I looked toward the box and considered it for a long moment. But we had the cooler and I figured that was probably good enough. “I don’t think we need it. We’re going to eat the cooked food and the rest of the stuff in here is just chips. Bears aren’t going to want that sort of thing.”

  She gave me a very jaded look. “I’m pretty sure bears eat anything, Connor. And we used a lot of our money on that food.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, sliding the cooler onto the table. “You’re worrying too much, Olivia. Give your brain a break.”

  She snorted, shook her head, and went back into the van.

  And I turned around and walked toward the bathrooms. Maybe she just needed some time alone to get her mind around what was going on. If I left her alone for a bit and then came back…

  Maybe she’d finally be ready to start planning what we were going to do next.

  “What are we going to do?” Olivia asked, propping her head up on her hand and staring at me from across the van. “We can’t just stay out here forever.”

  “What, you don’t want to live in the van for the rest of your life? Or at least until the label stops paying attention?” I joked.

  She made the face that I’d come to recognize as the face that meant she thought I was being stupid. “With you? No thanks.”

  Well at least we were back to making jokes. That was progress.

  “I think we stay here for at least the night. You know the buzz won’t last. We’ll be talked about for one media cycle and then it’ll be all over.”

  “Maybe nationwide. But in Montana? I don’t think they have a lot of news to replace us.”

  “Okay, that’s a good point, but our problem isn’t in Montana. The people here love us. They think it’s great that we’re doing what we’re doing.”

  “Which is exactly the problem,” she pointed out. “They think it’s so great that they’re talking about it, which is how the label found out. So I’m asking again. What are we going to do? If the label won’t send us money and no one else can, and we’re not allowed to play the shows that are keeping us fed...”

  I watched her work through the problem again—this wasn’t the first time we’d had this exact same conversation tonight—and gulped. She looked exhausted. The shadows under her eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them and the rest of her face was pale, like this problem was sucking the color right out of her.

  And I hated it. I wanted to reach out and touch her, tell her it was going to be okay. Tell her we’d figure it out, one way or the other. I wanted to find a way to make her stop worrying.

  And for once, I listened to that instinct. I reached out and laid my hand over hers, not demanding or pushing but just resting it there. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. But I promise we’ll get this figured out. We’ve got two pretty good minds between the two of us and one way or another, we’ll find a way. Don’t quit on me, Olivia.”

  Her eyes met mine and she bit her lip. For a moment we just stared at each other, neither of us saying anything, and I wondered if she was holding her breath the way I was. I wondered if she’d ever had anyone she could trust to take care of her like I was offering to. I knew she’d spent her high school career taking care of Parker rather than vice versa, and though Parker was in a better situation now and, in theory, Olivia’s manager, I wondered if she’d actually returned the favor.

  Or if Olivia was still so closed off because she was still trying to take care of herself, and thought that opening up and asking for help would just set her up for disappointment.

  Her eyes flicked to my lips then, and I caught my own lip in my teeth. Was she breathing? Because I couldn’t. I felt like the air had suddenly turned to molasses, everything moving one hundred times more slowly than it should.

  Except for my heart. That was hammering so hard I thought she could definitely hear it.

  God, what was wrong with me? I’d known this girl almost my entire life. I’d spent time with her over Christmas. I’d kissed her, held her in my arms, and done a whole lot more than that. So why did I feel like a fourteen-year-old boy facing his first kiss right now?

  Why did this feel so much more important than any other moment I’d ever lived through?

  I blew a breath out, forcing myself to move forward, and reached my hand up to brush my fingers softly along her lips. She parted them at the touch, and I felt her breath brush across my skin.

  And something inside me cracked wide open.

  A moment later, chaos erupted outside the van.

  CHAPTER 22

  Olivia

  We exploded out of the van, Connor holding the bat he’d insisted on buying for self-defense, and came to a sudden stop right outside the doors of the van, both of us standing so still we might have been statues.

  Because that bat might have been for self-defense, but I didn’t think it was going to do one damn thing against the enormous bear currently rifling through the cooler of food we’d brought with us.

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. And a stupid, insane part of me wanted to start laughing hysterically. I was still rational enough to realize that all three of those were probably bad ideas, though my mind was refusing to hand me the right answer. What were you supposed to do when you ran right into a bear? Hit it on the nose? No, that was a shark. Yell as loud as you could? No, that was a coyote.

  I had no idea what we were supposed to do. The truth was, I’d never in a million years thought I would run into a bear, so even if I’d read what you were supposed to do, I’d probably forgotten it.

  Wait. It was run uphill, I thought. They weren’t fast uphill.

  Or was it downhill?

  Not that it mattered. We were in a flat campground with no hills around, and though there were a number of trees around for climbing, I was pretty sure that bear could climb a tree faster than I could.

  What the bear couldn’t do, though, was get into our van. Which was where we would have stayed if we were smart.

  “I don’t suppose you have any ideas, do you?” Connor whispered from right next to me.

  “What, you don’t think you can take him on with your bat?” I replied.

  Look, I knew it was snarky and totally inappropriate. But he had it coming. He was, after all, the one who’d left the food out on the table in the first place.

  “Told you we needed to put the food into the bear box,” I added, unable to stop myself.

  “This,” he said coldly, “is really not the time, Olivia. What do we do?”

  “Weren’t you in the Boy Scouts or something? Didn’t they teach you what to do if a bear invaded your campsite?”

  “If they did, I was sick that day. Stop making jokes. All day you’re the most serious person in the world and now you want to make jokes? Do I have to have a bear riding around with us in the van to bring this side out in you?”

  The corner of my mouth twitched and that insane urge to laugh came back. “Now who’s making jokes? Focus, Connor!”

  “You’re one to talk!”

  He shouted that last part, and that was a mistake because the bear, which had been ignoring us in favor of a bag of chips—evidently bears did eat chips—suddenly whirled on us, its tiny eyes going from Connor to me and back again.

  Oh. My. God.

  When the bear jumped toward us I did scream, and Connor and I turned and ran, racing for the front of the van to put something between us and the enormous beast. But it chased us, of course, letting out alarming growls as it ran, and this just made me want to scream even more. Connor grabbed my hand and increased his pace, pulling me along behind him so my strides felt more like flying, and I tried desperately to get my brain to work. What were we supposed to do, here? Why was the bear chasing us in the first place? Presumably it thought we had more food. Or maybe it was just angry that we’d interrupted its meal.

  That didn’t matter, I told myself, struggling for breath as Connor towed me along. The thing was bigger than us and faster, and I had a bad feeling we were going to get tired before it did. We needed to get to someplace safe, and we were far enough from every other campsite that we couldn’t exactly go to anyone else for help. We only had ourselves to depend on. Just Connor and me.

  And the van.

  Oh my God, the van.

  “Get in the van!” I shouted.

  “But the food!” Connor replied.

  “What are you, stupid? We can buy more food! Get in the van! The bear can’t open doors!”

  “Right!”

  When we rounded the back, Connor managed to grab the handle and open the door, turning and slinging me into the back like I was a stuffed animal. He jumped in after me and slammed the door, then ran for the driver’s seat. The keys were still in the ignition and he turned them quickly while I threw myself into the passenger’s seat.

  Outside, the bear had realized where we’d gone and was banging on the side of the van like he was going to tear right through the metal and get inside.

  And I was screeching. I heard myself and knew how obnoxious it was. I also knew that it wasn’t going to do any good. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. My body had become unhinged from my brain and was acting of its own accord.

  Connor, meanwhile, had started the engine, giving the van the amount of gas it needed to get started—which I had yet to perfect—and thrown the vehicle into drive. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered.

  “Less talking, more driving!” I shouted. “Or that bear is going to open this van like a can of tuna.”

  Connor barked out a laugh, jammed his foot on the gas, and took us skidding out of the parking lot and away from the bear. We left the cooler and the food. The bear could have those.

  The van flew onto the road and toward the main highway, the trees blurring as we got the hell out of there. Connor didn’t stop until we hit the gas station fifteen miles away, and when he pulled over and looked at me, he had the start of an insane smile blooming on his face.

  “Think we stayed hidden long enough to throw the press off?”

  “I don’t even care,” I replied. “Take me back to civilization, Connor. We’ll deal with the fallout when we get there.”

  Because if we could fight off a bear together, I was thinking the press—and the label, and their rules—would be no problem.

  CHAPTER 23

  Colin

  Guys. For a full day, I thought Olivia Johns and Connor Wheating had deserted us.

  In my last post I talked about that show in the bar and how the two of them went into the same bedroom that night, and you might remember that I was heartbroken because I had to admit that Olivia might have feelings for Connor.

  I also told you that my blog had been picked up my a pretty big magazine, with the first publication coming out the next day. Yesterday, to be exact.

  And that morning, Olivia and Connor got in their van without telling me where they were going and flat out disappeared.

  I felt deserted. I felt betrayed. And I was, I have to admit, worried. They’re two city slickers from Nashville in the wilds of Montana and though our state is beautiful, I don’t think any of us would say it’s kind to people who get lost in the wilderness. Those people don’t know our state. They don’t know our people. We may have welcomed them into our hearts but that wasn’t going to save them if they’d driven into the forest and been attacked by a bear.

  Which, it turns out, is exactly what happened.

  I caught up with them again in that famous mining town of Butte and after at least five minutes of lecturing them about disappearing on me like that, I finally asked them where they’d been.

  And yeah, I can hear you guessing already. They ran off together to get married. They were tired of the spotlight and needed a moment alone. Their label, who famously threw them into the wilderness on their own, set the whole thing up as a mystery, for the press.

  But it was none of those things.

  They weren’t tired of us and they weren’t set up by their label. They were on their way to the next show in Butte and got lost. And while they were lost, they were, in fact, attacked by a bear at a campsite where they’d pulled over to try to regroup.

  They survived, in case you were wondering, and I had the privilege of getting to see the show they put on for Music on Main. There was a great turnout and lots of speakers—a new sound for them—and everyone had a great time. Olivia and Connor were terrific, of course.

  But I couldn’t help but think they were better when I saw them on a stage in a bar. Without the amps and speakers. Without the big crowds.

  Could it be, dear readers, that our very own Olivia and Connor are better with small, intimate crowds and purely acoustic appearances? Could it be that those two crazy kids, whose careers have been molded her in Montana, belong on a small Montana stage rather than in the stadiums, so we can see the way they laugh and joke with each other during their performances?

  And if that’s true, what are the chances that we can get them back here for another tour next year?

  I’m off to bed and to sleep in tomorrow, as I’ve heard we’re staying here for a couple days. But I’ll be back soon with another update. Until then, I’ll see you on the road!

  -C

  CHAPTER 24

  Olivia

  When I woke up, I had only one thought on my mind.

  We had a day off. An actual, honest-to-God day off. We’d played the Atomic appearance yesterday at a street fair in Butte, and though we were still in Butte, we were free for the day. We had money left over from the deposit Danny put in Connor’s account and were going to get breakfast today in a Real Live Restaurant, then hang out during the day at a church fair we’d heard about.

  Just Connor and me in Butte, Montana, acting like normal people instead of the blue collar workers of the music industry, touring our butts off and trying to keep from starving to death.

  It felt weird and wonderful and unexpected, and I grinned at the thought.

  When I looked over, Connor was watching me and grinning back.

  “What are you grinning at?” I asked. “And how long have you been watching me?”

  “I’ve been watching you for long enough to see you going through the day in your head and realizing that you like it,” he said honestly. “And I’m grinning because you’re grinning. If that thought was good enough to make you smile like that, then I’m guessing I’ll like it, too.”

  It should have made me mad that he’d been watching me. It definitely should have creeped me out. Instead, it made the butterflies in my stomach start flitting around and the smile on my face grow.

  “Well, you caught me. I have indeed been thinking about the day. I can’t believe we have an entire day to do nothing but hang out. No driving, no performing, no press...”

  “No Colin,” he agreed quickly. “I’m tired of watching him watch you.”

  I made a face. “He’s just doing his job.”

  Connor didn’t look amused. “If his job is to stalk you and constantly ask you if you need anything. Did you bring a valet along and force him to start a blog as his cover or something?”

  I reached out and shoved him. “I’ve never met him in my life. And he’s not that bad. He’s just enthusiastic.”

  “Enthusiastic about being in love with you,” Connor muttered, looking sour.

  “What?” I asked, sure I’d heard him wrong.

  His expression changed to one of pure innocence. “Nothing. I said I’m excited to get breakfast with you. Want to get breakfast? I dreamed about it all night.”

  I narrowed my eyes, seeing the lie for what it was, but he gave me his best impression of a cherubic choir boy, all big eyes and raised eyebrows.

  “Breakfast?” he asked again.

  “Oh my God, yes. Breakfast,” I finally gave in, waving him off.

  But as he slithered out of his sleeping back and opened up the van, looking around for the nearest bathroom, I watched him, wondering. Colin was just doing his job, covering the band he was following. And he was doing a pretty good job of it, in my opinion.

  Connor evidently didn’t think so.

  Was he... jealous?

  Why?

  We went to the fair right after breakfast and stopped at the entry, just to appreciate all the noise, color, and movement. The entire park was taking up by booths, a pony ride, what looked like an archery contest, and a stage where kids were dancing to the stereo. People were laughing and eating and blowing up balloons in the sunshine; weaving flowers for their hair and gossiping with each other.

  “Looks like that summer fair in Arberry,” I noted quietly.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” he replied. “Makes me miss home.”

  “Have you talked to anyone there lately?” I asked, feeling homesick as well. I’d been in Nashville for months—years, even—and it had started to feel comfortable to me, but being on this tour and in the middle of so many small communities had made me realize that I was a small town girl at heart. I liked the big city and all the action, but a part of me would always belong to a town where there was one main street and several smaller ones, and that was it.

  I liked being in places where I knew everyone’s name.

  I liked that Connor had come from that sort of place, too—the same place, actually. And I wondered if this tour had had the same effect on him.

  “I want to go home,” I said. “I miss Arberry.”

  I felt him turn to look at me but didn’t look up at him. I’d just admitted something that was deeply personal and I wasn’t sure I was ready to see how he’d taken it. I went to such great lengths to protect myself. And yet here I was admitting one of my most closely held secrets to someone who could take it and use it against me.

  Not that I thought he would. Connor Wheating was quite possibly the best person I’d ever met. But still. Admitting weaknesses didn’t come easy to me. And there had been people who’d used them against me before.