Black Lilith: Book One (Black Lilith #1) (11 page)

The security detail arrives the next morning. A couple of toneless men named Jack and Finn, who seem to consider defending musicians to be a personal calling. It’s a lucky thing that they arrived so quickly because Twitter exploded with news of the attack within minutes of it happening. Mikayla spends the next few days with her ear permanently glued to her phone, organizing interviews and additional performances at the Getty and other venues. People were buying tickets faster than TicketHub could sell them.

Dash, it turned out,
did
know the woman who’d attacked him. Her name was Tammy Bergland—a woman he’d spent one night with at the beginning of
Black Lilith
’s rise to fame, who had apparently become more obsessed with the guitarist as he’d gotten more and more successful. Dash hadn’t remembered her at the time, and could only vaguely remember her once the police came to take his statement and explain the motivations that Tammy had given them.

He told Mikayla a few days later that he felt guilty for forgetting Tammy.

“I mean… I don’t think I deserve to get stabbed or anything. But it’s kind of a dick move, isn’t it? Forgetting a girl you had sex with?”

She thought that it was, but she didn’t say it. Dash already had enough guilt. She’d just nodded sympathetically and patted his shoulder as he’d tried to recall all of the others he’d forgotten.

They couldn’t extend their stay in LA. Soon, they were packing up the bus—and a second bus for the security detail and the roadies—and then they were in San Francisco with a handful more shows than they’d planned on performing with back-to-back interviews planned for the first three days.

“Can we
not
do this next time?” Slate asks after the eighth interview in a row, running a hand through his hair and letting his eyelids droop closed. The rest of the band nods tiredly in agreement.

Mikayla had sat in on a few of the interviews this time. The journalists all seemed to be asking the same questions over and over again.

Where do you get your ideas?

How long has the band been together?

Is it true that your PA tried to step in front of the knife?

Mikayla had been asked to do interviews as well, but she’d made her excuses. She didn’t want the attention. She didn’t want people to focus on her. That’s why she’d gotten into events management because she wanted to be behind the scenes, making sure everything went according to plan and the venues and talent were happy. That’s where she excels, not sitting in front of the camera cracking jokes like the men in
Black Lilith
seemed to do so easily. Those men looked like they were having the time of their lives for the first few interviews, but the novelty had apparently worn off.

“I’ll see what I can do. Get you guys some free time,” she says, pulling out her phone with the band’s schedule and scrolling through. “If we do interviews in the afternoons you can have the mornings free?”

“I love free mornings,” Dash replies easily.

Mikayla makes the changes and by the time they’re in Portland the band has a clean schedule. They fall into a pattern—a rhythm almost as smooth and omnipresent as one of Slate’s beats. They have leisurely mornings, do interviews all afternoon, then perform at night if they have a gig.

Slate picks up a woman or two early in the show and brings her back to the green room. They’re usually pretty nice and Mikayla will make conversation with them while the band plays. Slate usually introduces a woman to Dash or Tommy as well. Dash seems to be a lot more attentive to the women now, and she is proud of him for that. For some reason, Slate never tries to set up Logan. Maybe he thinks that Logan wouldn’t be interested, but after Tommy’s surprised reaction to the fact that Logan hadn’t been interested in the groupies in LA, Mikayla doubts that’s the case. But Logan doesn’t seem to pay attention to any of the women waiting hopefully in the wings for a night with one of the
Black Lilith
boys.

Mikayla can’t help but be glad for that. Even if she knows that they will never be anything but colleagues, she hates to think of him in the arms of another woman.

On their third night in Portland, the band is scattered around in various rooms, entertaining their guests for the night. Mikayla is in her own room, tossing and turning and glaring at the ceiling. She keeps repeating her last phone call with her mother over and over in her head.

‘I don’t see how you can justify being a personal assistant with your degree.’

‘You’re worth more than that, I know you are.’

‘Your father would have been disappointed.’

That was a low blow. Mikayla had hung up after that last comment, and then coiled herself into a ball in her hotel room and cried until there were no tears left. When she was done, she’d fixed her makeup and gone to
Black Lilith
’s gig as usual. Logan had given her a long look when she’d arrived, but she was sure that her concealer had hidden any redness. None of the rest of the band had noticed anything.

After staring at the ceiling for what feels like hours, trying to push her mother’s words out of her mind, she finally gives up. She rolls out of her plushy, too-large hotel bed and pulls on one of the robes with the hotel’s name on the breast. It’s itchy and a bit too short for her, but it keeps her warm enough. A walk is all she needs. She just needs to get her mind together so that she can get some sleep.

Mikayla wanders the halls, keeping one hand on her room key in her pocket and the other on her phone. She’s not reading emails or trying to do research. She just needs the warm, familiar weight of it to act as an anchor. She finds herself at the elevator and steps inside. It’s one of the fancy elevators that hotels like to have to make them seem more sophisticated than they are. Vintage chic, she thinks vaguely. On the wall is a button that reads—Gym and Pool. She presses it.

The elevator opens up into the pool area, right next to the showers and the entrance to the changing rooms. Down in the basement, the air is thick with humidity and chlorine. The gym is set up behind a huge glass window overlooking the Olympic-sized swimming pool. The lights are low and no one is using the equipment, but Mikayla can see someone doing laps in the water. A man swimming freestyle with a speed and aggression that surprises her.

He raises one glistening arm in the air and Mikayla freezes—it’s Logan—she’d know those tattoos anywhere. She thinks about turning around and heading back upstairs when Logan slaps his hand against the wall of the pool and stands up, revealing his long, lean torso which is dripping with water. She desperately wants to turn away, but her eyes betray her. They stare hungrily at Logan like she’s never seen a half-naked man before.

Maybe you should ask Slate to set you up
, she tells herself as she admires the way the water slides down Logan’s bare chest, trying not to imagine following those droplets with her tongue.
You obviously need it.

Logan is breathing heavily, leaning against the edge of the pool so that his back curves deliciously. He must have been swimming for a while. Then he looks up, their eyes lock, and he seems to stop breathing completely.

“Mikayla?” he asks. His voice is rough and heavy from the exercise, and it sends a blazing rush of want through her as it echoes through the pool area.

“Sorry… didn’t mean to interrupt…” She’s babbling. That echo isn’t nearly as sexy as Logan’s voice is. “I’ll just—”

She turns back to the elevator, feeling her cheeks go red, but Logan’s voice stops her.

“Hey, wait!”

Reluctantly, Mikayla turns back. She prays to every deity she can think of that her face is as inscrutable as his always seems to be. That she can look at him without the naked want that she can feel rushing through her.

“Yeah?” Mikayla calls back. She’s still standing right next to the elevator. All the better to make a quick getaway.

“Is everything okay?” he asks.

She blinks. “Okay?”

“You seemed a bit upset before the gig tonight,” says Logan. He’s leaning against the pool wall, still breathing heavily now that the shock of seeing her has worn off. She can see the water droplets falling off of his nose and getting blown away by the harsh exhales coming out of his mouth.

“You noticed that?” she asks, though a part of her knew that he had.

He shrugs. “Yeah, I noticed.”

Logan puts both hands on the edge of the pool and hoists himself up. Mikayla thinks that is a very dirty trick. She can’t possibly dodge any of his questions, or even think coherently when he’s striding toward her in nothing but a pair of shorts.

She realizes several things at once. The sleeve is apparently the only tattoo he has, he’s even more beautiful with his shirt off, and she really, really needs Slate to set her up with someone. Logan walks toward her, his eyes bright, before making a sudden detour and heading for the row of towel hooks along the wall. Mikayla hadn’t even noticed them. But then, she’d had more interesting things to focus her attention on.

“Is there anything I can do?” asks Logan as he takes the plain white hotel towel off of the hook and starts rubbing it all over himself.

She needs to physically restrain herself from saying,
‘You can let me switch places with that towel.’

“It’s not important,” she says instead.

“It seemed important.”

“How did you… I mean… I thought I covered it up pretty well.” Because it’s too late to try to deny it. Her brain’s too scrambled to even think of denial as an option.

He looks at her then. His brown hair is damp and coils tantalizingly along his neck, and his biceps bulge slightly with muscles she hadn’t even realized were there. His tattoo looks bright and vibrant even under the dull fluorescent light.

“I guess I could just tell,” Logan says. He rubs the towel over his head, and she has to chew on her lip when his lower torso and triceps start flexing with the movement. “Must have been important if it upset you. You usually seem pretty unflappable.”

If she weren’t trying hard to keep her emotions in check, she would have laughed out loud. As it is, Mikayla can only answer wryly. “Why would you want to do anything about it?” He gives her a confused look, and she elaborates, “We’re not friends.”

Logan blinks in surprise. He drops his arms so that the towel hovers over his crotch and gives her a long look.

“You stood between my brother and the knife that was meant for him,” he says finally. “You can ask for anything you want and I’ll give it to you.”

Mikayla feels herself blushing again, just like she had back in that hotel room in LA when Tommy and Slate were praising her, and she hadn’t known how to react. Logan hadn’t offered anything beyond silent gratitude. She had never expected this declaration, not from him, and certainly not when he was half naked. She wants to pinch herself to see if she’s dreaming, but none of her dreams have ever been this real. Or looked this good.

“I didn’t do it to get something,” she says. “I don’t want your gratitude.”

“Then what do you want?”

He steps forward, and she can see a galaxy of freckles on his chest. His eyes dart over her, searching for… something, she can’t tell. She wishes she could. She wishes more than anything that she knew what he was thinking right at that moment. Did he think about the night they met and wonder what could have been? Does he imagine where the night would have taken them if she hadn’t been the new PA? She does.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. She’s not sure what question she’s answering—his or her own. “I don’t know.”

They’re a foot apart. A part of her wishes that he hadn’t just climbed out of a pool, even if it does give her a nice view. His usual cologne has been washed away and now he just smells like chlorine. He wears it well, but she prefers his usual scent.

“Why don’t you start by telling me what got you so upset earlier?” he asks.

Mikayla shuffles her feet, finally managing to tear her eyes away from him and focus on the tiles on the opposite wall.

“It’s nothing,” she replies.

He gives her a shrewd look. “Nothing?” he says skeptically. “So, what? You came all the way down here just to watch me do laps?”

“What if I did?” she challenges.