My brother didn’t mess around. As soon as I told him I’d be staying in Vancouver after the wedding, I saw the musical gears turning in his head. Not that I’d decided to stay for musical reasons, but it was a little flattering how quickly he set out to woo me.

Yes, I’d planned to leave right after the wedding, but that was before Brody decided to dry-hump me within an inch of an orgasm.

I’d made my decision at brunch the morning after. When I’d walked into the lodge, hungover, just hoping to fade into the background and maybe force down some French toast without barfing, I instead found Brody and Amanda gone and everyone else staring at me as my brother raised a toast to me. He then announced, in front of everyone, that he and Katie had decided to postpone their honeymoon so he could stay in town and spend some time with his sister. “And just maybe,” he’d added casually, “we’ll write some music together.”

To which everyone went nuts with excitement.

Yeah. No pressure.

I’d looked around at all those hopeful and expectant faces and told my brother, in front of everyone, that I could stay for ten days. After that, I had a photo shoot in L.A. I was committed to. And while I loved my brother, the truth was that I was only partly staying for him.

The other part was because I just couldn’t leave things the way they were with Brody—which was all kinds of fucked up.

My memories of that night were… unclear. But I remembered enough. I remembered rubbing myself off on the stiff package in his jeans, ready to blow up like a load of fireworks dropped in a volcano. And I remembered what he said to me, too. About me breaking his heart.

I also remembered, more or less, how I’d handled that information, and it was pretty cringe-worthy.

Did I really throw Christy Rempel in his face?

What was I, fifteen years old?

So yes, I was staying, because I had to talk to him. I had no idea how I was going to do it, to work up the courage to start that conversation, though. The I know that you know that I’ve fucked up, but here’s what you don’t know conversation.

Hardest conversation I’d ever have to have.

Luckily I had ten days to figure it out, and by the looks of things I could easily fill those ten days with musical distraction. Because apparently my brother was planning to make full use of those ten days—and every available tool in his arsenal to persuade me to write some music with the band.

The night after the wedding, as I arrived back in Vancouver with Roni and got settled into the guest bedroom of her condo, Jesse sent an incredible acoustic guitar over for me to play on: a brand new Gibson Hummingbird Vintage, which was kind of a monster. A powerhouse of an acoustic, it was probably too much guitar for me—and not like my brother didn’t know it. Clearly, it was something for me to grow into.

Something for me to write new music on.

The next morning, he sent Maggie over with a car to drive me out to Dirty’s new rehearsal space for a little jam session with him and Zane.

Cool, right?

Especially when the new rehearsal space turned out to be an old church outside of town. When my brother mentioned “going to church,” I just thought he was being cute, referring to the religious nature of his passion for music.

Apparently not.

The building was maybe a century old or so, smallish, originally built of gray stone that had seen better days. A lot of the exterior was in disrepair. Inside, beyond the entrance vestibule, there was the big main room, along with a small office, a washroom, and a tiny renovated kitchen. Most of the original wooden pews had been removed, but there were still three rows of them at the back. Some of the walls were partly deconstructed. There was exposed wood everywhere, a high arched ceiling, and a big, gorgeous stained glass window, which, like the rest of the place, had been hastily repaired over the decades but still held a kind of timeless, awe-inspiring beauty.

Where there would have been some sort of altar there was now just a large, low stage area blanketed with worn Persian rugs and lined with an intimidating wall of Marshall amps. Other music gear was strewn around, including several of my brother’s guitars and one of Dylan’s massive drum kits.

Best of all, the church sat on a corner lot butted up against an auto wrecker’s lot and a stretch of farmland on the other side; no neighbors to complain about the noise.

“It’s fantastic,” I told my brother as he gave me the tour. “How did you get it?”

“Brody found it for us last summer,” he said. “Apparently it hasn’t been used as a church for about two decades. It’s a bit of a drive, but I like it. I just make sure I go off rush hour and use the time to clear my head, work on writing and stuff.”

“What happened to the other place?” The band’s old rehearsal space was a studio right in the middle of town, not far from my brother’s house.

“Gave it to Katie,” he said with a grin. “She’s using it as her art studio. But we moved out here before that happened anyway. Wanted a bigger space.” Then he plugged in a black-on-black Fender Strat and let his fingers fly—and raw, twisted, gorgeous music roared out of the amps behind him like some pissed-off beast awakening from its beauty sleep.

Holy hell.

My brother was a total rock god.

I plopped back on a stool to listen as warmth flooded my chest, like I’d just downed a shot of good whiskey. I had memories of Jesse rocking out when we were kids. He was good then; really good. He’d always been a gifted guitarist, but he was better now than he’d ever been.

I could hear it right away.

I could hear how his playing style had developed over the years, matured… his sound mellowing out around the edges and growing more substantial in the middle, fattening up… and it wasn’t just the better, more expensive equipment. I didn’t even know how to describe it, exactly. All I knew for sure was that when my brother took a stage and started working a guitar, my hair blew back and even I could see why girls threw themselves at him, half-naked, at his shows. Jesse had matured along with his music, and my once-annoying but cute big brother had grown into a rather beautiful, force-to-be-reckoned-with type of man.

I loved watching him play.

I’d seen him in concert over the years, here or there, but I’d always been careful to stay away from his shows unless I was one hundred percent sure Brody wouldn’t be there. Which meant I missed out on many more shows than I ever attended. I’d also missed out on a lot of hang time with my brother, the time we might have spent together if I wasn’t always so nervous about running into Brody. But today, treated to a private show and a front row seat, watching him play while his wedding ring gleamed on his finger, I really got to see and hear the man and the musician my brother had become.

There was also something fresh, new and alive in his playing, like I really hadn’t heard since we were kids, and I was pretty sure that had a lot to do with Katie. My brother was crazy in love; I could feel a kind of unbridled bliss dripping from his fingertips as he played. And I couldn’t stop smiling.

“Shit, brother.” Jesse stopped playing as Zane walked in, a big grin on his face to match my own. “Is it okay that shit gave me a boner?”

“Since when do you care if anyone’s okay with your dick being up?” my brother said, throwing him a look. “And if it is, don’t sit next to my sister.”

Zane didn’t sit next to me. He sat in a pew, next to Maggie, who ignored him as she worked on her laptop. A short while later, when Zane joined Jesse and I onstage to jam and he promptly made the mic his bitch, belting out his sexy, angsty version of The Beatles’ “I’m a Loser,” Maggie put on coffee and settled in with a mug.

Jude was there too, but he was in and out of the church, on his phone a lot. If he wasn’t directly working in his capacity as Dirty’s head of security—which probably kept him busy enough, what with managing a security team to cover the asses of four mega-famous rock stars—he was working something else. I was pretty sure when he was in town he did work of some kind for his brother’s motorcycle club. And maybe when he was out of town, too. I didn’t ask. I’d learned many years ago not to ask those kinds of questions. But I was used to having them all around—Jude, Piper, all the security. The constant entourage. And I loved that they all had my brother’s back. That he was so loved. Jude had been a permanent fixture in our lives since my brother met him at age ten, and Zane since a couple of years before that.

This was my brother’s tribe. My tribe.

I’d never realized how much that was true until I sat back in an old church and listened to Zane and Jesse jam on a bunch of old songs; just stuff they used to play together for fun in Dolly’s garage when we were kids, or around a fire as we grew up. CCR’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?,” The Box Tops’ “The Letter,” Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” I played along on my fancy new guitar, just keeping up wherever I could. Which wasn’t really happening, but I had fun trying.

Where I was more useful was adding my backup vocals to the mix—and generally fangirling over my brother and Zane. Because seriously. These two got together to make music, it was like clash of the Titans. Just sit your ass down, try to keep up, and try not to get slaughtered by falling debris. The two of them together had always had crazy, off-the-hook energy, and chemistry through the roof.

Not only were they an extraordinary musical match, but their lifelong rivalry added an edge to everything they did. They were constantly competing, as far as I knew, for everything under the sun—other than women, which was probably a really, really good thing, and the only reason they’d managed to keep it together as a band—their friendship riding that delicate, serrated edge between soulmate and nemesis. It was kind of a love-hate-love thing.

They loved each other.

They hated each other.

They loved each other more.

By late afternoon, we were all caught up in the music, playing original stuff for each other, bits of whatever we’d each been working on since we last jammed together, which in my case, was a hell of a long time ago. They played me the few songs they’d already written for the new album, which were pretty killer, though I was eager to hear them played again when the whole band was here. For my part, I really hadn’t been writing much these last few years, or at least I thought I hadn’t been. But once I’d pulled out my phone and started sharing all the little bits of lyrics, poetry and general ramblings I’d been making notes of whenever the mood struck, there was a lot more of it than I’d thought.

“It’s mostly a bunch of verbal vomit,” I told them. “You know, shit I come up with in the shower to entertain myself.” I’d just finished singing them some bits and pieces that I thought I might develop into a full song, but I hadn’t yet. “I don’t really write full songs anymore. Other than when Jesse held me in a room at gunpoint and ordered me to write them for his solo album.”

“Right,” Zane said, his expression thoughtful. “Same thing he did to get Katie to marry him, I guess.”

Yeah. Childish burns like that… all day long. My brother just threw a drum stick at him.

“Seriously, little sis, that stuff is shit-hot.”

“Yeah,” my brother agreed. “You stick around a while, we’ll make some of that into songs.”

They stared at me expectantly. All of them. Jesse. Zane. Even Maggie looked up from her laptop, her face lit up in the glow of the screen, a pretty little blip in the dark at the back of the church. The sun had gone down a while ago and she’d lit candles for us; there was a whole mess of them burning all over the stage, sending shadows up the walls and giving the stained glass a moody, almost romantic look.

And not like I hadn’t noticed the feast she’d brought in for dinner or the wine and cold beer that had been rolled out, or the joints that had been offered my way. Obviously, what Dirty had going on here was the perfect setting for writing their next kickass rock album—and yet they’d been struggling writing it, coming up with only three semi-finished songs in the last several months. So I knew what this little jam session was all about.

They were trying to seduce me.

Over the years, Dirty had tried about everything to get me to come back and write with them again. Every member of the band had hounded me about it. Not Elle, not as much as the others; she usually just opted to casually probe the subject whenever we saw each other, and let it drop when I brushed it off. But my brother? Dylan? Even Maggie? Relentless. And Zane? Obsessed. Every time we were both in L.A., he’d find out where I was, drag me back to his ubermansion and force me to listen to whatever they’d been working on most recently.

Please, Jessa, he’d beg, a big, charming grin on his face—the kind a Viking must’ve worn just before plundering some defenseless village. Don’t make me sing these shitty lyrics I wrote.

And if I was any other girl—one who hadn’t known him since I was four years old and would always see him as an obnoxious big brother—that grin probably would’ve worked. Because it wasn’t like I wasn’t at all tempted to write with the band again.

Far from it.

Writing with Dirty was the best thing I’d ever done. It was the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do.

But writing with Dirty meant working with Brody. And I just didn’t know how that could ever work.

Consider me dead to you.

Well, clearly, he wasn’t dead to me. Because Brody Mason would never be dead to me.

But after the other night, when we’d made out and then he’d stormed out, I really wasn’t sure how much better or worse off we now were than when he’d uttered those five horrible words to me.

Maybe… one step forward, three steps back?

But of course, my brother had no idea about any of that.

“Let’s do this again tomorrow,” he said when I remained silent. It wasn’t really a question.

“Definitely,” Zane agreed. Also not a question. “First, though, we should throw some of those lyrics down on that track we were running through last week. You know the one.” He and my brother exchanged a conspiratorial look. “I smell a tasty hook on that last line Jessa just sang. We’ve gotta twist that shit right into the chorus.”

“Like this?”

And then my brother was off, fingers flying up and down his fretboard as he ripped into some new song I hadn’t yet heard. When Zane kicked in with the vocals I didn’t know the words. But sure enough, he threw in some of my new lyrics and what started to sound a hell of a lot like a song—a catchy, edgy Dirty song—took shape. It started out kind of dirty-bluesy… then Zane laid my words into the much heavier, raunchier chorus, indulging himself with a Robert Plant-esque scream that went straight to my girl parts and probably cracked a few sections of stained glass.

Jesus.

If I just closed my eyes and pretended it wasn’t my family up there…

Wet panties. Guaranteed.

I kept my eyes open.

They played it again from the top, and again, until Jude slipped into the back of the church to listen and Maggie rose from her seat to stand next to me and watch; I’d cleared my ass off the stage when the guys started rocking out, because we were now deep in Dirty territory and I didn’t belong up there.

When they finally finished, there was about a minute of silence as we all stood there, staring at each other. My ears were ringing. Then Zane threw his head back and laughed, his white teeth gleaming in the candlelight.

“What the hell was that?” Maggie demanded.

“That,” Zane said into the mic, “was our next single, Maggie May.” Then he did a dramatic mic-drop and jumped down off the stage to tussle my hair.

Next single… no shit.

Something had just happened on that stage, while Zane belted out my words to Dirty’s music. Something I hadn’t been a part of in far, far too long. I wasn’t blind to it and I wasn’t immune.

Magic had just happened. And it had me in tears.

The guys didn’t judge. They just let me have my cry as they hugged me. Zane was first. “I said it once, I’ll say it twice and as many times as you need to hear it,” he told me. “It’s good to have you home.”

Then my brother wrapped me in his arms. For a moment, he didn’t say a thing. Then he whispered, “Remember this.”

Then the guys went outside to smoke a joint. Maggie went with them without a word, just a small smile in my direction… leaving me alone in the aftermath of that magic vibe.

I climbed up onstage and stared up at the gorgeous stained glass window for a while as the candlelight and shadow danced across it, hearing that new song in my head. The way Zane sang it… so different than I would’ve sung it, and yet… like it’d been written just for his voice.

Maybe it had.

When I finally turned around, Brody was there. He was leaning on the wall near the back of the church, watching me.

“Hey,” I said, startled. “How long have you been here?”

“Since you left.”

I let go a small sigh as my shoulders dropped. And just like that, all the joy, all the hope, all the warmth and the love and the kinship I’d felt here in this incredible old building, embraced by a few of my old friends—my family—making music with them again, making magic… it all evaporated in an instant.

Just like I’d always feared—no; like I’d always known it would.

I was left standing onstage alone, as if I were on trial, staring across a very empty room at a man I’d once abandoned, with no idea how to brave the chasm that lay between us.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t wanted to talk to him after our blow-out in the bathroom, but he hadn’t exactly made it easy. By the time I’d gotten my drunk ass out of the bath he was gone, and Roni was waiting in my room instead, along with my Zeppelin shirt, rescued from the dock.

I hadn’t seen Brody since.

I’d thought a lot about what I might say when I did see him, though. It was pretty much all I’d thought about. I’d even tried to write down everything that was in my head and somehow organize it. Simplify it. Get to the heart of the matter.

I’d thought about all the times I’d done this before, all the letters I’d written to him over the years but never sent.

I’d thought about what might happen when I finally told him what happened all those years ago. But the fact was I didn’t know what would happen. That was the hardest part; the uncertainty.

I had no idea how he’d react.

And this was the hardest part.

Other than Brody, I’d only ever gotten involved with men I could predict. Men I felt like I could control. Brody I could never control, and that had always scared me. I still had no control over him, and I knew it. If he’d wanted me to, I would’ve come right there on that bathroom counter, in his arms; if he hadn’t stopped it, I would’ve given him whatever he asked of me. At least, whatever he’d asked of my body.

I wasn’t a screwed-up kid with a million reasons to say no anymore.

But he had stopped it.

Because clearly, Brody was never going to let himself get carried away over me—even in my underwear, with my legs spread, wrapped around him and ready to go.

You drove me fucking crazy.

Brody had fallen for me once, but it was in his stance now, in his body language, in the look on his face and the way he looked at me: he was never going to make that mistake again.

I half-expected him to turn and walk out of the church, but he just stood there leaning on the wall, staring at me.

“You left,” I said, carefully, “after the wedding. I didn’t see you at brunch.”

“Amanda had to be back in the city.”

“Oh.” I nodded, pretending like hell that the mention of his girlfriend didn’t turn my stomach. “Right.” I knelt down and got busy putting my new guitar away in its pink-lined case.

Brody walked up the aisle toward me. He stood in front of the stage and looked up at me, hands in his pockets… looking so much like that boy I’d first met on the playground it made my heart thud.

“Just don’t fuck around, okay?”

I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t make them think you’re coming back, that you’re staying, when you aren’t,” he said, his voice flat. “Don’t start writing songs with them you’re not gonna finish and don’t let them get attached to the idea of having you around.”

Okay; that got my back up.

I wasn’t one of his clients. I wasn’t paying for his advice and I sure as hell didn’t ask for it.

Brody could freeze me out, hate me if he needed to; that was his prerogative. But who was he to give me orders? Who was he to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with the band? With my own brother? He was their manager, yes. But I didn’t need his permission to hang out with them, to write a few songs.

They’d be my songs, too.

I stood and crossed my arms over my chest, giving back all the attitude he was giving me. “You telling me that as their friend, or as their manager? Or just out of the good of your heart?”

“I’m telling you that as a man who knows what it’s like to be left by you.”

With that, he turned and walked back up the aisle toward the exit.

Oh, damn.

Low blow.

I hopped down from the stage, going after him. “They told me you found this place for them?”

He turned back to me. “So?”

“So… it’s amazing. Perfect.” I met him partway up the aisle. “You always did know what was best for them. You’ve been a great manager to them, and a great friend. You should be proud of everything you’ve accomplished together. But… that doesn’t mean you have a right to tell me where I fit in, just because you give a shit and you think that makes you boss. If the band wants to write with me… if I want to write with them… you’ve got no right.”

“Actually,” he said grimly, “I do. It’s my fucking job. A job I’ve been doing every day while you’ve been gone. A job I’d do even if they never paid me. That’s how much of a shit I give.”

He got closer and looked me right in the eye, and I felt that magnetic pull between us, overwhelming. His eyes were dark and hooded and for a confused moment, I thought he might kiss me. And I wanted him to, even though I knew it was a bad idea; because if Brody kissed me again before I confessed all my fucking sins, things were only going to get more complicated. For both of us.

But he didn’t kiss me.

“And for the record,” he said instead, his voice low, “I’ve advised them against writing with you. I told them you’re unreliable, you’re unstable, and you’re not committed. We’ve been down that road before, with Seth, and we all know how it ends.”

Wow.

That was not flattering. At all. And being compared to Seth felt… unfair. And yet, somehow, exactly what I deserved.

But true or not, it hurt to hear all those unflattering things out of Brody’s mouth. To know that he’d said those things about me to Jesse, Zane, Elle and Dylan.

I opened my mouth to respond, but he wasn’t done.

“This isn’t about you, Jessa. It’s not about me, either. It’s about Dirty. Things are raw with the band right now. With Jesse and Elle’s break up, and their tenth anniversary album and tour around the corner, and now we’re without a rhythm guitarist, again. They’ve got enough to deal with. They don’t need any bullshit from you.”

“Wait. What do you mean? What happened to Paulie?”

“Paulie’s out.” Brody rubbed his hand over his face, looking weary. Suddenly I recognized that dark look in his eyes, and it had little to do with wanting to kiss me. “His wife’s been diagnosed with some shitty rare cancer. He’s dropping everything to get her through treatment.”

“OhmyGod.” The words came out of my mouth in a blurred, pained breath.

“I just got the call. Came to tell the guys. Look,” he said, sounding beyond tired, “this is gonna take the wind out of everyone’s sails.”

“Yeah.” I hugged myself, suddenly cold. The church was drafty, and that warm and fuzzy adrenalin buzz of playing with the guys? Long gone. “I understand. Just let me know what I can do to help? Please.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, looking me in the eye again. “Except leave now if that’s what you’re gonna do.”

Then he turned and walked out.