The screaming crowd, blaring music, and glaring lights gave him a pounding headache, and if he’d known he wouldn’t catch hell from Mike and Zane, Damien would have begged off from showing up at the August on Fire concert. It had been all he could do to focus on his play for the past two days. All his instincts were wrong, but somehow he’d managed to hang in.

“Where’s Emma?” Rowan had asked as soon as he’d walked into Zane’s dressing room at the arena, and he’d had to tell them the truth. He feared it was all over his face.

“She went home.”

Mike and Zane had immediately zeroed in on him like two bloodhounds picking up a scent. Even Savannah had grown quiet, looking to her fiancé for his reaction.

“Why?” Mike asked. His face still carried a cut and a bruise from his fight the other night.

Damien felt like his fucking skin was on inside out as they stared at him. He waved a hand, striving for nonchalance. “Family emergency.”

“I hope everything is okay,” Savannah said tentatively. “Tell her we’re thinking about her.”

If she has her way, I’ll never speak to her again. The very idea was unimaginable; it made him want to jump on a plane right now, fly home, and fucking make her understand. But he couldn’t do that. He didn’t even know what it was she needed to understand. He only knew he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking sometimes. Even a couple of his poker buddies had noticed and asked him if he was all right.

He wasn’t. He wasn’t fucking all right. It was not a thing he liked admitting.

Now he was standing at the side of the stage next to Mike, watching Zane do his thing in front of more than ten thousand people. He’d always been such a natural onstage. Mike was a natural in the cage. Damien . . . he’d been a natural in the shadows, except for once a year when he came out here to destroy dreams. If he wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t even make the final table this year.

Only three songs into the set, Mike caught his eye and jerked his head toward the backstage area, and Damien knew what was coming. With an inward groan, he followed his big brother back to the dressing room again.

“Zane’s going to have our asses for not watching every second,” he commented as Mike shut the door, hoping to get this over with as soon as possible. Sleep had been hard coming since Emma had left. It was probably too much to hope that he could catch up tonight, but he wanted to get started on that. The sooner the better.

“You’re not fooling anybody,” Mike said, turning to stare him down with crossed arms and eyes like shiny daggers. They could always pierce any shields Damien tried to throw up against them. “So tell me what’s going on.”

“I shut my room down.”

He watched his brother’s face undergo a dramatic transformation, from worry to surprise to absolute and utter relief. “I’m glad to hear that. I really am.”

“Are you? I thought you liked coming by there.”

“I liked seeing you. And you were always there. But it scared the shit out of me for you to be over something like that, I won’t lie.” Mike reached forward and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be all right. I know you’ll miss it, but you’ve still got the club. Let that be enough.”

“It will be.”

“I have to ask. Is this Emma’s influence? Because if it is, I’d like to give that girl a hug right now.”

“Emma . . . doesn’t want anything to do with me. It’s over.”

“Hey, now. Don’t say that.”

“I’m only saying it because it’s the truth. Her words.”

“We all say a lot of shit we don’t mean when we’re pissed. I bet when you get back home, she’ll be ready to talk.”

“Not about this. You don’t understand what I did.”

“What did you do?”

Damien shook his head. “Nice try. Not going there.”

“Then I don’t know whether to be encouraging or call you a dumbass and tell you to grovel at her feet. Did you cheat?”

“No, man, nothing like that.”

“Savannah always says that’s about the only thing she couldn’t forgive.”

Yeah, but Mike hadn’t used Savannah as the fucking pot in a stupid-ass bet just because her brother pissed him off. Then again . . . Savannah had found it in herself to fall in love with the man who spelled her brother’s demise. How the hell had Mike pulled that off? For one, he hadn’t listened to a damn bit of advice anyone had given him.

And Damien himself had had his own part to play in Zane and Rowan’s eventual hookup. He’d lent his club to Zane for an impromptu August on Fire concert to win her over. He’d encouraged Zane not to listen to Rowan telling him to stay away.

Now he wasn’t taking his own advice. He wasn’t jumping on a plane to fly home and get the fucking girl.

Emma . . . she wanted forever. He could see it in her eyes. She adored him. He had absolutely no fucking clue why, after what he’d done to her.

“I broke her, Mike. I played with her fucking heart, and—”

His brother’s face fell as Damien’s voice choked off. Furious with himself, he struggled to shove the agony back down in the pit of his gut where it belonged, knowing that every bit of that battle showed across his face. Mike, of all fucking people, jerked him into his powerful arms.

“I haven’t seen you like this in . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this,” he said. “Not even when Mom died. It’ll be all right. You can fix it.”

He’d been more upset over Rich leaving him than his mother overdosing.

“I can’t. There’s no coming back from this. I fucked around like I always do and I ruined us before we ever got started.” Feeling like an idiot, he shoved back from Mike’s embrace and rubbed his thumb and index finger hard across his eyes, composing himself. Enough. Enough of this. Mike still stared at him in concern. “And that’s it,” he concluded. “I fucked up, and there’s no coming back from it. She deserves better. She deserves . . . everything.”

“Then she deserves you,” Mike said solemnly. “Because you sound willing to give it to her. Whatever it was, make it up to her, Damien. You said you broke her? Then be the goddamn glue. Put her back together. Savannah and I . . . we had more pieces to pick up than we even knew about. But we did it. Together, we did it. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life with her, and I can’t wait. I want to see that for you, little brother. I need to know you’ve got your shit together and from what I’ve seen in just the past five minutes, you’re ready.”

Six weeks ago he would’ve thought his shit was thoroughly together. Then one feisty redhead slept on his couch and he hadn’t been the same since. A slow chipping away of his resolve, of his walls, of everything he thought he knew.

He still didn’t think there was any way possible to fix what he’d done. She got under his skin so much, she made him want things that weren’t for him. Things like Mike was talking about. Forever with someone. But when he considered a possible alternative—finding one of Zane’s hopeful groupies who didn’t stand a chance now that Rowan was in the picture, taking her back to the hotel and fucking out his frustrations on her—his stomach churned. The things that used to appeal to him had lost their taste. She wouldn’t be Emma, with her big, innocent, adoring eyes and her eager body. Her sweetness, her light shining on all his dark places.

Fuck.

For the first time in years, he didn’t know what to do.