Rock God (Hearts of Metal Book 3) (5 page)

He ignored the ones criticizing his new guitarist in favor of his last, who’d left the band ten years ago, and instead thanked the writers of complimentary posts. One commenter wrote about how one of his songs had helped him through a depressed time in his life, and Dante grinned and took the time to craft a more detailed reply.
This
was why he did this job, as much as because of the music inside him.

His smile faded a little. He remembered himself as a kid, relying on his favorite singer, Ritchie Panic, to help him through the tough times of his mother’s lingering illness—and how that singer had abandoned him and everyone else who looked up to him. The jerk. That was something Dante would never do.

Halfway through his correspondence, a piercing scream rent the air, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Dante took the stairs two at a time and burst into the guest room, expecting to see Shayna being murdered, but instead she just thrashed on the bed, her face contorted with agony. Her screams died down to incoherent moans.

“Shayna!” he called, charging forward and tripping over a pillow she’d knocked to the floor. He caught his balance and seized her shoulders. “Shayna! What’s wrong?” Was it a dream, or had something in her feet ruptured?

“He’s not breathing!” she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Who’s not breathing?” Dante asked. It was apparently a nightmare—a horrible one.

“My baby!” Shayna wailed. Her voice dissolved into choking sobs.

Dante gently shook her. “Shayna, wake up. It’s just a dream.”

Her eyes fluttered open, but there was no recognition in her muddled gaze. “My baby,” she sobbed brokenly. “My baby…”

Never before had he heard such agony. Dante held Shayna tight and rocked her. “Shhhh…it was just a dream.”

“No,” she murmured in a leaden voice. “He’s really dead. I picked the coffin myself…and…and…Shawn wasn’t there.”

A lump rose in Dante’s throat. An image of that little blue blanket flashed before his eyes. The reason for Shayna’s pitiful condition was quickly coming together in his mind.

“Where was he?” he asked, already knowing from her torn photograph that the answer wouldn’t be good.

“With
her
!” she gasped against his shoulder.

Dante couldn’t help his outrage. Shayna’s baby had died and her husband… “He was having an affair?”

“Yeah.” A hint of anger blended with Shayna’s tears. “With the vending machine girl at his office,” she slurred, and Dante was reminded of her drug-addled semi-consciousness. He held her as she cried and ranted, stroking her back and hair. Shayna had lost her baby and was left alone while her husband betrayed her. No wonder she’d sounded so apathetic when speaking of her impending divorce. That was why she’d walked until her feet bled, too. She’d been trying to outrun the pain.

Dante couldn’t imagine that kind of agony. The loss of his mom still ached like an open sore, but losing a child? He would have gone insane. Not knowing what else to do, he sang to her.

Although he was at his best belting out powerful melodies before a crowd of thousands, he had a few soft ballads up his sleeve. Taking a deep breath, he sang his cover of Rainbow’s “Catch the Rainbow”—one of his mother’s favorites.

His voice soothed Shayna, and she relaxed in his arms, her breath flowing in the even rhythm of sleep. But Dante wasn’t ready to let her go. Slowly, he eased them both down on the bed, cradling her head before he placed it on the pillow as if to shield her from any more impact. But his mind raced with all she had told him.

One thing was certain. It would take longer than a week for her to heal.

Chapter Four

The smell of bacon and pancakes coaxed Shayna’s eyelids open. For a moment she lay there blinking at the sunlight streaming through the pale curtained windows. She’d dreamed of Dante holding her, singing to her with a voice that was too beautiful to be human. It seemed she could still even feel his presence, but when she turned over, the other side of the bed was empty.

She should have been alarmed by the idea of him in her bed, but instead all she had was a sense of comfort. Her stomach rumbled, and she reluctantly rolled out of the blankets and limped forward toward the tantalizing scent of breakfast. A throbbing ache infused her feet with every step, each foot pulsing like a mouth full of infected teeth, but at least this was nothing like the stabbing agony of the night before.

It took an eternity to hobble down the hall, pausing every so often to lean against the wall or an antique end table. Pictures of medieval battles were hung everywhere, making her raise a brow at the choice of décor. But she approved.

She gingerly made her way down the stairs, panting against the banister, and the soothing sound reached her of a woman humming in the kitchen. Was this the housekeeper Dante mentioned?

“You must be Miss Shayna,” a curvy older Latina said, appearing in view while wiping her hands on her apron. “I am Rosa. Please, sit down and rest those feet.
Señor
Deity says you must eat. He is right. You are much too thin.”

Shayna went and sat at the dining room table with a bitter smile. Her husband had often said she was too fat after she’d given birth, and now she was too thin. It seemed perfection was impossible. Though, to be fair, the bath last night
had
revealed emaciation from her long walk.

“Where is Dante?” she asked as the housekeeper placed a heaping plate of bacon, eggs and pancakes in front of her. The portion was enough for ten people.

“
Señor
Deity is shopping,” Rosa said, setting Shayna’s pain medication next to her glass of orange juice. “I tell him I could do it and he tells me no, it is too personal.” The woman sighed and lifted her gaze heavenward. “He needs a wife. Are you married?”

Shayna choked on her pancake. “No,” she croaked, eyes watering. “I just got divorced.”

Or at least she thought she had. Last week, she’d stopped in Eugene and notarized and mailed the papers with the final check in her checkbook included for the filing fees; and her husband shouldn’t have a problem with the paperwork. She had signed everything over to him, except for her personal bank account. She didn’t want anything to do with the house she’d failed to make a home, or even her car. After all, he’d paid for all of that. After mailing the papers, she’d stopped by the library to use the computer and sent Shawn a terse email to notify her when the divorce was finalized.

Thankfully, Rosa didn’t press the issue. The housekeeper remained silent until Shayna managed to eat four pieces of bacon, an egg, and most of one pancake. But when Shayna pushed her plate away, the woman gave a stern frown and said, “You must eat more.”

“I can’t. It was very good, but I’m full.” Shayna uncapped her medicine bottle and took a pain pill.

Rosa sighed melodramatically. “Fine. Then you must get back to bed.
Señor
Deity says you must rest and stay off your feet for a week.” She looked down at Shayna’s bandaged feet and muttered under her breath, “They look very bad.”

Deity
. Now that Rosa had quit bringing up marriage, the odd last name registered, making Shayna blink. There was something familiar about it. She’d heard that name before….

Rosa interrupted Shayna’s train of thought. “You go rest now.”

“He said I could check out the library,” Shayna countered. Her feet were already killing her, along with her hips and back, but she didn’t like the housekeeper’s bossy tone. Just like Rosa’s employer’s! And she’d die of boredom lying in bed all day without a book. Honestly, she also wanted to explore the rest of the house and see if there were any more clues to unlock the mystery of the man who’d saved her. “I’ll rest in there.”

The housekeeper escorted her down the hall and to the library, muttering in Spanish. Shayna knew it couldn’t be complimentary.

“If you need anything, I will be dusting upstairs, but soon I must go grocery shopping.” Rosa crossed her arms under her breasts and gave Shayna a dark look. “If
Señor
Deity catches you up, he will be upset and I will not be blamed.”

“Of course not,” Shayna replied with a distracted smile, eyeing Dante’s vast book collection.

The man had excellent taste. He had three long shelves dedicated to the classics, a biography section, and a selection of history books that blew away her own library. No romance novels, unfortunately, but that was to be expected.

Shayna grabbed a collection of stories about Camelot, propped up her feet in a comfy chair by the unlit fireplace, and immersed herself in Arthurian tales. They would be good inspiration if she could get back into writing.

Dante was a lot like the chivalrous knights in the stories, Shayna mused. Although he and his friends had rescued her from thugs rather than dragons, he had saved her all the same. But he was still a mystery. She didn’t even know what he did for a living. She had a vague memory of asking him, but she must have fallen asleep before he told her. She’d have to come up with a way to ask him again without sounding like an idiot.

Then again, she’d been evasive to him about her job as well.

When she heard Rosa leave, Shayna decided that now would be a good time to do some exploring. As she set her book aside, the mom voice in her head whispered that maybe she should wait until Dante returned to give her a tour, but she pushed it aside. If she was going to be spending a week with this man, it would be a good idea to make sure he wasn’t hiding any dead bodies.

Besides,
the strong new Shayna voice added,
how can he give you a tour if he won’t let you walk?

Shayna laughed lightly at that snarky logic. She’d used to think she was crazy for hearing voices—until she found out that many authors did. Then they’d become her friends. She wondered if she’d be able to make use them in the same way again.

She made her way through the library. Her feet throbbed with every step, though the pain had dulled somewhat as the Percocet kicked in.

The semi-cluttered office down the hall didn’t give her any clues—except that Dante might be gay. All of the pictures on the wall were of him and other long-haired guys; no women. Still, she didn’t
think
he was gay. And there was something about these pictures that nagged at her mind. Something familiar.

She thought of firing up his computer to dig for more clues, but decided that would be going too far. As it was, she shouldn’t even be in his office.

The phone next to the computer monitor made her pause. Hard to believe, but he still had a landline, and for the longest time she stared at the phone as if it were speaking to her in a language she could only partly grasp. Then she understood. There were people she should call, people who were probably worried about her. Her mother, for one. Emma, for another.

Shayna squeezed her eyes shut and forced the thought of talking to her editor out of her mind. She wasn’t ready to face
that
situation yet. Hell, she wasn’t ready to face talking with her mother either, but she never was, not even on a good day, and it needed to be done. As tumultuous as their relationship was, it would be wrong not to call and say that she was alive. She’d rushed out of the house in Portland so fast she’d forgotten her cell phone. Even odder was that she hadn’t realized it until she woke up in the hospital.

Her mouth screwed up, and she reached for the phone like a child anticipating a dose of foul medicine. With shaking fingers she dialed the Montana area code, hoping Dante had a good long distance plan. Dread washed over her, but she pushed the remaining numbers. Like taking nasty cough syrup, it would be best to get the conversation over with. Maybe she’d even get lucky and get the answering machine.

“Hello?” Janet Gray answered on the second ring. Her voice was cautious, and Shayna pictured her mother frowning at the unfamiliar number on her caller ID.

“Hi, Mom.” Shayna’s voice quavered.

“It’s about time you decided to give me a call.” Her mother’s displeasure was not lost over the long miles, though Shayna wasn’t
that
far off, in terms of days, from her monthly call. “Shawn told me you left him, but he didn’t tell me anything more. So here I’ve been, worried sick that my daughter’s lying dead somewhere in a ditch! Where are you? What happened?”

That voice was even more grating than the similar one in Shayna’s head. Shayna closed her eyes and forced herself to calmly explain.

“Shawn was having an affair, so I left. He was the one who brought up divorce. I just beat him to it.” She omitted mention of her insane long walk, knowing that would open a Pandora’s Box of recriminations. “I’m staying with a friend until I figure out what to do.”

A friend,
though
.
Could Dante really become her friend? Did Shayna even remember how to make friends?

Her mother favored her with a longsuffering sigh. “Did you even
try
to work things out? And why didn’t you come to me?”

Shayna heard her mother take a deep breath, preparing for a laundry list of scoldings and bitter pseudo-wisdoms to slap down any explanation she could provide, and she cut in before the rant could begin. “I need to handle this alone for now. And I better go. I don’t want to ring up my friend’s long distance bill.”

“Who are—?”

“Bye, Mom. I love you, and I’ll call you soon.”

Shayna hung up the phone, heaving a sigh. The conversation had gone better than she’d hoped, actually, though maybe that was because she’d kept it mercifully short. Or perhaps Janet’s usual immediate rain of judgment and cynicism had been tempered by genuine relief that Shayna was okay. Of course, she’d known exactly what her mom was about to ask.

Who are you staying with?

If she knew her daughter was staying with a stranger, and a man at that, Janet would have gone nuclear. No matter the fact that Shayna was a grown woman.

Shayna’s shoulders sagged, and a wave of exhaustion threatened to drown her. Talks with Mom were always tiring, but after her ordeal, this one, despite being way shorter and slightly more civil than usual, had been exhausting.