The Girl's Got Secrets (Forbidden Men #7)(69)

I laughed.

“Actually,” he shrugged, “another reason I was so determined to be in a band was so I could piss off my dad.”

Now he sounded like me. I’d recently gotten my purple highlights pretty much just to piss off my uncle, who hated unnatural hair colors.

Splaying my hands out as if reading a nameplate on an office door, I said, “Asher Hart, rebel singer.”

He smiled lightly. “My old man used to knock the shit out of me every time he caught me singing when I was a kid. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I’d just be playing with my Tonka trucks, you know, minding my own business and trying to stay out of his way, when wham...out of nowhere I’d get a wallop on the back of my head. He’d tell me to cut the singing shit out because it was gay.”

“Shit,” I murmured. I’d known he’d been abused, but to hear actual details tore me up. Tío Alonso had been a strict motherf*cker and never seemed to hold back on punishments, but he’d never physically struck me aside from a couple slaps on the back of the hand with kitchen utensils.

Asher sent me a sudden, mischievous grin, which told me his bad childhood hadn’t kept too tight of a hold on him. “If I didn’t love boobs so much, I probably would’ve turned gay too, just to piss him off even more.”

My breasts tingled at his words, making me wish I could unleash them on him and let him enjoy my boobs. But then I remembered I was in guy mode. Gay guy mode. So I said, “Well, that’s a damn shame,” and I wiggled my eyebrows as if to tempt him to the other side.

He let out a full laugh and bumped my arm. “Sorry,” he offered with an amused grin that was so freaking adorable it sizzled my hormones.

This guy was going to be the death of me. The more time I spent with him, the more I liked him and the more attractive he grew.

“I should probably get back up front.” He hitched his head toward the door. “You want a beer or anything?”

Totally not ready to leave him yet, I nodded. “Sure.”

I followed him from the storeroom, then waited in the hall as he dropped the Non-Castrato box off in the break room. Once we made it back into the main area, he slid behind the bar and went to fetch me an Angry Orchard, which gave his coworker a moment to slide up across the counter from me and whisper, “Learn his tell yet?”

I scowled. “Shut up.”

He only laughed as he moved to the other end of the bar to serve a customer.

“What was that about?” a curious Asher asked, glancing between the two of us as he opened my bottle and set it in front of me.

God bless my mask; he couldn’t see my blush. I was able to play it off by shrugging and lifting the malt liquor to my lips. “How should I know? I’m only fluent in Spanish and English, not Asshole.”

Asher laughed. “Good one.”

Had I mentioned how much I loved his laugh? But I loved even more how I seemed to always be able to make him laugh. He liked me, not just as some pretty girl he’d seen in a shower or someone singing on stage. He liked me, the person.

That made me feel better than I could ever verbalize.

The first moment his back was turned as he tended to a customer, I tapped the bar top to get Ten’s attention.

“Hey,” I hissed. He scowled suspiciously at me but wandered closer. “Just how sure are you that it was me he was singing about in that song?”

“Oh, so you finally heard your song, huh?”

I growled. There was no time for him to crow with a load of I-told-you-so’s. “Ten,” I warned.

He rolled his eyes and sighed. “Incubus shirt girl was singing with Jodi. I know that for certain. How many f*cking chick friends named Remy does she have?”

Just me. I gulped. “Did she have longer, straight black hair? Taller than Jodi? A black, tighter, form-fitting, instead of loose, Incubus shirt?”

He nodded. “Yep, yep, and yep.”

Damn. I bit my lip. That sounded exactly like me. But I didn’t want to admit without a doubt yet. “Any other distinguishing features? Tattoos? Birthmarks? Anything?”

He sighed, clearly growing weary with my interrogation. “No, but...” Snapping his fingers, he pointed at me. “Tattoos. The dude she kissed after singing had this tattoo on the left side of his face of a—”

“Fish,” I finished for him. “?Dios mío! It was me. Oh...my...God.” I buried my face in my hands and leaned forward, unable to handle this. “What the hell do I do?”

“Tell Hart the truth,” Ten said on a careless shrug as if he thought it was as easy as that. Then he narrowed his eyes. “Wait, you’re done with fish-face, right?”

I scowled at him as if he were insane. “Yes! He turned out to be a lying, cheating, thieving *, so yeah...that’s over. Way over.”

“Good. So then come clean with my boy, and all will be okay.”

All would just...be okay, huh?

Yeah, right.

Leveling a get-real stare at him, I said, “You really think it’d be that easy? He’d just...forget I’d been lying to him for almost two weeks?”

“Yeah, I never did catch why you were lying to begin with? There’s, like, a good reason for that, isn’t there?”

I sighed. “They wouldn’t even listen to me audition when I went in to try out as a girl. So I had this stupid crazy idea to dress up as a dude to see if that made a difference, and obviously it did. Things just snowballed from there. Every time I had a nice little opportunity to come clean, something would happen to make me keep up the act just a little bit longer, until now...now it feels too late to say anything without causing a huge problem.”