“I love it when you’re all business.”

  “I’m all business because it’s my job to be.”

  “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

  “No clue.” I read the names on the placards of each record. A pop princess. A Latin superstar. A boy band who’s endured.

  “Tutoring. Your freshman year. My sophomore. I could care less—”

  “Couldn’t care less.” I chuckle. “Clearly I didn’t do a good job tutoring you.”

  “No, you did, but like I told you, when was I ever going to know the periodic table or the correct use of past participle or whatever it’s called? It’s just that I was more distracted by my pretty, strait-laced tutor. She sat there every day trying to help a kid who couldn’t focus because he was too busy trying to figure out how to get her to notice him.”

  His words cause a smile to spread on my lips he can’t see.

  “I never charged my computer so I was forced to sit next to you and use yours. I may have flunked a few tests on purpose so I had to keep seeing you. I might even have driven you crazy playing a beat on the table with my hands so you’d be forced to reach over and grab my wrists to stop me.” He laughs. “And that touch might have made this sixteen-year-old hard as a rock under the table where we were sitting together.”

  The memories are bittersweet. The fact that he remembers them even more so. And despite all that has happened, they were such good ones.

  “Then one day over The Catcher in the Rye—”

  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I correct.

  “I leaned over and kissed you.” His last words are whispered in my ear from behind. The warmth of his breath tickles my cheek. I have to actively restrain myself from leaning back against him as the good memories assault me.

  I stay focused on the gold records in front of me. A rock icon. A jazz singer.

  “We were good together, Shug. What happened to us?”

  “You left. Remember?” I try to keep my voice light, unaffected, but I’m anything but.

  A hip-hop artist.

  “No, not after high school. I mean the last time.” He puts a hand on my hip. His guitar-roughened fingers tickle ever so gently as they rest on the strip of skin between my top and leggings. The heat of his body is at my back.

  Focus, Bristol. Get the answers McMann wants. Leave promptly. Save yourself the heartache that is Vince.

  “How’d we let that escape us? How’d we walk away from us?”

  “I wasn’t aware there ever was an us?”

  A rock band named Bent. A picture of the four of them—Hawkin, Vince, Rocket, and Gizmo—beside the platinum record in the frame.

  Remember how bad he hurts.

  “Why’d you leave the band?” I ask, grasping at straws, at my sanity, from giving in to his seductive voice and the feelings I can’t erase.

  His hand tenses on my stomach. It’s brief, but I feel it. “Why do I make you nervous?”

  “You don’t. And I asked you a question.”

  “I do, and I asked you first, but you’re avoiding this discussion. It seems that’s something you’ve mastered.”

  “Hey—” But when I spin around to face him, to argue, I flinch, because now we’re face-to-face and well within each other’s personal spaces.

  Kiss me.

  The minute the thought hits my mind, I take a huge step back as if to chastise myself. Vince reaches out to prevent me from falling against the wall. I immediately shrug out of his grasp.

  “Don’t touch me.” It’s my only line of defense—and it doesn’t work because his hands are back on my biceps and his mouth is inches from my lips. “What are you doing?” I ask when he doesn’t move.

  “I’m letting you get used to the idea that I’m going to kiss you. It’s inevitable, isn’t it?” He leans forward and brushes his lips ever so slightly against mine. It’s the faintest of touches, but there’s beauty in its simplicity. Tenderness that is so unexpected from a man who is all or nothing. An undercurrent in both of our unsteady breaths that follows it. A burning through my body to want more, to take more, to have more.

  “I can’t—we can’t do this,” I manage to get out. My mind races a million miles an hour while my feet don’t want to move. “We called a truce. We agreed—”

  “You called it. I didn’t agree to shit.” He reaches out and tucks an errant piece of hair behind my ear. “You always were addictive, Bristol, and that’s a bad thing for a man with an addictive personality like mine. One taste is never fucking enough.”

  Take a step back.

  “It’s going to have to be.” My jaw is clenched. My resolve is front and center. Truce. Truce. Truce. Dodge. Divert. Deflect. “Why’d you leave Bent?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Vince

  “Fine.” I let a slow smile crawl on my lips. Truce, my ass. She wants me. It’s plain as fucking day.

  So much for my resolve to keep my hands to myself, but fuck if it isn’t hard when she’s dressed like that.

  So I’ll humor her for a bit. I’ll play her game of not wanting me when every damn thing about her says she does. Then I’ll take what I want. “We’ll play your way. Then we’ll play mine.”

  I want more of those lips. Of the taste of her. Of just her. Definitely even more than the sixteen-year-old did for that first kiss, years ago. And sure as hell more than the twenty-three-year-old me did the last time.

  I forgot what it was like to have to work at getting a woman. The thrill of the chase. The desperation for the victory.

  Ironically, it’s only ever been Bristol I’ve had to chase.

  The woman standing before me with cheeks flushed and eyes skittish as she tries to deny she wants me just as much as I want her.

  “There is no playing anything other than the guitar,” she says.

  “The lady has jokes.”

  “The lady has a job to do.”

  “Ah, yes.” I watch her ass as she walks across the room. It’s hard not to, especially when she moves to avoid looking at me. “The never-ending questions. Christ. Tell McMann that the writing is what it is. My muse is silent—or maybe she died. Who the fuck knows. Art is tragic or some shit like that. No doubt, he’ll hear that sound bite and have people rushing in to try and fix shit that can’t be fixed.”

  “Sounds promising.” She looks over her shoulder and lifts her eyebrows in challenge.

  “A documentary isn’t exactly my thing. You know that. I know that. They know that. But apparently, it’s a necessity to polish my tarnished image. An image that I could give a flying fuck about.”

  “You care,” she says and turns to face me, those intelligent eyes of hers studying me. Looking closer than I want them to. “You care more than you let on.”

  “I don’t need to be a media darling. Never have been. Never will be.”

  “And yet you still care.”

  “Only to the extent that people still buy my music.”

  “Is that why you’re solo? You need to chase a new high?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you left something good once before to chase the high. It seems only fitting you’d do the same again.”

  There’s the dig. The subtle reminder that I walked away from her but no acknowledgement over my lack of options. It was my dad’s fists, his disapproval, and staying with her, or leaving it all behind and trying to make something of myself.

  There is no correlation between back then and what happened with Hawkin.

  No connection other than my dad fucking things up for me once again.

  But he doesn’t belong in this moment. In my head. Not when the woman I’ve thought about more times than not over the years is standing before me, tempting me with her sass and her grit and a body that I’m more than itching to touch.

  It’s amazing how easily you can disregard how connected you are to someone when there’s so much other than noise in your life. But I’ve never forgotten Bristol. She’s everything a sane man would want. She’s the ultimate prize, but I’ve never been in the running. And I never will be.

  “I’ll give you that one dig, Shug. But how come you’re allowed to bring up the past and I’m not?” I take a few steps toward her, the urge to touch her stronger with each passing second. “I mean, if we’re going to go there, then let’s talk about the last time we saw each other.”

  She stares at me with what feels like a million unspoken thoughts in her eyes that I wish she’d voice. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  Liar.

  “No?”

  “We knew what we walked into that night. We did it willingly. We did it knowing we were going to both walk away with a bit more closure than we had before. I woke up. You were gone.” She swallows forcibly but keeps her chin high as her words hit me where it hurts. “You made it more than clear that’s all there was to it. Even picking up the phone was too much for you. I wasn’t just some groupie, you know.”

  The hurt in her voice hides beneath the bravado. “No one ever said you were.”

  “You didn’t have to say it, Vince. Actions spoke loud enough.”

  I sigh. What did I expect her to think? “I had my reasons. Ones that—”

  “Save them. I don’t care.”

  “That’s not fair.” Fuck. I run a hand through my hair, wanting a drink but needing to have this conversation without it. I purse my lips and shake my head. “Guilty as charged.” I hold my hands up. If only she understood the why behind it. “Walking away is something I’ve seemed to have mastered and mastered well.”

  “We called a truce. It doesn’t matter anymore.” Her smile is shaky, but there nonetheless. “See how that works? How easy it is?”

  She says the words but for the life of me, I don’t believe her any more than I believe myself.

  “Nothing is ever that easy, Shug.”

  Our gazes hold. “True.” She lifts her chin at the platinum record on the wall for Make Me Fall, Bent’s massively successful single. “Why’d you leave Bent?”

  “It’s a long story.” I point to my guitar. “And McMann wants progress that I can’t make if I’m telling it.”

  “You’re so full of shit. You said yourself that your muse is dead.” She lifts her eyebrows.

  Christ. Do we really have to do this? There are much better things I’d rather be doing than talking about this shit.

  “Like I said, it’s a long story.”

  “Most are.” She shrugs. “What happened?”

  “Hawke and I got in a fight. Words were exchanged. Threats were made. A lot of things were said that can’t be unsaid. Happy?”

  “No, because it doesn’t seem that you are. What did you fight about?”

  Nothing. Everything.

  I’ve been asked this question a hundred times and never wanted to talk about it. Why do I want to talk about it with her?

  I lace my hands behind my neck and sigh. “Look. I was in a bad place and said a lot of shitty things. I made my bed and now I’m lying in it.”

  “It’s easy to take words back. Even easier to say you’re sorry for what you did.”

  I meet her eyes and feel like she’s talking about more than just Hawkin right now.

  “It’s complicated.” My answer stands for the fight and how I left things with her last time. I wonder if she knows that.

  “Misery often is.”

  “Who said I’m miserable?”

  She crosses her arms over her chest. “You forget that I know you too.”

  And isn’t that the fuck and the fight of it? She knows me, and as much as I like that, it also means she can see right through me.

  “You’re right. You do. And that means you know the only thing on my mind right now is how I don’t give a flying fuck about truces.”

  “What do truces have to do with anything?”

  “They don’t. Not when all you want to do is talk about shit that doesn’t matter while I stand here obsessing over how much I want to kiss you again.” Her cleavage is looking pretty spectacular with her arms crossed like that, and I’m desperate to stop talking about futile crap.

  “Vince. I’m serious. Clearly you’re—”

  “I’m serious too. I’ve humored you. Answered your questions even. Studio time is precious and we’re wasting it, so now it’s time to get back to what I want to talk about.”

  “And that was what?”

  Jesus. She even has to ask? I stride the three steps forward and grab the back of her neck. I’ve had plenty of women, I won’t lie. But there has always been something . . . magical about Bristol. Her intelligence, her beauty, her presence. It seems like anytime I’m near her all I can think about is want. So I say the words that need no further explanation. “This. Just fucking this,” I say before slanting my lips over hers and claiming them.

  Her startled gasp gives me access, and I slip my tongue between her lips to meet with hers.

  Fucking hell.

  My groan says it all as she reacts and gives in to the desperation of a kiss that feels like we’ve anticipated for seven years.

  I’m still nowhere near good enough for her, but fuck if I’m not going to enjoy every goddamn second of this kiss.

  It’s been too long.

  Too long without her taste. That soft moan in the back of her throat. The sting of her fingernails as they dig into my biceps. The feel of her body against mine.

  I take without asking. Tongue and teeth and lips. Fingers tangled in her hair.

  Already wanting more.

  Already needing more.

  “No.” Bristol presses against my chest and pushes me back. “I can’t. We can’t.”

  “We did. We are. We will again.” I reach for her again and she shakes her head forcefully, her eyes wide.

  “No. I’ll get fired.”

  I snort. “You’re so full of shit.”

  “No. I’m serious.” She paces the length of the room. Her hands moving just as much as her feet. “Lilah Glasnow was fired last month. She slept with a client. McMann found out.”

  “Like I give a fuck about Lilah what’s-her-face.”

  “But you give a fuck about me so it should matter. I mean . . .”

  Jesus. She’s cute when she rambles, and I’m definitely not complaining about getting to watch the sway of her hips as she paces, her words tumbling out.

  “Bristol. For the love of God, stop.” I stride over to her and block her path. She tries to dodge to the right and I stop her. Then the left and she collides squarely with me. Tits against my chest. Her lips close once again. “Kissing’s not sleeping so we’re all good.”

  “This isn’t a joke. I’m serious.”

  “I am too. Fuck McMann. How would he ever know that we kissed?” We need to get over this hurdle, Shug, because I plan on doing a whole lot more than just kissing when it comes to you. “Who’s going to tell him?”

  “He’ll just know. Someone will say something and—”

  “Come here,” I say.

  “Absolutely not. Don’t order me—”

  “Bristol.”

  She doesn’t budge—she never was one to take orders—but her eyes track me as I walk over and turn the lock on the studio door. “See? Now he can’t know. Easy.”

  “I get this is all fun and games to you, but this is my—”

  “Excuse? Justification? Because from where I’m standing, you enjoyed that kiss just as much as I did. It seems every time you give in just the slightest, you put up a fight to justify why you shouldn’t. We both know you want this as much as I do. First it was the truce and now it’s McMann.” I shrug. “If you don’t want me, just say it, and I’ll walk away.”

  I watch her lips. I wait for them to deny me. Seconds pass as our breaths remain the only sound in the room.

  “I thought studio time was precious,” she finally says. I don’t want you, never falls from those lips.

  I bark out a laugh. It’s all I can do because I want to pin her against that wall at her back and knock those gold records off. “It is. I think I can make an exception this once.”

  She shakes her head. “You don’t understand. You’ve never played by the rules so why would I expect you to do so now?”

  “Fine,” I finally say, pained as it is. “We can play by the rules.”

  Her eyes flash and her mouth shocks in an O. She wants to bend them just as much as I intend on breaking them.

  Perfect.

  “I forgot how hard it is for you to color outside of the lines, Shug,” I murmur as I step into her and trace a fingertip over her collarbone. She sucks in a breath, and it’s all I need to hear.

  I’ve read her right.

  She wants this.

  She wants me.

  But she doesn’t know how to give in to what she wants.

  Thank fucking God I know how to do it for her.

  “So we’ll follow the rules.” I lean in, my lips right at her ear, and her perfume in my nose. “There’s a whole hell of a lot we can do.”

  “Vince.” My name is part plea, part protest, and a whole lot of gray area in between.

  I love gray areas.

  I lean back. “McMann says we can’t sleep together. Fine. So that means sex is off the table. Care to define that term for me, though? Sex?”

  She gives me a look—eyes wide, lips parted, cheeks flushed. That look alone is enough to get me hard.

  “No touching.”

  “No?” I study her. “So if I were to do this, we’d be breaking the rules?” I run the back of my hand down her arm, then slide my fingers over her midsection, before gripping her hip and pulling her against the length of me. There’s no mistaking what she’s doing to me. My rock-hard, confined-by-my-jeans cock speaks for itself.

  “Yes.” She’s breathless. Affected. “No touching.”

  “Hmm.” I bite my bottom lip, the pain a handcuff on my restraint. “It wouldn’t be touching if you slid your fingers between your thighs and I watched. I mean, that definitely wouldn’t be sex, right? It would be me enjoying your company is all.”

  “We can’t—”

  “But we wouldn’t be touching. Just like if while you were spread eagle over there—ass on that soundboard, thighs wide so I can watch those red nails of yours work over the pink of your pussy—I were to free my cock from these jeans and stroke it while I watched . . . I mean, that would still be coloring inside the lines, wouldn’t it?”