Page 3 of Play Dirty (Brooklyn Dawn 1)

If he wouldn’t sing the words, I would.

Eyes locked on his, I dropped my bags beside his bench and grabbed the mic, tilting it toward me.

This dream was going to be for two.

Two

She had no fucking right.

Staring at me, she opened her pale pink lips—glossy even in the near dark, as if she’d shined them recently—and started to sing the lyrics I hadn’t needed. Everyone knew them. At this point, they were practically redundant. I wasn’t a singer besides.

Not any longer.

Not ever again.

Nor was I her accompanist. But she used me that way just the same, gripping her glass as she sang the lyrics effortlessly. She knew every line. Let her class drip over every word and made them into the pleas of an angel.

Blond hair, blue eyes, porcelain skin. A sweet voice that could rock out with the best of them like Ann Wilson or even Janis when she was in a mood. She sang the lyrics as I slammed on the keys, the oppositio

n in our styles somehow working. I was anger and jagged lines and rudeness, and she battled me back with crisp clarity and a resilience that only filled me with more rage.

It was just a song. Just a combination of words and notes that became whatever the listener needed. Until she’d stepped into the corner of my world, I’d played with half disinterest, because I was fucking bored and I didn’t know why I’d even come to this shithole tonight.

Staring into those crystal blue eyes that bored into mine, I knew all too well.

I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months, not since the benefit concert in Winchester Falls. Hell of a thing that had been. After the horrific disaster at the hands of a madwoman, the scars had run deep.

Scars were another thing I knew about. And there were no pretty bandages in my world. No bright-eyed songbirds to sing away the cobwebs and let in the light.

Especially one who turned it on and off like a flashlight for anyone who was in her midst.

She sang with her eyes open and then she sang with them closed. Either way, I wanted to shake her. This wasn’t her song. Wasn’t her show.

Fucking lead singers were prone to take over wherever they were. Most people just let them.

It’s Lindsey York’s play, and we’re all just actors. Just here to do her bidding.

Not me. I’d given her space to work her magic once before. Not again.

Her silken voice climbed, stroking the lyrics in a way that put a lie to every slashing note I played.

Dream on.

Dream of me.

It didn’t have to be part of the words for the sentiment to be true. She broke hearts and left fantasies in her wake. Didn’t matter if it was a big arena like MSG—oh, yeah, I knew she was in town for a show—or a smoky piano bar in the bowels of Brooklyn.

So much for not knowing why I’d been pulled out of my silent, tomblike apartment tonight. I was too much of a bastard to seek her out, but if I put myself in her path…

Except Ruin wasn’t. It shouldn’t have been. Yet she’d found her way here.

Now she was weaving her web. She knew how to hold an audience in her sparkly fingers. When she finally let them go, they would be dazed and grateful she’d ever held them at all.

As the end of the song neared—again—I heard the restlessness from the scattered customers beyond the screen. We were only semi-protected back here, though the place was emptying out the longer the night wore on. Only a few tables were full now. Just enough to give them a real show if that was what they were after.

Depended how far the little Barbie songstress wanted to go. She liked pushing buttons. Liked showing who was in control.

You’re not going to sing? Well then, make way for me.

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