Merry Ever After

“Not what I meant, babe.”

My eyes met his, and I stopped breathing again. “What did you mean?”

“Why are you with that asshole?”

“Who? Mark?”

“My woman brings me to a concert, I’m sure as fuck not deserting her in the middle of it. She gets hurt? I’m not letting another man take care of her. Get rid of the dead weight, Brooke.”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, feeling snarky, “but Mark has a lot on his mind.”

He pressed a butterfly bandage into place, then dipped down until I met his eyes. “From where I’m standing, he’s got the wrong things on his mind.”

Okay. That was flirting. Right? Or was it the head wound confusing things?

“He…had an important call.”

“On Christmas Eve, when he hasn’t seen his woman in two weeks,” he prompted. “What the fuck are you doing wasting time with him?”

I didn’t know why his opinion mattered. But for some reason it did. “I’m trying to break up with him. Okay?”

“Trying?”

I dropped my hands and crossed my arms. “We met through a dating app. I thought it would be fun to date a younger guy. I thought he’d be interesting, energetic. My ex-husband married a woman eleven years younger than I. They made it look exciting. But Mark is…”

“A narcissistic prick,” Vonn supplied.

“You met him for a minute,” I said. I’d taken Mark backstage to meet the band before the concert. He hadn’t been particularly impressed or gracious.

“Already knew I wasn’t gonna like him,” he continued, pressing a second bandage into place. “Just didn’t realize there’d be good cause.”

His hand slid down to my neck, thumb at my throat. It felt amazing. “Why were you going to hate him?”

All amusement disappeared from those blue eyes. “Because he’s yours.”

“Seriously? What does that even mean? You’ve spent the last two weeks ignoring me! You refused to sit down with me. You refused to answer every single question I asked. The rest of the guys had no problems talking to me, but you acted like I was chasing you with a machete.”

“What do you wanna know, babe? Ask me anything.”

His flippant reply made me mad. “Don’t play games with me, Vonn. You made sure that I didn’t get the story. And now I don’t get the job that went with it.”

His hand tightened at my neck. “Explain.”

“I’m hungry,” I said petulantly. And bizarrely turned on.

“I’ll feed you after you explain.”

My sigh was half groan. “The magazine told me if I got you to actually open up and talk about saying goodbye to the band, the fans, that I’d make staff writer.”

“Is that something you wanted?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve always wanted to be a music journalist. I thought this was my shot to get out of a mom job and into something I wanted to do.”

It was Vonn’s turn to blow out a breath. “You know and they know I don’t do one-on-ones. I don’t talk about anything but the music,” he insisted.

He had me there. The man was a vault. He was infamous for avoiding questions and getting downright pissy when journalists didn’t take the hint. And part of me couldn’t blame him. He’d been hounded mercilessly by the press ever since the death of his best friend and the band’s original lead singer.

“This your farewell tour. You’ve been doing this for thirty years. Why don’t you want to talk about that?” I asked in exasperation.