“Finn will kick my ass when he hears that I took Sophie to Hardy’s concert. Hardy had a thing for Sophie. Finn won’t like me taking her to LA to spend time with Hardy while Finn’s in Somalia or God knows where.” His brother, a SEAL, was on his last deployment.
Reeves shrugged. “Finn trusts Sophie. He’ll be happy that she’s with Danni.”
“Are you sure about the part about Danni? Those two women are known as troublemakers for damn good reasons.”
“That’s why I don’t think you should share anything with Sophie about the stalker… If Sophie is in danger, Finn will kick both of our asses.”
Chapter Three
Danni rushed into Alex’s dressing room to check for a note. There hadn’t been one before she went on her little scouting excursion. Like tonight, Frank definitely had the opportunity to deliver the notes at every city, including Portland.
She immediately headed to the scotch and Dom Perignon on the table in the middle of the seating area. The tray with Alex’s drink requests had been the spot where the stalker had left the previous menacing letters. Nothing. Danni moved to the changing area. The long table in front of the mirror was filled with deodorant, expensive hair products, several brushes, and a hair dryer. Alex was very particular about his hair and the hair products he used to keep its shine, but nothing was out of the ordinary.
The expansive change space held a rack of Alex’s clothes against one wall. Ironed T-shirts hung next to at least ten pairs of torn black jeans. Designer Converse runners and black boots of all sorts were under the clothing rack. At every concert, Alex had an entire wardrobe brought backstage. He always chose his shirt, jeans, and shoes to match his mood at the beginning of each concert. He had a highly honed brand, and he was careful to choose what met the different expectations of each city’s crowd.
Danni dropped into a chair and reached for the Dom Perignon. Her adrenaline bounce was bottoming, and she was headed toward a crash. All she had accomplished was acting paranoid and tiring herself out by her search. She wanted to help Alex, and she wanted to solve this problem. She excelled at deductive reasoning and thrived on being challenged. Besides, sleuthing gave her a damn good excuse to be away from Seattle and Lars Jenkins, the man who risked his life by diving in the line of fire to protect her.
Who took such risks?
Insane alpha male protectors. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about Lars, bleeding and vulnerable, lying on the floor. She had made her decision. Like any self-actualized woman, she assessed the threat to her well-being and ran away as soon as Lars was discharged from the hospital. Ran away from the only man who could make her repeat the same stupid mistake of caring too much. A man who wasn’t interested in anything more than fun in bed. She was sure that he had left a record-breaking number of women wanting more.
Alex, his long black hair down around his shoulders and his skin glistening in sweat, sauntered into the dressing room after finishing his set. His open shirt revealed a sculpted chest. His tight jeans hugged his muscular thighs. He was the living, breathing sex god image that he had promoted for years to keep his thousands of women fans panting.
Why couldn’t she get a bolt of animal magnetism? He was a perfect specimen of male virility. Where was the overwhelming craving to undress him and lick every inch of his chiseled chest as she experienced with a mere glance from Lars Jenkins?
Alex’s narrowed eyes searched hers. Relief floated across his face when Danni shook her head.
“Thank God. She didn’t follow me to LA.” Alex poured a small amount of Balvenie into a glass and threw it back.
Danni sipped her champagne, letting the cool liquid soothe her frazzled nerves.
“Or she hasn’t arrived yet—four more days here.” He poured himself another shot.
Danni hated that Alex had started drinking heavily. Alex wasn’t the typical rock musician cliché. He didn’t drink or get high when he performed. He was an athlete and an artist. He worked out and did intermittent fasting and ate a healthy diet. He was way better disciplined than Danni, who was a sucker for fried food and bubbly.
“We’re going to get her, Alex.” Danni tried to sound enthusiastic but didn’t feel any of it. “Maybe she made her point, and she’s finished.”
“You don’t believe that, and neither do I.”
Danni tried to muster a smile, but this wasn’t the time to get into it with another set to perform.
“We can talk about it later. Go get your shower. Dom Perignon can’t block your stink.” Another reality of touring with a band. Sweaty rock stars looked good on stage, but up close, they reeked.
“Sure, Mom.”
Her friends would think she was insane if they found out she was mothering Rolling Stone’s hottest musician, Alex Hardy, instead of getting down and dirty with him. Maybe she really hadn’t recovered from Jax’s betrayal. It had been over a year. She’d stopped loving him, but not what he represented.
Danni leaned back in the seat and listened to the sound of the shower. She could join Alex in the shower and prove that she was over her Jax’s cheating ways and that she was free. Unfortunately, a naked Alex didn’t conjure one fantasy of soaping his hard body…but a damn Scandinavian twin with an irreverent sense of humor and raw hunger in his bright eyes had her brain spinning and her body tensing.
Danni was lost in a fantasy of Lars begging. It was one of her favorite fantasies—kneeling in the shower, her lips around him, making the macho marine beg.
“What the fuck?”
Danni rushed to the bathroom door, which stood open. Alex, bare-chested with his jeans half-open, held a T-shirt.
“What’s wrong?”
“What the fuck?”
“Did the wardrobe person not iron it?”
She had never seen him lose it over something so trivial as a T-shirt. The pressure of the stalker was getting to him. Maybe it was time to stop touring—take a break like Frank had recommended—despite how much she hated agreeing with Frank.
Alex stretched the T-shirt between his hands. Exactly like the threatening notes, the T-shirt had bold red calligraphy surrounded with red blotches resembling blood. The difference was the stalker’s canvas was now a T-shirt. Unlike the previous three letters’ threat, “March 2006” was in the center of the blood splotches on the shirt. The stalker had taken a great deal of time and care to construct the artistically awful T-shirt.
A thousand icy pinpricks jabbed at her skin.
The stalker had invaded Alex’s space again under Danni’s watch. And this time, the assault was more personal. The stalker had touched his belongings.
The only way the stalker was able to gain access to Alex had to be due to a breach in his security. But Alex would never accept that Frank was complicit with the stalker or possibly even was the stalker.
Danni led Alex to a chair, then poured him a glass of water. Alex needed to pull it together since he had to perform in less than twenty minutes. “You need to hydrate.”
Alex drank the water in one gulp. “I’m so fucking tired of the invasion. And tired of being paranoid about everyone around me.”
Danni dropped into the chair across from him. “This is a real clue. We can figure out what happened in March 2006. This is a good thing.”