Рони Лорен – Call On Me (страница 12)

However, once they were in the kitchen, Oakley turned to him and asked him what he wanted to drink, and that voice hit him again right where it counted. That tone, dropping half an octave, and pressed close to the phone? It could probably make a guy hard before a dirty word was ever spoken. It’d be lethal.

He liked Oakley a lot already but had accepted yesterday during dinner that he was too far from her type to get anywhere. She wasn’t looking to sow some bad-boy oats. She’d moved beyond that phase of life. But if the lovely Ms. Easton wasn’t as buttoned-up and conservative as she was portraying, if she was up to some naughty, secretive business behind closed doors, that put a whole new shine on things. Because nothing was hotter to him than a woman who had her shit together during the day but who could also let loose and play dirty at night.

Maybe that had been part of what had gotten him in trouble with his teacher. She’d been strict in the classroom, so put together. But one day he’d walked up on her in between classes. She’d been bending over to get something on the floor and had stumbled, giving him the glorious sight of her lacy red thong before she could right herself. After that, he’d lost hours in that class imagining what she was like outside of school, picturing what happened when she took the pins out of her hair and stripped off that stern expression. And one day when he’d run into her in town on a weekend, he’d found out.

But that had been his young infatuation and a raging libido at work there. He’d been dumb and eager. She’d been lonely and recovering from an abusive relationship. Looking back, he’d been the epitome of non-threatening, which is why she’d probably crossed lines that should’ve never been crossed. He hadn’t known what to do with that kind of situation then.

But now the thought of discovering a woman who had that ability to play both sides of the line had his mouth watering. The girls he usually hooked up with wore their sexuality on the surface. One-dimensional. Like the one he’d kicked out the other night. Physically, she probably would’ve been game for whatever he suggested. But it often lost its punch when a girl was doing something simply to impress him—to win the I’m-the-hottest-girl game. To play the porn star to his rock star.

So much of it was pure bullshit.

But a woman who wanted to do things because it would make her feel good, because she craved it? Well, that’d be an altogether different rodeo.

“You look lost in thought over there,” Oakley said, sliding a glass of tea his way.

He took a long sip from the glass.

“Nickel for your thoughts?” Reagan said, mouth half full of pizza. “And if you say them, Mom actually pays you a nickel. I’ve got a big jar of them. I have lots of thoughts.”

He nearly choked on his drink. His thoughts were so not kid-friendly, and he had a feeling it was showing on his face. He needed to pull it together. Here he was sitting in a kitchen with Oakley and her daughter in the middle of suburbia eating pizza and spinning some bent fantasy that the woman in the Disney shirt was secretly a phone-sex operator. He was an idiot. “I was thinking you should tell me what kind of music you like.”

Reagan’s face brightened like this was her favorite topic in the world. “Have you ever heard of punk rock?”

He laughed. “A time or two.”

Oakley slid onto a stool and grabbed a slice of cheese pizza. “Reagan is very into the eighties.”

“Is that right?” he asked, directing the question to Reagan. “How’d that happen?”

“Because Mom’s a whore.”

“Reagan!” Oakley said.

Pike spit out his drink.

Reagan’s eyes went wide as she looked between the two of them. “What’s wrong?”

Oakley looked like she’d swallowed a porcupine but managed to lower her voice, replacing it with a terse but calm one. “Where’d you learn that word? That’s not a nice word.”

“Whore?” she asked, all innocence and doe eyes. “On TV. How is it bad? It just means you like to keep a lot of stuff. That’s how I found all those records and magazines from the eighties.”

Pike bit his lips together, trying not to laugh as Oakley pressed her fingers between her eyes and rubbed. “It’s hoarder, baby. Hoarder. That’s the correct word. The other one means something different.”

Reagan seemed undeterred. “What does the other one mean then?”

“It’s an ugly word. We’ll talk about it another day. Finish your pizza. You need to be in the bathtub in fifteen minutes.”

Reagan didn’t look as if she wanted to let it go. But after a few seconds she rolled her eyes, muttering a “whatever,” and went back to her meal.

Pike had grabbed a paper towel and was dabbing at the spray of tea he’d sent flying. He cut Oakley an amused look.

She shook her head in kill-me-now chagrin, but the humor in her eyes warmed him right to his toes. Vixen or not, this woman was beautiful.

She 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.

SEVEN

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—”