I stared at the door to his bedroom, finding myself curious. What was it like in there? A hot mess like what I’ve seen of him? Or clean like the green room from that night? Why was I even wondering about this?

Sky, seeing my gaze locked on Jax’s bedroom door, raised an eyebrow. "I wouldn’t go in, if I were you."

"Oh, I wasn’t," I said hurriedly, hoping she didn’t think I had a thing for Jax.

She shook her head, giving me a wry half-smile. "I know."

Her smile gave me pause. "Are you and Jax together? I mean, not that it matters, I’m just curious."

"Heh. No. Jax isn’t exactly the ‘together’ type, with anyone," she said, wrinkling her nose. "The length of his relationships can usually be measured with a stopwatch."

From what I knew about Jax already, I wasn’t surprised. "I guess it must be easy to move from girl to girl when you’re a rock star," I said lightheartedly.

"It’s not that," Sky said in a quiet voice. "Believe me. He was like this before he ever wrote his first song. I’ve known him since he was fifteen, and he’s just not wired for real relationships—rock star or not. There’s no soft, mushy core in Jax, and there never has been."

"Ah, I see." It was more candor than I was expecting, and yet another sign clearly pointing to Jax as bad news. The more I learned about The Hitchcocks’ frontman, the more I resolved myself to keep him at arm’s length.

I’d seen him for the first time just a few days ago, and in that time, he’d nearly caused a riot at his own show, flashed his c**k at me, and been chased by a jealous mob. And in the midst of all that, I’d had my life threatened multiple times. He wasn’t just a bad boy anymore; he was a very real danger.

When it came to a man as desired and dangerous as Jax, there was only one way I could keep both my job and my life safe. Look, but don’t touch.

"Anyway!" She wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly. "I’m so glad there’s another girl on this bus!"

I squeezed her back, realizing how much better I felt after having met Sky. She seemed like a kind, cool girl that I could hang out with, especially if I wanted an excuse to avoid Jax.

Chapter Seven

PUSHING BUTTONS

"What are you doing up there, Sky?" a voice came from the first floor—a masculine voice, but without Jax’s velvety smoothness.

"They must have gone downstairs when we were up on the deck," Sky said to me. "Come on, let’s go."

We walked down the steep bus steps to the living area. Chewie sat hunched over, looking at a metal machine in the middle of the room that I didn’t recognize. Behind him was a man with soulful, pale blue eyes and blonde hair. It must be Kev—the resemblance to Ryan Gosling really was uncanny. Next to Chewie’s tripped-out persona and Jax’s larger-than-life bad-boy presence, Kev’s clean-cut look made him seem like the boy scout of the group.

In any other rock group, Chewie and Kev would have been the ones with admirers hanging off them. But compared to Jax, they looked like overgrown boys. A joint hung limply in Chewie’s mouth as he twisted the machine’s parts. His frizzy hair and big sunglasses were haloed with thick, skunky smoke. "Okay, I give up," he said, looking up at us hopelessly. "Either of you know how to work this?"

I looked at the machine, which seemed almost industrial. It was relatively small, and had an empty round part at the bottom. I shrugged. "I don’t even know what it is. Sorry."

"Oooh!" Sky burst out, as gleeful as a kid. "Is that the new button maker?"

Chewie nodded. "It’s supposed to be able to make a button a minute, but Kev and I tried for an hour up in our room and only managed to do . . . this." He gestured to the end table, where I saw two mangled buttons with The Hitchcocks' logo emblazoned on them. The paper with the band’s logo was flapping away from the metal backing of the pin, which in turn was bent almost in half.

Sky looked at the twisted metal circles and laughed. "What did you do? Did you even bother reading the directions?"

Chewie lifted his sunglasses slightly, showing his brown eyes beneath. "Directions? We’re men. No directions, no problem."

Kev sighed. "Also, we lost them."

Sky looked at him, dumbfounded. "You lost them?! Now we’ve got a useless button maker machine and we wanted to have the buttons ready for Chicago tomorrow night."

"Maybe it’s a dud," Chewie said. "We might’ve just gotten a bad machine. We could throw it out."

I’d seen all kinds of wasteful spending on the bus—from the ridiculous hot tub to the insane quantities of top-shelf liquor—but this was becoming ridiculous. "Wait a minute," I said. "Are you seriously talking about throwing this out? Look, Chewie, how much can you sell a button for at the merch table?"

"Five bucks, I guess?"

"So if you could make a button every minute, that’s three hundred dollars per hour. Can you really afford to give that up?"

Sky grinned at me. "You have to put this in terms Chewie will understand," she said, elbowing her brother playfully. "Chewie, the accountant says you could make an ounce of weed an hour."

"Damn," he said, shaking his head, "that’s a lot of weed. But that still doesn’t mean I can figure out how to use it."

I pushed up the sleeves on my blouse. "Here, let me try. Let me see one of each of the supply parts." I looked for the back of the button first—that part was easy, it had a pin. I slid it into the machine, then put a blank piece of metal, artwork, and a cover over it. "That’s gotta be the right order," I mumbled, half to myself. Nothing else would make it possible to see the artwork and have the pin in the right position. "Now we just have to figure out how to use it. If I just bring this lever here down . . . and then we . . ."

After a few seconds, I lifted the lever and brought out a perfectly serviceable Hitchcocks logo button. Smiling, I handed the masterpiece to Chewie.

"Far out," Chewie said then turned his head toward the stairwell. "Yo, Jax, we have a button maker!"

My smile faded and pulse quickened as Jax came downstairs, a towel wrapped around his waist. If he was wearing anything else, I couldn’t see it. His muscled torso gleamed, and I had an unwelcome urge to reach out and touch him. "Good," he said with an approving nod toward me. "We’ve needed that."

His sudden appearance refreshed my mind of our last interaction, and my positive mood quickly soured.

As he went to the bar, Sky said, "Want to stay here and make buttons with us?"

He shook his head. "I’m going to my room to write. Instead of messing with buttons, you guys should be practicing the set—we’ve got a big show tomorrow and I don’t want anyone blowing it." He locked eyes with me for a moment sending a flutter through my stomach before heading to the stairs with a couple bottles of Guinness.

As he walked up, I couldn’t help myself from honing in on the firm contours of his towel-clad ass. Wow. I’d been so focused on everything he had going on in the front—tatts, muscles, nipple rings, and all—that I hadn’t taken a moment to appreciate the magnificent backside he had. My fingers flexed with a sudden urge to slap it.