The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(19)

“When I was thirteen, I dared Beck to get on a trampoline with me to see if we could time it right so that we could both jump high enough to reach this tree branch in his backyard. Both our moms had to take us to the emergency room. I broke my collarbone. He sprained his ankle. Believe me, I’ve done a lot worse to myself.”

She chuckles. “Oh, I believe it. But I still feel—”

“A fan at a concert threw a box of Milk Duds at the stage, and I ducked because I thought it was a bat—don’t ask—and as I was standing up, I ran into my bassist and the two of us tripped over my feet and I sliced myself open on the rough edge of a snap inside my jacket.”

“Don’t forget the part where you just tried to maim yourself with the coffee maker,” Mom calls.

Of course she does.

Ingrid smiles over her mug, which she’s gripping with both hands, like she’s afraid of what she’ll do with them if she doesn’t. “Okay. Message received. I’ll stop feeling bad. But now I want you to know I’m refraining from asking why you wear a jacket on stage when you have to be sweating up a storm with as active as you are up there.”

“Thank you. Your tact is appreciated. If you said something about the dumbness of wearing heavy clothing on a stage that’s four hundred degrees, I’d have to tell you that fashion is important. And you’d probably tell me I could get up on stage just like this, and I’d have to be modest and argue that sweatpants and a tight T-shirt don’t do me any favors, despite the number of times gossip rags post pictures of me like this and sell out every time.”

She laughs. “Yes, I can see where you’re all kinds of modest.”

“Talent. It’s all talent.”

“Stories.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“The magazines selling out? Yes. But the part where you cut yourself on the rough side of a snap? I know you can do better than that.”

I lift my shirt and point to the scar under my ribs, and her eyes go wide, then dark.

Good dark.

I’m not the let-it-all-hang-out underwear model Beck is, showing off nearly everything on billboards around the world and causing car crashes on a daily basis, but I’m not a buttoned-up Hallmark Channel hero either.

Having a woman staring at my body isn’t new.

Feeling like she’s touching me everywhere her eyes rake over is, though.

Single mother, I remind myself. Complications.

“What about that one?” She doesn’t touch my skin, but her fingers hover just over my hip.

“Are you asking as the mother of a kid who’s gonna make the same mistakes I did, or as a woman who likes what you see?”

Her eyes lift to mine, and for the first time since she spotted me in her bookstore last week, I feel like we’re on even footing. She’s not flustered. Not in a star-struck way at the moment, anyway.

Turned on?

I hope that’s what I’m seeing in the way she’s biting her lip while her darkening eyes drift down to my torso again, then back up to my eyes. “What did you really stop by to ask me the other night? You could’ve had someone on your team call if you wanted to rent space to write songs. But you didn’t. Why?”

Correction.

She definitely has the advantage.

I drop my shirt to cover my stomach again, but I don’t step back. She’s one-handing her coffee while she studies me.

Her eyes are like a treasure chest. Gold wrapped in brown. And they’re asking a question I don’t have to answer.

I want to.

But I don’t know her well enough, and I’ve been in the limelight long enough to know that once I put it out there, I can’t take it back.

Telling someone she was my inspiration for changing my entire life?

I can’t do it. “I thought you’d say no.”

A pink stain comes over her cheeks again, matching the heat I feel rising around my ears. “To what?” she asks softly.

“Dinner.”

I swear she knows I’m not telling her everything. It’s in the subtle twitch of her eyes and the tightening of her lips.

Or maybe she doesn’t believe I’m serious.

She did just call me out on two very believable fibs.

“Let me take you to dinner.” Yeah. I’m doing this. “Whenever it works for you.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what you do to clear the air after you bond over a drunk accidental pet squirrel.”

Her eyes narrow. “So dinner wasn’t what you were going to ask about before the squirrel interrupted us.”

Hello, hole. Let me dig you a little deeper. “When’s the last time you had a quiet dinner out, just you and one other adult?”

“Do you ever have quiet dinners out?”

“Out is a relative term. I can promise quiet.”

“So you’re asking me to dinner, just the two of us, at a secluded place where no one could see us, hear us, or possibly find us?”

My mother snorts softly in the kitchen and almost makes me wish I didn’t have top-notch hearing protection on stage so that I couldn’t hear her and didn’t know she was listening in.

“I’m a sucker for a woman who won’t pull punches when I’m being an idiot.” I roll my neck and jerk my head toward the kitchen. “Clearly.”