Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance (5 page)

He leaned against the brick wall next to the trash cans. The night was warmer than most had been lately, although they were also moving farther south with each stop. He pulled out his phone and scrolled through the texts from Katie. So far, it looked like she’d kept her promise. The last he’d heard from her, she was going to thirty meetings in thirty days; apparently she hadn’t gotten to the ninth step again yet, since his voice mail wasn’t full of tearful apologies.

He hated the ninth step. He hated it every time she got to it.

It looked like she was turning to her sponsor for help instead of him, which was probably good.

At least that’s what Tom told himself.

Letting go and trusting her was hard; hard because he’d always been a big brother, reminded over and over by his mother that
big brothers take care of their little sisters
, right up to the point when she’d left in the middle of the night when Katie was two and he was eight, leaving him to take care of her indeed. Trust was harder, too, because of the number of times Katie had destroyed it—the shoplifting charge when she was twelve, the wasted tuition money to culinary school. The drinking, and quitting, and drinking. Again and again. Tom wrapped an arm around his middle, pulled the cigarette to his lips. Smoke filled his lungs, the fog of it softening all his emotions and sharpening his physical senses, just a bit, just for a little while. He exhaled into the humid night, and it felt like expelling something poisonous and infected from himself—a relief to let go.

Tom took a last long inhale. He ought to quit. He’d thought about it. Never really tried, though. What if he failed at it? Would that make him as bad as his sister? His dad?

Tom navigated the labyrinth of storage areas and narrow hallways back to the front of the bar. They’d already sound-checked; just a few more minutes before they opened the set.

The crowd didn’t look any different from most of their audiences—a combination of college kids in jeans and more serious music fans, but they had great energy. Audiences were a tricky beast, a balancing act between involved and rowdy that Emme always seemed to manage with a skill he’d rarely seen.

She’d introduced a new song to the band the week before. “Lord Have Mercy,” it was called, and while it was still sultry and soulful, there were some country elements that were new for her music. Tom was afraid to hope that he’d had any influence on her work, but some deep-down part of his belly felt a hit of pride at the thought that this talented woman had written a new song right after listening to his playlist. And what a song it was—the first time he’d heard her voice sing out the first line, he’d gotten an instant hard-on. The melody wound around the instrumentation like smoke rising from a cigarette, just as seductive and addictive.

She’d looked right in his eyes the entire time she’d sung it through, and although he’d heard the bass line for it thumping in his head, he’d felt it thumping in his cock. He wanted her to push him down and take him over and over and over again, preferably while she sang in that husky wet velvet voice.

By the time the stage lights got brighter and Emme launched into their first song, Tom got lost again in the feel of performing. No matter how many nights they played the same set, none of the magic had gone out of playing for an audience. Not yet, anyway. And Emme just had
presence
. Even alone with him in the van she did, but up onstage in front of ten admiring fans—and seventy more people who would be admiring fans by the time she left the stage—she shimmered and glowed.

He lost track of time. The lights were hot, and he knew he must be sweating through the back of his shirt, but he didn’t feel it. Carried away on a line he created with Guillermo while Dave and Emme worked embellishments around them, he couldn’t stop his smile.

They played through the first four songs of the set like they did every night, but somehow the music felt magical, blessed, sacred. Guillermo
always
tried to rush the beat on the third song, but that night, he kept it steady. Dave hit the perfect balance on his guitar solos; working around the melody without overwhelming it.

And Emme. Dear God, Emme.

When she announced the debut of a new song, the audience whooped and cheered. There couldn’t have been more than seventy people in the bar, but Tom could easily imagine an entire auditorium on its feet.

Emme turned back to the band members. Her blonde hair was haloed by the stage lights, her
eyes shadowed with liner. She turned to each of them, nodding at Dave, then Guillermo. When she looked at Tom, her eyes locked with his for a long, charged moment. “Ready?” she asked.

Hell yes
, he thought. “Let’s do it.”

She grinned, then a full-on smile spread across her face, and she looked so beautiful and impish and powerful that he thought he might tumble off the stage.

Dave played the first few notes. Then Emme took over, voice aching with desire and regret. Tom could feel the vibrations of the strings under his fingers as he joined in, laying the foundation underneath. The stage wasn’t very big; his back was practically on the drum set, and every time Mo hit the bass drum, he felt the rhythm shimmy up his body from the floor. He lost himself in the feel of it, in the sight of Emme in front of him, owning the crowd, and grew hard inside his jeans, trying not to thrust against the back of his bass guitar. Her voice twined around his body. Thank God his bass covered his lap, or the whole audience would get more of a show than they’d bargained for.

He’d listened to the lyrics before, of course. He’d heard her sing. He’d helped write the bass line. But with it all put together, the energy of the crowd, the power of her personality over the whole room … as she sang about asking the Lord for mercy for the man she was about to hurt, all he could think was,
Please let that man be me
.

Dave and Guillermo weren’t speaking to her again.

Emme sighed and curled up in the van seat. They’d at least had a night in a hotel before leaving for the next tour stop, but the long and pointed silence was beginning to wear on her, and more than that, was beginning to make her angry.

“Lord Have Mercy” was a
good
song. They couldn’t have asked for a better debut for it. She hadn’t been so proud of anything she’d written since “Walking Away,” and that was saying something. They’d sold more copies of their album at their last show than they had at any of the previous shows, including ones in bigger cities.

Tom had been profiled on the SoundGap website, and good reviews of her album were popping up in unexpected places. She’d even had a show review that had called their work “transcendent.”

She knew they were afraid of another Indelible Lines-style disaster, but she’d learned her lesson. She didn’t mess with married men, and she didn’t mess around with coworkers. She had
promised Dave that she wouldn’t. Not even if she wanted to hold Tom down and lick his skin until he begged for her; wanted to use her mouth on him until he tangled his fingers in her hair, and then stop, and then do it again and again and again until he exploded all over her; wanted to make him watch as she touched herself, taunting him with what he couldn’t have the way his very presence taunted her day after day and night after night.

Instead, she channeled all her longing into songs.

Mississippi sped by outside her window. It looked different in the daylight; a little more rundown, maybe, a little less mysterious. Every state they’d been through so far had its own color scheme. Kentucky’s was green, variations on the shade and intensity of a single color. Tennessee had added brown and rust to the green.

Mississippi had its own palette that shifted as they drove. Her first impression of it had been the varying shades of blue and indigo of a night drive; during the day, and the closer they got to Alabama, the redder the ground got. It wasn’t the dark delta mud she’d expected from listening to blues songs, but nearer the Alabama clay she thought she’d find farther east.

Emme didn’t dare look over at Tom. Every time she did, lately, Dave or Guillermo seemed to notice. So instead, she watched weathered power lines racing by beyond the glass, humming to the rhythm of the tires against the asphalt.

They were right, of course. It had only been three years since the breakup of Indelible Lines. She’d only just wrestled her image back from the gossip blogs, and she was still getting death threats on Twitter from distraught fans. Every time she thought she’d learned to live with it, some new reminder reopened a wound she had assumed was healed.

Besides, as frustrating as it was, there was something … delicious about wanting but not having. She’d been in a near-constant state of arousal since they’d debuted “Lord Have Mercy.” Her body had roared to life and was determined, it seemed, to remind her of its existence.

Of its needs and wants.

Emme turned away from the window, risking a glance over at Tom. The collar of his shirt was open at his throat, just the tiniest hint of chest hair showing above the placket. She wanted to bury her face in it and inhale his scent. Would he close his eyes in pleasure, or would he smile with the full force of his dimples turned in her direction?

When she heard Dave’s cry of, “Shit. Hold on,” from the front seat, some guilty part of her immediately assumed that he had read her thoughts, had turned around to find her ogling Tom and
decided to turn the van around in the middle of the road like an angry parent. It took her a moment to register the drunken lurch of the van that threw her against the door, and the responding swerve as they skidded toward the shoulder of the road. The body of the van tipped dangerously as she dug her fingers into the armrest, every muscle clenched in an effort to hold herself in place.

The sudden stillness didn’t register until the van had slid to a stop. The radio was still on, Gram Parsons singing about sin, but no one moved for a solid minute. It struck Emme as strange, that the radio could still be playing even with the front half of the van resting awkwardly in a ditch.

She opened her door and jumped out on trembling knees. They’d left early enough, and their next tour stop was close enough, that time shouldn’t be too much of an issue if they could get a tow truck soon. She was already calculating wait and arrival times in her head when Tom touched her shoulder.

“You okay?” he asked.

Emme rolled her shoulders, taking inventory of her body. Shaky, yes. Filled with adrenaline that would wear off and leave her wiped out and crabby, yes. Her muscles would be sore from the seat belt, but she wasn’t injured. “I’m fine. Everyone else?”

As her bandmates nodded their assent, Emme surveyed the damage. The rear passenger side tire lay in strips across the road, and they would definitely need a tow out of the ditch, but otherwise, the van didn’t look the worse for wear. “Dave? What happened?”

Dave’s face turned so red it was nearly purple. “Well, we blew a tire for sure.”

Guillermo cleared his throat. “And …,” he prompted.

Dave glanced at Guillermo, then back down at the ground. “AndIwastryingtoavoidanarmadillo,” he said in one rush.

“What?”

“I was trying to avoid an armadillo.”

Emme looked back at the road. “I don’t see one.”

Mo smothered a laugh with a cough. “It was there,” he said. “Seriously. I saw it, too.”

Emme wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or shake them. Maybe both. After all her careful planning, to have part of her tour torpedoed by an armadillo? She pulled out her phone. “So we call AAA, get the van towed, and get a new tire. We’re back on the road in … four hours, max?” She glanced down at the screen. “I have … no bars. How is it possible to have
no
bars?”

The three men simultaneously whipped out their phones.

“No signal here, either,” Dave said.

“Mo? Tom?” Emme felt herself growing frantic, but pushed the feeling down into her stomach.

Both men shook their heads.

Emme forced herself to relax her clenched fists. “Oh for God’s sake. What century are we in?”

Guillermo shrugged. “It’s Mississippi,” he said, as if that explained everything.

Emme surveyed their surroundings. The air was sticky and unseasonably hot, mosquitoes buzzing even in the early afternoon sun. They hadn’t passed a house in some time; just endless rows of plank fencing and weathered, leaning power line poles.

“I think we passed a house about three songs ago,” Dave volunteered. “Back north. Maybe fifteen minutes driving?”

Emme took a deep breath. “Good. Okay, then, you and Guillermo should head in that direction. See if they’ve got a phone you can use. Tom and I will stay here with the van, and if we can flag down a car, we’ll do that. If you haven’t found the house in an hour, turn around and come back here.”

Her tone brooked no argument, but Dave tried anyway. “I think you should come with us,” he said. “Tom can stay here with the equipment.”

Emme didn’t want to admit that part of her motivation was getting Tom alone. It ought to be the last thing on her mind when everything else was falling apart, but somehow, it had crept back up to the fore, and she
really
didn’t like Dave pointing that out. There had to be some kind of logical argument for staying with the van, but in her frustration, she couldn’t for the life of her think of one. “I ought to stay here,” she said. “Because …”