Chapter 2
DEAN
I’d lost it.
Every hint of inspiration, every word I’d ever known, had tumbled out of my skull. Now, I was useless. A hell of a songwriter I was, with no goddamn words.
The cap of my pen buckled between my molars as I bit down on it. The paper in front of me was completely empty. I had a melody in mind, but lyrics? Zilch. Nadda. Not a damn thing.
And Craig had the audacity to walk into our rehearsal space smiling.
“What are you so happy about?” I grumbled, shooting a glare up at him.
He shook his head, then shrugged. “Nothing much, really. Ah—” He set down the case of his bass and bit his lip, overcome by something.
It wasn’t fair for me to resent his smile.
I did it anyway.
“Kimmy just called,” he said. “She got the lead in her school play. Just proud of her.”
I blew out a slow breath. Here I was, snipping and impatient because Craig was proud of his daughter.
Kimberly was a great kid, at that. She was bubbly and bright and so damn brave. When I was her age, I’d been too shy to do that kind of thing, bitter and prickly and convinced I was above it all.
Kimmy just went for shit and tried everything. She was so freaking cool.
“That’s awesome,” I mumbled, deflating. “She’s amazing.”
“Yeah.” He opened his case and pulled out his instrument while I stuck the abused cap on the writing end of the pen and dropped it on the paper.
“You’ll have to let me know when they’re performing,” I said.
Craig grinned at me then, and everything snapped back to rights between us. “Sure thing.”
For a couple minutes, he fiddled with amps. It wasn’t uncommon for Riley to be late, and normally, I’d have joined Craig in setting up. Right then, I was just as frozen in my seat as my brain was about, you know, having a cognizant thought or a single worthy lyric.
“What are you working on?” When Craig was finished adjusting, he turned my way, glanced briefly down at my blank notepad, and raised an eyebrow, but he was decent enough not to come and crane his neck over my shoulder to behold my barren field of inspiration.
“Don’t you think our standards are already solid? We don’t need a longer set list.”
Maybe we didn’t, but that didn’t change the fact that I was stuck. Eventually, we would need something new, and I didn’t have anything in me. After years of demanding three practices a week and dragging us all through the ringer, I was wasting everyone’s time.
But Craig was being nice, trying to let me off the hook and take the pressure off, so I couldn’t exactly snap at him for it. My molars ached from how hard I clenched my jaw though.
“Sure, yeah.”
Except that I was a hack. I’d plateaued.
My career was over before—
Well, before I’d proven to Henry I could do this.
It was the last thing I could do for him, but he’d been the one who knew how to twist a few words into something beautiful. Here I was, squandering the last bit of momentum we’d built for Lucky Black Cat, and I—
“Sorry!” Riley gasped as they crashed into the practice room. “I’m sorry. I was—”
Still wearing their work apron was what they were. They grinned sheepishly, tugged it over their head, and bundled it up in a ball, dropping the green cloth beside the drum kit.
“Here now,” they said, grinning.
I guess that meant I needed to get my shit together.
That didn’t make rehearsal run smooth or anything. My voice came out tight instead of gravelly, my frustration bleeding through in every note I played.
Craig and Riley didn’t say anything. Every time we ended a song that hadn’t gone right, Riley gamely said, “Go again?” And we did, until Craig looked at the clock.
“Dinner’s at eight . . . ”
It was seven forty-five.
And—shit.
I dragged my phone out of my pocket. It’d been buzzing for the last twenty minutes, but I’d ignored the notifications, because part of me was constantly convinced that we could just play one more time, and it’d be right. I’d calm down and it’d go well and then I could take a break.
Then I could check my messages.
I didn’t deserve a distraction when I was fucking up so bad.
Except I’d forgotten about goddamn trivia night.
It didn’t matter anyway; we never won. But the idea of leaving Lucas hanging? My brother had been there for me in a way few had, and I couldn’t disappoint him. So every week, I sat beside him at bar trivia while he assured me that some question would come up about music and I’d be invaluable.
Meanwhile, we just got drunk and laughed together over silly questions and sillier answers, which was the best part of the whole thing.
Lucas had already texted me three times, the most recent asking if I wanted my regular drink. He usually got there an hour early, and—well, I didn’t show up at seven, but I was rarely this late.
“Yeah, I have to—”
Riley waved their hand. “Go. We’ll lock up.”
I grabbed my stuff, rushed out the door, and was on the back of my bike within a minute.
At the bar in just a handful more. Trivia started at eight, and I slid in the door at seven fifty-four.
From our usual table, Lucas smirked my way.
My drink was sitting there in front of an empty stool, despite my never having answered him.
“I almost thought you weren’t going to make it,” Lucas said as I shrugged out of my leather jacket.
“And then what? You’d have had to lose alone?” I dropped my jacket on the empty stool in front of the drink he’d bought me.
It had always baffled me that Lucas insisted on making his own team.
His coworkers had teams that did decent enough.
He could have joined one of them, but every time I brought it up, he scoffed and bumped me with his shoulder and said we were in it together, and it was .
. . sweet. And stupid. And really, this whole thing just felt like an excuse to get me out of the house and off my ass and—
That drink. That was the important bit.
I dragged the cold mug to my lips and took a sip before I even noticed Lucas was smiling across the table—not at me, but at some stranger.
As I licked the beer foam off my lips, I looked at the man in the chair across from me and breathed in slow. I definitely didn’t recognize his scent, but there was something familiar about it. Feline, sure, but in a way that spoke of fresh rain and the dense, ozone smell of a faraway city.
He was delicately featured, with fine, sharp cheekbones and eyes bright as amber. His hair was a warm golden brown that caught the light hanging over our table. Next to Lucas’s tricky panther smirk, the stranger looked—
He wasn’t quite shellshocked, but there was a distance, a kind of startled confusion, that reminded me too much of how it felt to walk into a room now. Alone. It was hard to get used to. Impossible, without the beer.
“We’re not losing this time,” Lucas said, beaming at the guy. “Dean, this is Landon, new head of IT at Crescent. Landon, my brother, Dean.”
I shifted forward over the round table, holding out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Landon seemed to catch himself staring, and a second later, his expression had gone from hazy and startled to a perfectly reasonable smile. He shook my hand, his grip firm and confident. A rival predator?
I didn’t think so. I didn’t get that tingling feeling at the back of my skull that prickled at me around the wolves.
“You too.”
“Dean’s our resident music buff,” Lucas announced, “so he’s got that covered. And Landon’s basically a genius. He just started today, so obviously, I had to snatch him up for Team St. James.”
“Lucky,” I said. “But it seems like we need a new team name if we’re adding another player.”
Relegating Landon to third wheel on a team that shared our surname was rude, considering the fact that he was the only one of us at the table who had a single shot in hell of scoring tonight.
“Ideas?” I asked him.
Landon bit his lip. “Uh . . . ”
“Frisky Business!” Lucas announced, slapping the tabletop.
Landon snorted.
And it hit me—why he felt familiar and not, all at once. He was a cat, just not a werepanther like me and Lucas.
Interesting. Little kitties tended to stick to their own. I wondered what had dragged Landon away from his.