Reflected in You: A Crossfire Novel

each other. My heart kicked into a mad beat, a combination of excitement and apprehension. He cursed suddenly, shaking out the match as it burned his fingers.
    I took off, struggling to maintain a casual pace as I made a beeline for Angus and the limo.
    “Hey! Hold up,” Brett shouted. I heard his footsteps approaching at a jog, and adrenaline surged through me. A roadie was pushing a flat hand truck loaded with heavy gear and I darted around him, using him as cover to duck between two buses. I pressed my back flat against the side of one, standing between two open cargo compartments. I cringed into the shadows, feeling like a coward, but knowing I had nothing to say to Brett. I wasn’t the girl he knew anymore.
    I watched him rush by. I decided to wait, give him time to look and give up. I was hyperaware of the time passing, of the fact that Gideon would be looking for me soon.
    “Eva.”
    I flinched at the sound of my name. Turning my head, I found Brett approaching from the other side. While I’d been looking to the right, he’d come up on the left.
    “It is you,” he said roughly. He dropped his clove smoke on the ground and crushed it beneath his boot.
    I heard myself saying something familiar. “You should quit.”
    “So you keep telling me.” He approached cautiously. “You saw the show?”
    I nodded and stepped away from the bus, backing up. “It was awesome. You guys sound really great. I’m happy for you.”
    He took a step forward for every one of mine backward. “I was hoping I’d find you like this, at one of the shows. I had a hundred different ideas about how it might go if I saw you at one.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. The tension between us was so thick it was hard to breathe.
    The attraction was still there.
    It was nothing like what I felt with Gideon. Nothing more than a shadow of that, but it was there nonetheless.
    I retreated back out into the open, where the activity was high and there were lots of people milling around.
    “Why are you running?” he asked. In the pool of light from a parking lot lamp, I saw him clearly. He was even better looking than before.
    “I can’t . . .” I swallowed. “There’s nothing to say.”
    “Bullshit.” The intensity of his glare burned through me. “You stopped coming around. Didn’t say a word, just stopped showing up. Why?”
    I rubbed at the knot in my stomach. What was I going to say? I finally grew a pair and decided I deserved better than to be one of the many chicks you fucked in a bathroom stall between sets?
    “Why, Eva? We had something going and you just fucking disappeared.”
    Turning my head, I looked for Gideon or Angus. Neither was anywhere in sight. The limo waited alone. “It was a long time ago.”
    Brett lunged forward and caught me by the arms, startling me, briefly frightening me with the sudden aggressive movement. If we hadn’t been so near other people, it might have triggered panic.
    “You owe me an explanation,” he bit out.
    “It’s not—”
    He kissed me. He had the softest lips, and he sealed them over mine and kissed me. By the time I registered what was happening, he’d tightened his grip on my arms and I couldn’t move away. Couldn’t push him away.
    And for a brief span of time I didn’t want to.
    I even kissed him back, because the attraction was still there and it soothed something hurting inside me to think I might’ve been more than a convenient piece of ass. He tasted like cloves, smelled seductively like hardworking male, and he took my mouth with all the passion of a creative soul. He was familiar, in very intimate ways.
    But in the end, it didn’t matter that he got to me still. It didn’t matter that we had a history, painful as it was for me. It didn’t matter that I was flattered and affected by the lyrics he’d written, that after six months of watching him enjoy other women while nailing me anywhere with a door that locked, it was me he was thinking about when he seduced screaming-for-it women from the stage.
    None of that mattered because I was madly in love with Gideon Cross, and he was what I needed.
    I wrenched away with a gasp—
    —and faced Gideon charging at a dead run, his speed unchecked as he rammed into Brett and took him down.

Chapter 10
     
    I stumbled back from the impact, nearly falling. The two men hit the asphalt with a sickening thud. Someone yelled. A woman screamed. I could do nothing. I stood frozen and silent, emotions twisting