“What happened between you and Pete Sovereign?”
He’d been waiting for this question since Tuesday, and dreading it. “Why?”
“I need to understand because we have to figure out how to make this tour happen. I need to know where the hate comes from, on both your parts, so I can figure out how to get him on board.”
Mark sighed. “This isn’t a good story to tell you in the underwear department.”
“Is there a better place to tell this story?”
He thought about it a moment. “No.”
“Then shoot.” She pulled a studded belt from the rack, held it up, accepted his vehement head shake and replaced it.
God, he didn’t want to get into this with her, and yet he sort of did. Right there you had the way he felt about Haven. Conflicted and backward, all pent up and ready to spill. “There...was this woman.”
“So I gathered,” Haven said dryly.
“Her name was Lyn. She was a super-groupie. You know the type? Came to every show, knew every lyric of every song, had all of our life histories memorized. She had a lot of industry connections. She’d been around with a lot of bands, she was connected with labels, she was totally plugged in. She promised me things. She said she could get me a solo album. She said it was practically a done deal. She said—she said—”
Haven’s eyes were soft, sympathetic, but he just couldn’t get the words out. She said she was in love with me. “We were a couple,” he finished instead.
“And Pete?”
“We’d kind of had this jokey thing in the past about trying to see who could get a woman into bed first. But I had it in my head that he would be able to see that Lyn wasn’t one of those women, that she meant something to me. Problem was, he kept pursuing her, so I went to him and said I—I—cared about her—and he had to lay off her.”
“And he slept with her anyway.” It wasn’t a question. She reached out and touched his shoulder.
He had to pull away, because if the warmth of that touch made it past his T-shirt and into his skin, he wouldn’t be able to keep from grabbing her and holding her close.
“I shouldn’t have hit him. It was just fodder for all the stories that came out after that, saying I was the one who broke up the band. The truth was, Lyn got Pete a solo album instead of me, and when he left, that was what broke up the band. Neither Pete nor Lyn ever tried to set the story straight. Neither did I, because—I didn’t want anyone to think I actually gave a shit. I did confront Lyn, but—”
He broke off. Enough. He’d told her the story, he didn’t have to go there, to the deepest store of his humiliation and hurt. “Maybe it’s juvenile for me to still hold a grudge, but I know what he did, and that he did it knowing it would hurt me. He’s not a man I can bring myself to beg for anything. He’s definitely not a man who deserves my respect or even tolerance.”
“God,” she said. “I’m really sorry. That sucks.”
She’d stopped browsing through belts. The two of them were just standing there, together in the accessories section, her full attention on him. This was Haven—really hearing him.
“Were you in love with her?”