“Always were a big dreamer.”
It was a dig he’d heard a million times. Away with the pixies, never going to amount to anything. Too many schemes and not enough rubber on the road. He’d disproved that a billion times over, hearing it shouldn’t have any power over him.
“You’ve gotta have dreams, Grip. You don’t have dreams, you might as well be dead.” Did he even want to know what made Evie give up hers? Maybe once, but now, it was ancient history and not his beeswax.
“Dude, I dream of Evie allowing me to do the walk of shame from her bed.”
“You’ve had ten years to seal that deal.”
Grip laughed. “I’ve been busy sealing other deals. Evie was always the longest shot. Speaking of deals, everyone is waiting for you to make a start.”
“Right.” He was holding everyone up, which is exactly the kind of behavior the guys would expect from an entitled douchebag rock star. He clapped Grip on the shoulder and inclined his head towards the gents. “I’ll be there in five.”
Up ahead the door of the ladies’ room opened, and Evie strode out, cutting them a look that would scrape the fur off your tongue. Did he care why she lied to him and then gave on up taking her own shot?
Fuck, yeah. Lying to himself was something he gave up on years ago.
Was he going to do anything about it?
Not if he wanted to keep the peace, and since this whole exercise was a peacekeeping mission he was sworn off starting trouble.
“It’s going to be easier to convince people you’re over her if you quit looking at her like she’s your next fix,” Grip said.
Jay opened his mouth to protest Grip’s assumptions and shut it again. He went with flipping Grip off and then banged into the men’s room as if a peacekeeping force was chasing him. The hole in his esophagus was big enough to swallow the whole damn tour.
THREE
Evie counted eighteen people in Sound Blast Touring’s conference room. That included the tour management team, her dad and three brothers, four members of World’s End, their manager and promotor, a bunch of record company execs from two labels and a work experience student who was taking a third round of coffee orders.
They were all waiting for Jay and in serious need of an icebreaker.
Everyone else was on their phone, except Dad and World’s End’s manager, who was Jay’s mother, Janina Endicott.
Evie eyed them suspiciously. Janina had been a single mum and a marketing bigwig in a bank when Errol started managing Property of Paradise. She dressed in slick suits, had a no-nonsense shiny bob and wore understated jewelry and towering heels. Evie had always admired the heels. The only things Janina had known about the music biz were that her son had an incredible voice and could write a killer song and what Errol taught her when they were backstage at PoP shows. Now she managed one of the biggest bands in the world. She wore tight tan pants, a white cami and a boho-embroidered duster. The jewelry was funky, the shoes were edgy, and her salt-and-pepper hair was halfway down her back and gloriously untamed.
Evie admired nearly everything about her.
Except her spawn and the hand she had on Errol’s arm.
That hand made Errol puff his chest up and break out his Christmas Day hit-song smile. That hand was on its way to making sure Jay got everything he wanted from this tour and the name of the game was compromise for Lost Property.
She nudged her oldest brother, Abel, and inclined her head towards them.
“I saw,” Abel said, keeping his voice low. “Dad had to scrape his jaw off the floor when Janina walked in.”
The number of whitened teeth the two of them were showing would make a dentist happy but made Evie think of sharks.
“I’ve got this itchy feeling that none of this is good,” Abel said with an illustrative squirm.
“Except for playing stadiums and the money,” said Isaac without raising his head from the game he was playing on his phone. Sitting next to Isaac, Oscar gave that a thumbs-up.
“Did you push Grip down a set of stairs?” Abel asked, shaking the empty chair beside him.
“He’s outside with Jay.”
The color drained from Abel’s face and he swiveled around to look out through the glass wall at the corridor beyond. “So the bastard is here.”
Ninety minutes late because of some airline screw-up, but Jay was certainly here. It was like every cell in Evie’s body was vibrating with the knowledge of it.