“Rockstars?” He cocked his head, lips twitching, and pointed. “That one’s ours.”
She rolled into the last bunk on the bottom driver’s side and stretched out. A few inches remained above her head and below her feet, but a tall guy like Jay would have to bend. “How the hell are we going to share this?”
He crossed his arms. “How the hell would we not?”
Their bus would sleep the four performers, Tony, Nathan, the tour manager, and her. Eight bunks, eight bodies. There were enough beds, but he didn’t want to sleep without her. Damned if that didn’t make her insides melt into warm squishiness.
She leaned out of the bunk. The aisle ended with a door. “Who gets the bedroom?”
“We don’t rent the coaches with a bedroom suite. We’d just fight over it.” He squatted to her level. “There’s a second lounge back there. Gives us another place to hang out or get away so we’re not all stuck up front.” He climbed in the bunk and lay atop her, his thighs, hips, and chest flattening her into the memory foam, his mouth hovering a kiss away. “The spare bunk will be our junk bunk. Trust me, every bus needs one.”
The weight of him combined with her accelerating heartbeat made her breath ragged and noisy. She wanted to dig her fingers into his tight ass and hold him against her. She gripped the sheets instead.
His regret over leaving her on his veranda that night had darkened his temperament for days. She wasn’t sure if his brooding was the catalyst, but his trigger had become more sensitive. After several breakdowns in the warehouse from the casual brush of her fingers, she was hesitant to touch him at all.
“Is this how we’ll sleep then?” She looked up to catch him watching her. “If so, you might have to massage the blood back into my limbs in the morning.”
His laughter wrapped around her as he shifted them. A few bumps into the wood paneled wall and he had them positioned on their sides with his hips cupping her ass. “How’s this?”
Heaven. “Pull the curtain and wake me when we get there.”
His hand slid up her thigh and patted her butt. “I want to show you a couple things before everyone piles in.” He crawled over her and pulled her by her hand into the aisle. Reaching under the frame of the bed, he turned a crank she hadn’t noticed. A couple rotations raised the closest edge of the mattress and angled it toward the cubby’s roof.
Oh, wow. Extra storage space. Daylight streamed from the compartment below. He gripped the wood frame and hopped in the hole. “I had this modified hatch added so we could access the storage area from inside or outside.” He ducked, closing the exterior door on the concrete landscape beyond.
“I thought you rented this bus?”
Standing, he rested his forearms on the top edge of the compartment. “True. After what happened at the estate, I called the bus owner and sold him on the benefits of emergency exits and flashed the almighty green dollar.”
“Pimp My Ride, rock star style.”
He grinned.
Did his need for an escape hatch have anything to do with his burns? “What’s the real reason you need a secret hide away?”
He reached behind him and removed a handgun from his waistband. “Gun laws for civilians vary by state. Some states require the piece to be separate from the ammo and stored under the bus. I don’t want any trouble with the law, and I don’t want the gun out of reach.” He twisted, bending, and tucked the gun in a pocket on the compartment wall.
“I had a Bodyguard 380.” Used it to kill a Craig. Bile hit the back of her throat. “But Nathan confiscated it.” The bastard.
He jumped out. “You know where mine is if you need it, but don’t shoot at the door or windows. I had everything replaced with bulletproof glass.” He rotated the crank, returning the mattress to its seated position. “Sit down. I want to show you one more thing.”
She lay down on the bunk, and he knelt in the aisle beside her. Lifting a folder from the pocket on the wall at her feet, he opened it on her tummy and raised it so she could see the first page.
Her eyebrows clenched as she skimmed the headers.
Oxycontin. Recreational Uses. Side effects. Street names. Pictures.
She flipped the pages to the next tabbed section. Heroin. Same list of headers. Next tab. Cocaine. Same headers. A numbness settled around her heart, and she wasn’t sure if it was relief or worry.
He lifted her chin and rubbed his thumb over the skin around her mouth. “I can’t ask you to trust me. I have a long ways to go to earn that back, but I hope having this information will take some of the constant out of constantly wondering. If you know what to look for, I won’t be able to hide any of these…addictions from you.”