The bus pulled to a stop late Saturday morning and everyone was wide awake and ready to party. Especially Mia. She knew most of the bands that we were friends with and wanted to say hi immediately. Those we didn’t know personally? She would no doubt wrap them around her pretty little finger in no time. And the ones that were pricks? Her daddy and her Uncle Axton would kick their fucking asses until they played by Mia’s rules.
For OtherWorld, today was not just about performing that night. We had obligations. Monster had their own booth and we would have to go over and make an hour-long appearance. Wroth and Liam were expected at the Fender tent, to sign guitars and meet fans. Then we would all take turns at our own merchandise tents set up outside the arena, signing anything that fans happened to buy or bring. It was going to be a long day. And I planned on eating lots of junk food, drinking plenty of Monster, and listening to some kick-ass music with Dallas.
Of course, I had one more obligation. One that I didn’t want to mention to anyone, especially my girlfriend.
Gabriella was performing today on stage two. She’d already emailed me twice about it, using it as an excuse so that she could check on Liam since the tabloids had stopped following his recovery process over six weeks ago because it just wasn’t entertaining enough now that he was doing so much better. I was supposed to perform the song we did together back when we first started dating.
That song alone should have told me that Gabriella hadn’t been the one for me. She’d written “Shatter Me” about her cousin Alexis. Alexis had gone through a bad breakup with her now husband and she had fallen apart emotionally. After recording the song with OtherWorld, Gabriella had rushed to get the video shot so that she could use it to break Alexis and Jared up again. It had worked.
Big time.
Fortunately, Alexis and Jared had finally gotten back together and now had a beautiful son. If nothing else, Gabriella wouldn’t change that one little thing. Jordan was her favorite person in the world. It was for Jordan’s safety that she had ended things the way she had with Liam in the first place.
I didn’t want Dallas to know about performing with Gabriella and her band. Things were perfect with us for a change. Neither one of us had actually said the words ‘I love you’, but I could see them in her eyes. And while I hadn’t been able to voice them myself, I tried to show her with everything I did for her how much she meant to me.
The fact that I was adopting Kenzie? It had brought us even closer. All of Dallas’s walls were down, and had stayed down from the moment I had told her that I was adopting the girl who had touched my heart in just a matter of minutes after meeting her.
With Emmie’s help, the paperwork was being rushed through, and by the time the tour was over in a few days, I—and hopefully along with Dallas—would be going back to Baltimore and picking up Kenzie. The kid had no idea about the adoption, but I had emailed her a few times to see how she was doing, and I was hoping to surprise her. I’d promised her that things were going to get better that night at the little mom and pop restaurant, and I meant that completely.
I didn’t care that Kenzie was going to be eighteen soon. That poor kid had no one when she did turn eighteen and I wanted to make sure that she was okay. Ever since that night I’d met her and she had told me about her parents, I couldn’t help but think in some way her parents had sent her to me. They had known that I would meet their precious daughter and immediately want to protect her.
Mostly I just wanted to make sure that she was safe, eating enough, and getting everything that she needed. Dallas and I had actually talked about Kenzie’s future. I’d told her my plans for Kenzie—the same plans that I hoped would include Dallas too. Once Kenzie had graduated, which would be in just a few short weeks from what Kenzie had told me in her last email, we would head out to California and Kenzie could pick whatever college she wanted to go to. I didn’t care where it was. I’d get her an apartment, a few credit cards and fix her up a trust fund. I wasn’t expecting her to call me Dad or any shit like that. I was thirty-four years old to her seventeen. NO, I didn’t think I was going to want her to call me Dad.
Unless…she wanted to. I mean, I was okay with that if she wanted to.
As we stepped off the bus, the doors of the second bus opened and Wroth and the others climbed down. Like good little soldiers, we lined up in front of Natalie and a very pregnant Emmie. Since she was eight months pregnant, she wouldn’t be able to fly home next week when the tour was over so she, Nik and Mia would be taking the bus back to their home in Malibu.
I was going to miss her like crazy just like I did every time we were on opposite sides of the country. I was hoping that once Dallas and I picked up Kenzie we would all go back to California and find a house there. I had a penthouse on both sides of the country, but a house for the three of us would be much better. A place that we could call ours.
Nik, with Mia riding on his shoulders, stepped up beside his wife. As soon as Demon’s Wings’ obligations were done in the UK, Nik had been on the first flight out. The moody Emmie had disappeared the moment she had seen Nik when he had surprised her at our Delaware show. Of course, moody Emmie had come back with a vengeance a few days later when she had to separate Liam and Wroth on the buses just as she had Zander and Devlin, switching out Linc for Liam on my bus, because of Wroth and Marissa’s breakup from a relationship that Marissa insisted hadn’t been a relationship after all. Confusing females.
Confusing females that were tearing my damn band apart. If things didn’t change and in a hurry, I didn’t know if we would even be a band by the time our fall tour started with Demon’s Wings. The paps had gotten wind of the stressed relationship between Z and Devlin, and the rumor mill was going bonkers over if the tour would take place in the fall, or even if we would last the rest of this tour.
I was seriously starting to wonder the same things.
Natalie stepped forward with a stack of papers in her hands. As she stopped in front of each of us, she picked out an itinerary that had our names on them. I saw mine and noticed that Emmie had already scheduled my time with Gabriella on stage two later. I shot her a look and she shrugged before nodding toward Dallas who was getting her own itinerary.
Dallas frowned at the single sheet of paper that Natalie handed her. “What’s this?”
“The medic tent is short on staff. I need you to take an hour shift to let a few of the paramedics take a lunch break,” Emmie explained with a straight face, her hands rubbing over her distended belly tenderly. “That isn’t a problem, is it?”