Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit

24. Lila

24

LILA

I walked into the restaurant feeling like I’d already had three cups of coffee.

I hadn’t. But the thought of a meeting with Taylor—which Taylor herself had called for—had me getting all sorts of excited, and the depression of having woken up without anything from Rivers faded into the mists of the early morning. I’d spoken with Taylor quite a bit over the last two weeks—and more over the last week, when Rivers had started making himself scarce—but she’d never actually called a meeting with me.

With us.

I reached down and took Anna’s hand, squeezing as hard as I could. “I can’t believe we’re being called into a meeting with a Real Live Agent,” I whispered. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Anna snorted in typical Anna fashion. “Lila. This is an agent you’ve seen every day for the past two weeks and talked to at least 103 times. This girl asked a favor of you on your first day here. What’s the big deal?”

I yanked her to a stop and turned her so I could stare into her eyes. “What’s the big deal? What’s the big deal? Taylor James called us at 5 in the morning for a meeting. A mee-ting ! How could you think that wasn’t a big deal?”

She shrugged and gave me a sly smile. “I don’t know, Liles, you’re the girl who evidently has a direct line straight to God. You ask him for favors and he delivers. I’m just surprised you’d get so jittery about a little old agent like Taylor James.”

Okay, well I had to give her that much. I didn’t actually have a direct line to God—at least I didn’t think I did, and if I did, I certainly wasn’t using it enough—but I had sent a thought up into the ether asking for a sign about what Anna and I were supposed to do for our music careers. And the DJ on the radio had announced that Olivia Johns and Connor Wheating were essentially taking auditions on the road. Then no one else had turned up for said auditions and we’d essentially waltzed in as the only act in town. So to speak.

Coincidence?

Probably.

But still.

I grinned at her. “Okay, well when you put it that way. I guess compared to God, Taylor James should be easy as pie.”

“Even easier. Considering you’ve already been doing her favors and she owes you.”

Another point on Anna’s tally. My mind went back to that first morning, when I’d stupidly decided to get up on a stage in a café and do some performing. She’d cornered me afterward and asked me—pretty bluntly—to play Rivers Shines’ girlfriend. At that time, the standing opinion was that he was too broody and damaged to be good for Olivia and Connor’s reputations, and that he needed a shine up. Taylor had taken one look at my bright, red-headed look and decided it was exactly the one that would add more shine—if you’ll forgive the pun—to his persona. I’d been hesitant, because hello, Rivers Shine , but when she’d thrown in a guaranteed contract, I’d said yes.

Guaranteed contract.

God, please let that be what she wanted to meet about, and not Rivers. Because he was well and truly out of my reach at this point, and I wasn’t sure what else I could do to help him or his reputation. I might have buffed it up a bit that first week, but he was now doing everything he could to tarnish it again.

And I didn’t think I could stop him. No matter how much Taylor might want me to.

I’d barely had the thought when I looked up through the restaurant, taking in the size of it, and noticed a familiar set of dark eyes staring at me. Ruffled, dark hair. Wide cheekbones. Impossibly lush lips.

Lips that looked like they’d been built for kissing.

I happened to know exactly what it was like to kiss those very lips.

My eyes dipped to them and then shot back up to the eyes—smoldering and shadowed, as usual—and I gasped. Rivers looked like he was going to burn me up with his gaze. Like he wanted to eat me up right here and now. Devour my mouth and every other piece of my body and leave me begging for more.

He also looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, and if he had, the sleep had been filled with nightmares. Shadows crept beneath his eyes and his skin was even paler than usual. He looked sick. I felt my heart reaching for him, trying to find that connection we’d had, trying to ask what was wrong and what I could do to make him?—

A hand appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my arm, and yanked me to the side, breaking my eye contact with Rivers, and I jerked my gaze over to see Taylor James herself dragging me toward her table, her mouth already moving a mile a minute and her eyes intent on me.

Right. Okay. Forget about Rivers and him wanting to eat me alive or how I might save him from whatever was wrong. It was evidently time for our meeting with Taylor.

“The plan is,” she was saying, “to shift the publicity away from Rivers a little bit. Sure, he’s great and everything, and you two are so good together, but people are way more interested in you than him at this point. They’ve already done all the stories on Rivers Shine. The tattoos. The drugs. The booze. They want something new to talk about. Something bright and pretty and...” She gestured vaguely in my direction, indicating everything about me, from my auburn hair down to my flip flops. “Something that doesn’t make them depressed,” she ended wryly.

“Rivers makes them depressed?” I asked, frowning. That didn’t seem like the right slant for any reporter to take.

Then again, Rivers hadn’t exactly given them much choice, I guessed.

“It’s not that he makes them depressed, but how many times can you write about a guy who only gives you one angle to write about?” she asked. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had reporters ask me what he was like behind the scenes and what could I tell them about his background. They’re dying for something with more depth, and he can’t give that to them.”

I bit my lip. She was right about that; Rivers only showed the press one version of himself, and it was always the same. I’d seen more than that—I’d seen the lost boy he was on the inside—but I also knew he’d never let anyone else glimpse that part. He certainly didn’t want them writing about it, or even finding out that it was in there. He’d been in the music industry since he was just a kid, the new phenom on the block, and I knew for a fact that he’d learned early to give the press—and his fans—what they wanted and nothing more. It had become a mask he put on every time he went outside.

A mask that hid the real him so effectively that most people didn’t even realize there was anyone else in there.

He hadn’t told me everything about why he did it, but I thought I knew enough. He’d been fourteen when he was discovered and hadn’t had anyone to look out for him. His parents were, for some reason, out of the picture, and his managers and agents hadn’t exactly kept his best interests in mind when they sent him out on the road to perform. He’d been learning to protect himself from a very early age.

I didn’t think he’d ever stopped keeping everyone else at arm’s length, just to maintain that protection.

None of which was my story to tell.

“So, what are you thinking?” I asked, coming back to the meeting with Taylor.

Not, as I’d hoped, a meeting about the contract. But she wouldn’t be putting the time and energy into getting me more publicity if she wasn’t invested in Anna and me as an act, right?

“I’m thinking that you and Anna are the rising stars, here. You’re marketable. You’re cute and young and from good families. You have everything going for you. We get you in front of the cameras as much as possible and start sending out press releases about you, giving the reporters what they need to start writing stories. We say Rivers essentially discovered you and is head-over-heels for you but focus on your career rather than the relationship. More of you. Less of him. He’s getting moodier and harder to handle and between you and me, I’m just about done with his shit. But I want you on the stage as much as possible.”

I felt Anna squeezing my hand, urging me to agree, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. More publicity was great. More time on the stage sounded amazing. And I was guessing our contract depended on me agreeing to this new scheme. But I couldn’t get over the muttered addition that Taylor was getting tired of Rivers. Getting annoyed with him.

She wanted me to replace him in the papers.

She wanted me to essentially sell him out. Leave him behind. Take his place.

I looked over my shoulder, wondering if he was still sitting at that same table, and found him staring at me, his face still and quiet like he was afraid to let anything show. He looked more lost than I’d ever seen him, there by himself with a big stack of pancakes and way too much syrup, the other people in the restaurant avoiding him like he was a plague victim or something.

He’d opened up to me. He’d let me in and maybe—maybe—started counting on me to see who he really was and give him a safe place to land. He’d shared blueberry pie with me and forced me to help him steal a car and seen dragons in the clouds.

And now he was shutting me out, and Taylor wanted me to step in front of him and take the glory for myself.

“Your contract depends on you doing this, Lila,” Taylor said, like she could hear what I was thinking. “I can’t sign artists who won’t do the work I give them.”

I swung back to her, my heart in my mouth. I’d known that was coming. It wasn’t a surprise.

And luckily, I already knew what I was going to say.

I stuck my hand out and grinned at her. “Then it’s a good thing you’ve got a deal, Taylor. When do we start?”

She began talking again, laying out plan after plan for what she wanted me to do, and I prayed that Anna was listening and taking mental notes. Getting it all organized so she could tell me about it later. I hoped Taylor also had it all written down somewhere so she could email it to me.

Because I’d already stopped paying attention.

I was too busy building a plan for how I was going to save Rivers Shine from himself and worm my way back into his life while I was doing it. Because as long as I was doing Taylor another favor and staying on the tour as a more important part…

I was going to take advantage of it and do some work on the side.