Rock Kiss 01.5 Rock Courtship(15)

Thea went to the bouquet, and touched her fingers to one of the flame-red blooms. It was glorious. The petals were soft and velvety, curling gently outward from a golden core that held another, hidden core of opulent cream. Heart sighing, she pulled out one from the bouquet, intending to clip off the stem so she could tuck it behind her ear.

“Ow!”

Glancing down, she saw a red bead of blood on her skin; the stunning flower had tiny green thorns all down the stem.

Laughter shook her shoulders. He had to have made a special request that the thorns not be stripped or the florist would have done it as a matter of course. “Okay, David,” she murmured, “point to you.” She could get on board with a man who saw beauty in her thorns.

Of course—her smile faded—Eric had said that at the start, too.




David knew he couldn’t rest on his laurels. Thea might have replied to his memo, might even have swapped messages with him, but she was far from convinced. Throwing some meat on the grill on the back terrace of the hotel, he thought about his next move.

“What’s eating you?”

He looked up, saw Noah watching him with open curiosity in the dark gray of his eyes. The band’s guitarist had arrived from the mainland a few hours ago, but the two of them had been doing their own thing until now. “Nothing.”

“David, you’re drumming a steak knife and a fork against the edge of a grill you haven’t turned on.”

David looked down, saw Noah was right. “New beat,” he said, trying to shrug it off. He wasn’t ready to discuss Thea; back at the start, when he’d first started falling for her, the others had razzed him about his “crush,” but that had stopped a long time ago. His friends had realized it was serious for him, that any teasing would be rubbing salt in the wound.

Noah raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? This new beat requires raw meat?”

“Shut up if you want to get fed.” He got the grill going. “Abe here, too?”

Noah shook his head, his blond hair brilliant in the early evening sun. “Gone for a walk.” Hitching himself up on the wooden railing of the terrace, the cookout area sheltered from the wind and from the prying lenses of paparazzi cameras by the natural curve of the land, he wrapped his legs around the thick posts. “Want some help?”

“Make a salad.”

“Real men eat their meat as it’s meant to be eaten. On its own.”

“I’ve seen you drinking that weird green shit for breakfast.”

“That weird green shit is energy in a bottle.”

And Noah, David thought, needed the hit. The other man didn’t sleep much. He was almost always the first one up and awake when they were on tour; the only way David, Fox, or Abe could beat him to the dawn was if they just didn’t go to bed. “Will potatoes insult your manly taste buds?”

“Not so long as there’s butter involved.”

David pointed out the bowl of mashed potatoes on the outdoor table. “As ordered.” He cooked when he was stressed; another man might’ve thought that was odd. That man probably hadn’t grown up in a home where the kitchen was the center of the house, warm and welcoming and always a little crazy.

Even when they’d lived in a tiny two-bedroom place, the entire Rivera family would end up cramming themselves into the kitchen, talking over one another, chopping and stirring and doing homework. His father had often pulled long hours and his mom had to go to bed early in order to be ready for her morning shifts, but no matter what, the family always ate dinner together at the narrow kitchen table.

David had been so homesick the first week at boarding school that he’d stopped eating. Without Abe, and then Noah and Fox, he wasn’t sure he would’ve survived the culture shock despite his burning desire to make his parents proud, give them and his brothers a better life.

“So,” Noah said from his perch, “you cooked and you were drumming with a steak knife. What gives?”

That was the thing with Noah. Voted one of the world’s most beautiful people recently, complete with a cover photo shoot where he was dressed only in ripped jeans that were barely hanging on, a wicked smile on his face, the guitarist pulled off the laid-back musician routine so well that most people never realized he was always stone-cold sober in company unless with those rare few he trusted down to the bone.

The fact was, Noah’s intelligence was a blade; it was Noah who’d read all their gig contracts back when they couldn’t afford a lawyer, Noah who’d made sure they walked away from things that would’ve equaled handcuffs in the long-term.

So David didn’t try to bluff. “I don’t want to talk about it.”