Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 98823 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98823 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
“Your mom isn’t wrong,” Duncan said coolly.
“Stay, and you can meet her.” I waggled my eyebrows at him. I’d get him to forget about earlier one way or another. “Stay, and I’ll do a better job of listening.”
I threw that last offer in as an olive branch, but he only deepened his frown.
“I don’t think you get it.” Duncan’s gaze was sharp enough to pierce my soul. “I’ve worked with guys like you before. Young cocky-asses who think rules don’t apply and they’re made of rubber. And I’ve heard them say next time they’ll listen. And when they don’t, when they wind up injured or worse, that’s on me because I was the one in charge, and I believed them. I’ve failed to keep my personnel safe before, Ezra, and I won’t do it here.”
The pain in his voice was unmistakable. It was easy to dismiss his military service as a sort of super-intense boot camp that gave him great muscles and a stern voice. But it was more than that. He’d had real human lives on the line before. And he’d had times where not everyone on his team had made it back, and those losses had changed him. He’d blamed himself, that much was clear, and he’d do the same if something happened to me. Because when he agreed to guard someone, that put them on his team, and he took each failure personally.
I had to swallow a few times before I could speak. “I’m sorry. Like really sorry. I didn’t think…and I know that’s the whole problem right there, but I don’t want you beating yourself up for my mistakes. I’m making it hard for you to do your job.”
“Yup.” His expression remained tight.
“I get it now. We’re supposed to be on the same team, and I keep getting in your way instead of working with you.”
“You do seem to have a talent for that.” He exhaled hard, tone less frustrated and more resigned.
“I wasn’t really thinking about you,” I admitted. He’d given me something of himself. Perhaps I owed him some of my own truth. “I was only focused on how much I hate this music label, not on how that might make things difficult for you.”
“The same label that made you a gazillionaire and a household name?” Duncan sounded as skeptical as most people who didn’t know the full story. On the surface, I was supposed to be grateful, not bitter.
“I know, I know.” I gestured with my fork. “I was just the kid with the great voice on Geek Chorus, and I wasn’t even the star of the show. No one expected me to become the most famous Chorus kid, and when others would have put me on the has-been circuit, the label gave me a record deal and a chance. And a prison.”
“Are they really that bad to deal with?” Duncan’s voice was surprisingly gentle after my rant.
“In a word? Yes. Ten years ago, I was lucky to get a second chance at stardom at seventeen, a washed-up child star who was only getting B- list reality show offers. So I took the deal because I believed in us, believed in me and Carl and Dirk and the rest of the band. I believed in our music and was happy to get a big label deal.”
“What changed?” Abandoning his ear of corn, Duncan peered more closely at me.
“At first, I was happy to go along with their rules about what to wear or who to be seen with. But then the rumors started up about me being queer. Which I am, and I wasn’t interested in hiding, but the label spent years trying to push me into the closet in the name of making us into superstars.”
“I didn’t think that sort of thing happened in today’s music industry.”
“Ha.” Someone with his pedigree should have known things in the industry weren’t always as they appeared on TV, and I snorted. “Oh, they’re all rainbow lip service—” I gestured at the set piece next to Duncan because that was the industry in a nutshell, all showy glitter and paper-thin convictions. “They know the right things to say, but they didn’t want to jeopardize radio airplay or concert sales by having a front man openly dating dudes sometimes. We had the pulse of teens all over the world. And they kept pushing fake relationships on me, planting rumors that I was dating this movie star or that model, threatening to pull support for the group as a whole if I came out.”
“Meanwhile, you were becoming a mega-hit for them, right?”
“Exactly. Hit after hit until I knew they couldn’t quietly drop us like they’d threatened to do early on. I was tired of being the worst kept secret in rock and roll. So a few years ago, I did the one thing they couldn’t argue with. I came out at a music awards show.”