He’d known kissing her, touching her, would be good—but he’d never known hunger like this before. Never known pleasure so raw. So all-encompassing.
And while they’d been kissing, he’d forgotten everything but how good she felt, smelled, tasted. Right and wrong had been lost to him as he’d completely lost sight of his promise to her father to keep her safe. But then, when something had startled her and she’d pulled back to tell him how shocked she was at how deep their attraction really went, Drew’s promise to her father had slammed back down on him like a two-by-four crashing into his chest.
Of all the women in the world, she was the one he couldn’t have. So he’d forced himself to stop them from taking the next step. From stripping each other’s clothes off and making love on the deserted beach. Even though there was nothing—not one single thing—he’d wanted more than that.
God, he’d hated seeing the hurt in her eyes, and hadn’t wanted to let her think for one second that he was keeping his distance because she wasn’t beautiful or desirable. She was. So beautiful, so desirable that being close to her in his bus all night as they’d driven to Phoenix, and then all day as she shadowed his interviews, had been hell. Pure, unadulterated hell.
But even worse than knowing he could never kiss Ashley again or hear her incredibly seductive sighs of pleasure as his mouth roamed down over her skin, was the fact that since that moment when she’d told him just to forget it, she’d shut down on him. She was still friendly. And he could see that she still loved his music. But the closeness that they’d been building—the friendship he’d quickly come to count on—had come to a stop.
While they’d waited for Max in the parking lot, her body language had spoken volumes about how she felt—with her shoulders and face turned as far away from him. And when Max had come to pick them up from the beach in the bus, she’d immediately gone into her bunk and closed the curtain to block him out. Drew had wanted to say something, anything, to make things better. To go back to the way they’d been before he completely screwed things up by trying to do the right thing. But he’d been afraid of making things worse, and had told himself that, hopefully, by the following morning things would be better and they could at least go back to being friends again.
But when morning came in Phoenix, though Ashley had still made breakfast for both of them, by the time he’d thrown on clothes to come out and eat with her, the curtain on her bunk was drawn and he’d heard the clicking of her fingertips on her computer keyboard. She hadn’t come out until James boarded to grab them for interviews.
James obviously immediately noticed something was off between the two of them, but Drew wasn’t going to kiss and tell, and he definitely didn’t want James to say anything to Ashley that would make her any more uncomfortable than she already was.
Now he was finally with her again at a TV station in Phoenix. She looked beautiful, but pale, as if she hadn’t slept much better than he had. Which was to say, barely at all.
All day long he’d been trying to figure out what to say to her when they were finally together again. I’m sorry wasn’t right. I wish I’d never made your father that promise wouldn’t work either.
Drew had never second-guessed himself like this before. On the contrary, his decisions, his path forward, had always been obvious to him. But now, not only was his music tying him up in knots, but so were his feelings for Ashley.
The station was in a historic four-story building downtown. He’d toured through here before and when he saw the interest in Ashley’s eyes as they got out of the town car, Drew said, “I heard that the building was built as a love letter from a poor man who had nothing more to his name than his hammer to the wealthy magnate’s daughter who was off-limits to him.” At this point, he would take any excuse to get Ashley to talk to him again, even if it was just about some building in Phoenix.
For a moment she seemed to forget to keep her distance. “What happened to them? Did they fall in love?” In the moment their eyes met, heat sizzled between them just as much as it had on the beach.
“The night before she was to marry the wealthy fiancé that her father had chosen for her, but that she didn’t love, she went to tell the builder she would run away with him. But when she got there, she found him lying on the floor, unconscious from a piece of cement that had hit him on the head.”
Too late, Drew realized that he should have kept the sad story of star-crossed lovers to himself, because instead of opening up more, she said, “That’s really sad. Sometimes I guess people really aren’t meant to be together.”