Caught in the Glow (The Glower Chronicles Book 1) (9 page)

“Why did you buy these just to put them in your pocket?” I said, holding them up. We were close enough that his startled exhale grazed my wrist. “Why did you
pretend
to take them? To be tripping?”

He snatched at the pills and I skipped backward. Then, letting impulse take over, I marched to the kitchen sink and dropped them down the drain, hitting the button for the food disposal. I stalked back to where Ryder was still standing by the table, his face frozen in a mask of indifference.

“Are you going to answer the question?” I said.

He let out another breath. “It’s too hard to explain,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand. What does it matter to you anyway? Shouldn’t you be glad I wasn’t really high?”

“I’m definitely not going to understand if you don’t even try to tell me,” I said. “And of course it matters. I’m supposed to be... to be looking out for you. How can I do that properly if I don’t know what’s real and what’s you pulling slight of hand tricks?”

He dropped his gaze, swiped his fingers through his shaggy hair, and then looked at me again. “It’s just the job,” he said. “That’s why you care.”

There was something needy in his eyes, a plea I didn’t totally understand. But it pulled a little ache into my gut. I opened my mouth and hesitated, and Ryder shrugged.

“Of course,” he said flatly. “Well, don’t worry. I can ‘look after’ this just fine on my own.”

The words slammed down, cutting me off, crushing any progress I’d made with him in the last ten days. They knocked the breath out of me. So it wasn’t that hard to honestly say, “No. Colin, I’d care—even if they took me off duty right now, I’d want to know you were okay. Just because it’s a job doesn’t mean you’re not a person to me too.”

He took a step toward me, closing that distance again, and this time there was no ignoring the solid presence of him, that piney aftershave mingling with the smoke still clinging to his clothes.

“Yeah?” he said softly.

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, at times a highly irritating person, but frequently one I actually enjoy being around.”

A sliver of a smile touched his lips. “You’re never going to cut me a break, are you?”

“Do you want me to?”

He paused. “No. I want...” The sentence hung unfinished in the air between us. Then, without warning, he caught me by the waist, spun me to the side, and sat me on the edge of the table. I barely had time to let out a stutter of a laugh and a “What—” before his lips captured mine.

In the first few seconds of the kiss, my thoughts fragmented. The wall I’d built so carefully inside me crumbled to dust. There was nothing in the world but Ryder, and he was everywhere, and that was all I wanted. His mouth, hot and demanding against mine. His fingers tangling in my hair. The length of his torso flush against me. His hips between my knees, the seam of his jeans rough against my skin where my dress was riding up. One of his hands traveled from my hair over the back of my neck and down my spine, pulling me even closer. As I gripped his shoulders, my lips parted, welcoming. His tongue glided past, teasing out mine. My fingers twined around the soft curls at the base of his neck and tugged accidentally. The pleased sound he made in his throat sent a jolt right through the core of me.

It was that little jolt that woke me up. A shock of panic raced through me.

It didn’t matter how good this felt. He was my client. I had to keep a clear head around him. I had to be on my game.

He was Colin Ryder, who went through lovers like lattes, and my heart was already panging at the thought of letting him go.

This
was dangerous.

I pushed back with a gasp, the loss of contact radiating through me. Ryder—oh, who was I kidding, I couldn’t think of him as anything but
Colin
after we’d been entwined like that—stared at me, his chest heaving. His hands slipped to my waist as if to tug me back toward him, and I caught them, shifting so I could hop off the table beside him. My legs wobbled under me. My pulse was skipping wildly. I had to tear my eyes away from his, so bright and wanting.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I
can’t
.”

Then I fled to my room.

8.

I
’d never flown on a private jet before. The one the record label had sent for Colin and his crew, to deliver us to Austin where he was scheduled to play at a fundraiser music festival they thought would give him good “exposure,” was all soft silver-gray carpet and creamy leather seats: a sofa that could have seated eight stretched alongside sets of more traditional, if larger, airline chairs with mahogany tables perched between them.

I was sitting in one of the latter, theoretically working on an essay for my sociology course, though I’d been rewriting the same paragraph for about forty minutes. Colin was lounging on the sofa just beyond the edge of my laptop’s screen, tweaking the tuning on an acoustic guitar and chatting with Joel, who was tossing one of his drumsticks between his hands. Marcy and Kevin had retired to the smaller seating area beyond the washrooms. From the eyes they’d been making at each other since we took off, I figured it was better I didn’t interrupt whatever they’d gotten up to over there.

So I stared at the screen and tried not to let my gaze wander past it to Colin’s striking profile. It’d been five days. I’d rebuild my wall of professionalism brick by brick. But I still couldn’t brush my hand over my mouth without that kiss flashing back to me at full force.

It was my fault. I’d played along with his flirting. I’d let the flames of attraction burn too long before dousing them. I should have held that wall steady, patching up every crack the second a wisp of unwelcome emotion started to trickle past it. Now... Now no matter what I did, that moment would always remain between us.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, jerking me from my regrets, and I startled. I’d forgotten it was even on—private jets didn’t come with the standard, and apparently unnecessary, warning to turn off all cellular devices. I pulled it out and hesitated at the name on the display.

Why was Mateo calling me?

Well, only one way to find out.

“Hey,” I said, and noticed Colin glance over. I shifted in my seat, wishing there was a room where I could take the call in private. “You have the honor of being the first person to ever speak to me on the phone on a plane in flight.”

Mateo chuckled. “A historic moment,” he said, his hint of a Colombian accent almost lost in the background static. “So you can talk?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I... It’s been a while since we caught up. I’m on a bit of a break between clients—Sterling has me helping digitize all the old records. As exciting as that is, I thought I’d check in and see how the new job is going. If you
want
to talk. I know Sterling’s been on a tear about this Ryder guy.”

So Sterling had been venting about Colin around the office too. My fingers tightened around the phone. “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s going fine.”
I have no idea what the hell is going on in my client’s head ninety percent of the time, and it’s requiring a major ongoing effort to keep my hands off him, but otherwise...

I certainly couldn’t have said that last bit to Mateo, even if I’d been alone. He and I had broken up because he hadn’t been comfortable opening up more with me, but technically I was the one who’d called it quits. He’d acted disappointed but not especially broken-hearted, and after a couple months of distance we’d fallen back into the friendly work dynamic we’d had before we started dating, but I had no idea what was going on beneath that. That’d been the whole problem when we were together: Mateo had stoicism down to an art form, and it’d been hard to feel at ease with someone who wasn’t willing to start sharing his deeper thoughts and feelings with me even after a year of dating.

I hoped this call really had been motivated by Sterling’s blustering and not by the thought of exactly who my new client was.

“So you’re hanging in all right?” Mateo said.

“Yeah. It’s, you know, the job. Sterling’s given me more to stress about than the client has. Hey, have you talked to Fiona lately?” I’d texted Fee a few times since our awkward brunch and left her a voice mail two days ago, but I still hadn’t heard back. Which was really not like her.

“She came by the office for a moment yesterday,” Mateo said. “She’s— Well, she’s Fiona.”

From the reluctance in his voice, I suspected he meant the new Fiona, not the Fee I’d trained in with. If Mateo could tell how much she’d changed after just a few minutes around her...

Fee had asked me to leave it alone. Sterling was keeping an eye on her too—and if he decided there was a real problem with her behavior, she
had
to listen to him.

I bit my tongue to keep from asking if Fee had said anything about me. “Okay.”

“Well, I’d better get back to the paperwork. You call me, okay, if you ever need to talk anything out?”

“Of course,” I said. A lump rose in my throat. I wouldn’t, but I was touched that he’d offered.

After I put away my phone, I turned back to the laptop, but sociological theory seemed even more irrelevant than before. I dropped my head into my hands, replaying my last conversation with Fee in my head. Random chatter about the presentation of the bistro’s food, about some new fashion designer who’d opened a shop near the Society’s office, about the Starlet’s hot new bodyguard. All skimming around the surface of the issue we’d been avoiding coming back to.

She must have been able to tell I hadn’t really let it go. Why else would she be avoiding me?

Damn it, Fee.

I looked up at the sound of a body dropping into the seat across from me. A body I was now more familiar with than I really should have been. Colin raised his eyebrows at me and motioned to his ear as if holding a phone. “Everything all right?”

I was surprised he’d come over to ask. We’d been doing a bang up job of pretending nothing had happened the other night on his dining table, mostly by speaking to each other as little as possible. He must have wondered if the conversation had been to do with him or with the upcoming gig.

“As far as I know,” I said, forcing myself to meet his eyes with a smile. Pushing away all thought of how the lips that had formed the question had felt against mine. “And I’d like to point out that I’d prefer it stayed that way. No stunts today, right?”

“Now, why would you think you have to say that?” Colin said with a grin I didn’t entirely like. Then he got up and went back to the sofa—without actually answering the question.

I had a feeling this was going to be a longer day than most.

“What do you think, Austin? Are you rocking with me?” Colin hollered, strutting across the outdoor stage. I braced myself against the scaffolding, but at the roar of the crowd on the lawn, he just brandished his guitar and launched into another song.

I let out the breath I’d been holding. So far, so good. Colin’s half hour set was drawing to a close, and he’d done nothing Sterling or the record label could complain about. My gaze wandered over the stage to Marcy wailing on her bass, Kevin pounding chords on his keyboard, Joel’s sticks flying over the drum kit with a precise power I couldn’t help admiring. A twitch ran up my arms. It had been so easy to release any tension that was gripping me back when I still played regularly. I’d just sit down at Dad’s old home kit and give myself over to the rhythm and the flow.

Yeah, I missed it. That didn’t mean going back to it was a good idea.

I pulled my attention back to the crowd. We had two Glowers in attendance—which was to be expected given the number of bands involved in the festival, but I’d still have preferred to see none. A black guy with neat cornrows and a wide-collared suit had been hanging out near the fringes of the crowd since the set before Colin’s, his eyes sparking every time he blinked. And a strawberry blonde girl—if she’d had a human age, it couldn’t have been more than eighteen—had been moshing by the front of the stage for the last fifteen minutes, hair flashing and face tilted back. She looked taller and curvier than the redhead who’d been chasing Colin before, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t her. I didn’t know yet just how dedicated that Glower was, and I wouldn’t be able to get a sense without a close encounter. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

An odd twang split the air. My gaze jerked back to the band. Colin was still singing, but he was staring down at his guitar—at one of the strings, snapped. A tight little smile curled his lips as he drew in a breath. The crew probably had spares somewhere, that was standard, but with just a couple minutes left in the set, there wasn’t much point in stopping to search for one now.

“Well, look at that,” he said instead of continuing the song, and his tone made my back go rigid even before he brought down his hand, wrenching across the remaining strings. Another snapped. Colin laughed, but it was a rough humorless sound. The rest of the band kept playing, their eyes on him, Joel paling, Marcy biting her lip.
They
clearly knew this wasn’t leading anywhere good.

Before I could even consider stepping onto the stage after him, Colin yanked the guitar strap over his head. With a swing of his corded arms, he slammed the instrument into the stage. Then he stomped his heel down on body—I winced at the crunch of splitting wood—and jogged backward a few paces to take a running kick at it. His foot sent the crumpled guitar spinning toward the far speakers.