He’d often wondered why she was forever in the studio and never touring with a specific band. Mystery solved. “Layla, I don’t give a damn about fruit trees and sweet peas,” he said, giving her a small shake. “You’ve got to pull it together. You’ve got less than a minute and a half to be ready to walk out there and play. Straighten up,” he told her, grasping her shoulders.
She resisted. “I can’t breathe if I straighten up!”
“Yes, you can.” He gave her another little shake and tugged. “Did you tell Clint you’d do this?”
She gave him a wild-eyed, indignant stare. “Of course I did! I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Then you have to do it. You gave your word.”
Her anguished expression became even more pained and her frantic gaze darted out toward the stage. Her mouth turned white around the edges and for one horrifying instant he was afraid she might actually faint.
His gaze dropped back to her lips.
Clearly a distraction was in order.
“You have the sexiest mouth I’ve ever seen,” he remarked, sliding his thumb over her bottom lip.
She blinked, startled. “What?”
“I’ve wanted to kiss you for years.” And because that was the truth and she needed a distraction and he wasn’t accustomed to denying himself, he did just that.
He kissed her, and while the earth didn’t tilt on its axis, his own world did. Her lips were soft and warm and she tasted like chocolate and mint. He’d expected her to be a bit jarred by his preemptive attack, to be hesitant before fully settling in.
He’d been wrong.
The instant his mouth touched hers, she melted against him like a taper candle too close to a flame. She sighed as though she’d been waiting, too, and then her arms wound around his neck, her hands tunneled into his hair, and she tangled her tongue around his own, sucking it into her mouth.
Layla Cole flat knew how to kiss.
She knew when to slide, knew when to suckle, knew when to lick and knew how to keep the perfect balance of moisture between their mouths.
He could literally eat her up.
His heart kicked into an irregular rhythm, the balls of his feet tingled and a distant ringing sounded in his head—a warning bell he resolutely ignored—as he filled his hands with her ass. She made a little mewling sound and licked a slow path over his bottom lip. Incredibly, he felt that caress along the head of his straining dick and instinctively rocked against her. She was tiny, he realized as his hands slipped over her waist and up her back. He’d never realized how small, how petite she was.
In the dimmest recesses of his mind he registered the final strands of “Lead Me On” and, breathing heavily, wrenched his mouth from hers.
“You’d better go,” he said.
Her lids fluttered drunkenly. “Go where?”
He smiled and handed her the mandolin. “Onstage.”
She gasped as comprehension dawned, then hurried out.
Well, that had worked brilliantly, Bryant thought, still reeling from the kiss. Maybe she’d need more distraction before her next performance.
One could hope, anyway.
4
LOST IN THE SOUND, LAYLA was milking the final note from her instrument before she had the presence of mind to realize that there were roughly twenty thousand people watching her. She finished with a flourish and waited for the applause to end and the intro for the next song to begin before she disconnected the amp from her mandolin and made her way back offstage.
He’d kissed her.
More significantly, she’d kissed him back.
Quite enthusiastically.
Her cheeks blazed right along with the rest of her and a cold sweat broke out across her brow. Her gaze skittered around backstage until she found Bryant. He was seated at the Scrabble table, arranging his tiles as though everything was right with his world.
Hers felt as if it had been upended and she was hanging on to what was left of her sanity with her fingernails.
“Well done,” he said, without looking up. “You wanna play?”
“You kissed me,” she said blankly, because she couldn’t think of anything else.
He arranged a word on the board, his nimble fingers easily managing the slippery tiles. He had nice hands. Strong and capable. “You needed a distraction. I was afraid you were going to hyperventilate and pass out.”
A distraction? That’s all it had been? Despite the instant prick to her ego, she’d almost prefer to think of it that way. Really. If she thought hard enough, she knew she could come up with a reason why that would be so. Why it would be better to believe that he really hadn’t wanted to kiss her, but had merely done her a favor.
She was having a hard time being grateful.