by Roni Loren
He laughed. “I’ll remember that for next time.”
“Can I eat another dinner, Mom?” Reagan asked, clutching the pizzas like she was afraid she’d have to give them back.
“Sure. Why don’t you bring them in the kitchen and get out some paper plates? We’ll be there in a minute.”
Reagan hurried off, and Oakley grabbed her guitar to slip it into the case.
The living room was small and lived in, the furniture and carpet worn but not in disrepair. Nothing fancy, but Oakley’s place had a cozy, welcoming feel to it.
“I heard you playing when I walked up. Great song.”
She latched the case. “Thanks.”
“Who’s it by? I haven’t heard that one before.”
She glanced over at him, wariness putting lines around her mouth. “No one. It’s just a thing I tinkered with a long time ago. Reagan found the lyrics and wanted me to play it.”
“Wait, you wrote that?” He moved closer without realizing he was doing it. That was her song? “What’s it called?”
“‘Dandelion.’ It was just a stupid teenage thing I scribbled down.” She gave him a dismissive wave of her hand. “Reagan wanted to change some of it around and maybe use it as a starting point for one of the songs for the group.”
“Oh, hell no.”
She set down the guitar case next to the TV and peered back over her shoulder. “What?”
His mind was already working, grabbing onto thoughts and running with them. “I only heard a little bit of it, but that’s not a kid’s song. Too much yearning in it for that. And that’s a one-voice song. Besides adding in some drums and a bass track, it didn’t sound like it needed to be messed around with. Maybe you could play the whole thing for me?”
She crossed her arms. “We’re here to work, not to waste time serenading you with my teenage ballads. Plus, I don’t play my own stuff for other people. I only did it because Reagan asked.”
“Hold up. You have more stuff?”
A smile finally broke through at that. She tilted her head. “What’s with you? You look like a beagle who just got offered a rack of ribs.”
What was with him was that he had been trying his hand at producing for the last year, and he hadn’t had a song hit him with that kind of gut-level force since he’d heard Keats. He was still new to this producing thing, but his instincts on what was good hadn’t let him down yet. “Fine. We’ll eat pizza and work. But before I leave, you’re going to play that song for me.”
“I will n—”
He raised a finger. “Remember, I am selflessly donating this Thursday night for the good of children, Oakley. I provided dinner. And I am mostly keeping my eyes to myself even though you are parading around in that enticing ensemble. All I’m asking in return is a song.”
She snorted and looked down at her shirt. “Mickey Mouse does it for you, huh?”
“His ears are very strategically placed. Not that I’ve noticed.”
She narrowed her eyes in playful warning. “Okay. I’ll think about it. One song. But only if we get this plan hammered out before ten.”
“I will accept this deal.” But there she went with the time limit again, which had his mind chasing that bunny trail from last night.
After their dinner the night before, he’d gone home and had tried to talk himself out of his crazy theories about the phone calls. He’d ruled out the most ridiculous one first. No way was Oakley a call girl or escort. She had a kid and wouldn’t be able to get away that much. Plus, during their conversations about the bathroom, she’d blushed. A hooker doesn’t blush.
So there were only a few other possibilities he could think of. One was that she was seeing a guy who liked to role-play. Pike liked those kinds of games himself, so he’d been down that road of false names and such. But Oakley had said she wasn’t seeing anyone and he believed her. Then he’d thought it could be an online relationship thing—pretending to be someone else and hooking up via the Internet. But really, why would Oakley need to catfish anyone? The woman was hot.
So then he’d landed on the last theory. That she was some kind of phone-sex operator. That would explain the guy mentioning minutes.
But maybe he’d heard it all wrong and was chasing crazy ideas. First, did people still call those old-school lines when every porntastic thing imaginable could be found on the Internet? And secondly, after replaying the scene, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure that she’d said Sasha to the caller when she’d walked away. Maybe he’d heard wrong. The music had been loud in the restaurant.
And as he followed Oakley into the kitchen to share a pizza with her kid, he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that this doting mother who worked at a non-profit could flip the switch and play filthy phone-sex girl at night. He’d called those lines when he was a teenager. He’d lift credit card numbers from his mom’s boyfriend and charge the calls that way. And he’d gotten quite an education when he’d found there was no limit to what those women would talk about. He had a hard time picturing Oakley saying “fuck” much less describing sex acts in explicit detail.
However, once they were in the kitchen, Oakley turned to him and asked him what he wanted to drink, and that voice hit him again right where it counted. That tone, dropping half an octave, and pressed close to the phone? It could probably make a guy hard before a dirty word was ever spoken. It’d be lethal.
He liked Oakley a lot already but had accepted yesterday during dinner that he was too far from her type to get anywhere. She wasn’t looking to sow some bad-boy oats. She’d moved beyond that phase of life. But if the lovely Ms. Easton wasn’t as buttoned-up and conservative as she was portraying, if she was up to some naughty, secretive business behind closed doors, that put a whole new shine on things. Because nothing was hotter to him than a woman who had her shit together during the day but who could also let loose and play dirty at night.
Maybe that had been part of what had gotten him in trouble with his teacher. She’d been strict in the classroom, so put together. But one day he’d walked up on her in between classes. She’d been bending over to get something on the floor and had stumbled, giving him the glorious sight of her lacy red thong before she could right herself. After that, he’d lost hours in that class imagining what she was like outside of school, picturing what happened when she took the pins out of her hair and stripped off that stern expression. And one day when he’d run into her in town on a weekend, he’d found out.
But that had been his young infatuation and a raging libido at work there. He’d been dumb and eager. She’d been lonely and recovering from an abusive relationship. Looking back, he’d been the epitome of non-threatening, which is why she’d probably crossed lines that should’ve never been crossed. He hadn’t known what to do with that kind of situation then.
But now the thought of discovering a woman who had that ability to play both sides of the line had his mouth watering. The girls he usually hooked up with wore their sexuality on the surface. One-dimensional. Like the one he’d kicked out the other night. Physically, she probably would’ve been game for whatever he suggested. But it often lost its punch when a girl was doing something simply to impress him—to win the I’m-the-hottest-girl game. To play the porn star to his rock star.
So much of it was pure bullshit.
But a woman who wanted to do things because it would make her feel good, because she craved it? Well, that’d be an altogether different rodeo.
“You look lost in thought over there,” Oakley said, sliding a glass of tea his way.
He took a long sip from the glass.
“Nickel for your thoughts?” Reagan said, mouth half full of pizza. “And if you say them, Mom actually pays you a nickel. I’ve got a big jar of them. I have lots of thoughts.”
He nearly choked on his drink. His thoughts were so not kid-friendly, and he had a feeling it was showing on his face. He needed to pull it together. Here he was sitting in a kitchen with Oakley and her daughter in the middle of su
burbia eating pizza and spinning some bent fantasy that the woman in the Disney shirt was secretly a phone-sex operator. He was an idiot. “I was thinking you should tell me what kind of music you like.”
Reagan’s face brightened like this was her favorite topic in the world. “Have you ever heard of punk rock?”
He laughed. “A time or two.”
Oakley slid onto a stool and grabbed a slice of cheese pizza. “Reagan is very into the eighties.”
“Is that right?” he asked, directing the question to Reagan. “How’d that happen?”
“Because Mom’s a whore.”
“Reagan!” Oakley said.
Pike spit out his drink.
Reagan’s eyes went wide as she looked between the two of them. “What’s wrong?”
Oakley looked like she’d swallowed a porcupine but managed to lower her voice, replacing it with a terse but calm one. “Where’d you learn that word? That’s not a nice word.”
“Whore?” she asked, all innocence and doe eyes. “On TV. How is it bad? It just means you like to keep a lot of stuff. That’s how I found all those records and magazines from the eighties.”
Pike bit his lips together, trying not to laugh as Oakley pressed her fingers between her eyes and rubbed. “It’s hoarder, baby. Hoarder. That’s the correct word. The other one means something different.”
Reagan seemed undeterred. “What does the other one mean then?”
“It’s an ugly word. We’ll talk about it another day. Finish your pizza. You need to be in the bathtub in fifteen minutes.”
Reagan didn’t look as if she wanted to let it go. But after a few seconds she rolled her eyes, muttering a “whatever,” and went back to her meal.
Pike had grabbed a paper towel and was dabbing at the spray of tea he’d sent flying. He cut Oakley an amused look.
She shook her head in kill-me-now chagrin, but the humor in her eyes warmed him right to his toes. Vixen or not, this woman was beautiful.
She pointed a finger his way. “Not a word from you.”
He raised his hands. “I didn’t say a thing.”
But boy was he thinking them.
Many, many things.
SEVEN
After tucking Reagan in for the night, Oakley plopped down on the couch, settling against the side farthest from Pike. Like that would help. The guy had a gravitational field like a black hole. She could feel the force of it dragging her toward him, threatening to consume her completely if she let her guard down for one second. “All right, she’s zonked out. We’re good to go until ten as long as we keep our voices down.”
“Then you turn into a pumpkin?” he asked, looking up from the legal pad he had in his lap.
“Got to get my beauty rest.”
“Yes.” He nodded gravely. “Very important for a whore.”
She grabbed a throw pillow and tossed it at him. “Hey, only eleven-year-old kids are allowed to call me that.”
And almost every single caller every freaking night. She’d nearly died when the word had rolled off Reagan’s lips. For one panicked moment, she’d thought Reagan had somehow broken through all of Oakley’s safety measures and had discovered what Mom did at night.
“She seems like a sweet kid,” Pike said, glancing in the direction of the stairs. “And surprisingly knowledgeable about bands that existed decades before she was born. Good taste, though.”
Oakley tucked a leg beneath her. “That’s her thing. When she finds something she likes, she obsesses about a subject and wants to know everything about it. Wants to live and breathe it.”
“Nothing wrong with passion. I was a lot like that when I started getting into music. Though, I was a little older than her when I got to the obsessive phase.”
Oakley smiled. “I love that she’s passionate and smart. But it doesn’t win her many favors socially. She struggles with the group stuff, so I’m hoping this project will be good for her. At her school, she’s in really small classrooms with specialized attention. Bluebonnet’s where she gets a dose of the real world.”
“What school does she go to?”
“The Bridgerton Academy.”
“Whoa. That’s the fancy one downtown with all the ivy on the fences, right?”
“Yeah. She has a partial scholarship. It’s still crazy expensive, but it’s the best thing that ever happened for Reagan. She has some extra needs, and she’s made so much progress since I moved her there. She’s finding her confidence.”
“That’s awesome.” He shifted on the couch to fully face her. “So ready to get this stuff done or do you want to sing for me first?”
She grabbed her cup of coffee and lifted it in a toast. “Work comes first. This caffeine’s only going to last so long.”
“I see how it is. You’re into making a guy wait.”
She smiled sweetly. “Endlessly.”
He narrowed his eyes at her and stretched his arm across the back of the couch. “Sadist, huh? I can work with that.”
“You’re flirting again.”
“So are you.”
“Am definitely not.” She totally had been. It was like a goddamned reflex around him. “Talk to me about rehearsal schedules.”
“Slave driver.”
They worked for a little over an hour, Pike talking fast and her jotting down as many of their half-formed ideas as she could manage. Once Pike got started, his brain seemed to work faster than his mouth. Full-on creative mode. The energy rolling off him infected her, too, getting her heart beating quicker than the coffee ever could. This was the part she missed about the industry she used to be in.
She didn’t miss the bullshit, the business, or the backstabbing, but she missed being around artistic people who ran on the fuel of their ideas and passions. She missed being in that flow with others and creating art. Music.
“Maybe we could see how expensive it’d be to get the rights to record some cover songs. If we tell them it’s for charity, we might be able to get permission,” Pike said, almost talking to himself. “Or maybe the kids want to do all originals. I guess that depends on how strong the originals are. We’d need at least one anchor song that has solid hit potential. Something people can really sing along to. And we could do a YouTube video with the kids—something fun. Morning shows will eat that up. And how many kids are in the program, not just in the music one, but all of it? A choir of kids in the background of a song can sound killer. You know, like the kids in John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas’ or even like the crowd singing in 30 Seconds to Mars songs. It makes it anthemic. Or—”
“Whoa, slow down, speed demon,” she said, raising a hand and forcing Pike to take a breath. “You’re spinning ideas faster than I can write. I should grab my laptop.”
He nodded. “Yeah, do that. We can share notes better that way anyhow.”
She went into her room and unhooked her laptop from the docking station, double and triple checking that the window for the call service was closed, and then brought it into the living room.
Pike continued bouncing ideas with her, and the clicking keyboard filled the spaces between sentences. But she was watching the clock closely. When it hit 9:50, she set the laptop aside and stretched her arms above her head. “I think we’ve gotten more than enough done for tonight. Next week, we can look at the songs they have already first, and you can see what direction we need to go.”
Pike pulled his phone from his pocket. “Is it that late already?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Damn. Well, guess it’s time for you to sing for me.”
She shifted on the couch cushion. No way was she singing that song in front of him. It’d be like standing in front of him naked. “It’s too late. Maybe next time.”
“Come on, I’m sure you can stay up a little past your bedtime? It’s just one song.”
His tone was gentle, cajoling. Part of her really wanted to give in to him. But that was the same part that also wanted to crawl across the couch and run her hands up his T-shirt
while she discovered what his mouth tasted like. She knew not to listen to that part. “I really can’t. I have some other stuff to do before bed.”
He frowned, considering her. “The same stuff that made you run out of the restaurant last night?”
Her heart ticked up a beat.
“You know how I said I have a thing about honesty?” he asked, setting aside his pad and pen.
The question caught her off guard. She swallowed past the tightness seizing her vocal cords. “Yeah.”
“Well, I have a little confession to make. Last night when you left the table, I accidentally answered your phone.”
Her stomach dropped right through the floor. Boom. Crash. Catastrophe. “You what?”
His gaze didn’t waver. “It was a complete accident, and I’m really sorry. We have the same ring and I wasn’t looking. I just grabbed it. A guy asked for Sasha.”
Her pizza was going to make a reappearance. She could feel it burning the back of her throat. “So a wrong number.”
“Was it?”
She’d gone clammy all over, like all the interrogation lights in the world had just turned onto her, glaring in her face. “Well, that’s not my name, so yeah.”
Pike blew out a breath and rubbed his palms on his jeans. “Okay. I just wanted to let you know that it happened. I’m not into secrets.”
“I—I appreciate you telling me,” she said, her words coming out as nervous as she felt.
He stood and she followed suit. But instead of turning toward the door, he stepped over to her, standing far closer than any two co-workers had any business doing. He put a knuckle under her chin to guide her face up to his. “Also, I’m not into judging. Or telling other people’s secrets.”
His eyes were going to be the death of her—those long, dark lashes framing eyes that changed color with his moods. Right now they were golden brown, penetrating. But she couldn’t give him the honesty he wanted. She gave him a tight smile, ignoring her twisting insides. “Good to know.”
After a long few seconds, where he held her solely with the power of that searching, steady gaze, he stepped back and grabbed his keys from the coffee table. “I left a name and number on the kitchen counter. You call that guy and tell him I sent you. My band’s playing a big festival in Fort Worth next Saturday and he’ll get you tickets. You and Reagan should come. I think she’d like it—even if my band’s a little more hard rock than punk.”