Mark was in her ears, in her skin, pulsing in her blood. His music was making her wish for things she couldn’t have. Making her wish Mark Webster would put his hands all over her. Grip and slide and stroke and strum.
* * *
PLAYING BLUES WAS Mark’s therapy, and it felt good to be up on stage in that dark room, the noise so loud it rang like silence in his head as the music poured out of his guitar. His mind, his fingers and the strings were one. He loved being surrounded by a few of his favorite musicians and some ringers from the sign-up sheet, slipping into the groove, egging the other guitarist on, echoing a great riff from his buddy Jack on the Hammond B-3 organ. The drummer, someone he’d never seen before, wasn’t half bad, a hot-shot conservatory kid. People were into it, too, tapping and chair dancing and dropping conversations to pay attention.
This was what he needed to drown out the confusion in his brain.
As he played, he pictured Haven Hoyt watching him in the mirror and his mind wouldn’t let go of the image. Her eyes had wandered over him, a shameless scrutinizing and undressing he wouldn’t have expected from a woman like her. She’d dropped her gaze when he met her eyes in the reflection, then peeked back as if to make sure he was still looking. A flirtation, even if she didn’t know it or really mean it. It had boiled his blood, fast, and several times he’d had to force himself to think about Pete Sovereign in order to keep from sporting visible wood.
A hard game of basketball with the guys earlier in the evening, plenty of pushing and fouls, yelling, laughing, hadn’t washed away the visual. None of it had brought his horniness back down to manageable. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, wondering what she was like in bed.
The first time he’d met her, he’d thought her Teflon coating was too thick to penetrate, but he was far less sure now. He’d seen that blush sweep all the way down to her neckline. He bet if he got Haven’s clothes off, got her under him, she’d be a spitfire. He bet she’d writhe and squirm and beg and whimper his name.
Oh, hell.
The front man, Devon, called “Seven Nights to Rock,” a twelve-bar jump blues in A with a quick four, always a crowd-pleaser. People got up to dance, and through the path they’d cleared, he saw her. For a split second he thought he’d conjured her, voodoo’d Haven Hoyt right out of the dirtiest part of his mind. How else to explain what she was wearing? Some kind of top that tied around the waist and plunged deep between her breasts—was it possible she wasn’t wearing a bra at all? The thought made him flub a riff he’d been working up. Because those breasts, sans support—
It was remarkably hard to imagine your hands on a woman’s breasts and play the guitar at the same time, like two pathways in the brain colliding. His lust tripped over the notes and made a jangled mess of his music.
What the hell was she doing here? Coincidence? Or had she come down to hear him?
If she had, he told himself, it was out of professional interest. She had to know who she was dealing with on every axis if she were going to remake him, right? She had to know where he spent his time and whether he was dressed like she’d told him to.
He wasn’t. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to put on all those pretty-boy clothes. She’d kept his favorite jeans and bomber jacket. He’d meant to get them back from her, because there was no effing way he was going to let her dispose of them. He and that jacket had been to hell and back.
Sure enough, she caught his eye, pointed at his clothes—an old T-shirt and the jeans they’d picked out together today—and shook her head. But he thought she might be smiling. Just a little.