My Husband’s Song with My Best Friend (Billionaire Marriage in Crisis #15)

1. Liliana

— ? —

Liliana

The guitar wakes me before the sun does.

Not fully, just enough that I’m aware of warmth on my face and music somewhere close, the soft pluck of strings finding their way into my dreams until I can’t tell what’s real anymore.

I keep my eyes closed and let myself float in that hazy space between sleep and waking. His side of the bed is still warm against my hip. I press into it, chasing the heat of him, and let the music pull me up by inches.

Tristan is playing a melody I don’t recognize.

It drifts through our bedroom and curls around me.

I drag my eyes open by degrees, blinking against the soft wash of light.

Hollywood sprawls beyond our floor-to-ceiling windows, all pink and amber in the early morning, but I barely register it.

I push up onto one elbow, then sit up slowly, gathering the sheet around me, careful not to make a sound because I don’t want him to stop.

Tristan is right where I expected, shirtless and sleep-rumpled at the foot of the bed, the sheets long abandoned, his bare back to me.

His favorite acoustic rests across his lap, the Martin he’s had since before anyone knew his name, the one he swears sounds better than any guitar worth ten times as much.

Muscle shifts under his skin as his fingers move over the frets, carrying on a conversation only he can hear.

There’s a warmth low in my chest that has nothing to do with the morning sun, an ache that shows up every time I catch him unguarded, when he isn’t performing for anyone, when he’s just mine.

I tuck my knees up and rest my chin on them and let myself watch.

His hair is a disaster because he never remembers to touch it before he starts working.

His brow is furrowed in concentration, his lower lip caught between his teeth on a chord he likes.

He hums under his breath, testing words that aren’t quite words yet, and I could stay here for the rest of my life doing nothing but this.

Then he must feel me watching, because he turns his head, and the light finds the angles of his face, that defined jaw shadowed with stubble, those ridiculous cheekbones, the slight crook in his nose from a bar fight he swears he didn’t start.

When he sees me awake, his whole face opens. He doesn’t stop playing. He just holds my eyes and lets his voice rise into the next line, low and rough with morning.

“Some kind of light I wasn’t looking for,” he sings, quiet, the words half-formed and searching, “found me on the floor and called it home…”

He sings it straight into my eyes, as if the whole song was only ever an excuse to get to this part, as if he’s been sitting here in the dark building the words just to hand it to me first.

That boyish smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

I first met him in the worst week of my life, at my father’s funeral reception, of all places, when I was drowning in black and condolences and had forgotten what my own voice sounded like.

He didn’t offer me a single sorry. He just said the one absurd thing that startled a real laugh out of me, the first in days, and when I laughed, he smiled as if he’d won a prize.

I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

My heart trips over itself and forgets, for a second, how to keep a steady beat.

“Morning, beautiful,” he says, when the line runs out.

The last note hangs in the room and fades into the hum of the city waking up below us.

I let it sit there. I let myself feel it settle somewhere behind my ribs before I trust my voice not to give me away.

Then I roll my eyes, because if I don’t do a thing with my face he’s going to see exactly what that did to me.

“That’s new.” I can’t keep the smile off my face and I don’t try to. “I’ve never heard that one.”

“You weren’t supposed to.” He drapes an arm over the body of the guitar, unbothered, that grin creeping wider. “It’s still a mess. Half a thought and a chord I stole from myself.”

“It didn’t sound like a mess.”

“That’s because I was distracted.” His eyes move over me, slow and warm, the sheet slipping off one of my shoulders. “Hard to play badly when the prettiest woman in Hollywood is sitting in my bed watching me.”

“You’re just too good with your words this early in the morning, huh?

” I narrow my eyes at him and aim for a glare, though we both know it has no teeth.

“Last time you talked to me in that voice, I found out you’d booked us a week in Positano without telling me.

So… What is it? What are you buttering me up for? ”

That slow smirk spreads across his face, the one that has gotten him out of more trouble than any man deserves. “Can’t a husband just wake up wildly in love with his wife?”

“Maybe.” I can’t help the smile tugging at my mouth. “Or maybe you’re stalling.”

“I guess I just have to prove myself.” He sets the guitar aside against the wall.

I recognize the mischief the second it hits his face, that quiet promise of danger he never bothers to hide from me. He starts crawling up the bed and my stomach flips before he’s anywhere near me.

“Tristan, it’s barely morning, I swear to God…”

He doesn’t answer. He just catches my ankles in his hands and tugs me flat beneath him, dropping his mouth to the inside of my knee.

A hum vibrates against my skin, low and pleased, as he kisses a slow path up my thigh, his stubble dragging in his wake, two lazy fingers skimming the hem of my nightgown higher.

“Gotta prove a point,” he murmurs, and lifts his eyes to lock on mine. “Exhibit one.” His lips press the soft skin above my hip and I gasp. “Exhibit two…”

I’m laughing, breathless with it, my fingers buried in his disaster of a hair. He works his way up my stomach, unhurried, the silk bunching under his hands, until he settles his weight over me and braces on his forearms so his face hovers above mine.

“Convinced yet?”

That stupid grin is pure sin.

“Mm.” I let my fingers trail down the back of his neck, playing along, biting back my smile. “I think I need more convincing.”

His eyes drop to my lips. When they lift again they’ve gone dark, the teasing burning off into a thing that steals the air out of my lungs.

Tristan kisses me.

His mouth takes mine as if he’s been starving for it, one hand sliding up my ribs and higher, spreading warm and possessive over my skin while the other fists in my hair to tilt my head exactly where he wants it.

I open for him and he groans into me, the sound rumbling through my chest, and I stop thinking about the hour or the song or anything that isn’t the drag of his lips and the weight of him pressing me into the mattress.

My hands map the muscle of his back, feeling it flex under my palms. He tastes of mint and my Tristan. I never want him to stop.

When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard.

“Alright.” I drag in a breath, my heart still tripping over itself. “I believe you.”

“Too late. I’m committed to the case now.” He drops his head and nuzzles into the crook of my neck, kissing his way up the side of my throat until he reaches the shell of my ear and closes his teeth over it gently. I shiver, and I feel him smile against me.

“We should have breakfast,” I manage to say.

“No, we shouldn’t.”

“Tristan, I’m hungry.”

“I’ll feed you later.” He pulls me tighter, tucking me under him, kissing the corner of my jaw, my cheekbone, the edge of my mouth, refusing to let a single inch of space open up between us.

“Later,” I repeat, weak.

“Much later.” His mouth finds mine again.

I squeal his name, laughing, and stop pretending I have anywhere else to be.

We finally make it to the terrace somewhere close to noon.

The city spreads out below us, a promise in gleaming glass and green hills, a sky so blue it almost hurts to look at.

I’m wearing his t-shirt, an old Springsteen tee gone soft from a hundred washes, and nothing else, my bare feet propped up on the railing while I work my way through a stack of crepes that definitely came from the café down the street.

The coffee is fresh while the morning is half gone. Neither of us has said a word about the wasted hours and neither of us regrets a single one.

Tristan is watching me eat with an expression I can’t quite read.

“What?” I ask around a mouthful of blueberries.

“Nothing.” But he’s smiling, that small private smile he saves just for me. “I just enjoy looking at you.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I missed you.” He says it lightly, but there’s a weight underneath it that lands in my chest. His foot hooks around my ankle under the table and stays there, as if he can’t stand even that much distance. “I mean it. I feel like I’ve been living at that studio.”

“You kind of have.”

“I know.” He drags his chair around to my side of the table instead of staying across from me, close enough now that his knee presses mine. “I’m almost done. I swear. Then I’m all yours, no manager, no label, no six a.m. calls.”

I want to believe him.

The thing about being married to Tristan Everett is that his time was never entirely ours to begin with. He belongs to a lot of people. Twenty thousand of them at a stretch, screaming his name in arenas I watch him command from the wings.

When I married him, I married the noise too. The tour buses, the flashbulbs, and the parts of him the whole world thinks it owns. Most days I don’t mind. Most days I understand that the same fire that pulls him away from me is the exact thing that pulled me toward him in the first place.

“How’s the album?” I steal his fork and eat a bite off it just to watch him pretend to be offended.

“Close.” That guarded look crosses his face again. “Different this time. More personal than anything I’ve done.”

“Your albums are always personal.”

“Not like this one.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his thumb lingering on my jaw. “This one’s got a whole plan attached to it. Ford’s been circling like the album’s a wounded gazelle. He wants some big theatrical reveal. Wants to build a moment around it.”

“That sounds very Ford.”