from an oversized sectional. I hung back, feeling a lock of hair become ensnared in the lip gloss I’d applied using the overhead mirror in Piper’s car. Prying it loose, I nervously tucked the wayward strand behind my ear and watched as Piper edged around the back of the couch, resting a manicured hand lightly on Travis’s shoulder until he acknowledged her presence by leaning back, his head cocked expectantly to the side.
She whispered something in his ear and discreetly pointed in my direction. Travis looked up, his eyes locking onto mine immediately. He smiled and I reluctantly smiled back.
Maybe tonight wouldn’t be so bad.
Piper reappeared at my elbow. “Come on, let’s get a drink.” She had been significantly nicer to me on the drive here, as if she’d resigned herself to her fate and decided to make the best of the situation. Or maybe Travis had picked up on the mean girl sarcasm after all and told her to quit it.
A bar had been set up at the far end of the pool, staffed by a bartender in a tight black T-shirt and dark jeans. Piper flashed an aloof half smile at him, his lowly worker-bee status apparently deserving only a brief glimpse of her shiny teeth. “Two mojitos please,” she ordered, not bothering to ask if I liked the minty Cuban cocktail. As he mixed the drinks, she turned to me, her voice hushed. “Listen, be nice to Travis. If he likes you, he’s definitely a good guy to know.”
I frowned. “What if I don’t like him?”
Piper blanched, as if the idea were so outlandish she’d never considered it. Then she took our drinks from the bartender’s outstretched hand and walked toward a tree glittering from the soft white lights wrapped around its trunk and branches. I followed. “Don’t be silly. Everyone likes Travis.”
“I pay her to sing my praises at every opportunity, you know.” A silvery voice appeared inches from my ear.
I turned, instinctively knowing there was a grain of truth to the deceptively casual comment. “I guess Piper deserves a raise, then,” I said.
Travis offered a small nod to Piper, who quickly handed me my drink. “So, you and Piper were friends in school?” he asked, turning his attention back to me.
I spied my friend quietly slinking away. “Not really,” I answered honestly. “But Bronxville is a small town. I guess you could say we were all friends.”
He was wearing jeans, but Travis’s compact, muscular frame begged for a suit. “I’m from back East, too. Yonkers though. Not quite the same as Bronxville.”
No. If Bronxville were an honor student, Yonkers was its troubled, dropout cousin. The invisible border that separated the neighboring towns may as well have been a gaping divide the size of the Grand Canyon. “What brought you out here?”
“UCLA has great weather and, at the time anyway, the cheapest tuition.” He shrugged dismissively. “One thing led to another and I never left.”
I lifted my chin. “Looks like you made a good choice.”
Another shrug. “When you do what I do, L.A. is the place to be.”
The lights suspended in the tree overhead trembled as a breeze gusted, their dancing glow sinister on Travis’s face. “Piper said you were an agent. A super agent, actually.”
He crooked a smile. “Said like someone from my PR team.”
I took the last sip of my mojito, the mint sharp on my tongue. “So, what’s your super power?”
He waited for the ice to settle back in my drink. “I fix problems.”
Gesturing at his huge house and stunning view, I trilled out a high-pitched laugh, expecting Travis to elaborate. When he didn’t, I said, “So do exterminators, but I doubt they can afford a place like this.”
Travis looked out over the Hollywood Hills, offering a self-assured chuckle. “We both deal with pests, but I charge a hell of a lot more than Terminix.”
I looked around for Piper. Where was she and why had she left me alone with her boss? “Do you represent anyone I know?”
His chuckle graduated to a belly laugh, flashing teeth so white they couldn’t have been real. “Probably.”
“Oh, um, cool.” Jesus. What was I doing here? I hated small talk and big parties.
Travis eyed me with open interest. “So, what brought you out West?”
“I guess I just needed a change,” I answered, sounding slightly strangled. After my father’s conviction, I’d packed up and kept moving west, working at bars and restaurants just long enough to afford another bus ticket. The Pacific Ocean had put a halt to my travels. Any farther and I’d need a plane ticket. Of course, I could have changed direction, gone north or south. But I couldn’t decide between the two, so rather than make any decision at all, I had stayed in L.A.
“Did you get it?”
Travis’s question interrupted my thoughts. “What?”
“Change,” he said, his eyes narrowing at the edges, focusing on me to the exclusion of everything around us.
Change. From Ivy League coed to an L.A. waitress just trying to get by? Yeah, you could say that. “I did,” I said.
“I’ve never met a waitress who wasn’t just biding her time, figuring out their next step. Tell me, Delaney, what’s yours?”
I didn’t have a next anything. I was trapped in the past, unsure I deserved a future at all. My lips tightened, and I took a half step back, suddenly suspicious of Travis’s perfectly shaved pate and dark, piercing eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
Travis gave a small sigh. “Maybe I don’t.” Turning on his heel, he walked back toward the group he’d been talking with earlier, smoothly reclaiming his seat as if he’d never left.
Shane
I pulled up to Travis’s house late, after midnight. Not because I had anything better to do. Just that I didn’t want to arrive before my girl. For the next few months, anyway. I didn’t know her name yet, or what she looked like, although Travis knew what I liked. Dark hair, light eyes, and curves that made me believe, for at least a few minutes at a time, that life wasn’t all sharp corners and jagged edges.
Travis’s parties were always a scene, and although I loved the stage, I hated crowds. Hours passed like minutes in a cramped recording studio, but even the thought of being trapped in conversations with people I didn’t know—or want to know—sent a shiver of revulsion sprinting across nerves already stretched to the point of breaking.
I’d been to Travis’s house so many times it should have felt like a second home to me. Then again, I didn’t know what home felt like. Never had, really. Was it a place, a concept? I had a house of my own now, but to me the Malibu bungalow was nothing more than a five-million-dollar assemblage of windows, steel beams, doors, and drywall. And a view I’m told is priceless, whatever that means. But home? I’d ruined any chance of that long ago.
Parking on the street, I kept my head down and hugged the shadows. I didn’t bother heading for the front door. Instead, my feet crunched on mulch as I walked along the perimeter of Travis’s backyard, just beyond reach of the spotlights popping up from the ground at odd intervals between trees, meticulously arranged to create intermittent patches of darkness for anyone seeking privacy without actually leaving the party.
Not surprisingly, there were people everywhere. In the front, in the back, inside the house. Unless you were one of the lucky few on his star-studded client list, scoring an invite to a Travis Taggert party was a coveted prize, and he always assembled an interesting mix of people. Plenty of celebrities and their associated hangers-on, the moneymen who made their careers possible and the press and bloggers who stroked their egos with one breath and ripped them to shreds in the next. Travis also included people who were still green, still intrigued by the money and fame, by the beauty and allure of it all. People who hadn’t been sidetracked by bad press or good drugs. Yet.
The throng was easily three-quarters female, Travis’s way of stacking the deck in my favor. Would I be tempted to leave the comfort of the shadows tonight? Travis said so, but I wasn’t feeling it. Sighing, I scanned the crowd for my agent, debating whether to say a quick hello before I slipped out the same way I had come. I spotted him standing beside a tree that looked as if it had been caught in an electrified fishnet. He wasn’t alone.
My chest squeezed as I caught sight of the girl he was talking to. She stood out like a tropical fish in a sea of dense algae, and although I didn’t know her name yet, I knew exactly who she was. My girl.
From afar she was strikingly pretty, her skin luminous. I wanted to get closer, determine whether her features were as delicate and finely drawn as instinct told me they would be. The kind of beautiful that pulled you in and held on tight, quelling any desire to escape.
I was good at escaping. Better than good, actually. Maybe the best.
No one had ever been able to hang on to me. Not my father, who’d tried to hold me down and beat the insolence out of me. Or my mother, who’d been so lost inside herself, she could barely make eye contact with me. Not my brother, who wasn’t there when I needed him the most. Not the parents of my best friend, Caleb, who’d let me live with them after my parents died, while I was still in high school. Not the cops who were probably still itching to charge me with Caleb’s murder.
Escape. I knew it well. I was a fucking expert.
Travis pulled away from the girl, and I watched as she took a quick sip from her nearly empty glass, those big eyes sweeping over the crowd like a bewildered Dorothy dropped into Oz. I stepped onto the lawn, soles sinking into soft grass before my mind caught up with my body’s decision to move in. She was wearing a dress I wanted to rip off her with my teeth. Not much bigger than a Band-Aid, it still covered way too much of her creamy skin.
Her back was to me when I found my voice, usually the one constant in my life. As soon as I did, I could feel Shane Hawthorne descending, the persona I’d created, the barrier I needed between me and…everything. Life.
I wore Shane like a geeky teen slipping into the personality of his buff, heroic alter ego in his favorite video game. Shane Hawthorne was my avatar, and everyone thought he was real.
Every girl wanted to fuck Shane Hawthorne.
Every guy wanted to be Shane Hawthorne.
No one more than me.
Delaney
“Not looking to become Travis Taggert’s next client, huh?”
“I think the feeling’s mutual,” I answered, turning around to introduce myself. Except, I had no words. None. Shane Hawthorne, lead singer of Nothing but Trouble, the hottest band on the charts, was standing in front of me. I sucked in a deep breath, my eyes widening in surprise. Holy shit, Shane Hawthorne.
Seriously, I could get lost in his face and enjoy every minute of my journey. Glide across the high plane of his forehead, cartwheel down the sharp angles of his cheekbones, slide along his jaw to land at his mouth. Full lips, slightly crooked at one corner, smiled down at me.
“You’re in the minority, in this town at least. What are you doing here, at Casa Taggert?”
Somehow I managed to pick my jaw up off the flagstone patio and glance around at the people illuminated by the floating lights scattered on the surface of the pool. “To be honest, I have no idea. I’m a friend of a friend. Sort of.”
Up close, Shane’s longish hair was a river of brown, from dusky caramel to burnished mahogany, threaded through with shades of henna, chocolate, and deepest umber. He wore a snug black button-down shirt, setting off his tall, buff physique perfectly, the sleeves rolled up just enough to catch traces of ink on his tanned forearms, leaving me fighting an urge to push aside the fabric and expose everything that remained hidden. I longed for a pocket to stuff my hands into, settling instead for awkwardly wrapping both around my sweating glass.
Shane eyed me curiously, as if he knew I didn’t belong. As if he knew the direction of my wholly inappropriate thoughts. “I guess you’re here for me, then.” A grin spread across his face, punctuated by a sexy-as-hell dimple in his left cheek.
“Me?” I choked. What on earth would Shane Hawthorne want with me? I swallowed thickly, my eyes darting around for Piper. I am so out of my league.
With a hand in the back pocket of his ragged jeans, Shane followed the path of my anxious stare. “Expecting someone?”
My focus snapped back to Shane’s face. “No.” I shook my head. “Sorry. This is just so not me. I don’t wind up at Beverly Hills parties talking to rock stars. I mean, this is crazy.” My fingers twitched. There was no part of him I could look at without wanting to touch—especially the two-day growth of scruff covering his strong jaw, which practically guaranteed goose bumps if it brushed along any part of my anatomy.
“Imagine how I feel.”
I tilted my head. “You?”
“Yeah. I’m usually stuck in a tour bus or chartered plane flying to some city I won’t actually see. But tonight I’m at a Beverly Hills party where I don’t really know anyone, besides my agent and a few industry suits, talking to the most gorgeous girl in the place. Pretty lucky, huh?”
Feeling like a complete idiot, I looked around again. And then I pointed at my collarbone with my index finger. “Me?” I repeated.
Shane threw back his head and laughed. Instantly I wished I could record the sound on my phone so I could play it on repeat. Forever. It was the most delicious noise I’d ever heard. “Yeah, you. Where did you come from, anyway?”
“Bronxville,” I squeaked.
Shane laughed even harder. When he finally got control of himself, he brushed at his eyes. “And do you have a name, or should I just call you Bronx all night?”
All night. “Delaney. Delaney Fraser.” I extended my hand.
“I’m Shane.” Offering his last name would have been redundant. Shane’s fingers closed around mine, the pad of his thumb pressing into the center of my palm.
I nearly groaned. Please don’t let go, ever. “Would I sound like a groupie if I said I already knew that?”
He quirked a rich, sable brow. “Are you a groupie?”
I shook my head. “No. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a fan.” Since high school, when lusting after rock stars I’d never meet was safer than talking to boys I encountered in my real life, who eyed my chubby body and frizzy hair with barely disguised revulsion.
“I do love my fans.” Shane’s throaty growl pulsed in my ears, and for a moment I let myself believe he might be flirting with me. But then I looked down, a blush staining my cheeks as a sea of uncomfortable memories rushed in. Get a grip, Delaney. Why would Shane Hawthorne ever be interested you? All those years of awkwardness, of feeling so uncomfortable I almost couldn’t bear it, were still trapped inside me even though my reflection in the mirror had changed.
Shane lifted his other hand to my jaw, pulling my gaze back to him. “Don’t do that.”
His fingertips were hot, controlling my blood flow like some kind of stylus. I could feel it rushing to the surface of my skin, surging to meet Shane’s touch. “Do what?” I asked, my voice a ragged whisper.
“Look away from me. I like feeling your eyes on my face.” He balled his hand into a fist against my cheek, stroking my flesh with his knuckles, each touch erasing a tiny piece of the self-conscious teen living inside me.
Knowing this was probably the last time I would be so close, I studied Shane. Memorized his face. His lips, I decided, were almost too full to belong on a man’s face. Tried to imagine how they would feel on mine.
“If you keep looking at my mouth like that, I won’t be held responsible for what happens next.” Shane’s comment interrupted my perusal.
Color me gullible, but I couldn’t help myself. “What would happen?” I breathed. There was a moment before Shane answered, a moment when I lost myself in his eyes. His pupils were black flies caught within a whorl of amber. My heart thudded inside my chest, trapped by the darkness I saw within the depths of his gaze. Shane Hawthorne wasn’t just some vapid one-dimensional celebrity. He bristled with intensity. And even in the center of a Beverly Hills party, punctuated by popping corks and trying-too-hard laughs, waves of danger rolled off Shane’s broad shoulders, swirling around me like the chilly waters of the Pacific.
I should have been scared. I was, actually. But not scared off. I wanted to meld my body against Shane’s taut length, potential groupie status be damned. Desire filled my lungs, every breath a heady cocktail, and I swayed toward him, catching myself just before crashing into the perfectly carved statue wrapped in tight jeans and a shirt that did nothing to hide his rippling abs.
Shane stood still, watching the flicker of emotions on my face with interest. “Maybe we should go somewhere else. Somewhere with a lot less people. Somewhere we could both be wearing a lot less clothes.”
Pulling my eyes away from Shane’s blistering gaze, I looked down at the trail of feverish skin exposed by the plunging neckline of my borrowed dress. “I don’t think I could wear anything less and still be considered dressed.” I didn’t even recognize myself right now. Was I flirting?
His laugh was a caress, the rich timbre soothing nerves rubbed raw by his overwhelming presence. “That’s my point. Exactly.”
Breath punched from my lungs and I staggered back a step. Shane didn’t mince words, did he? I raised my face back to his, just as he reclaimed the distance I’d put between us.
“Let’s go,” he added, one of his hands reaching out to cup my elbow.
A shiver tore through me at Shane’s blunt command, reality hitting hard from the shock of his palm sliding against my skin. Instinct made me step back, out of reach. I didn’t have room in my life for Shane Hawthorne. He was a distraction I couldn’t afford. There was only one man I should be focused on right now, and he was sitting in a jail cell. Because of me. I was the only one who knew he was innocent, except he’d made me promise not to say anything. I was free because of him, but feeling alive—smiling and laughing and having fun. It had been three years since any of those things felt appropriate, or even possible.
Tonight, I did feel alive. And I was smiling and laughing and having fun. God, it felt so good. And so wrong.
There was a woman lying in a cold grave tonight whose laugh I would never hear again.
What Shane was offering—more of this, of him, of feeling this way—terrified me. Spending the night with Shane Hawthorne, or even just a few hours, would either be knock-my-socks-off amazing, or a bitter disappointment. Either way, when he walked away from me without a second glance, I’d be crushed.
I had reached my quota of broken dreams already. One more might break me.
“Sorry. That’s not who I am.” I forced the words out through gritted teeth, the quivering kaleidoscope of butterflies in my stomach launching a winged protest. I’d already started to walk away when Shane grabbed my arm, pulling me so close I could feel the washboard of muscles ridging his abdomen. His touch seared my skin, melting my willpower.
“Who are you?” he whispered in my ear. Shane’s breath was hot along my neck, sending ripples of need racing in all directions before making their way to one spot in particular. Throbbing en masse.
My resolve wavered, desperate to claim the promise shining from Shane’s eyes. The promise that he’d outshine everything in my world for just a few minutes. That he’d make me forget about the wrecking ball that had slammed into my life and shattered everything I’d ever believed in. But this kind of reaction, just from a touch…No. Any more and I’d go into toxic shock.
I glanced around, not wanting to make a scene, wrenching my arm from Shane’s grasp with a small grunt and forcing words past my lips that left a bitter taste in my mouth. “No one you want to know.”
Piper was talking to someone on the other side of the pool, but she broke away when she saw me striding toward her. “If you don’t get me out of here right now, I’m going to walk home,” I hissed, passing her.
“What? Why?” Piper responded immediately, but it was too late. I blew right by, heading for the front door, but not before catching her quick backward glance at Travis, an anxious, apologetic pull to her lips.
“Delaney, wait!”
Halfway down the driveway, I spun around. “Are you going to take me home or not?”
“Jesus Christ, slow down. You’re not a prisoner, for God’s sake.” Piper moved as fast as her stilettos would allow. “I’m not exactly dressed for a sprint, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
I released an angry breath. “Sorry, I just…That party wasn’t exactly my speed.”
Fishing a set of keys from her Prada clutch, Piper unlocked the car and opened her door. “I saw you talking to Shane Hawthorne. Most girls I know wouldn’t let themselves be unglued from his side, let alone run away from him. What happened between you two?”
I slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door, her deliberately casual tone scratching at my last nerve. “Nothing.” Nothing except he mentioned getting naked…and it might have been the best idea I’ve ever heard.
Piper glanced over, arching one perfectly waxed eyebrow. Waiting for a straight answer.
“What?” How could I possibly explain the effect Shane Hawthorne had just had on me? I was having an allergy attack, my skin itching with need for a man whose interest in me didn’t go beyond what was between my legs. Or maybe it was because I was certain he was already hitting on any one of the gorgeous girls back at the party. Girls who probably wouldn’t be dumb enough to turn down a night with Shane Hawthorne.