Black Lilith: Book One (Black Lilith #1) (14 page)

Would he do the same to her? Mikayla likes to think that it’s unlikely after everything that has happened between her and
Black Lilith
, but if he can fire Tommy’s girlfriend, was any PA safe? What happens when she makes a mistake, or Logan decides that flirting with her is breaking the rules he’d set for himself and the rest of the band, and she suddenly finds herself out of a job and heading to some out of the way country? Would he turn on her as completely as he’d turned on Danielle, despite Tommy being in love with the woman? Would the rest of the band stand up for Mikayla if Logan did that? Would that even make a difference?

These questions swirled around her mind, and as she fell into an uneasy sleep one thought became clear,
I can never risk getting involved with him.

Because if it ends badly, she thinks as she runs her fingers through Tommy’s soft hair, it won’t just be her who gets hurt, it’ll be her band. Because they’ll have to see her leave just like Danielle did, and she won’t let any of her men get hurt.

Mikayla wakes up with Tommy’s hair in her mouth.

“
Urgh
,” she mutters, spitting it out.

Tommy’s head is on her chest, cushioned on her breasts, and he’s got his arm wrapped around her like she’s a teddy bear. His sleeping face looks almost melancholy, as though his dreams are full of things he can’t have. After their talk last night, Mikayla thinks she knows what he’s dreaming about.

“Hey, Tommy, you sober yet?”

She rubs his shoulder to try and rouse him awake. He comes to after a moment, blinking in confusion before pulling away from her and stretching like a cat.

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

He doesn’t seem embarrassed, and Mikayla is glad. If he were embarrassed, then this would be awkward, but as he stands he’s rolling around on her bed as though they wake up together every day while she relaxes back into the pillows.

“What time is it?” he asks.

She checks her phone. “Nine-forty,” she replies. “Want to get breakfast?” The hotel has breakfast until late, which had excited the band more than Mikayla had thought possible.

“Sure. I’ll just go get changed.” He looks at her. His brown eyes are lighter than Logan’s—more like hazel than chocolate, and not as bloodshot as they had been earlier. “Thanks for letting me stay last night. And letting me ramble.”

“No problem,” she says, giving him a smile. “You can come find me anytime you need to ramble.”

The grin he gives her is a bit cheeky, but even when he’s grinning his lips are turned down slightly. Mikayla had noticed that when they’d first met but she’d never asked herself
why
he always looked so sad.

He rolls out of bed. His hair looks like a bird’s nest, and she laughs when he rubs his hands through it, messing it up further. His plaid shirt is badly rumpled and still smells faintly of marijuana. Mikayla thinks that she should probably open a window or something to get the smell out before the maids come in to clean.

Tommy leaves to get dressed, but before the door has even closed behind him she hears a shout, “What the
fuck
?”

Mikayla jumps out of bed, moving toward the shouting. It isn’t Tommy’s voice, it sounded like Logan. She gets out into the hallway and finds Logan and Dash standing in the center of the carpet, staring at Tommy. Dash looks confused. Even more confused when he sees Mikayla emerge from her room still wearing her hotel robe while Logan looks furious.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Tommy?” he demands. There’s pink color on his cheeks, and one side of his hair is standing up so that it looks like a bird in mid-flight. Mikayla would have found it funny if his fists weren’t clenched as his eyes dart between Tommy and Mikayla, lingering for just a moment on Mikayla’s robe.

Tommy looks almost as confused as Dash. “What am I doing?” he inquires.

“Uh… Mik, apparently,” Dash says. He’s got his head cocked like a spaniel who had heard an unfamiliar sound.

“Who’s doing Mik?” Slate asks as he sticks his head out of the room behind Logan. He looks as good as he always does, but he’s frowning as he takes in the scene.

“Nobody is doing me!” It’s only when the hallway falls silent that she realizes she’d shouted, and that other guests could probably hear them. All eyes turn to her. She raises her hands in exasperation. “Tommy got high last night. He stayed with me to sleep it off.”

Slate and Dash both nod and smile as comprehension dawns on their faces. “He wanted you to play with his hair, didn’t he?” Slate asks.

Mikayla shrugs, glancing at Tommy and expecting him to be smiling sheepishly, as he usually did when his recreational drug use was discussed. Instead, he and Logan are glaring at each other. She is well aware of what Logan looks like when he’s angry, but seeing Tommy with his eyes narrowed and his lips thinned, is something entirely different. There’s a sense of overwhelming wrongness when she sees that look on his face.

“You think I’m stupid?” Tommy asks. His voice is low and dangerous, and it makes Slate and Dash share a look of concern. “You’d probably ship Mik to Abu Dhabi or something if I tried anything with her.”

“Do you
want
to?” asks Logan. His voice is also low and dangerous, but from Mikayla’s perspective, anyway, there seems to be an edge of hurt as well. He’s not looking at her, but she can feel his attention on her anyway.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no,” Tommy says.

“It
is
my business,” says Logan. “The rules—”

“I know the rules, Logan.”

“Good, because after last time—”

“
You…
don’t need to lecture
me…
about last time, Logan!”

Mikayla jumps. She never expected to hear Tommy raise his voice. Dash and Slate both watch grimly from the sidelines, all of their mirth is forgotten.

Logan and Tommy stare each other down for a moment. Perhaps it’s because she spends so much of her time watching him, but she imagines that she can see the concern in Logan’s gaze mixed in with the anger that still lingers. But he doesn’t seem to be backing down.

Tommy moves past Logan, pushes past Slate, and disappears into the room they share without another word. Slate’s lips are set in a grim line as he closes the door, leaving Mikayla, Dash and Logan standing in the hallway.

Dash is the first to speak. “Sorry about that, Mik. There was—”

“I know,” she says. Her eyes find Logan’s and she gives him a look which, she hopes, conveys how disappointed she is in him. “Tommy explained everything.”

Logan doesn’t look concerned about that. He just runs a hand through his hair and mutters, “Just as long as he didn’t try to make a move on you.”

“That’s a bit pot and kettle, don’t you think?” she asks.

Logan frowns. “That was different.”

“Yeah! You thought I was just some easy fuck who wandered into the green room. Tommy actually got to know me.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “You’re right, there really is no comparison.”

Logan opens his mouth to say something but, before he can form words, Dash is there and covering the other man’s mouth with his hand.

“Slow down, cowboy. If you say what I think you’re gonna say then you’re gonna get bitch-slapped, and I’m not brave enough to try and stop it.”

Logan transfers his glare to his younger brother, who stares him down. Finally, Logan pushes away and turns his back on the pair of them, heading to a room at the other end of the hall and slamming the door behind him.

Dash watches him go, shaking his head. “Drama,” he says ruefully, turning back to Mikayla. “Everything all right, Mik?” he asks.

“Of course,” she replies. She’s glad to hear how calm her voice sounds. Almost nonchalant, now that she thinks about it, which is good. “See you at breakfast?”

“Yeah, see you.”

She returns to her room, closes the door and leans against it for a moment, taking deep breaths. Her mind is blank for a moment as she tries to process what she just saw.

Tommy angry.

Slate grim.

Dash being the mature one.

Logan… jealous?

It all feels so wrong. Like the men in
Black Lilith
have taken on new personalities. She never thought that she’d see them argue—if what she just witnessed could be considered an argument. Among any other friendship group, it would be more of a spat or a difference of opinion, but with
Black Lilith
there was no mistaking it for what it was. It had been there from the first meeting she’d had with the band. An undercurrent of hostility which centers around Tommy and Logan, and Danielle, the woman Mikayla had replaced. She’d been aware of it on some level, but now that she’s seen it she’s not sure how she could have missed it.

Logan’s reaction to seeing Tommy leave her room would have made sense if she had only had Tommy’s story to go on. She will admit that Tommy leaving her room in the morning looking so disheveled could be considered suspicious.

But she also can’t help but wonder if there’s more to it than that. If Logan had reacted the way he did because he was jealous. He and Mikayla have—something—going on between them. And whatever it is, it’s enough to make her blood boil at the thought of Logan in the arms of a groupie. That’s why she’s always so grateful when she sees him leave gigs alone, and why she gets to enjoy their time in the pool most nights. If he feels the same way, then maybe his response to Tommy leaving her room has less to do with the band’s policy about dating PAs and more to do with Logan’s own feelings.

Mikayla pushes herself off of the door and heads for the bathroom. She can’t afford to let herself think like that.
She can’t.
She steps out of her robe and pajamas and turns on the shower, waiting for the water to get just this side of scolding before stepping in.

Under the hot water, she tries to forget what she saw and re-center herself. It is unprofessional, she decides, to let an argument between her clients get the better of her.

But then she wonders, hasn’t she already crossed the line into unprofessional? She stayed up late last night running her fingers through Tommy’s hair, she has become so close to the band that she gets jealous when she’s left out of interview rooms, and she’s constantly flirting with the lead singer. She’d rearranged their press interviews to give them free mornings, she’d avoided booking gigs every night because she knew that Slate and Logan liked to rest up. It wasn’t helping the tour, which was what
Bass Note
was more concerned about, and
they
were technically her employers.
Black Lilith
were really just her clients. How could she do her job well, when she was more concerned with the happiness of her clients than she was with the success of the tour? What part of that is professional?

She wishes, not for the first time, that her father was there. But he hadn’t been there for years. Not since she was thirteen and came home to her mother standing grimly in the kitchen. That should have been her first clue that something horrible had happened. It had been her father’s weekend. She shouldn’t have seen her mother until Monday morning.

“Mama?” she’d said cautiously as she’d entered the room.

“Mikayla, honey… sit down.”

But Mikayla hadn’t sat down. She’d wanted to know what was going on. So she’d received the news of her father’s fatal heart attack standing in the doorway, with one hand resting on the wall. It hadn’t been enough to hold her up. That was the first and last time that Mikayla had fainted.

After that, she went to live full-time with her mother, while her mom did everything in her power to climb the social ladder one rich husband at a time. The more Mikayla had watched her, the more she’d come to realize that her father had been right. That the only way to really be sure of yourself and your place in the world was to work hard and earn it. Skipping the hard work hadn’t made Mikayla’s mother happy, it had only made her rich. Which as far as she was concerned were two very different things.

What would her father say if he knew that she was becoming more and more unprofessional the longer she stayed with
Black Lilith
? Would he understand? Would he tell her to quit now and find a job where the lines between personal and professional aren’t so blurred? Would he be disappointed in her for not working harder to be an events manager, and for settling instead on a job that was beneath her skillset?

Mikayla runs her fingers through her hair, deciding on the spur of the moment to give it a wash. She squirts some of the hotel shampoo into her hands and lathers it through, paying attention to the roots and rinsing it quickly. Then, after a moment’s thought, she reaches for the conditioner. Just to make absolutely sure that she doesn’t smell like weed when she goes down for breakfast.