Page 75 of Shattered Chords

Camille’s expression didn’t change, but her eyes did. They darkened ever so slightly. “Snowflake?” She arched a neat brow and flopped back into her chair.

“My puppy.”

“I didn’t take you for a dog person.” She sounded surprised and...relieved.

“You know, a friend of mine told me the same thing the other day.”

“It would be difficult to care for a pet when you’re always on tour.”

“I’m not on tour right now and I don’t plan on going in the near future.”

Camille was quiet.

“So what do you say?”

“To what?”

“To a barbeque at my place.” My pulse was now a loud thrum in my ears.

She tilted her head to the side, and loose strands of her flame-colored hair whispering in the wind caught the yellow glow of the string lights that rattled above the yard. There was something particularly intimate about all this—about me and her sitting across from each other, casually dressed, talking, not touching or openly flirting.

The world outside this little terrace ceased to exist. The world where my lawyer was talking to Frank’s lawyer about countersuing KBC. Where Quin had left an unexpected voicemail on my cell. Where we were ready to gamble with our careers and our money just to stick it to the label minions who knew nothing about making music.

None of that seemed important.

“What’s going on between us, Dante?” Camille murmured, her voice small and deep and dangerous all at once. It had a detonating quality to it, as if we—our lives—were on the cusp of a huge explosion.

Heat surged through me, wild and certain. I marveled at how much her presence vexed me, vexed me because I couldn’t have her the way I’d had hundreds of other women before.

“Do you want to hear the uncomfortable truth or do you want to hear the convenient lie?”

She drew a breath, long and measured, preparing herself. “I don’t like lies.”

“Me neither. I’d rather make a thousand enemies by telling the brutal truth than lose a single friend by not saying anything when it matters.”

It struck me then how relevant this notion was, how fitting. It described my life with such vivid accuracy, the fraudulence of it.

I’d done it before—deceived a friend because I was too scared to speak up, too scared to look him in the eye and hurt him then and there so he wouldn’t hurt after.

“You know my interest in you isn’t strictly platonic,” I rasped out, holding her green gaze. “You can deny all you want that you’re not even a bit curious, but the fact remains. You are. You’re just scared. And I understand why. This may sound cheesy coming out of my mouth, but I care about Ally. I care about where she takes this fire she has in her. She’s ridiculously talented and I’ll gladly help her get where she wants to go professionally, if she chooses to pursue that route.” I paused for a second to gauge Camille’s reaction. She was motionless. “But I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t feel things when I’m around you. Because I do. So do you.”

“Where does that leave us then?” she whispered, hardly moving.

“We could give it a shot. A slow start.”

“And when you decide you don’t need us anymore? It’s not just me, it’s Ally too.”

“I’ve done a lot of shit I’m ashamed of and I’m learning how to live with the consequences of those fuck-ups, but if no one will take a chance on me, how the hell am I supposed to figure out where to go from here?”

“So it’s about you.”

“No, it’s about you trusting me. About you trusting that I’m not out to just screw you and leave you like I would have done in the past. I like you. You’re the first woman who’s caught my interest in a long time.” There were tons of one-night stands and short-lived girlfriends before the overdose, but they were also, just like everything else, background noise. Their names—the ones I knew—were long forgotten now, erased from my memory by months of sobriety and clean living.

“And if it doesn’t work out?”

“I’m not going to leave Ally hanging if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’d like to be there when she gets her first Grammy nomination.”

Camille laughed. It was a deep and bright sound and it reverberated through my chest and warmed my stomach. “You really lay it on thick.”

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