I watched him rush by. I decided to wait, give him time to look and give up. I was hyperaware of the time passing, of the fact that Gideon would be looking for me soon.

“Eva.”

I flinched at the sound of my name. Turning my head, I found Brett approaching from the other side. While I’d been looking to the right, he’d come up on the left.

“It is you,” he said roughly. He dropped his clove smoke on the ground and crushed it beneath his boot.

I heard myself saying something familiar. “You should quit.”

“So you keep telling me.” He approached cautiously. “You saw the show?”

I nodded and stepped away from the bus, backing up. “It was awesome. You guys sound really great. I’m happy for you.”

He took a step forward for every one of mine backward. “I was hoping I’d find you like this, at one of the shows. I had a hundred different ideas about how it might go if I saw you at one.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. The tension between us was so thick it was hard to breathe.

The attraction was still there.

It was nothing like what I felt with Gideon. Nothing more than a shadow of that, but it was there nonetheless.

I retreated back out into the open, where the activity was high and there were lots of people milling around.

“Why are you running?” he asked. In the pool of light from a parking lot lamp, I saw him clearly. He was even better looking than before.

“I can’t…” I swallowed. “There’s nothing to say.”

“Bullshit.” The intensity of his glare burned through me. “You stopped coming around. Didn’t say a word, just stopped showing up. Why?”

I rubbed at the knot in my stomach. What was I going to say? I finally grew a pair and decided I deserved better than to be one of the many chicks you fucked in a bathroom stall between sets?

“Why, Eva? We had something going and you just fucking disappeared.”

Turning my head, I looked for Gideon or Angus. Neither was anywhere in sight. The limo waited alone. “It was a long time ago.”

Brett lunged forward and caught me by the arms, startling me, briefly frightening me with the sudden aggressive movement. If we hadn’t been so near other people, it might have triggered panic.

“You owe me an explanation,” he bit out.

“It’s not-”

He kissed me. He had the softest lips, and he sealed them over mine and kissed me. By the time I registered what was happening, he’d tightened his grip on my arms and I couldn’t move away. Couldn’t push him away.

And for a brief span of time I didn’t want to.

I even kissed him back, because the attraction was still there and it soothed something hurting inside me to think I might’ve been more than a convenient piece of ass. He tasted like cloves, smelled seductively like hardworking male, and he took my mouth with all the passion of a creative soul. He was familiar, in very intimate ways.

But in the end, it didn’t matter that he got to me still. It didn’t matter that we had a history, painful as it was for me. It didn’t matter that I was flattered and affected by the lyrics he’d written, that after six months of watching him enjoy other women while nailing me anywhere with a door that locked, it was me he was thinking about when he seduced screaming-for-it women from the stage.

None of that mattered because I was madly in love with Gideon Cross, and he was what I needed.

I wrenched away with a gasp-

– and faced Gideon charging at a dead run, his speed unchecked as he rammed into Brett and took him down.

Chapter 10

I stumbled back from the impact, nearly falling. The two men hit the asphalt with a sickening thud. Someone yelled. A woman screamed. I could do nothing. I stood frozen and silent, emotions twisting through me in a frenzied tangle.

Gideon pinned Brett by the throat and pummeled his ribs with a relentless series of blows. He was like a machine, silent and unstoppable. Brett grunted with each brutal impact and struggled to break free.

“Cross! Dio mio.”

I wept when Arnoldo appeared. He leaped forward, reaching for Gideon, only to scramble back as Brett wrenched to the side and the two men rolled.

Brett’s bandmates pushed in through the growing crowd around the front of the buses, prepared to brawl… until they saw who Brett was fighting with-the man with the money behind their record label.

“Kline, you fuckhead!” Darrin, the drummer, gripped his own hair in both fists. “What the hell are you doing?”

Brett broke free, lurched to his feet, and tackled Gideon into the side of a bus. Gideon linked his hands and hammered Brett’s back like a club, forcing Brett to lurch away. Pressing the advantage, Gideon lashed out with a roundhouse kick and followed with a lightning-quick jab to the gut. Brett swung, his powerful biceps bunching with his fist, but Gideon ducked fluidly and retaliated with an uppercut that snapped Brett’s head back.

Jesus.

Gideon didn’t make a sound, not when he struck out and not when Brett landed a direct hit to his jaw. The quiet intensity of his fury was chilling. I could feel the rage pumping off him, saw it in his eyes, but he remained controlled and eerily methodical. He’d disconnected in some way, retreated to a place where he could objectively observe his body doing serious damage to someone else.

I’d caused that. I had turned the warm, wickedly playful man who’d enchanted me all evening into the cold, murderous fighter in front of me.

“Miss Tramell.” Angus grabbed my elbow.

I looked at him desperately. “You have to stop him.”

“Please, return to the limousine.”

“What?” I looked over and saw blood dripping from Brett’s nose. No one was intervening. “Are you crazy?”

“We need to take Miss Ellison home. She’s your guest; you need to see to her.”

Brett swung and when Gideon feinted to the side, Brett rammed his other fist forward, nailing Gideon in the shoulder and sending him backward a few steps.

I grabbed Angus by the arms. “What’s the matter with you?! Stop them!”

His pale blue eyes softened. “He knows when to stop, Eva.”

“Are you shitting me?!”

He looked over my shoulder. “Mr. Ricci, if you would, please.”

The next thing I knew, I was slung over Arnoldo’s shoulder and en route to the limo. Lifting my head, I saw the circle of bystanders close in with my absence, blocking my view. I screamed my frustration and pounded at Arnoldo’s back, but it didn’t faze him. He climbed right into the back of the limo with me, and when Shawna hopped in a moment later, Angus shut the door as if everything was totally fucking normal.

“What the hell are you doing?” I snapped at Arnoldo, scrambling for the door handle as the limo rolled smoothly into motion. It wouldn’t open and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to unlock. “He’s your friend! You’re just going to leave him like that?”

“He’s your boyfriend.” The calm neutrality in Arnoldo’s voice cut me deep. “And you are the one who left him like that.”

I slumped back into the seat, my stomach churning and my palms damp. Gideon…

“You’re the Eva in the song ‘Golden,’ aren’t you?” Shawna asked quietly, from her position on the opposite bench seat.

Arnoldo started, obviously surprised by the connection. “I wonder if Gideon-” He sighed. “Of course he knows.”

“That was a long time ago!” I said defensively.

“Not long enough, apparently,” he pointed out.

Desperate to get to Gideon, I couldn’t sit still. My feet tapped, my body battling against restlessness so intense I felt like crawling out of my skin.

I’d hurt the man I loved and through him, another man who’d done nothing more than be himself. And I had no good explanation for it. Looking back, I had no idea what had come over me. Why hadn’t I pulled away sooner? Why had I kissed Brett back?