Page 6 of Guitars and Mistakes
Probably.
But still.
I grinned at her. “Okay, well when you put it that way. I guess compared to God, Taylor James should be easy as pie.”
“Even easier. Considering you’ve already been doing her favors and she owes you.”
Another point on Anna’s tally. Taylor had spotted me the first morning we joined the tour, when I’d stupidly decided to get up on a stage in a café and do some performing, and had asked me straight out to play Rivers Shines’ girlfriend. She’d decided he was too broody and damaged and needed to clean up his reputation, and evidently my bright, red-headed look was exactly the one that would add more shine—if you’ll forgive the pun—to his look. I’d been hesitant, because hello,Rivers Shine, but when she’d thrown in a guaranteed contract, I’d said yes.
Guaranteed contract.
God, please let that be what she wanted to meet about, and not Rivers.
I’d barely had the thought when I looked up through the restaurant, taking in the size of it, and noticed a familiar set of blue eyes staring at me. Ruffled, dark hair. Wide cheekbones. Impossibly lush lips.
Lips that looked like they’d been built for kissing.
I happened to know exactly what it was like to kiss those very lips.
My eyes dipped to them and then shot back up to the eyes—smoldering and shadowed, as usual—and I gasped. Rivers looked... like he was going to burn me up with his gaze. Like he wanted to eat me up right here and now. Like he wanted to devour my mouth and leave me begging for more.
He also looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, and I felt my heart reaching for him, trying to find that connection we’d had, trying to ask what was wrong and what I could do to make him?—
A hand appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my arm, and yanked me to the side, breaking my eye contact with Rivers, and I jerked my gaze over to see Taylor James herself dragging me toward her table, her mouth already moving a mile a minute and her eyes intent on me.
Right. Okay. Forget about Rivers and him wanting to eat me alive. It was evidently time for our meeting with Taylor.
“The plan is,” she was saying, “to shift the publicity away from Rivers a little bit. Sure, he’s great and everything and you two are so good together, but people are way more interested in you than him at this point. They’ve already done all the stories on Rivers Shine. The tattoos. The drugs. The booze. They want something new to talk about. Something bright and pretty and...” She gestured vaguely in my direction, indicating everything about me, from my auburn hair down to my flip flops. “Something that doesn’t make them depressed,” she ended wryly.
“Rivers makes them depressed?” I asked, frowning. That didn’t seem like the right slant for any reporter to take.
Then again, Rivers hadn’t exactly given them much choice, I guessed.
“It’s not that he makes them depressed, but how many times can you write about a guy who only gives you one angle to write about?” she asked. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had reporters ask me what he was like behind the scenes and what I could tell them about his background. They’re dying for something with more depth, and he can’t give that to them.”
I bit my lip. She was right about that; Rivers only showed the press one version of himself, and it was always the same. I’d seen more than that—I’d seen the lost boy he was on the inside—but I also knew he’d never show that to anyone else. He certainly didn’t want them writing about it, or even finding out that it was in there. He’d been in the music industry since he was just a kid, the new phenom on the block, and I knew for a fact that he’d learned early to give the press—and his fans—what they wanted. It had become a mask he put on every time he went outside.
A mask that hid the real him so effectively that most people didn’t even realize there was anyone else in there.
He hadn’t told me everything about why he did it, but I thought I knew enough. He’d been twelve when he was discovered and hadn’t had anyone to look out for him. His parents were, for some reason, out of the picture, and the managers and agents he had hadn’t exactly kept his best interests in mind when they sent him out on the road to perform. He’d been learning to protect himself from a very early age.
I didn’t think he’d ever stopped keeping everyone else at arm’s length, just to maintain that protection.
None of which was my story to tell.
“So what are you thinking?” I asked, coming back to the meeting with Taylor.
Not, as I’d hoped, a meeting about the contract. But she wouldn’t be putting the time and energy into getting me more publicity if she wasn’t invested in Anna and me as an act, right?
“I’m thinking that you and Anna are the rising stars, here. You’re marketable. You’re cute and young and from good families. You have everything going for you. We get you in front of the cameras as much as possible from here on out and start sending out press releases about you. Giving the reporters what they need to start writing stories. We say Rivers essentially discovered you and is head-over-heels for you but focus on your career rather than the relationship. More of you. Less of him. He’s getting moodier and harder to handle and between you and me, I’m just about done with his shit. But I want you on the stage as much as possible.”
I felt Anna squeezing my hand, urging me to agree, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out.
More publicity was great. More time on the stage sounded amazing. And I was guessing our contract depended on me agreeing to this new scheme. But I couldn’t get over the muttered addition that Taylor was getting tired of Rivers. Getting annoyed with him..
She wanted me to replace him in the papers.
She wanted me to essentially sell him out. Leave him behind. Take his place.
