5. Jonah
5
JONAH
I light my cigarette and take a long drag, deliberately ignoring the four pairs of eyes burning holes in my back.
My head is fucking pounding, and an intervention staged as a band meeting is the last thing I want to deal with right now. They should have stayed in Paris.
I close my eyes and tip my face to the ceiling. Christ, I really fucked it up this time.
When my cigarette is gone and no one has said a word, the silence becomes lethal, and I’m ready to lay my neck on the executioner’s block just to put an end to it. Jeer. Pelt me with rotten vegetables. Celebrate as my skull falls into the dirt with an unceremonious thud. It would be better than the silence.
“Okay,” I say with a tired exhale. “Can we just get this over with? I’ve had enough of the funeral atmosphere this weekend.”
No one laughs at my joke. I guess that’s the real test of the evening. When even the dark humor goes unappreciated.
I turn to face them and raise my eyebrows. “Get on with it.”
“Get on with what, exactly, Jonah? I don’t think you need me to tell you what a mess you’ve made. A Class E felony in New York State. Should I repeat for you what that means?”
I clamp my eyes shut so I don’t roll them at Hammond’s dry, patronizing tone. “No. That was covered, thanks.”
Hammond humphs . “Then maybe you’d like me to get on with reminding you that we’re supposed to be touring. Should I go over the schedule? Do you need me to tell you where we’re all supposed to be right now?”
“No.” I sigh. “I’m aware of that, too.”
“Then what exactly should we get on with?”
“I don’t know, Wade . You’re the ones who decided to charter the jet and invade my hotel room at four in the morning. You tell me.”
Hammond’s jaw ticks and his nostrils flare as he tries not to lose his temper.
“Need I remind you where we picked you up from, Jonah? You’re lucky we were already here. If we weren’t, your ass would still be in a jail cell.”
His voice quakes with repressed anger as he speaks. It’s more emotion than we’re used to seeing from him. Well, except Sav. She’s been on the other end of some serious verbal ass-beatings from our manager. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid one for this long.
I shake my head, but I don’t have anything snarky to retort. I really don’t need the reminder. It will be plastered all over the tabloids by sunrise, and he’s right, anyway. I am lucky they were here. The fact that their first move after hearing about my mom was to cancel the shows and fly to New York...
It makes me feel even worse.
I finally let myself look at the other three people in the room. When I do, I immediately wish I hadn’t. It’s been a while since I’ve seen those expressions on their faces. Disappointment and anger laced heavily with concern. It bothers me more this time than it did last time.
Fuck.
I really fucked up.
I bring my fingers to my temples and rub, trying to lessen even a fraction of the tension in my head. I’m going to sleep for a week after this.
“Look. I appreciate you p?—”
A firm rap at the door cuts me off, and my eyebrows slant. I didn’t make plans with anyone. I’m not expecting a visitor, but one look at the four other faces in the room tells me that they are.
“What the fuck did you guys do?” I say with a growl, and Sav scoffs, drawing my attention to her as Hammond moves to open the door .
“It wasn’t us, dickhead, but it’s the best option you’ve got right now, so I suggest you bite your fucking tongue. The angry, tortured musician act is overplayed and not doing you any favors at the moment.”
Her words cut where she’d intended, and my defenses shoot back up.
“Oh, shut up, Savannah. I’m getting real tired of your high-and-mighty bullshit. You don’t get to scold me.”
I am grateful that they picked me up, but I don’t need another fucking lecture right now. I’m a conflicted mess of emotions as it is, but Sav doesn’t back down. She never does. She just smiles sweetly and bats her eyelashes.
“Stop acting like a petulant child and maybe I won’t have to scold you.”
I scowl and open my mouth to snap something back at her, but Hammond clears his throat, drawing my attention to him.
To him and the woman standing beside him.
My hackles rise. She doesn’t look like another cop, but I can tell right away I’m not going to like why she’s here. By showing up unannounced at my hotel room at four in the morning, she already has the upper hand, and I can’t let her keep it. I’m outnumbered as it is.
Slowly, I drop my eyes down her body. I don’t hide it. I check her out brazenly, but I keep my face blank. Making her uncomfortable is my goal. I linger on her breasts and subtle curves. I track her long legs from the hem of her pencil skirt to the heel on her understated designer pumps. When I leisurely arrive back at her face, I settle my attention on her lips before my gaze finally collides with hers.
She doesn’t so much as flinch.
She narrows her eyes, lifts her chin slightly, and arches a delicate, perfectly-shaped eyebrow. Not intimidated. Not impressed. In fact, her perfect posture, fit figure, and disapproving expression piss me off and get my dick hard.
This woman is going to give me trouble.
“Well,” I say smoothly, letting my voice maintain an edge of irritation. “Who do I have the pleasure of welcoming into my room this morning?”
The woman gives me a tight, forced smile before confirming my assumption .
“My name is Claire Davis.” She drops her eyes down my body in an assessing manner before bringing them back to my face in a way that suggests she’s found me wanting. It fuels my irritation, but when the next sentence leaves her mouth, I damn near crack a molar. “I’ll be your PR manager for the foreseeable future.”
When my eyes widen, hers flash with a challenge, and I grit my teeth. I was right. She’s trouble. With a capital fucking T.
I turn my glare toward Savannah, then to Hammond. “Answers. Now.”
Hammond sighs. “I might have been your first call from jail, but the cops called your father. Then he also called me.”
I clamp my eyes shut. I should have known. The cops wouldn’t have let me out without speaking to him first. It was his mausoleum I broke into, after all. But Conrad Henderson doesn’t do things out of the kindness of his heart. If he’s not pressing charges, there are definitely strings attached.
I take a deep breath, then open my eyes and look at Hammond. I intentionally ignore the woman in the corner. “And?”
“And, as you can imagine, he’s not happy about the hoops he’s currently jumping through to keep this out of the morning headlines?—”
I scoff, cutting him off, but he raises an irritated eyebrow and continues.
“—and neither am I. You’re still tied to the label until the European shows are finished, and if you remember correctly, there’s a morality clause in our termination contract.”
“Fuck.” I drag a hand down my face, then reach into my pocket for another cigarette. “I forgot about the fucking morality clause.”
Sav lets out a dry, tired laugh. “That actually makes me feel better.”
I glance at her and raise my eyebrows in question. “You thought I would do this intentionally?” My exasperation increases when Sav gives me a shrug but says nothing. “I wouldn’t, Savannah.”
She looks away, dismissing me, and the fact that she doesn’t believe me just proves the extent of the damage I’ve done. I light a new cigarette and take a long drag, closing my eyes from the disapproving faces and letting the toxins sit in my lungs before blowing it out slowly. This room is non-smoking. I’ve opened the balcony doors, but I’ll still be paying a hefty bill to take care of cleaning and deodorizing after I check out .
Hammond speaks again.
“Headlines about you getting arrested for drunkenly breaking into your family mausoleum and desecrating the gravesite would put us in violation of the morality clause.”
I nod and grit my teeth again, grinding them together and breathing through the guilt. I keep my eyes shut and focus just on the sound of his voice, the smoke in my lungs, and the feel of the nicotine coursing through my bloodstream. The help the liquor and the pills provided is disappearing by the minute.
No one is as disappointed by my actions as I am. Violating the morality clause would mean everything Hammond negotiated for leaving our label “amicably” after the tour would be void. The label would drop us, and we’d be forfeiting our cuts from the tour.
And while that sucks, it’s not the worst part.
The worst part is that if we’re dropped, we would be forced to abide by a non-compete. We couldn’t put out another album as The Hometown Heartless for five more years. Not independently, and not with Rock Loveless Records, the label Sav is starting.
It would leash us creatively, and the despair that lashes in my chest warns that I wouldn’t survive it. Heartless has been the only thing keeping me together. If I lose it because of my own fucked-up mistakes...
I’d have nothing left.
The thought is like a punch to the stomach, and I have to lean my body on the wall so I don’t hunch over from the swirling anxiety. My life would be over, and not just metaphorically. What is there to live for if I can’t write and perform music?
Nothing .
The reality makes me want to throw up.
I work to control my breathing as Hammond’s voice waves about in the air around me, mixing with the sounds of my panicked heartbeat.
“Your father and I have almost successfully killed the story, but there are still likely to be mentions about it in the tabloids, and the label will probably find out eventually. Luckily, as of right now, they’re just as eager to finish this tour as you are. They make more money that way. So your father and I have worked out a?—”
“What’s in it for him? What’s my father getting out of this? ”
“Having a son who isn’t a felon isn’t incentive enough?”
It’s not Hammond who answers. It’s the woman, and despite her obvious attempt to sound neutral, I hear the tension in her tone. Her voice is like warm honey over jagged glass. Sweet masking sharp. Husky, yet deceptively smooth and soothing. It calms my nerves before setting my teeth on edge.
Finally, I open my eyes and turn them toward her. Her face is blank as she stares back at me. Her head is cocked slightly to the side, and her eyebrow is arched as if her question wasn’t rhetorical. She’s waiting for me to answer, and when she blinks once, I do.
“No. It’s not.”
She purses her plump lips, and her forehead creases as she carefully considers her next words. When she speaks, it’s slowly, and with a clarity that commands all my attention. Everything else in the room fades into silence until it’s just her. The woman with the deceivingly honeyed voice and the cherubic blue eyes.
“Your reputation and well-being are important to Mr. Henderson, Mr. Hendrix. He doesn’t want you or your career to suffer. This is why he sent me.”
I walk toward her, closing the distance between us in only a few strides, until I’m only three feet in front of her. I tower over her, but she doesn’t back down. She doesn’t seem intimidated in the slightest.
“Sent you to do what?”
“To repair the damage to your public image and assist you in”—she pauses, and I watch her once again take measure of the weight of her words before continuing—“making less destructive choices in your daily routines.”
My nostrils flare as I blink through the haze of fury. I can tell she’s doing her best to avoid coming off as patronizing, but she fails. There’s no delicate way to tell someone they’ve fucked up so badly they’ve been assigned a babysitter. She calls herself a PR manager, but I see through the posturing. She’s here because my father doesn’t trust me to behave on my own. I’ve threatened the one thing he cares about—his image.
All my other fuckups pale in comparison to this one because this one connects me to him.
Shame burns my throat and fans the flames of my anger. Anger toward myself. Anger toward my father. Anger toward this woman for being his paid minion. I stare down at her. Her hair and makeup are flawless, despite it being almost four in the morning. Her designer clothes are without creases or wrinkles, and the expression on her pretty face is carefully constructed. It’s all an artfully crafted facade for a single purpose. To deceive.
She’s everything I hate about my father’s world. Manufactured sincerity. Beautiful and calculating. Fake in every way.
I ball my hands into fists and squeeze tightly until my fingers ache from the pressure of my thick metal rings. A small voice in the back of my head tells me that this woman is not the enemy, that she doesn’t deserve my wrath, but the chaotic vortex of my own emotions silences it.
She’s here. He’s not.
And focusing on her will hurt less than acknowledging the truth.
I curl my lip into a sneer. “My father sent you to babysit me.”
“Those are your words. Not mine. I’m here to do a job.”
I narrow my eyes. The surety in her voice pisses me off further. I don’t like being a project. I don’t like the idea of being manipulated into someone else for my father’s approval. In this moment, I think I’d rather take the felony.
Bad press has followed Heartless around since the beginning, and while Sav has been able to somewhat repair her image, I’ve barely begun. Even attempting sobriety has done nothing to quell the rumors and gossip columns. As far as the public knows, I’m the volatile guitarist who will smoke, swallow, snort, or screw just about anything without pretense.
And honestly? They’re not exactly wrong.
“Do you even know what you’re getting yourself into?” I ask, my voice low and taunting. “You think being my shadow will come without trouble? It won’t. This job won’t be easy.”
She lifts her chin defiantly. “I take my work very seriously. I am prepared.”
“So staging a few photoshoots is supposed to reform the bad boy rock star in the public eye? Keeping me on a leash between shows will appease my father? You’re working against a decade’s worth of press. Shining me up and putting a bow on me isn’t going to be enough. Do you understand that, Ms. Davis? ”
She gives me a single nod, her prim and proper demeanor never wavering. “I’m aware.”
“You’re aware ?”
“Yes. I am quite aware of the task before me. I have done my research, and I assure you I have a plan that’s a bit more sophisticated than photoshoots and leashes .”
I tilt my head to the side and study her. Her eyebrow is twitching slightly. It’s the only tell that she doesn’t like me questioning her ability to do her job. It makes me want to poke her again. It makes me want to see her composure break.
Then she surprises me by stepping closer, leaving only inches between us. She smells like lavender and sugar, and it has a soothing effect that throws me off-balance. I have the strongest urge to bury my face in her neck and breathe in, but I resist. Instead, I don’t blink as she holds my eyes with her piercing blue gaze.
“Any moment you’re not playing a concert will be managed by me. From the minute you wake up, to the minute you go to sleep, you will be adhering to my calendar. My plan. Call it babysitting. Call it PR management. Call it whatever you want. Either way, I can guarantee that if you cooperate, we will successfully reverse the public’s opinion of you.”
I scoff just to piss her off, but she arches an eyebrow.
“And here’s something you should understand, Mr. Hendrix. Managing public relations is a lot like chess, and I am very good at chess.”
My eyes flare at her words, and her lips twitch, almost as if she’s fighting a smirk.
Chess .
Managing public relations is a lot like chess .
The analogy isn’t lost on me. I can read behind the lines. If this is chess, then I’m about to be her pawn. The anger that’s been building in my stomach isn’t enough to smother the spark of interest that she’s ignited, and I think she knows it.
I bounce my eyes between hers. They really are a remarkable blue. Even in this poorly lit hotel room, I can tell. Her eyelashes, thick and long, brush against her eyelids as she looks up at me, staring me down. Refusing to concede .
Chess .
“How long?” I ask, and the question comes out quieter than I intended. An intimate whisper despite the four other people in the room. She lifts her shoulder in a small shrug before responding in kind.
“As long as it takes.”
“And what’s in it for you?”
Finally, she lets that smirk slip free, pink lips curving upward in a way that promises trouble. The most tempting kind.
“Let’s just say I find fulfillment in a match well-played.”
In this moment, I don’t doubt her confidence. I believe her when she says she’s good at her job. In fact, if there is anyone capable of cleaning up my abysmal image, I’d put money on her. I have a feeling I’m not going to like how she does it, but fuck me, it piques my interest anyway.
I nod once, then take a step away from her, clearing the air of lavender and sugar.
“Okay, Claire Davis. Let’s see what you can do.”