Insider (Exodus End #1) (47 page)

Even though she personally didn’t want anything to do with the circle pit, Toni realized she should be getting pictures of Logan’s interaction with the crowd for the book. She sidled along the edge of the stage, hoping to stay out of sight as she cautiously made her way to the front left corner of the high platform. She looked through her camera, trying to capture Logan as one of the crowd, but it was all a hopeless blur. She couldn’t tell who was who. She noticed a riser at the very front of the stage but off to the far side and bathed in darkness. Riott Actt wasn’t using that part of the stage at all. Maybe she could see better from there. She’d be a bit higher up, but farther from the mosh pit. But that was what a zoom lens was for. To get the best shot, she needed a high vantage point, not a close one.

Once she was standing on the platform, she zoomed in on the mass of writhing bodies below. Scanning the crowd, she eventually focused on the center of the mosh pit and took dozens of shots in rapid succession. She hoped she captured something usable. Watching through the viewfinder, she cringed each time someone got shoved a bit too hard, hit a few too many times. She didn’t see the appeal of this ritual in the slightest. But then she didn’t have mass quantities of testosterone pulsing through her veins.

“Hey,” she heard someone yell from down below. “You can’t be up there.”

She wasn’t sure if the security guard was talking to her or not. Before she could figure that out, something hard and solid hit her in the stomach—an arm, she realized as the air wooshed out of her lungs—and then she was falling. Her arms pinwheeled before her, her hands trying to catch hold of something—anything—but all her desperately clawing fingers found was empty air.

Twenty-Five

Logan was having the time of his life releasing pent-up energy until the music stopped abruptly. The men in the mosh pit continued bounding off each other for several seconds before stopping to face the stage in confusion. Logan stared up at the band with the rest of the audience, wondering what had drawn their fun to a sudden halt. When he saw a familiar brown boot poking out from behind a riser on the stage and several concerned faces peering down at the figure attached to that boot, his heart skipped a beat.

“Toni!” he yelled, shoving his way through the crowd toward the stage.

He scarcely heard the whispers of his name in his wake. “Logan Schmidt. Isn’t that Logan Schmidt? That
is
Logan.” The whispers became yells, and then the crowd rushed in on him, surrounding him, trapping him in a press of bodies and enthusiasm. He was oblivious to the dozens of hands on him as he fought his way forward inch by inch. He focused on the neon yellow shirt of one of his security team and pushed and shoved his way through the crowd until he finally reached the metal barrier fence. The entire pit audience tried to follow him over the barricade; he’d apologize to the security crew later. Now he had to find out what had happened to Toni. Why was she lying on the floor? He’d thought she’d be safe on the stage—far safer than she’d have been in a mosh pit—but apparently he’d thought wrong.

He galloped up the steps and weaseled his way through the group of onlookers surrounding Toni on the stage. He breathed a sigh of relief to find her sitting up and smacking at a medic who was trying to shove an oxygen mask over her face. “I said . . . I’m fine. I . . . I don’t . . . need . . . oxygen,” she said between wheezing gasps for air.

“Did you have the wind knocked out of you or not?” the medic asked, following her twisting face with the mask in one hand and the stretchy strap in the other as he tried to affix it to his target.

“Yeah, but . . . I’ll find . . . my wind . . . myself. Thanks.”

“So you’re refusing treatment?”

“Yes!”

The paramedic backed off, shaking his head at her stubbornness.

Logan squatted next to Toni and brushed her hair behind her ear. “What happened?” he asked.

“Where . . . are . . . my glasses?” she wheezed, shoving his hand aside and struggling to her feet.

She was still gasping, but apparently had no intention of waiting until she caught her breath before causing an additional scene.

“And my camera? If it’s . . . broken, I swear I’ll . . . I swear I’ll . . . ” Her bottom lip quivered as she glanced from one person to the next as if trying to figure out who they were. Maybe she had a concussion or something.

“Did you hit your head?” he asked.

“No!”

Logan wrapped an arm around her shoulders and slowly urged her from the stage. “Find her glasses and her camera,” he said to a stagehand, who jumped at the opportunity to do his bidding.

“Well, that was a bit of excitement,” the lead singer of Riott Actt was saying to the crowd. “But the show must go on.”

Logan helped Toni down the stage steps. She was trembling so badly, she could scarcely stay on her feet. He would have scooped her into his arms and carried her, but somehow he figured that would upset her even more. He led her into a corridor—where it was a bit quieter—found an empty equipment case and promptly forced her to sit on it. Once seated, she slumped forward, elbows resting on her knees as she sucked in deep ragged breaths. He knew she was seconds from a monumental meltdown, and he was okay with that, but he didn’t think
she’d
be okay with it. He squatted before her and tilted his head into her line of vision.

“Now tell me what happened,” he said. “Are you hurt?”

“I’ve been better,” she snapped and then she started gasping again. “I can’t breathe . . . I need . . . inhaler.”

“Why didn’t you let that medic help you?”

“Shut . . . shut . . . shut,” she said between gasps. “Shut up. Y-you.”

Logan would have smiled at how cute she looked trying to be mad and catch her breath at the same time, but he was too concerned for her well-being to dwell on her appearance for more than a second. He waved down the nearest onlooker. “Go see if the medic has a rescue inhaler, but whatever you do, don’t tell Toni she needs help.”

Toni glared at him for a brief instant before doubling over and wheezing in misery.

Logan had no idea what to do for her, so he just crouched at her feet, patting her knee. Toni glared at the man who returned with a tank of oxygen hooked to a face mask.

“I said no”—wheeze—“oxygen.”

“How about a nebulizer with albuterol?” the medic said. He seemed to be used to working with difficult patients.

She nodded and closed her eyes while the medic slipped the clear plastic mask over her nose and mouth. She sucked in a deep breath. And another. Tears leaked from beneath her tightly squeezed eyelids. Logan touched her hair, his heart twisting with a mixture of anxiety and anguish. Her wheezing lessened slightly, and she took another deep inhale, finally catching her breath. He wasn’t sure what she was so upset about. Perhaps she was embarrassed. But he sensed there was something deeper going on in her head.

“Better?” he asked when her breathing normalized.

She opened her eyes and nodded. She then tilted her head back, panting at the ceiling as she fought the tears pooling in her eyes.

She pulled the oxygen mask off her face and tossed it at the paramedic.

“Thank you for helping her,” Logan said. “I’m not sure why she’s being so cranky. She’s usually really nice.”

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“I could start an IV. Give her some meds to help her breathing,” the concerned paramedic offered.

“Go away!” Toni yelled. “I can breathe just fine now. Having the wind knocked out of me triggered an asthma attack, is all. I haven’t had an asthma attack in over ten years.”

Feeling completely useless, Logan shrugged at the paramedic. If she really needed the meds, he’d hold her down if necessary. “Will she be okay without the additional medication?”

“She should be.” The young man grinned. “She seems to have her wits about her.”

Logan didn’t fully agree with the man’s assessment. Her behavior was irrational. At least for her. Still, he couldn’t call her out on refusing medical treatment. He’d once walked around for three weeks on a broken foot because he was sure he was fine after a rather tame wipeout on his dirt bike.

He sat beside her on the equipment case and took her hand. She squeezed with surprising strength, but refused to look at him as she used a soppy tissue to blot her eyes and nose.

“Toni? Tell me what’s wrong.”

She shook her head.

“Toni,” he said cajolingly.

“I don’t . . . I don’t belong here,” she said.

Logan laughed. That was all it was? Seriously? She felt out of place? “You’re at a metal concert. The only requirement for fitting in with a bunch of metal heads is to not fit in.”

She wiped at her tears with the heels of both hands. “Then I must be the most metal metal-head who ever lived.”

“You did just do a stage dive onto a stage. We usually aim for the crowd. But hey, keep the audience on its toes, I always say. Do the unexpected. I don’t know why I’ve never thought to get the wind knocked out of me onstage. Very metal.”

She rolled her eyes at him and then produced a breathy laugh. “That really hurt.”

“Your head or your pride?” He stroked her hair again, wanting to kiss her so badly he was practically salivating.

“My rear end.”

“Oh,” he said.

She rubbed a hand over her ass and winced. “I think I’m going to have a huge bruise.”

“Well, there’s only one thing to do in a situation like this,” Logan said.

She frowned at him. “What’s that?”

“Let me take a look.”

“You just want to see my butt,” she said wisely.

“Your butt?” he asked. “Oh no, I want to take a closer look at dat
fine
ass.”

Her eyes widened at his use of ghetto speak. “You’re weird.”

He tapped her nose with his index finger. “I prefer to call it
obsessed
.” He rose to stand before her, his best bored supermodel look in place. “Obsession by Logan Schmidt,” he said, framing her face with his splayed hands. “Obsession,” he repeated, like the distant echo heard in an arty commercial, at the same time framing her boobs with his hands. “Obsession.” He framed her ass. “Obsession.” He framed her crotch. “Obsession by Logan Schmidt.”

She got caught in a fit of giggles that made her wheeze again. He immediately dropped his hands. He wasn’t sure if the paramedic would survive another attempt to put a breathing mask over Toni’s face.

“Are you always this silly?” she asked.

“I think the word you’re looking for is
sexy
. And yes,
I’m sexy and you know it
,” he sang, doing a dance that was part ride the pony, part running man, part stripper lap dance until Toni was laughing so hard he feared she’d stop breathing altogether.

“Stop, please,” she gasped as he shook his ass for her and turned to grab her by the back of the head so he could dry hump her face stripper style. “I’m dying.”

He loved to make people laugh—didn’t care if it was at his own expense—and in all his years, he’d never made a woman laugh so hard she might actually die laughing. He took it as another sign that she was his perfect woman.

“Literally dying,” she wheezed.

He stopped in midmotion and sat on the equipment case beside her to catch his breath and allow her to catch hers again. “So,” he said, “how’s your ass?”

She flushed. “Huh?”

“Does it still hurt?”

She shook her head. “No, but my stomach hurts from laughing so hard.”

“It’s a miracle,” he said throwing up his hands like a TV evangelist. “You’ve been healed by the power of my sexy.”

She giggled. “If that’s what you want to call it. Aren’t you embarrassed? People were staring at you.”

“Fuck them. No one invited them to my party.”

She opened her mouth, but just then the stagehand returned with Toni’s camera in one hand and a wide-angle lens in the other. She groaned and accepted the two pieces, immediately trying to fit them together.

“Is it broken?” Logan asked.

“It’s seen better days,” she said as she forced the lens to turn in place and held the camera up to her eye. She groaned again. “The optics are out of alignment.”

“Can it be fixed?”

“I don’t think so. At least not by me.” She squinted up at the stagehand. “Did you find my glasses by any chance?”

“She can’t see a thing without her glasses,” Logan said. That might explain why she’d been tickled rather than impressed by his sexy.

“No,” the stagehand said, “and I looked everywhere. That’s what took me so long. I found the camera right away, but no glasses. Sorry.”

Toni cringed. “I really
can’t
see a thing without my glasses.”

“I’ll go look,” Logan said.

The stagehand insisted on helping him, so they left Toni alone and went back into the noisy arena to look for her glasses. Poor woman was having a rough day. He would be sure to make her feel extra nice later when they were alone. Well, as alone as they could be while riding on a tour bus with five or six other dudes. Every time he’d tried to get close to her today, either she was busy or someone was commandeering his attention. Was it strange that he’d missed her? He was certain it was.