Chapter Eight

“Pizza is here!”

Instruments dropped and seats squealed as Isaac’s bandmates and crew jumped to their feet and rushed the poor pizza guy, who’d probably thought this was a regular run. Not with these guys—they loved their pizza. Isaac trailed in their wake, slipping the guy a fifty for surviving the swarm of locusts that had just picked him clean. “Thanks, mate.”

The man’s eyes went wide. “Y-you’re h-h-him,” he sputtered.

A selfie and autograph were small prices to pay for fame, especially when someone was as enthusiastic—and polite—as this guy was. A few minutes later Isaac was filling his plate from one of the four extra pizzas he always added to their orders just in case.

Clinton and Tyler congregated in the sound room with their engineer and his assistants. Matt and Jordan began a debate on the commercial viability of the latest boy band that had recently released their first hit single. Isaac set his pizza-filled plate on the small table next to the keyboard in the rehearsal room, his already quarter-empty beer following as he sat behind the instrument. His smashed acoustic guitar had been replaced with his second favorite Taylor, propped on a stand across the room, but it was only one of several instruments he played. He’d had piano lessons as a child, as all his ultra-wealthy peers had, and the rest had come to him simply by picking up whatever he was interested in and starting to tinker. While Oliver had moaned and groaned his way through choir practice from the time they were young boys in primary school, Isaac had excelled at singing and often won lead roles in school musicals and concerts. Sitting at the keyboard felt like coming home; music was his home. Maybe that’s why its absence hurt so much now.

“Hey!” Jordan’s shout broke Isaac out of the dark memories the song always brought back. He glanced across the room to see Jordan frantically wiping pizza grease off his fingers with a wadded-up napkin as he loomed threateningly over Matt. “Get your filthy hands off my bass. You’ll give it an STD, you fucking pervert!”

Matt laughed uproariously at the insult as he passed the bass to his mate. Jordan cradled the instrument lovingly and flipped Matt the bird. Isaac shook his head but couldn’t help grinning. The members of his band were like brothers, and they got along about as well as he imagined brothers did, laughing one minute, punching the fucker beside them the next. Luckily most of them shared the same weird sense of humor and the punches were few—musicians couldn’t afford to screw up their hands. Even better, they performed as well onstage as they did in the rehearsal room.

Eyeing the middle finger directed his way, Matt shot his friend a mock-disgusted look. “No, thanks. You know I don’t swing that way. I’ll keep my fucking and perversion for the ladies.”

Matt was the troublemaker, obviously. And considering what Isaac had seen with the many groupies the man took to bed—or against a wall, a chair, in the greenroom, on the tour bus—pervert was an accurate description. You couldn’t unsee that shit.

“Better watch it,” Clinton warned, wandering through the door to the sound room. Probably scavenging for more pizza given his empty plate. “You don’t want to come back tomorrow and find honey in the case holding your pics.”

It was a valid warning. Matt had coated Tyler’s drumsticks in honey to get back at him for something none of them could even remember anymore. Though really, there didn’t have to be a reason—Matt gave them all equal chances to be punked, just as he gave all female groupies an equal chance to be with him. Their resident man whore and practical joker.

“He ain’t lying,” Matt said, laughing and ducking away from the punch Jordan shot half-heartedly in his direction.

“As long as he keeps the sticky away from my keys,” Clint added, mouth full of pizza. He nodded toward the keyboard where Isaac sat. The instrument was his baby, old and battered but having gone on as many tours as they had. Clinton had been with Isaac the longest, and he was the oldest member of the band, the “wise one” everyone looked up to. As a longtime songwriter, he’d been paired with Isaac when he’d first signed with Strange Eye; they’d gotten along so well that Clint had stayed as a permanent part of the band.

Resting his fingers on the keys, Isaac soaked in the smooth feel of them before beginning the introduction to “Cold Love,” his first number-one single. The song had been written during the period of his life when he’d been homeless. Oh, Grace had let him live on her couch until he’d developed a game plan, cashed in his savings and what he could of his trust, and left for America, but he hadn’t had a true home. And he’d had no way to deal with the losses in his life—his parents, Oliver. So he’d written at least one of those losses into a song.

“Do you ever talk to them?”

Isaac startled. Clint stood in front of him, blocking out the rest of the room, his plate empty of food. He’d been so absorbed in the song, the memories that he hadn’t even heard the other man approach. “Hell, no.”

That was the problem with letting other people close—they knew too much about old wounds. Not that Clint had given him a choice. Like Nick, the man had simply taken his territory in Isaac’s life whether Isaac wanted it or not. And somewhere deep in his soul where he tried not to look, Isaac was glad. Losing people hurt too much, but having no one…that hurt worse.

“Not in five years?” Clint asked.

Longer than that. He dropped his left hand, tapping out the melody line of the chorus to “Cold Love” with his forefinger. “Not since they threw me out.”

As his parents’ only child and heir to the Anschau fortune, he had been groomed to take over the family securities business, to spend his days in boardrooms and offices and hobnobbing with other rich pricks until everything but the mercenary bits of his soul disappeared forever, just like they had with his parents. But Oliver, and later Grace, had kept Isaac’s soul alive.

When Oliver committed suicide, Isaac had made his decision—he would go after his dream, not his parents’. They hadn’t agreed.

And it had been simpler since then to keep everyone at arms’ length.

He glanced up at Clint. The man’s thumb tapped out a rhythm on the table next to the keyboard. “Spit it out, mate,” Isaac said.

A wry smile crossed the older man’s face. “Word has it Tad Dugan came out here to see you.”

Damn the man. Isaac glanced at his empty beer bottle, wishing he had another. “Yeah?”

“He anxious about the new album?”

Who wasn’t at this point? The thought tightened Isaac’s gut, threatening to bring up what little lunch he’d eaten. “He wanted a timeline.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t ready to give him one.”

“You know…” Clint leaned a hip against the table, settling in for what Isaac knew was a round of advice giving he really didn’t want. Clint ignored his groan. “I’ve never seen you like this. I can’t even recall the last time I saw you working on a new song. Something’s up.”

Isaac forced down a swallow of pizza, refusing to choke on it. Their history together made it difficult to hide his total lack of creative inspiration, but that didn’t mean he wanted to talk about it.

“It happens sometimes,” Clint was saying. “All artists have dry spells. And we have been a bit overrun with this tour. Maybe you just need to get laid.”

The pizza lodged in his throat. Tyler walked by with a freshly opened beer, and Clint snagged the bottle from the man’s hand, passing it to Isaac to guzzle down. His laugh made Isaac want to punch him.

“I do not need to get laid,” he croaked when he could breathe again.

“Not what I’ve heard,” Matt crowed nearby. “Seems there’s this tight redhead that’s—”

He’d thrown the empty bottle toward his guitarist before he’d even thought the action through. Luckily Matt was a good catch.

“Yeah, definitely need to get laid,” Tyler agreed.

“Fuck off, the lot of ya,” Isaac growled.

His bandmates wandered toward the half-empty pizza boxes, their jibes about his sex life drifting his way. Pricks. He didn’t need to get laid.

God, no. What he wanted to do with Kennedy wasn’t nearly that simple. This morning, her kiss—he shifted on the stool, his finger fumbling off the keyboard. Restraining her had left the cool, confident woman off balance, and him drowning in the desire to do it again, over and over until they were both too exhausted to try again. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

He’d had plenty of women, some beneath his ropes, some simply beneath him, but it was never more than that, never because he had to have them. Going to Kennedy after he’d talked to Grace had been a compulsion; kissing her had been a drive he couldn’t ignore. He hadn’t wanted her—he’d needed her. That was dangerous for a lot of reasons, but mostly because he shouldn’t want to let her in. One kiss had told him that. If he took her to bed, he wouldn’t be able to get enough. And outside of bed? She was independent and headstrong, the worst kind of woman for him to be interested in. Needing her would be like trying to control water without a cup.

He didn’t need anyone. Not after losing his brother and his life. He couldn’t risk it.

“Look! Just the thought of gettin’ it on has him playing something new.”

What the— He glared at Matt. “What?”

Clinton stepped up beside their guitarist and nodded at the keyboard where Isaac’s fingers still rested on the keys. “What you were just playing. It’s good. What’s the inspiration?”

“I’m tellin’ you, man,” Matt crowed, “it’s the redhead.”

And fuck if the pain in the ass wasn’t right. If he’d been playing something new, Kennedy was the cause; he’d been thinking about her. And yet now, his mind was blank.

An odd mix of emotions—relief that his mind seemed to have generated a new collections of notes, even if he hadn’t been aware of it; shame that he couldn’t remember what he’d played, that he’d lost the spark he so desperately desired—churned in his stomach. He clenched his jaw against the need to lash out. His mates weren’t responsible for his creative block; he was. And as much as it galled him to accept help… “I—” He shook his head. “I’m not sure what I was playing.”

Matt leaned on the nearby table and began humming. “Like this.”

Jordan picked out a couple of notes on his bass, underscoring his bandmate’s song.

Tyler, wandering into the room, began to bob his head and blow across the lip of his beer bottle, adding the faintest whistles to the melody.

“That’s good, Matt.” He picked out a few notes on the keyboard, mimicking the man’s humming. “Again?”

The next album was their livelihood, and the men in this room deserved to succeed just as much as he did. So he swallowed back his pride and worked what they gave him. And tried to accept the fact that, out of control or not, Kennedy might very well be the key to breaking open whatever was locked up inside him.