Upstaged by the Rock Star Billionaire I Married

CHAPTER 1

ROMY

Eighty thousand people are singing the wrong words and nobody on the floor cares, which is the whole point of a stadium.

I’m side stage with a headset clamped over one ear, watching Knox work the end of the catwalk. Twenty years in and he still does this thing where he points the mic at a random section and lets them carry a line, and every person in that section believes he chose them personally.

“Ninety seconds to the finale,” Tessa says beside me. She’s twenty-three, three weeks out of some production program, and she holds her talkback button at arm’s length, in case it bites.

“Copy,” I say. “Pyro’s armed, wall’s on the ten-count, we’re fine.”

We’re not fine. The rear video wall freezes at the worst possible moment, sixty feet of Knox’s face locking mid-blink on a frame that makes him look drunk and mildly concussed. Then the lighting desk drops the sync, and I hear the programmer say a word his mother would invoice him for.

Tessa goes pale. “The wall’s down. The whole finale is built on the wall.”

“Hey.” I take her by the shoulders and turn her toward me, gently. “The crowd didn’t pay to see the wall. Breathe.”

Into the headset: “Kill the rear wall, kill it now, black it out before somebody’s aunt posts it. Lighting, dump the sequence, we’re going manual. House lights up on my mark, right after the bridge. Full wash, warm, make them pretty.”

A beat of silence. Then my programmer, who has known me eleven years: “Going manual. House on your mark.”

“Tessa. Tell floor security the lights are coming up. Nobody panic, nobody’s dead.”

She relays it in a voice that only shakes a little. Good kid.

I lean out far enough to find Dean at his rig.

Dean Wildstone has been playing guitar since before I married into this family, a man who once fixed a broken string with a zip tie mid-song in front of forty thousand Swedes.

I catch his eye and draw a circle in the air with one finger: turn it around, crowd chorus.

Dean nods. He doesn’t check with the desk. He walks upstage during the bridge, puts himself in Knox’s eyeline, and tips his chin at the house.

Knox gets it instantly. He always does. Twenty years of marriage and twenty-five of music, a whole language made of chin tips and hand circles.

“House lights,” I say. “Now.”

The wash comes up over eighty thousand people at the exact moment Knox steps onto the long extension, alone, no wall behind him, no fireworks, a man and a microphone and a sea of faces going up like somebody opened an oven door. He holds the mic out to them.

They sing the chorus. All of them.

It’s “After Midnight.” The finale is always “After Midnight.” Knox wrote the bones of it in our first apartment, the one with the broken kitchen window we couldn’t afford to fix, the winter we taped a garbage bag over the glass and called it curtains.

I wrote the harmony on a napkin at three in the morning after the worst fight of our lives.

He proposed six weeks later. A line from the second verse ended up in his wedding vows.

Twenty years, four labels, one fortune, and the song still closes every show, and eighty thousand strangers are singing my harmony back at my husband while the video wall sulks in the dark behind him.

The sound hits the side-stage wing and goes straight through my ribs, and for a second I forget I just rewired the finale with my bare hands. I’m only a woman watching her husband be adored by a small city.

Tessa is crying. I pretend not to notice, because I’m a professional, and because my own eyes are doing something I decline to discuss.

Dean solos over the crowd. Knox lets them take the last chorus entirely, both arms out, head tipped back, and the place detonates.

What should have been the most expensive malfunction of the tour becomes the loudest moment of the night.

Somewhere in the production office, a label guy is already telling people it was his idea.

“Good save,” my programmer says in my ear.

“Tell it to the wall,” I say.

They take their bows. The house goes dark. Then the post-show tide starts, the one I know better than my own kitchen: security funnels, laminates, guests with wristbands that cost more than my first car, all of them surging toward the wings for thirty seconds with Knox Wildstone.

He comes off dripping, towel around his neck, grinning, because he got away with something. We did.

A vice president of something reaches him first, hand out, mouth already open.

Knox shakes the hand without stopping, says something gracious over his shoulder, and keeps walking.

Past the executives. Past the guest list. Straight to me, side stage, where I’m coiling a cable, because old habits outlive net worth.

He wraps an arm around my waist and kisses me, full, and some of them are still watching.

“Saved my ass,” he says against my mouth.

“Again.”

“It’s a very valuable ass.”

“Is it insured?”

“Everything above the knees, baby. Lloyd’s of London.”

“Lloyd’s got robbed.”

He laughs, the real one, the one interviews never get, and presses his forehead to mine. Twenty-five years and the man still smells of sweat and guitar polish, and under that, home. I’d say it out loud, but he’d never let me live it down.

“Romy.” Miranda materializes at my elbow, a very well-dressed weather system. Miranda Shaw has managed Knox for nineteen years and once made a stadium in S?o Paulo appear out of spite. “Before you two vanish. There’s someone Knox should meet.”

“Miranda, it’s midnight and I’m holding a cable.”

“She came to the show,” Miranda says, which is her entire pitch, and steps aside.

Samantha Saint is standing in my wing.

Even if you’ve been living under a rock with no Wi-Fi, you know Samantha Saint.

Three albums, all of them monsters. A voice that could strip paint.

The current reigning everything of pop music, standing next to my cable bin in a dress that costs more than the PA’s entire rig, looking at the side of the stage with an expression I’d call religious.

Then she sees me, and her whole face changes.

“Oh my God,” she says, and crosses to me, and hugs me.

Over the cable. “You’re Romy. I’m sorry, I have to do this before I meet him or I’ll never get it out.

‘Wire and Gasoline.’ The bridge on ‘Wire and Gasoline’ rewired my entire brain.

I was fourteen, I played it until my mom threatened to burn the CD.

And the live arrangements on the second tour, the stripped versions, that was you, right? That had to be you.”

“Guilty,” I say, and I mean it warmly, because nobody leads with the bridge on “Wire and Gasoline.” Nobody. Casual fans don’t know that song exists. This woman cited my arrangement work from 2004. “You did your homework.”

“Homework is what you do for school. This was scripture.” She squeezes my arms and lets go, and only then turns to Knox.

And I watch it happen.

It’s not a gasp or a swoon, nothing that simple.

Every part of her comes to attention at once.

She’s met presidents. She’s sold out this same stadium on her own name.

None of it matters. Knox Wildstone is holding a sweaty towel and grinning at her, and Samantha Saint looks at him like the rest of her life was the opening act.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” Knox says. “Hell of a set of lungs you’ve got. I caught the second leg last year, the forum show. You buried the place.”

“You came to my show?”

“I steal from the best. Politely. With credit.”

She laughs, delighted, and I catch Miranda watching the laugh.

“Okay,” Samantha says. “I wasn’t going to do this tonight, I was going to be cool and mysterious and go through managers, but you’re right here and my filter died around album two.

” She plants her feet. “I have a song. I wrote it as a duet, and I wrote the male part for you, and I don’t want anyone else to sing it.

One song. Come in for one song, and if you hate it I’ll never bring it up again, and I’ll tell everyone you were lovely. ”

Knox glances at me. It’s a habit I love, the husband check-in before the business answer.

“I’ll listen to it,” he says. “That’s a promise about my ears, not my calendar.”

“I’ll take your ears. Your ears are legendary. Your ears have their own Wikipedia section.”

“They do not.”

“They do, I checked before I came over. I did homework on you too.”

It’s charming. Genuinely charming, and I’ve watched a hundred famous people work this room and most of them work it worse.

And here’s the thing: I’m not threatened.

She’s twenty-nine and gorgeous and the biggest thing in music, and I’m forty and holding a cable, and my husband is looking at me while she flirts at him, waiting to see what I think.

“If the song’s good, do it,” I say.

Knox raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“One song with the biggest voice on the planet? That’s not a decision.” I tap his chest.

“And if the chorus needs help,” Miranda says, “your wife charges by the minute.”

“My wife charges in wine and vetoes,” Knox says, and slides his hand into mine.

Samantha watches that, the hand, the easy fit of it. Her smile doesn’t move, but something behind it recalibrates, quick, and if you’d blinked you’d have missed it. I don’t blink much. It’s the job.

“It was an honor,” she says to me, and the funny thing is it sounds true. “Both of you. I’ll send the demo tonight.”

“You will not,” Miranda says. “You’ll send it at a decent hour, at least.”

“Miranda, I’ve never done anything at a decent hour in my life.”

We leave them there, Miranda already negotiating with the future, Samantha glowing even under the fluorescent hallway lights.

The SUV is waiting in the tunnel. Knox climbs in after me, drops his head onto my shoulder, and lets out the long post-show breath, the one that means the noise is finally out of his ears.

“She’s talented,” he says.

“She’s a Ferrari.”

“You like her.”

“I like that she knows the bridge on ‘Wire and Gasoline.’ Nobody knows the bridge on ‘Wire and Gasoline.’” I fish a water bottle out of the seatback and hand it to him, because he never remembers to hydrate and I have never stopped reminding him.

“Listen to the demo before you say yes. If the song’s bad, no amount of lungs fixes it. ”

“And if it’s good?”

“Then you go sing one song with Samantha Saint, the internet catches fire, Miranda buys a boat, and everybody wins.” I shrug. “It’s one song.”

Knox tips the bottle at me in a toast. “It’s one song.”

Outside the tinted windows, the last of the crowd is streaming toward the parking lot, eighty thousand people humming the chorus they think they gave him. The driver eases us into the night, and Knox laces his fingers through mine on the seat between us, and neither of us looks back at the stadium.

Why would we? There’s nothing back there but a party we already left.

Miranda calls later. She’s on speaker, and I can hear the smile.

“The demo’s already in my inbox,” she says. “She sent it from the hallway.”

Knox laughs. I laugh.

Somewhere behind us, in a fluorescent hallway, Samantha Saint is still standing in my wing.