You’re dead to me, Dani, if you go with him. Dead – like your father. Men don’t love. They only think with their dicks. He’s using you. He’ll discard you, just as soon as he’s sucked all the goodness from you.
She made Xane sound like a vampire.
Dani’s finger hovered over the delete button. As mementos went it was a strange one to want to preserve. Then again, it summed up her mother perfectly – batshit crazy, preachy, lacking in genuine understanding or warmth. It also succinctly summarised why Dani was here and not with her mum, locked inside the religious commune that’d been her home since the age of eleven.
Xane might tempt her to sin, but he sure made it a lot of fun, whereas being a good girl the whole time was deadly dull. She didn’t want to turn into the sort of sanctimonious leech her mother and the other women of the Sisterhood of St Agatha’s were. She wanted to live and love, experience what the world had to offer. And yes, it totally did help that the world in this current context happened to possess washboard abs, the voice of Lucifer and waist-length hair the colour of midnight.
Xane Geist could turn her insides mushy with a single glance. He rocked her goddamned world. Hers and a couple of million other folks’ – but she was the only one he was taking on tour.
‘Dani Fosbrook?’
Dani peeped up from her phone screen. The voice didn’t belong to Xane, nor to anyone else she recognised. Although, to be fair, she couldn’t see much of the man’s face, because of the asymmetrical cut of his blond hair. Crew, she gathered, given his Black Halo ‘Requiem for the Damned’ T-shirt and khaki cut-offs stuffed with guitar strings and bits of electrical cable.
‘I’m here to take you backstage.’
Hallelujah! She’d been sitting waiting for someone to fetch her for far too long. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but ever since a certain video clip of her and Xane together had gone viral, she’d become an object of curiosity – the rock star’s girlfriend. Hence the queuing fans with their faces pressed to the glass doors.
Unbidden, her escort hefted her suitcase, proving he had muscle hiding beneath that lean physique. She’d squeezed most of her worldly possessions into that bag.
‘Ready?’ He swiped them through a set of security doors.
Dani trotted along behind him. She’d never been more ready in her life, though she was nervous about properly meeting the rest of the band. It didn’t matter how many times Xane told her it’d be all right, she couldn’t entirely quell her butterflies. Black Halo were massive, and she’d been a fan of theirs for eternity. She still regularly pinched herself to check her relationship with Xane was real. Also, she wasn’t sure how much they blamed her for Xane skipping out on them after their last live performance. They might consider her major trouble.
‘First tour with the band?’
She nodded.
‘Mine too. I guess we’ll be seeing a fair bit of one another.’ He pushed back his curtain of long hair, revealing a pair of intriguing mismatched irises, one pale-green and one hazel. Both shone with excitement. ‘I’m Luthor.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
He gave her an endearing lopsided grin. ‘You’re not what I was expecting.’
‘Meaning?’ she asked, fearing the worst. People didn’t seem to like that she and Xane were together. She still wondered at the miracle of it herself. It didn’t seem to matter how often Xane said he loved her, part of her still expected him to wake one morning and wonder what the fuck he was doing with her – a screwed-up nobody, not especially pretty or clever, and with welts across her soul and body that might never heal.
For the most part, she didn’t even dress like a rock star’s girlfriend. She currently had on a pair of old jeans, a faded long-sleeved T-shirt and only a smidge of make-up.
Luthor shook his head, reinstating the curtain of hair over his eyes. ‘I only meant that I didn’t know he had a steady girlfriend.’
‘Where’ve you been living, Mars?’ She’d have bet money on the whole world having seen that video.
‘Malmö.’
Dani paused a moment to interpret the unfamiliar place-name. ‘Malmö, where is that?’
‘Sweden.’
‘You’re not English?’
He dropped her suitcase in order to release a bellyful of laughter. ‘You needn’t sound so surprised. Not everyone in the world is.’
‘I know, but you don’t have an accent.’
He leaned closer, so his breath stirred the wisps of hair around her face, making them tickle her cheek. ‘Does it make you feel better if I talk like this?’ She could hear it then, the soft inflection on certain words. It sent a tingle down her spine. Damn, he sounded sexy. She could imagine that purr driving a woman wild in bed.
Dani turned away from him, mortified by the heat that a few incongruous words whispered in her ear had generated. She wasn’t a free agent any more to be thinking random wicked thoughts about handsome strange men. She belonged to the sexiest man on the planet. Besides, Xane could do incredible stuff with his voice. He commanded the attention of stadiums full of people. His whispers invoked wild emotions. They could turn hearts inside out and even the tiniest of his growls dampened her and a million other women’s knickers.
She was moist now, merely thinking about him, which just proved that two weeks apart had been too long. They’d been surviving on nightly phone calls and sexting, which didn’t compensate for genuinely being together.
She hadn’t wanted them to be apart, but she’d had to face her mum and put a few things, like her degree, on hold. Taking charge of her life meant cutting a few tethers. On the plus side, she wasn’t beholden to anyone any longer.
‘Aren’t we heading to the dressing rooms?’ she asked, when Luthor turned the opposite way to the one she’d expected.
‘No. The sound booth.’
‘How come?’ Perplexed, she continued to jog along behind, her eye on the way his shorts were clinging to his hips, in danger of sliding down because of the weight of stuff in his pockets.
‘Because Ulf said so, and I do as he says. He’s the guy who hired me. Best damn sound and light engineer in the business.’
She’d never heard of him.
‘He also just happens to be my uncle.’ Luthor held open a door for her to pass through, and they began to climb, up towards the top of the building. ‘My guess is that he wants you out of the way until the soundcheck is done, so that Xane isn’t distracted.’
‘I wouldn’t distract him.’
‘Course not.’ Luthor made an appraising sweep of her body. ‘I bet Xane maintains complete focus when you’re present, just not on the music.’ His gaze lingered on her cleavage.
Dani covered her mouth and coughed, astonished by how blatantly he’d assessed her. Guys didn’t normally hit on her. This was a new thing that had only started happening since Xane took an interest. She guessed they all thought she must have something special hiding beneath her ordinary appearance to have ensnared a man with such a huge sexual appetite, or maybe they thought stealing her away would prove they were shit-hot too.
No man had a chance against Xane.
In