Author: Olivia Cunning

“Look, don’t touch,” she said.

Jon snorted. “That’s more Eric’s thing.”

“Not with Rebekah,” he said, blowing a breath over her wet nipple. “I can’t get enough of this woman.”

Rebekah put a thumb under Eric’s chin and tilted his face upward so she could kiss him. “You can leave anytime, Jon,” she said, glancing out of the corner of her eye.

Eric heard Jon close the door behind him. “I thought you wanted him to watch.”

She smiled. “You’re enough for me. You always make me feel like the sexiest woman in the world.”

“Well, you are. It’s not like I have to work at it.”

Chapter 18

Waiting for the signal to go onstage, Eric stood behind his drum kit twirling his drumsticks. Rebekah’s soft, yet confident, voice filtered instructions through his earpiece and made him smile. The woman was too good to be true. It was as if she’d been made especially for him. Things were almost too perfect. He kept waiting for a meteor to fall from the sky and pulverize him to ash. His life had been one train wreck after another. Something this wonderful had to end badly. And when it did, he knew it would destroy him.

“Eric. Eric? Eric!” His name echoed through his head. Rebekah was shouting into his earpiece to gain his attention.

Eric realized the lights had come up, the band was onstage, and he was supposed to be tapping out the intro to “Sever,” but he wasn’t even seated yet. Shit! Daydreaming on the job. Eric rushed to sit on his throne, aka small stool, and tapped a beat on his snare.

A spotlight hit the surface of the white baby grand piano. The piano reflected various colors—blue to red to yellow to green—in time with Jace’s playing. The rest of the band entered the song, and Sed roared that first note over the shouts of a chaotic crowd. Eric got sucked into his zone, letting the music, the beat, sweep him into a place where nothing existed but sound. Arms flailing, legs pumping, he put everything he had into the rhythm. He almost forgot he was supposed to sing the chorus until the time was upon him. While Sed roared, “Sever,” in increasingly loud and lengthy tones, Eric entered with his softer melody. He concentrated on his breathing, his arms and legs carrying the beat with little thought. He loved this song, but it was a bitch to sing live and play the drums simultaneously. Not enough air. By the time the first chorus ended, he was panting and trying to regain his breath. He hoped he’d sounded okay and not like an obscene phone caller. He was glad Rebekah decreased the volume on his mic when he wasn’t actually singing. She did it so it didn’t pick up the drums, but he was gasping for air, and his mic was sure to pick it up.

The playback in his ear suddenly sounded off to his drumming. Eric stumbled over a beat as he slowed to match the track. Sed entered the song several beats off, while the three guitarists struggled to keep up with Eric’s attempts to regain control of the song.

“Marcus.” He heard Rebekah’s panicked voice in his ear. “Marcus, the playback is off. Marcus!”

She was right. That was the problem. The band was hearing the echo of the stadium sound rather than what they were actually playing.

“You’re the one who programmed the damned song,” Marcus said. “It’s your fuckup, not mine.”

Sed stopped singing and lowered his microphone, glancing to the side of the stage where Marcus stood with his arms crossed over his chest. The band followed Sed’s cue and stopped playing with a discordant ring of notes. Eric went still, sweating and panting, wondering what the fuck was going on. They’d never had this problem before. Had Rebekah really fucked up? His first instinct was to speak in her defense, but he honestly didn’t know who was at fault.

“That’s bullshit, Marcus,” Rebekah said into the crew’s feed. “You’re the monitor engineer. You’re supposed to control the playback to the band. It has nothing to do with my program. That’s to control what the crowd hears, not what the band hears. You don’t even use my program.”

“Excuse us, folks,” Sed said to the crowd. “Technical difficulties. Bear with us until we get it straightened out.” His voice echoed through their feed a half-second later.

“Or you could bare with us,” Trey said, his voice also echoing strangely. Trey lifted the hem of his T-shirt and showed off his belly to a group of fangirls near the front of the stage.

Because of the echo in his earpiece, Eric could tell for sure that this was a monitor engineer mistake. Rebekah didn’t have anything to do with the band’s feed from the amplifiers. That was Marcus’s job. Did he think they were too stupid to realize that?

“So explain the echo in my ear when Sed and Trey just spoke,” Rebekah said, her voice breathless with anger. “How can you blame that on my program, Marcus? They might not know how this works, but I do. You’re trying to make it look like your intentional error is my fault, so they’ll fire me.”

“Bullshit, little girl,” Marcus growled. “You’re paranoid.”

“This isn’t about us, you jerk. This is about the band, the music, and the ten thousand people who paid to be entertained,” Rebekah continued. “Get your self-important head out of your ass, and do your fucking job. If you have a problem with me, we’ll take it up after the show.”

“Damn, baby,” Eric said to himself, “I love it when you exert your authority. Makes me all hard.”

The crowd broke into raucous laughter. Sed turned and quirked an eyebrow. Eric’s face fell.

“Shit, I forgot I have a live mic,” Eric said.

The crowd laughed again.

“I see the problem,” Marcus said into the feed going through everyone’s earpieces. At least the crowd couldn’t hear him or Rebekah’s hot little tirade. Marcus’s voice was significantly more humble when he asked, “Do you want to start from the top?”

“They’ve got it fixed now,” Sed told the crowd.

Jace struggled to remove his bass and get back to the piano. Jon was beaming when he returned to the stage with his bass. He got to play twice tonight instead of just once.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Rebekah said into their feed. “‘Sever’ from the top.”

The rest of the show went over without a hitch. Afterward, Eric grabbed a bottle of water and waited for the crowd to clear out of the arena before going in search of Rebekah. She was probably still upset about what had happened at the beginning of the show, and he had the powerful need to comfort her. And then to dress her up like a naughty cop so she could exert her authority over him.

He finally found her backstage cringing beside Marcus. Sed had them both cornered and was in berate mode. Eric had suffered under Sed’s wrath more than once. It wasn’t fun.

When Rebekah tried to speak in her own defense, Sed raised a hand. “I don’t give a shit whose fault it is. This isn’t going to happen again. Do you understand?”

Rebekah bit her lip, struggling to maintain her composure.

“Don’t yell at her,” Eric said to Sed.

Sed glanced over his shoulder. “I’m not yelling.”

Eric lifted an eyebrow. “Sounds like yelling to me.”

“Touring is hard enough without a feud going on between my soundboard operators.”

“It won’t happen again,” Marcus said. “I found the problem and fixed it.”

“If the two of you break into an argument during a show again, you’re both fired. Capisce?” Sed continued.

Rebekah nodded sullenly.

Marcus flung his hands out, his palms at chest level facing the ceiling. “Sed, I’ve been with this crew for four years. You can’t—”

“Marcus, I wouldn’t care if you were my own father. You fuck up another Sinners’ show, by neglect or on purpose, you’re out of here. End of story. No argument. Out of here.”

“This is fucking bullshit.” Marcus glared at Rebekah before storming off.

“Way to defuse a bomb, Sed,” Eric said.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asked.

“Yeah, don’t drag Rebekah into this when you know she had nothing to do with it.” Eric wrapped an arm around her back and tugged her closer.

“Then Marcus would think I was singling him out, and he’d get even more pissed at her.”

Eric glanced at Rebekah, and she nodded in agreement.

“Sed’s right.”

Eric sighed loudly and shook his head. “Sed’s always right.”

Sed grinned like a shark. “Well, we’re all in agreement on that.”

“I’ve got to tear down the equipment,” Rebekah said, squirming out of Eric’s sweaty grasp.

“Will you dress up as a cop for me later?” he asked.

She glanced at Sed and flushed, then turned her gaze to Eric and said, “You have the right to remain silent.”

He chuckled. “I think I want to waive that right.”

“I know a great soon-to-be attorney,” Sed said. His fiancée Jessica was in her final year of law school.

“If Jessica wants to participate in our scenario, I would not object,” Eric quipped. It earned him a thump in the forehead from Sed.

Rebekah tilted her head back for a kiss, which Eric gave eagerly. When they drew apart, she patted his butt before returning to work. He watched her until she was out of sight and then turned to find Sed grinning.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just happy for you.” Sed clapped him on the shoulder and directed him toward the tour bus.

Eric was happy for himself as well. There was still one thing that continually ate away at him though. It was past time that he spilled his guts to Sed. Sure, Sed would be pissed for a while. He might even hit him, but it had to be better than this constant cloud of darkness hanging over his subconscious for almost three years.

“Sed?”

“Yeah?”

“Sed, there’s something I need to tell you about me and Jon.”

Sed’s head swiveled, and his eyes were the size of saucers. “You and Jon? No fucking way.”

It took Eric a few seconds to realize why Sed was so shocked. “Ew. No, not that. Shit, where did that come from?”

Sed released a long breath through pursed lips. “Sorry. Now that I’m not getting it on with three or four different girls a night, I’ve been noticing Trey’s activities more. That guy will fuck anyone.”

Eric laughed. “You’re just now noticing that? He actually has excellent taste and a lot to choose from on both teams.”

They paused in the corridor that led to the stadium exit. “So now that my mind is out of the gutter, what were you actually trying to tell me?” Sed asked.

“Do you remember when the old bus broke down outside Phoenix and the cash that we kept in the lockbox for emergencies was sort of missing?”

“How can I fucking forget that? Jon used every penny we had to buy drugs. That was the last straw. We had no choice but to fire him.”

Eric winced. “Well…” Eric was starting to reconsider this confession. Maybe it was better to let Jon take the blame.

“Well, what?”

“There was this lady at a gas station near Tucson. She laid this sob story on me about running out of gas and having no food for her two little kids. They were in her van all sweaty and hot because it was frickin’ almost a hundred degrees that day. Crying that they were thirsty and hungry. So…” Eric sighed. “I didn’t have much cash on me. So I gave her the money out of our lockbox.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah. I figured she needed it more than we did. We were almost home. We had some great gigs lined up. I knew we’d make the money back in no time. And then the bus broke down, and we were stuck without a dime. I was going to tell you, but Jon said you were already pissed at him, a little more wouldn’t hurt. Next thing I knew, Jon was out of the band, and we were stuck without a tour bus. We had to cancel a bunch of shows. Lay off some of the crew. It kept snowballing from there.”