Rock Kiss 01.5 Rock Courtship(21)

If he did, David had a feeling it would be to Fox. Schoolboy Choir’s lead singer had never divulged what he knew about Noah’s problems, but David had woken some days on tour to find Fox had stayed up till dawn with Noah. As if he understood the demons were howling for blood and Noah needed the backup.

“You heard from Thea lately?” Abe’s casual question had David’s attention snapping back to Schoolboy Choir’s keyboard player.

He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“Just wondering.” A shrug. “Did you see the way she handled that dustup in London?” The other man whistled. “I could almost hear the paps whimpering. I pity the poor sucker who wants to breach her defenses.”

“Her strength is part of her and it makes her amazing,” David said through gritted teeth.

“I totally agree. I fucking love Thea.” Abe shrugged, muscles rippling under the black T-shirt all but painted to his body. “She’s got serious thorns though—man will have to be determined as hell if he wants to get through.”

David realized he’d been expertly played by his friend into betraying far too much. “Yeah,” he said and left it at that, damn sure Abe had figured out exactly who David was picking up at the airport.

He and Abe had been friends since the eighth day after David entered the private boarding school as a thirteen-year-old scholarship student who didn’t have designer anything and didn’t go to Aspen or St. Moritz on his vacations. Abe, by contrast, came from a seriously wealthy and influential family, one that had made its money in real estate but that also had a Supreme Court judge and a senator in its midst, not to mention a tenured professor and several high-powered attorneys.

The two of them should’ve had nothing in common. By rights, Abe should’ve been the kind of rich, entitled brat who tried to beat up on David. Instead, they’d managed to blow up something in chem lab the first time they’d been paired together in class—after making a mutual decision to “improve” the experiment—and had ended up in detention. Where they’d both groaned and said, “My mom’s going to kill me.”

That had been that. Despite their differences, the two of them had found they not only had strong family ties in common, but music too. David already knew he loved the rhythm and beat of the drums, while Abe had been playing classical piano since he was three, was gifted on the keys. Then had come the fateful meeting with Noah and Fox.

“What’s the grin for?” Abe asked, dark eyes curious.

“I was thinking about the choir tryout.” All four of them had sung flat and off-key on purpose that day, horrified at the idea of being in a choir. “Remember how Noah kept insisting he was a born singer before butchering the entire piece he was assigned?”

Abe scowled. “Fucker was smarter than I was.”

“Yeah.” David laughed; Noah’s apparent arrogance had so annoyed the choir teacher that she hadn’t even let him finish the assigned piece before declaring him “an insult to music.” “You almost got yourself busted.”

“Give me a little credit—I’d never tried to sing off-key before. At least I didn’t pull the ‘I come from a deprived neighborhood and don’t know what a choir is’ routine.”

“I’d have felt bad about that,” David said, “if the teacher hadn’t tried to speak very slowly to me in Spanish.” He’d been one of only two Hispanic kids in the entire school, a fact that could’ve been isolating as hell if he hadn’t had Abe, Fox, and Noah as his family away from family.

“You got your own back.”

David grinned at Abe’s reminder. Making an appearance of wide-eyed innocence, he’d asked to sing a Spanish song for his tryout—then dug out the rudest of the many ditties he’d heard on construction sites when he’d tagged along with his father. “Best part was the way she actually clutched at her pearls when she realized what I was singing.”

“No, man—best part was Fox having that coughing fit because he couldn’t stop laughing, and Noah ‘helpfully’ translating for the other kids. That’s when I knew we’d all be friends.”

“Me, too.” Afterward, they’d learned that Noah had picked up Spanish from his nanny as a child and taught Fox. Unlike David and Abe, the two other boys had been at boarding school since they were seven and were already best friends—but from that day on, two had become four, their friendship rock solid.

No matter what happened, they had one another’s backs.

It was Noah who’d ended up in detention with David the next time around—after the guitarist jumped in with fists flying against a group of assholes from one of the senior classes who’d thought to pick on the scholarship kid. Turned out the scholarship kid could fight better than the trust-fund babies—and the trust-fund baby David had on his side was a berserker when one of his friends was threatened.