Naughty Dreams

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“Why does DJ need his own personal detail? Tal throws himself in front of any hot women who want to attack his skinny ass.”

Steve chugged on the E string of his guitar to annoy Tal, stretched out on the floor behind his drum kit. While his eyes were invisible behind dark sunglasses, even his eyebrows looked tired. They barely twitched when he spoke in a froggy voice.

“It’s the least I can do for him, bro. No sacrifice is too great for the band.”

“It’s awake,” Pete observed. The stocky bassist with a short crop dyed wheat gold, and a tat of musical notes covering the hazelnut-colored skin of his right arm, strode onto the stage carrying a flat of coffee.

He eased behind the drums to sit a cup by Tal’s shoulder.

Then gave the shoulder a kick with his thick-soled biker boots.

“Drink this shit and get your ass up. We gotta do a run through.”

“DJ’s not ready yet. I’ll get up when he is.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Steve said.

He’d directed it toward Grant Moss, their manager.

The thirty-something freckled redhead with a compact boxer’s frame sat on a folding chair on the far side of the arena stage.

His Peter Millar camel-colored boat shoes were propped on a black and silver amp head road case, his laptop balanced on his knees.

“DJ is getting more security because he’s the one being sent fentanyl-laced chocolates,” he said without looking up. “With a love note that says, ‘I can help your pain.’”

“Why’d you turn those over to the cops?” Tal complained. “They didn’t need all of them. You’re supposed to look out for us, Moss.”

Moss rolled his eyes. He, Steve and Pete looked toward the subject of their conversation, but DJ, lead singer, songwriter and lead guitarist for Survival, didn’t appear to be listening.

He was, but participating wasn’t a priority.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against a pole as he plucked at the acoustic guitar in his lap and hummed under his breath.

The song they intended to debut tonight was bugging him, for several reasons, so he’d told the band he wanted to run through it one last time.

But he needed a few minutes of normal to figure out what kind of energy he wanted to bring to it.

Steve offered Pete the opening to Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” and Pete took center stage, gyrating his hips Elvis style. A smile touched DJ’s lips. Yep, normal.

The smile disappeared as he re-thought his agreement to meet with the security firm Moss had hired. Having a protection detail solely committed to DJ’s well-being made him uncomfortable.

No one band member was more important than any other.

Every song DJ created was made better by tossing it out to the three men and letting them work their magic on it.

Together they came up with the bones, and the producers and engineers fleshed it out.

Then Moss got it to the people who helped the fans fall in love with it.

The fentanyl thing had been bad. Sometimes roadies brought their kids to the shows, and if one of them had gotten hold of it… But why not just beef up the current band security and add more people?

In fairness, Moss had addressed that with DJ. “Our band security is good. But Henry, the head of that very security, says we need a specialist until the cops figure it out, or this nutjob moves on to his or her next obsession.”

Case in point. As his gaze lifted to the cheap seats in the arena, DJ found some random guy sitting there. With very little lighting in that section, he was mostly in shadows.

It did look like he was wearing one of the fire engine red visitor passes on a lanyard.

He might be a lighting or sound guy on the arena payroll, waiting for them to clear out so he could do some more tweaks to the in-house equipment.

There were always a bunch of such people around, anywhere they played.

Which admittedly made it pretty easy for the wrong person to be part of them.

DJ drew Moss’s attention. “Who’s that up there?”

Moss squinted in that direction and grunted. He closed his laptop and slid it into its case. “That’s the security specialist we’re meeting to determine if he’ll take the job. Roy Bloodwell. He’s early, probably just scoping things out.”

“He hasn’t agreed to take the job?” Pete asked.

“He doesn’t agree until he meets the client.”

“Well, that’ll be the end of that, then,” Steve noted. “You’re a pain in the ass, DJ.”

DJ gave his rhythm guitarist a beatific smile and the bird. Steve, who had electric shocked brown hair and deep-set blue eyes that barely saved his angular face from being butt-ugly, bared his teeth in a grin.

DJ shot a sour look at Moss. “I’m not cutting this short because he’s early. I want to get this song right, and we need the practice.”

“Speak for yourself,” Tal drawled, executing a drum sequence on the floor with the palms of his hands, his arm muscles flexing beneath two angel wing tattoos, one on either arm. Tal could land his sticks like feathers or beat the stupid off a clown’s face, depending on what the song required.

He was one of the best drummers in the business, when he wasn’t fucked in his buzzcut blond head. Which was happening far more often lately.

“You missed the bridge last time,” DJ responded.

“Fuck you. You’re an asshole.”

“Yeah. Still not wrong.” DJ looked at Moss. “I’m not feeling good about this.”

Moss put on the determined look he’d had since he first insisted this was a good idea.

Moss respected the band’s decisions, but when he dug in, there was usually a good reason.

DJ knew it, but it didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep testing it.

“He’s the best in his business. And you promised you’d at least meet with him. ”

DJ curled a lip, but shrugged. Okay, he’d meet with the guy. If it still didn’t feel right, he’d tell Moss he wanted to stick with Henry’s security people and leave it at that.

Roy Bloodwell could choose his own clients, but that door went both ways. This client would damn well decide if he was choosing Roy.

If Roy had walked in here cold, no clue as to who anyone was, the guitarist would have been his guess for the band front man, and Roy’s primary concern. But his client wasn’t Steve Lewandowski.

Nor Tal, the drummer. If it had been, Roy would have turned the job down flat. Tal Gooding had a problem showing up not stoned. While his bandmates weren’t happy about it, Roy had initially assumed they tolerated it because Tal was in the top ten of drummers active in the current music scene.

But after reviewing copious amounts of background material collected by his team, and confirming what he’d read by watching a few minutes of their interactions below, he knew it wasn’t that.

Roy was looking at a family.

Three of the four bandmates had shared the same foster home as teens. Tal was also a foster kid, and that factor, as much as his talent, had likely brought him into the band.

The quiet kid sitting cross-legged at the far end of the stage, picking out notes and off in his own world, was the one Roy was being hired to protect.

Dorian “DJ” James had eight million followers on social media, a 24/7 scroll of adulation to buffer him whenever his ego took the slightest hit.

His personality was hard to pin down through entertainment news sources, who flopped back and forth on it like gasping fish on a river bank.

Demon or angel. Bad boy or choir boy. Sensitive artist or unrestrained partier. Smart about his business, or frivolous spender his manager despaired of keeping in check.

Roy had learned that Moss planted wrong information to keep everyone guessing—and interested.

On his latest album cover, DJ had been wearing an altar boy’s robes while a hulking demon spread barbed wings behind him. Blood dripped from his fangs onto the white cloth. A clawed talon rested on DJ’s shoulder.

DJ had his hands in a prayer pose, and stared into the soul of the viewer with maple-tinged dark brown eyes.

The band flanked the demon, Steve with his guitar in an aggressive jut upward, Pete with a closed fist on his shoulder, while he gave the peace sign with the other hand.

Tal was on the opposite side, whipping his sticks against the demon’s beefy arm.

Critics had deemed it typically irreverent, stoking the anti-everything rebellion of his teen demographic. Comfortable In My Own Sin was the name of the album, and the name of one of the songs on it.

But Survival had a wider fanbase than just the teen crowd.

The music, which had the mass appeal of rock, but mixed in some of the attitude of punk, the precision and power of metal, and the grounding musicality of blues, spoke to a variety of ages, their fears and worries, their triumphs and pleasures.

One influencer laid it out in his review of the latest album, which was predicted to go platinum, just like the previous two.

“Survival’s lyrics tear us open to make us see what’s really inside, no matter how or where we hide. The music makes me want to jump on a winged dragon and go battle evil, screaming my defiance of the darkness.”

Survival’s first album cover had shown DJ as an eyeliner-wearing, sloe-eyed poet, proving that the covers changed as often as the stories about him did. But the jut to his chin hinted at stubbornness, while the spark in his eyes and tilt of his lips suggested a huge helping of wiseass.

Roy suspected that early image came closer to who the kid really was. Though Roy didn’t mix business with pleasure, he’d objectively recognized the flint of that look, sparking against the solid rock of his Dominant fantasies.

Seeing him in person wasn’t changing the potential for fire. An experienced Dom could recognize submissive traits, and the ones from DJ were strobe-level strong.