Page 23 of Four on the Floor: A Menage Romance

“The bloody hell did youdo?”I shout.

There’s smoke everywhere, and I’m waving a hand in front of my face, trying to drive it away. I’m half-covered in fire extinguisher foam, and Dalton’s almost completely covered.

“Nothing?” he says, sounding more than a little sheepish.

I head to the kitchen’s back door and prop it open with a twenty-pound bag of rice, because even though it’s single-digits outside, we need to let the smoke dissipate.

“Turn on the fan over the stove,” I order Dalton.

He switches it on, but it doesn’t do a whole lot. I grab a kitchen towel and start wiping foam off myself, since I was standing too close when he extinguished the fire. When I’m done, I toss it to Dalton, who puts the extinguisher down warily and wipes himself off as well.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” I ask. “Or did a fire start in the oven while you were in here cooking for no reason at all?”

“Okay, okay,” he says, tossing the towel on the counter and holding his hands out placatingly. “I’m sorry. I was trying to make macaroni and cheese, and I guess I left it too long in the oven or something.”

I walk to the open door and stick my head out, taking a deep, cleansing breath of fresh air. The adrenaline of hearing the alarm go off and then running into the kitchen only to find Dalton blasting the range and oven with a fire extinguisher is starting to wear off, and I just feel rattled and shaky.

“It’s all right,” I tell him when I come back in. “Is anything seriously damaged?”

Before he can answer, Cash and Larkin run in, looking alarmed and… disheveled.

Quitedisheveled. Cash’s hair is crazy, his fly is down, and Larkin’s not wearing a bra. It doesn’t take a genius to put all that together, and I can see Dalton do the math at the exact same time as me.

We exchange a quick glance. I raise one eyebrow, just a tiny bit, and he shrugs.

“What happened?” Cash says, peering into the kitchen. “Is everything okay? Are you guys all right?”

“A noodle incident, I think so, and yes,” I rattle off in quick order. “Bit of a false alarm, apologies.”

Slate’s head appears behind them, and his hair’s even wilder than Cash’s.

“You okay?” he asks, his raspy, low voice calm as ever, even if he looks alarmed.

“We’re all fine,” I reassure everyone for what seems like the thousandth time. “We just need to clear the smoke out of here before it damages anything, and we’ll all be right as rain.”

For some reason, now I’m in charge. It seems to happen a lot: in the band, in life. Luckily, I don’t mind — if anything, I prefer being in control. It comes naturally.

I order Dalton to start scrubbing out the oven, beginning with the removal of a blackened pan of something that was apparently once macaroni and cheese. It seems that the cheese bubbled out, got on the heating element, and caught everything else on fire.

I send Slate to find some fans, and tell Cash and Larkin to open all the windows they can find to let the smoke out.

And of course, I watch Larkin’s ass as she walks away. She’s completely irresistible — those blue eyes and dark hair, the way she laughs, even the way shewalks.I swear there’s music in her footsteps.

I don’t care that she’s already had Cash. If anything, that’s good. Maybe he’ll bring her around to the idea that we’ve been kicking around lately.

The idea of all of us sharing her.

Or me, Cash, and Dalton, at least. Slate hasn’t been around much, so although I think he might go for it, I haven’t asked him yet. But I know that Cash and Dalton shared a girlfriend for a while, and we’ve all shared one-night stands.

And frankly?

It’s those nights that I’ve been thinking about more and more lately, the ones that fuel my late-night session with my right hand. Except I’ve been substituting Larkin in for whatever groupie happened to really be there.

Because the better I get to know her, the more I want her. The more I think I mightneedher in my life: clever and funny, a little bit awkward, a damned good artist. I’ve started bringing her tea every afternoon and seeing what she’s been working on — lately she’s moved on from rocks to landscapes, painting what she sees outside the windows of her studio.

They’re beautiful, just like her.

Everyone gets to work. I grab some towels and start cleaning up the fire extinguisher’s mess, along with Dalton, and soon we’re scrubbing scorch marks from the walls and floor.

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