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.
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.”