Page 62 of The Stalker

You got too close to your client.

“Yes, that one,” she responded in a tight voice.

Jesse sighed and shook his head. “No. It’s fine. I’m not about to make you sleep on the sofa. My mother would kill me.”

“Your mother should know that I’m a big girl who has slept in far worse places than a sofa in a fancy tour bus,” she told him, trying to hold back a smile.

“I’ll let her know, but I’m pretty sure she’d still say something along the lines of, ‘no decent man would make a woman sleep on the sofa so he can have the comfy bed,’” he said the last line in a higher pitch and Tatiana thought he might be mimicking his mother, which caused her to chuckle.

“Okay. But if you change your mind, I can always take the sofa.”

They moved on to talking about the security plans for that evening’s concert. Tatiana asked Jesse if he could assist her with security at the first few soundchecks, so she could get comfortable with the process. Then, he would switch to night shifts and just come to the concerts once they reached their first major city where they would be staying in a hotel.

“Well, I’d better go get Hayden so we can take our stuff to the bus.”

Jesse nodded. “I’ll be by the elevator if you need me.”

She headed straight to the music room and opened the door. There was no sound, and fear flooded through her for an instant before she caught sight of Hayden sitting on a sofa at the side of the room and looking at his phone.

He glanced behind her as she closed the door, apparently checking for Jesse, because he said quickly, “How did it go?”

“Not great,” she told him honestly.

“Was he angry?”

Tatiana thought about it and shook her head. Jesse hadn’t been angry, more…judgmental, if anything. He had merely pointed out her professional failings to her.

“Are you sleeping on the sofa?”

Tatiana sighed and walked over to sit next to him. She swallowed heavily because she didn’t want to have this conversation with him, but she needed to.

“Hayden, where I sleep shouldn’t be important to you,” she said as gently as she could. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly touched that you had a room made for me on the bus, but it shouldn’t have happened. You should be focusing on your tour, and I should be focusing on your safety. I shouldn’t warrant even a second thought from you, let alone an entire rework of your tour bus’s interior to accommodate me.”

She couldn’t understand why the fuck this hurt so much. She felt like she was breaking up with him, even though she wasn’t. The man had a fucking boyfriend, and yet, she could still see the hurt on his face as he took in what she was saying.

“That makes sense. I really am sorry. I don’t want to care as much about you as I do, if that helps?” He gave her a chagrined smile.

Do not ask the question.

“Why do you care about me so much?”

That question. Don’t ask that question. Fucking hell.

“I’m surprised you don’t know,” he said in a quiet voice.

He met her gaze, and she frowned back at him. She knew that they had this insane chemistry. That maybe, in some other life, it was something they could have explored. But Hayden hadn’t made her a room on his tour bus because he thought they would have sex in it. It was nothing to do with the sexual tension that she often found floating in the air between them.

“I don’t know. I really don’t.” She shook her head.

Hayden sat back on the sofa so he was facing the room, instead of sitting up with his body angled toward her as he had been. He let his head rest against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes before sighing.

“I haven’t had a girlfriend in years,” he said, as though continuing the conversation, but she couldn’t see how they were linked.

“You have a boyfriend, though? Is this some bisexual thing where you miss women or something?”

Hayden snorted and shook his head. “I’m going to ignore the casual biphobia, Tati. Girlfriend, boyfriend, it doesn’t matter. Blake is my boyfriend, but it’s not the same. Before him, I had a woman who was something like a girlfriend, but not really. She lived in New York, I was here. We had no strings. Blake was before her, as well. Prior to the first time I dated Blake, I had a girlfriend for a year. That was the last time I felt connected to someone.”

Tatiana frowned at him. Her brain was sifting through the information he was giving her, yet she was still no closer to figuring him out.

---