Thea.
Blood a roar in his ears, he set aside the acoustic guitar he’d borrowed from Noah and pulled up the message. It was empty, with three attachments: one was text, the other two images. He took a deep breath of the salt-laced air and clicked on the text attachment, gritting his teeth as it loaded. It seemed to take forever, wave after wave rolling in to shore in front of him, leaving sea foam that popped and faded away into nothing under the cool afternoon light.
Then there it was, a return memo.
Reasons Why Your Reasoning Is Flawed
Introduction: In which I, Thea Arsana, explain the flaws in your argument, per your memo titled Reasons Why You Should Give Us a Shot.
Re your first point: Schoolboy Choir is my client. I’m not about to hand the band off to anyone. I certainly don’t need my business partner or our associates to look over my work. I am brilliant at what I do and I can separate my personal life from my professional.
That professional life has brought me into contact with any number of musicians. You must agree that those in your field do not make for excellent long-term relationship material. In evidence, I attach photos of one of your peers caught with his pants down with a woman not his wife. I believe you are friends with said peer and have been known to have a beer with him. It is often said that we are the company we keep.
You are deliciously sexy. Noah, Fox, and Abe have nothing on you. Don’t take that as encouragement. Sexy men can only get into trouble—see my previous line of reasoning.
The fact you see me as hot is a point in your favor, but I am not going to be swayed by your admittedly excellent way with words. As someone who also possesses excellent oral skills as well as a tight focus on the objective at the center of the oral discussion, you’re going to have to try harder to impress me.
Conclusion: Regardless of our acknowledged belief in one another’s hotness, the main obstacles to any relationship remain unchanged: you are a client, and you are a musician. Even if I decided to make an exception to my No Dating Clients rule, I, as a woman who works with musicians, know all too well that the species cannot be trusted. And trust is everything to me.
David read the memo five times over, getting more frustrated with each read. If the “excellent oral skills” comment wasn’t a sexual one, he needed to start taking remedial reading lessons.
…a tight focus on the objective at the center of the oral discussion…
Now all he could think about were Thea’s perfectly painted lips on his cock. She was always put together head to toe, and she liked to wear lipstick this color that was kind of between pink and red. She changed it up, but that was her favorite. And it was the one he saw in his mind as she moved her lips up and down his erection, her eyes looking up at him and her hands on the backs of his thighs, nails digging into his flesh. The possessive clasp of her mouth left his penis wet and shining and Jesus, he was going to come in his pants if he wasn’t careful.
He growled, closed his eyes, and tried to think back to his swim in the icy seawater and how it had almost frozen his balls off. God, Thea’s hot mouth would’ve felt so good aft—“Fuck!” The devious woman, he realized, had planted the image in his head deliberately, in retaliation for his memo.
Grinning through the agony of an arousal so deep it actually hurt, he clicked on the first photographic attachment because clearly, he was an idiot, and his mood dived. It was a tabloid shot of Will Taylor, poster boy for country music.
Will and David weren’t best buds, their personalities as different as their styles of music, but Will liked ice hockey. So did David and Noah, and the three of them had run into each other enough times at the games that they’d started grabbing seats in the same rows, getting a post-match beer together to discuss the game play-by-play. Of course, the tabloids had blown up the casual relationship into a bosom friendship.
Thea, of course, was too smart to fall for that. But there was no denying that David knew Will and that Will had cheated spectacularly on his beauty-queen wife. He’d taken his lingerie-model girlfriend to Barbados. Then the jerk had stuck his dick into her on a “romantic and secluded” beach.
And a pap with a long-lens camera had enjoyed one hell of a big payday.
Deleting the photo attachments because the last thing he wanted to look at was Will’s pasty ass, he read Thea’s memo again, this time focusing not on the statement that had made him so happy but on the truly important paragraph. The one to do with cheating. It was also the one thing it was impossible to prove he wouldn’t do.
David knew he’d never cheat, but he also knew his promise wouldn’t be enough for a woman who’d already had her trust betrayed.