One More Time Page 4

  Also, as much as I’d made the suggestion because I wanted to do well for GNM, I also really wanted that interview with Caleb. It would be interesting to get to know him better, and I really, really wanted that.

  Chapter 5

  Caleb

  “She wants to do what?” I asked disbelievingly. I’d been sarcastic at that fucking interview yesterday. Well, mostly sarcastic, since I really did think that the tour would be a test for Jared and Alicia. I hadn’t actually been serious or creating “brotherly conflict” as the spin was now calling it.

  Waves crashed outside the conference room at Alicia’s offices. The sky was about as black and angry as I was in this late afternoon. Jared, as always, found the whole situation funny. He was amused as hell and thought that it was hilarious that anyone would think we were fighting over this.

  Alicia played with her shiny engagement ring, twisting it around her finger as her eyes lifted to mine. She was being uncharacteristically tentative. “Kelly thinks that we might be able to garner some press by playing up this angle. Fuel the flames of the rumor fire just a little, in a manner of speaking.”

  “And she would do this by interviewing me?” Looking around the large conference table, the same room, apparently, where Madison broke the fake baby news to Jared and Alicia, I wondered if I should’ve known it could be disastrous news when we were called in here.

  “Yeah, that’s what she asked for. An interview with you as a follow-up to the question she asked yesterday. In other words, are Jared and Caleb Larsen on the outs because of the engagement?”

  “That’s idiotic,” I grumbled, ignoring the asshole in the back of my mind who was yelling that it wasn’t idiotic, that Jared—of all fucking people—finding that kind of happiness after everything he’d done and on top of everything else he had was a cruel twist of fate.

  Especially since that kind of happiness wasn’t for me, when—

  No! I shut the thought down so violently that the box I shoved it back into rattled from the force of it. Dom was watching me curiously, his gray eyes stormy as ever.

  Out of everyone here, he was the one who would come the closest to understanding what was truly going through my head, so I looked to him first. “What do you think, man?”

  “I agree with you that it’s fucking idiotic, but I’ll go along with whatever the rest of you decide. This is your choice, and Jared’s. Yeah, it’ll bring the tour publicity, but this is your real lives. Up to you.” He crossed his arms and sat back in his chair, clearly done raising his opinion. There was doubt plastered in his eyes, but as always, Dom had been completely straightforward in his opinion.

  “It’s not idiotic,” Jared countered. “The public eats shit like this up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We all know the truth. So what if we play around with the mirrors when they’re already blowing the smoke our way?”

  Nick and Matt nodded at Jared’s oversimplification of the issue. Then Nick shrugged. “I’m in. As long as I don’t have to actually do anything.”

  “I second Nick’s thoughts,” Matt added cheerfully. God, nothing got those two down.

  “You don’t think that’s an overly simple way of looking at it?” I asked my brother, since it appeared that I was the one who was stuck playing devil’s advocate here, what with even Alicia leaving it up to the two of us.

  “How is it an oversimplification? It’s the facts. The fans are already speculating about it, which means there’s smoke coming from a fire that we might, or might not, help fuel while placing the mirrors where we want them to create maximum publicity for the tour.”

  Alicia stood up from her black leather chair, placing her palms flat on the conference table. “I’ll leave this to you. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  She turned to leave, but Jared lightly grabbed her wrist and tugged her toward him, kissing her like he was a dying man and this was his one last shot at goodbye. At that, three more chairs scraped back, and the rest of the guys begged off too.

  Since Jared had been devouring her face, Alicia was the last one out the door, and she shot us a final, worried look before closing the door behind her. Jared stared at the spot she’d been standing in for a couple of beats before coming out with it pointblank.

  “Do you have a problem with Alicia?”

  “No,” I answered without hesitation. Alicia was smart, talented, dedicated, beautiful, and she’d managed to wrangle my brother into a semi-decent person when he wanted to be, or when she was around. I had no problem with her.

  Jared wasn’t pulling any punches though. “Do you have a problem with me and Alicia?”

  “No.” It’d been a long time since Jared was able to talk to me like my brother instead of the fucking Emperor of Rock bullshit he’d bought into. Alicia had pulled Jared back out of the Emperor. She was good for him, and he was amazing with her. I was happy for both of them, lingering resentment of their happiness aside.

  “It’s not that,” I started. “It’s that I don’t trust love. That’s all. It’s not you, and it’s not Alicia. It’s… that.”

  “You don’t trust love?” Jared asked, his brow furrowed in confusion. I could see the exact moment that realization dawned not a second later and watched as his eyes widened and his mouth formed an ‘o’. “That’s what this is about? Elizabeth?”

  “Jared.” My voice was a low warning. Her name coming from his lips was rubbing me the wrong way, stroking the red-hot flames of anger that sparked in my belly every time she came up. My brother either didn’t recognize the warning, or he didn’t care, because he carried on as if I hadn’t said anything.

  “Not every woman is like her, Caleb. Seriously, she was a—” Before I even fully knew what I was doing, I was across the table, and my fists were full of Jared’s shirt, my knuckles white and my fingers aching from their tight hold on the fabric.

  Even after all this time and everything that had happened, I still couldn’t stand people talking shit about Liz. It was fucked up, and a therapist could probably have a field day with it, but it couldn’t be helped.

  I relaxed my hold on Jared’s shirt, looking up to find the familiar shit-eating grin on his face. “You know what your problem is? You’re still in love with her, aren’t you? You still love Liz.”

  You still love Liz. His words clouded my mind, and red fog hazed my vision. The hand that had let go of his shirt formed a fist, and it connected with Jared’s jaw hard enough that the asshole stumbled back, but not hard enough to have done any lasting damage.

  Damn it.

  Jared rubbed his jaw, opening his mouth wide and testing whether he could move it properly. When he finished his self-assessment of the damage, something we were both plenty talented at for all the practice we’d had, he started laughing.

  “I can’t fucking believe that’s still what all this is about. Fucking Elizabeth. I didn’t believe in love either. I also didn’t think that it was real, but trust me, it is. You’re a fool and a coward if you keep running from it. Especially if you keep running because of her.”

  He finally managed to compose himself, returning to his earlier, serious demeanor. Stepping closer to me, he clasped my shoulder and looked me right in the eye. “If you decide to do this thing with Kelly, just don’t take it too far, okay? Despite what just happened here, you just said that you don’t actually have a problem with Alicia or with our engagement, so keep that in mind. This rivalry thing is only to help build up hype for PR and the tour. We don’t want negative results from it.”

  Rage and frustration with my situation was still coursing through my veins, and it was taking every ounce of willpower I had to keep from pushing him off me. I didn’t have the patience for a lecture or a talking to. “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.”

  “Of course you will. I’m just saying be smart about it, Caleb.” Dropping his hand from my shoulder, he walked to the door, gave me a salute, and shut it behind him, leaving me alone in this glass monstrosity of a conference room with only the angry ocean bey
ond the windows as company.

  I walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows and stared down at the beach, at the waves crashing into the rocks sending spray every which way before rolling to shore. My mind felt as jumbled and in turmoil as the waters below.

  Playing up a brotherly rivalry for the press was one thing: smoke and mirrors, as Jared put it. But there were a lot of ways that this thing could run away from us. As much as I hated to admit it, Jared was right when he said not to take it too far because it could easily blow up in our faces.

  On the other hand, while I didn’t know Kelly well, I had read her blog after finding out that Alicia’s sister was part of the dreaded press, and she was good at her job. If she thought this idea would be good for the band, maybe it was my turn to take one for the team.

  I would’ve been happy playing clubs and pubs for the rest of my life, but the others? They wouldn’t have. And they’d done a lot for us. Jared might’ve been my only biological brother, but the others were our brothers in every way that counted. I owed it to them all to do this if it would help.

  Besides, Kelly was kind of hot. She was curvier than Alicia, but I liked that. Spending some extra time with her wouldn’t be all bad. Fucking her would probably also annoy Jared, and while I wouldn’t take things with the rivalry too far, I was kinda in the mood to annoy him just a little.

  Chapter 6

  Kelly

  “So, Caleb. The tour kicks off here in L.A. in early December. That gives the fans just a little under a month to get tickets for the first shows, which are almost sold out already. The fans are chomping at the bit to get into those arenas you’ll be playing. How is the band feeling?”

  It was way beyond weird to know that the stone-faced rocker I was in my first one-on-one interview for GNM with was going to be my brother-in-law in just a few short months’ time. But Caleb, aside from calling me by my first name when he said hi earlier, gave no indication that we knew each other outside of this professional context.

  He sat cool as a cucumber in an ice bucket, in the seat across from me at one of the conference tables in Alicia’s office building. He leaned back in his seat like he owned the place, with his arms crossed and his one ankle resting on his knee.

  Dark sunglasses hung in the “V” of his long-sleeved white shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows to reveal muscled, tatted forearms. Navy jeans hung from his narrow hips. A few tears sat on the knees that didn’t look like they’d been artfully placed there by a designer. They looked like they were there from wear and tear.

  Stubble dotted his square jaw, and my mind briefly flashed to what that stubble might feel like rubbing against the soft, sensitive skin of my thighs. But that was hardly the kind of thoughts that I should’ve been having during an interview, so I banished them as soon as they popped into my head.

  His dark chocolate-colored hair looked almost black in the dim light with the rain clouds gathered outside, sticking up like he’d just rolled out of bed. Or maybe it had been styled that way. I couldn’t tell.

  My eyes traveled to his, and I found his gaze fixed on mine, an amused look in his eye that told me I’d just been busted checking him out. Mercifully, he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, now satisfied that my attention was on his answer and not his body, he began speaking.

  “The band is just as excited to start the tour as the fans are for us to do it, I think. It’s been a while since we’ve been on the road, and since the stage is our favorite place to be, we’re amped to get back out there.”

  Caleb was speaking the words, but I heard Alicia in them. I knew she’d have prepped Caleb for this interview. I was just surprised that he was sticking to her lines.

  For now, that was. Some of the questions I had coming up would be sure to rattle his cage a little.

  “This tour will be your longest yet, if I understand correctly. How do you feel about leaving your home behind for so many months?”

  “Honestly? I’m excited. We’re going to get to see a lot of places I never even would’ve dreamed of seeing, and we’ll be meeting fans from all over the world. It’s a dream come true.” The last sentence had sarcasm dripping off it in spades, and I made a note to return to that at a later stage.

  “I would imagine so,” I said. “Thousands of bands across the country dream of reaching the level of success that Destitute has. And you get to do it alongside your brother and some of your best friends. How does that feel?”

  “How does that feel?” He arched a pierced brow at me, the silver bar catching in the light and throwing prisms onto the wall beside us. “You seriously asking me that?”

  “I am. How does it feel to be doing all of this with your brother and your friends?” This was the start of my edgier questions, and I could tell that Caleb sensed there was something coming his way. His eyes narrowed, his hands fisting where he’d tucked them into his elbows, and the angle that he held his head at shifted.

  “It feels great. Better than doing it with a bunch of strangers, I guess.” He was definitely being cautious now. It was time to start springing the real questions on him, the ones this interview was about.

  Caleb had agreed to playing up this angle, of course. So he must’ve been prepared for it. Or so I would’ve thought.

  “If you’d been doing it with a bunch of strangers though, you wouldn’t always be in your brother’s shadow.” He clearly hadn’t been prepared for that.

  Caleb paled, and his jaw clenched tight. Something sparked in his eyes, and his demeanor turned to stone. “I’m not in anybody’s shadow. Jared and I do different things in the band. It doesn’t work that way.”

  His words were spoken in a low, scathing voice, and his tone was clipped. I was a little taken aback by his reaction because it didn’t look like he was playing an angle. His open hostility made it look like this was the way he really felt about Jared and his position in the band.

  If this was him acting up an angle, he should’ve pursued a career in acting, not in music—and he was fucking great at music. Deciding it was time to ease up some on the throttle, I backed off a bit and tried to dig deeper into who he was as a person, instead of risking getting shut down straight off the bat with that line of questioning.

  “That’s true. You two are both masters at your own game. Moving away from the band for a sec, let’s talk about you. Caleb Larsen. You’re young—”

  “Not that young anymore,” he interjected. The corners of his mouth lifted into a ghost of a smile. It was a rare moment of levity that I had not experienced with Caleb as of yet. Strangely, it suited him.

  I smiled what I hoped was a winning smile and continued. “You’re only twenty-seven. I think most of our readers would agree that’s relatively young. So okay, you’re young, successful, not bad looking. You must have scores of women chasing after you, yet you’re notoriously quiet when it comes to your romantic history. Tell me something about it, your past romances.”

  “I’m not quiet about it. There’s just nothing to say. I don’t have a romantic history. I have fuck history.” His eyes grew darker, and he uncrossed his arms, leaning forward slightly as he said it. I caught a whiff of his scent as he rolled his chair just a little closer to mine.

  Soap, the kind in the men’s section, and undertones of another masculine scent I couldn’t place pervaded my senses. It was heavenly, though I had a feeling this guy was no angel.

  If any other man had told me that he had a “fuck history” instead of a romantic one, I would’ve been ticked off as hell, but it was different with Caleb. The way he said it was like it was a foregone conclusion or a fact of life that he had no control over.

  For some reason, everything about him, from the way he smelled to the way he was looking at me, carefully watching me react to what he had said, wasn’t annoying. It was turning me on. Big time.

  There was something about this moody bad boy that was drawing me in, something magnetic that I couldn’t quite ignore. I didn’t know what it was, and I wouldn’t h
ave known how to describe it even if I did, but it was there as tangibly and definitely as the table we were sitting at. Since this was my first time alone with him, I’d never noticed it this intensely before, but I was definitely more than crushing on Caleb Larsen.

  I shifted in my seat, trying to draw my attention away from the dull ache starting up between my legs and the fact that my nipples were straining against the fabric of my bra, and I focused on my questions instead.

  Only, as soon as I glanced from the screen of my tablet where I’d neatly listed my questions the night before, his tongue flicked out of his mouth at the exact moment that my eyes hit his. It was nothing more than a quick swipe of his lower lip, but it felt like a hook to my gut.

  Before I could think about what I was doing or consider all the reasons why it was a bad idea, words came tumbling out of my mouth like bullets, and as potentially damaging. Yet there was nothing I could do to take them back.

  “Do you want to have dinner with me sometime?”

  It took everything I had not to slam my hands over my mouth or to hang my head in embarrassment, but somehow, I managed. Caleb seemed, at most, mildly surprised. His chin dropped to his chest as he surveyed me. “You want to go to dinner with me?”

  “Yes, you know, to see how you are in a different context. Away from all of,” I waved my hands around the room for emphasis and silently praised my great save, “this. To see how you are in an interview in a more relaxed setting.”

  He was silent for another beat. Then he nodded. He looked a bit smug about it, but he didn’t bring it up. “Okay. Dinner it is. Let me call you in a couple of days to set it up?”