Fade Into You (Shaken Dirty #3)(6)

Yeah, no pressure at all.

For a moment, she considered asking the driver to pull into the nearest convenience store so she could stock up on Cherry Garcia ice cream. If she was going to have to do this, she was going to do it fully fortified on Ben & Jerry’s. Otherwise, she didn’t have a chance of making it through.

But before she could hit the intercom button again, the driver pulled over to the curb. “This is as close as I can get you tonight, ma’am. But if you walk a block up, you can’t miss it on the right.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” She grabbed her purse and opened up the car door before the driver could make it around to her side and do it for her.

“Here’s my card,” he told her as he shut the door behind her. “Text me when you leave the club and I’ll meet you here.”

She nodded, shoving the card into the front pocket of her purse. “Thanks.” She smiled at him, hoping her nerves didn’t show. She’d been to this club many times since she’d turned twenty-one, but none of them seemed as important—or as terrifying—as this time.

Refusing to dwell on that fact, or what she was going to do once she got to Antone’s, she gave the driver a little wave and then walked away. As she turned on to Fifth Street, she was giving herself the pep talk of a lifetime.

By the time she got to Antone’s, she was calm, cool, in control. At least until she paid her cover at the door and started making her way into the belly of the club. Then, as the darkness and the noise of a band that was decidedly not Shaken Dirty closed around her, she couldn’t help freaking out.

There was no way she could do this, no way she could play Wyatt like that. She’d screw everything up, get him super pissed at the record label, and then any chance she had of showing her dad she could do this job would go up in smoke.

But did she have a choice? If there was a better, more reasonable option, she was all for it. But since she couldn’t come up with anything—and neither could Caleb or her dad—she was pretty sure she was stuck with this plan. Damn it.

As she made her way through the club, the close, hot air made it hard to breathe. Then again, maybe that was just her panic. Either way, she wasn’t about to have a meltdown in the middle of a show, so she pushed her way through the wall of bodies in front of her and slowly, painstakingly, made her way to the bathrooms. If nothing else, she’d spend a couple of minutes splashing water on her face and definitely not hyperventilating. She could do this. She would do this.

Except when she got there, the bathroom was packed—which overshadowed any good her you-can-do-it mantra had wrought. Bypassing the crowded room, she made her way down the hallway to the door at the end, clearly marked with a red exit sign.

Seconds later she was in a dimly lit alley behind the club, hands braced on her hips as she pulled giant gulps of air into her lungs.

She could do this, she repeated to herself.

She had to do this.

She could totally do this—

“You look like you need this even more than I do.”

The deep, rich voice came out of the dark, had her stifling a scream and whirling around, hand pressed to her heart.

As she turned, she came face to face with a guy leaning back against the brick wall of the club, his face in the shadows and a lit cigarette in the hand he was currently extending out to her.

She stared at the cigarette dumbly and willed her heart rate back under control. “I don’t smoke.”

As soon as the words were out, she wanted to snatch them back. What the hell was wrong with her? The hottest sounding man she’d ever run across had just offered her a cigarette and she acted like queen of the Goody Two-shoes? Was she insane?

He just laughed, though, and told her, “Smart move, that. Addiction’s a bitch.” Then he lifted the clove cigarette to his mouth for another drag.

She watched, hypnotized, as his full lips closed around it.

Watched, spellbound, while he inhaled the heavily spiced smoke then blew it out again in a series of perfect, concentric rings.

As she watched the rings dissipate in the air around them, she was pretty sure the only thing holding her panties up at this point were the skinny jeans she’d changed into at the airport in L.A. She just wished she could see him better—she desperately wanted to know if the face matched the voice.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked after a second, his voice even darker and more gravelly than it had been just a few seconds before. “Shouldn’t you be in there listening to the opening band? They’re pretty good.”

“They are,” she agreed—because they were and because she was pretty sure he was with them. “I just needed some air.”

“Yeah, I get that.” He laughed again, though this time there was no amusement in the sound. His eyes coasted over her then, lingered on the glow-in-the-dark words scrawled across her T-shirt—and her chest. “Hiding from a broken heart, huh?”

She glanced down at the shirt, too. I Heart Breakups. She’d picked it up when she was in Europe last summer, at the Museum for Broken Relationships in Croatia. She’d gone because she’d been fascinated by the concept of one of Europe’s most innovative museums, had figured she’d see a ton of stories about lovers gone wrong, maybe even pick up some ideas for marketing—or her secret songwriting hobby.

What she’d found instead were stories that broke her heart. Shattered stories of lovers, yes, but also friends, siblings, parents and their children. It was the last that had resonated so deeply with her, that had had her sitting in the museum’s café, drinking tea and eating freshly baked lemon cookies as she tried to regain her equilibrium.