He wished they’d had rehab for Kylie Ryans addiction. He never would’ve left.
The sweet sound of her laughter chimed through the bus as she boarded and greeted the driver. He hadn’t even noticed the man before. He only caught a few words of their conversation, but the ones he did were, “Oklahoma, my daddy, this guitar, and of course I’d love to sign that for your daughter.”
Yeah, she was different in a lot of ways. But she was still the same girl who had stepped tentatively onto his bus two years ago.
His mind’s eye conjured the memory of her greeting him on the bus during his Back to My Roots tour. He’d known even then that there was something about her. But he’d had no idea how drastically she was going to change his life. And he’d been completely clueless about how much she was going to change him.
He dragged himself back into the present and watched her smile and nod during the exchange with the driver, wishing for the first time ever that he’d never met her. He wished that he was a stranger to her and that this was their first encounter. So that she could get to know him as this man. A sober one who valued his career, his relationships, and more than any of that, her.
He wished for those things even more when she turned toward him and the smile dropped from her face at the sight of him. She was a professional though, so she plastered it right back on before his very eyes.
“I’ll take the suite in back if that’s all right with you. It has the attached bathroom I hear.”
Trace tried to make eye contact with her, but she wasn’t having it.
“Okay.” He couldn’t give a damn about which room she took. There was so much to say, so much they needed to discuss, and yet neither of them could admit it out loud.
“Okay,” she parroted back in the same tone. Apparently that was all she had to say because she disappeared into her room without another word.
The second he heard her door close, he made a decision.
He wasn’t going to try and get Kylie Ryans back. She clearly had moved on and if she was happy, he had no desire to take that away from her. But he was damn sure going to find out if she truly was happy, and if Blythe was into her for the right reasons. And like it or not, he was going to find out whether or not he could handle being on tour with a woman he still loved.
IT WAS 2:42 a.m. and Trace had an answer to at least one of his questions.
The answer, unfortunately, was no. No he could not handle being on tour with her. Kind of a shitty time to be realizing this, that much he knew for certain.
Knowing she was less than twenty feet away, probably scantily clad in one of her favorite threadbare T-shirts under her covers was killing him.
His blood burned in his veins as he lay in his own bed sans covers. Somehow her scent had infiltrated the entire bus. He wasn’t sure if he was actually inhaling that sweet warm vanilla-honey smell he loved so much or if his memory had become so vivid that it included all five senses now.
But it wasn’t his memory keeping him awake. It was his inability to tell the future that had him tossing and turning.
Questions swarmed and stung him in all his weakest spots. What if she brings Blythe on the bus? What if he sleeps in her room? Or worse—doesn’t sleep in there?
The thought of hearing even the tiniest sound of pleasure coming from her room while another man was in it stoked the fire she’d lit inside of him. The intensity was like nothing Trace had ever known.
He’d never been possessive or concerned about the love lives of any women other than his sisters. And that was just because he had their best interests at heart and because, naturally, he didn’t want to know anything about their sex lives. Despite the fact that Claire Ann and Rae were thirty and nineteen respectively, in his head, they’d never had sex—nor would they ever.
But Kylie Ryans had. He knew firsthand that she’d had great sex. Earth-shattering, mind-blowing, ruin-your-whole-damn-life-for-anyone-else-ever sex. He knew because she’d had it with him.
WHEN THE bus stopped moving, Trace roused himself from the half-ass version of sleep he’d been in. His head throbbed from not getting nearly enough rest. He stood and stared at his reflection in the mirror.
Swollen bloodshot eyes stared back from a pounding head filled with blurry memories of Kylie walking past him as if he were a stranger on the street. It was like having a hangover minus the night of drinking that led up to it.
He didn’t have an en suite bathroom so he had to step out of his room to take a shower. Which he did. A long and hot one that nearly scalded his skin right off.
But apparently painful memories didn’t evaporate as easily as shower steam. Because when he stepped out of the bathroom, he was once again wrapped in a towel from the waist down and standing face to bare wet chest with a fully clothed and fully startled Kylie Ryans.