The buses didn’t pull out until after three a.m. Iris, yawning and bleary-eyed, came to him after she’d talked Dylan and Seger into their bunks. She looked exhausted as she sat across the table from him. He glanced at her over the open lid of his Macbook and pulled the headphones from his ears. He was used to these hours. “You should get some sleep.”

“I guess I need to adapt to the crazy schedule at some point,” she said, scratching at something invisible on the table in front of her. “Better to do it now.”

Yeah, used to these hours or not, he was tired too. Eli imagined he would pass out himself if he got still for two minutes. The hum of the engines was like a lullaby. He sometimes thought he never slept as soundly as when he was on the road, though he imagined most of the people he worked with would call him insane if he said it out loud.

“Can I talk to you about something?” she asked.

Sighing, he shut the Mac’s lid and sat back. What was it now? A new order from Heidi? The boys playing too many video games? It was fucking summer. This was their vacation. “Yeah, shoot.”

“I think one of your band members made a pass at me tonight,” she said tentatively. “It made me very uncomfortable.”

Of course. Fuck. “Quin?” he asked, biting the name out. Motherfucker moved fast.

“Yes, that’s what he said.”

Elijah digested this in silence, chewing the inside of his jaw as she watched him, something like dread in her eyes. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“I know you have this dare going on that I won’t make it two weeks,” she said timidly, “but please don’t let this happen.”

He sat up again, his brows knitted together. “Iris, no matter what, I wouldn’t let someone harass you. I’ll have a talk with him. What did he do exactly?”

“Invited me on his bus. I have an idea that meant more than just going on his bus, though.”

“You’d be right. I don’t doubt the women you saw earlier had been ‘on the bus’ too, and since you turned him down, someone else took your place. He’s the one I mentioned who recently got divorced, not that it was much different when he was married.” It was ten times worse now, though.

Nervously, Iris fiddled with the thin gold band she wore on her right ring finger, twirling it around and around. “Listen, I don’t do well with stuff like this. I’ve . . . had bad experiences. But I don’t want to cause any problems.”

Bad experiences? Eli narrowed his eyes and watched her closely, feeling his lungs seize up. This woman, who so far had been doing a stellar job of putting her obstinate little chin in the air and standing up to him, looked . . . frightened. Here he’d practically been hoping to pawn her off on someone for the duration of the tour, and she was obviously suffering from some past trauma. Jesus Christ. He was going to hell.

He didn’t know where it came from, but something primal, protective, and seething twisted in his chest. “I’ll handle it,” he said firmly. “Don’t worry.”

The relief that crossed her face broke his fucking heart, the realization that she had thought he wouldn’t believe her, or that he would laugh it off. He would’ve thought twenty minutes ago that he didn’t give a damn what she thought about him. But that was unacceptable. He had to do better. He should’ve said something the first time Quin opened his big fucking mouth.

“Thank you,” Iris said, tugging her cardigan tighter around her slim shoulders. “Seriously, thank you so much.” He gave her a nod, and her gaze drifted to his computer. “Are you working on something? Did I interrupt a masterpiece in the making?”

He allowed a crooked grin. “I’m always working on something. But you’re fine. I should get to bed myself. We have to do it all again tomorrow.” The words were absent, his mind churning around other things. Bad experiences. I’ve had bad experiences.

All at once he wanted to put his fucking fist through something. Someone.

Quin might do.

Every guy in the band had knocked the hell out of one of the others at some point in their career. He was getting too old for that shit now, so he couldn’t let it get that far.

“I’m . . . did I upset you?” she asked timidly, and he realized his gaze must be boring a hole through her. He blinked and tore it away. She was so small. So delicate. What sick motherfucker could hurt her?

He wanted to know, but he’d given her absolutely zero fucking reasons to trust him with any of the pain in her history. That she’d had to come to him and admit this much of it must have taken a lot of courage after the way he’d been treating her so far. He looked her in the eyes again. “I’m sorry, Iris.”

Her wing-like brows rose slightly in her pale forehead. “For what?”

“You shouldn’t have to tell me about anything you’ve been through for me to act. I know how Quin is and I should’ve seen this coming.”

She laced her fingers together on the table top, not meeting his eyes. “Like I said, I don’t want to cause problems.”

“You’re not the one causing the problem. He is.” She looked up at him then with so much surprise that he wondered if this had never occurred to her before. Or maybe she was shocked to learn he didn’t harbor as much loyalty for his longtime bandmate as one might think he should. “Have you ever had that friend you just sort of tolerated, but you groan whenever they show up? That’s him. We’ve never been close. The rest of us were friends from high school, but we found him through an ad for a guitarist when we first started jamming in Russell’s garage. He was older than us, and a talented motherfucker. We needed him, but no one ever really liked him. If you want to ask why we pushed for separate buses as soon as we were raking in enough cash, he’s the main reason.”

“But you let him stay in?”

He shrugged, having argued this question with himself and Heidi and others countless times. “He’s a coworker, and you don’t always like your coworkers. We pride ourselves on having stayed together this long with all original members, so as long as he doesn’t fuck up too bad, we don’t rock the boat. And he’s too much of an arrogant asshole to realize not everyone loves him, so he’s not going anywhere himself.”

“What will he do if you confront him, then?”

“Pout about it. It’s happened enough by now for me to know.”

“But he’ll listen?”

“He usually does. To me, anyway.” Another reason he was still around.

She continued to look troubled, her mouth downturned, her lashes low. Below them, the tires continued to hum on the highway. Streetlight swept intermittently through the slats in the blinds, crossing her face. Light and shadow, light and shadow. “That’s good,” she said quietly.

“You don’t have anything to be worried about. Don’t even feel like you have to be around him or be nice to him. Fuck him. Figuratively, of course.” She laughed a little at that, and he felt better hearing the sound. Because he wanted her to feel better; he wanted her to feel safe. At the moment he couldn’t be bothered to investigate that realization to closely. It was just that Quin pissed him off.

That was all.

––––––––

HE’D BEEN NICE TO HER. She couldn’t believe it.

In every scenario Iris had played out in her head, Elijah had been dismissive, sarcastic, or downright hostile when she approached him about Quin’s behavior. In not a single one of those imagined encounters had he looked at her the way he had in reality, a look she was still trying to figure out as she snuggled down for her first night in a tour bus bunk.

He’d looked at her like she meant something. Like she mattered. When she was accustomed to his derision, his scoffing, his contempt for seemingly every word that came out of her mouth.

She had dealt better with that, maybe. It was expected.

When he’d told her he was sorry, he sounded like he meant it. When he’d said he would handle it, his voice had been hard enough to bludgeon, sharp enough to cut. She didn’t want anything so physical or painful to happen, of course, but his vehemence baffled her.

It also made her feel good. She stared at the ceiling only a few inches from her face, feeling—for perhaps the first time since Heidi approached her with this asinine idea—that everything was going to be all right. Feeling like maybe she had an ally instead of an enemy.

That’s all she could ask for. She doubted she would ever call Elijah Vance a friend, but maybe they’d taken a crucial first step.

She sensed his shadow move past her bunk, heading for his bed. A second later she heard Dylan say something, then Elijah’s deep answering laugh followed by an order to get to sleep.

For herself, Iris knew there was too much adrenaline pumping through her veins to close her eyes anytime soon. First with the show—her ears were still ringing—then Quin, and then the talk with Eli . . . she should be exhausted, and she was. Just not the kind of exhaustion that was conducive to sleep.

She was so glad he hadn’t asked for details. Not that it was any of his business, but the mere mention of what she’d gone through had brought back some of the ugliness that festered way down deep in her soul. She would be eternally grateful he hadn’t asked her to bring that out and show it to him to justify her misgivings about his band member.

Sara was the only person who knew how things had ended with Jacob, and how it had tarnished Iris’s view of sex and especially men who wanted to sleep with her. She could handle anyone she could keep at arm’s length. When a suitor began to push is when she wanted to run.

And what man didn’t want sex?

Well, the one in the back of the bus, maybe, at least not with her. And that was fine with her.

Except he was so damn captivating.

One day, she’d been telling herself for years, she would find him. The one who would be patient and gentle and make her want to explore all those things, not one who was greedy and pushy and pestered her so much she grew tired of the topic of sex altogether. He had to be out there, somewhere.

Sara’s advice was to find the hottest guy on the planet and let him show her what the fuss was all about. Just one night with a man who knew where the G-spot was would fix her, her friend promised. Iris wasn’t so sure. Sometimes Sara was as pushy as the guys, with her nicknames and stories of her own wild escapades, but she just wanted Iris to live her best life. That’s all Iris wanted, too. Not a crazy sex life, but to find someone, settle down, be happy, have kids. Easier said than done, because whoever ended up with her would have to have the patience of a saint. She’d never met anyone like that.

Iris didn’t know why she was dwelling on this now, except that the conversation with Eli had bordered on her history, and any mention of her history brought on this melancholy “where is he?” funk.

She also knew she would never find him if she shot down every guy who looked her way. But she liked to think there would be an instant connection she would sense immediately, a need to let this person in when she’d only wanted to shut all the others out. She liked to believe in soulmates, though Sara said the entire idea was romantic tripe and she would die alone if she held to it. Human beings were biologically programmed to have sex with as many partners as they could, Sara had once told her, so find a manly specimen and go at it. Iris loved her friend, but she thought Sara might end up dying old and alone herself if she didn’t change her hedonistic way of thinking.

One damn thing was for sure: whoever the guy for her was, she wasn’t going to find him out here. Better to avoid them all.