“You wish,” she said, digging up a smile. “If I ever throw my panties onstage, it won’t be for some pretty guitar player.”
“Oh, ouch.” Laughing as the crowd started to chant for Schoolboy Choir, he blew her a kiss and, slipping his guitar over his head and across his body, ran on with Fox. David and Abe ran up from the other side at the same time, and the crowd went crazy.
Genevieve slipped on more quietly after saying a quick hello to Kit and Molly.
Cupping the mike with both hands in that way he had of doing, Fox said, “You guys ready to party!” while Noah plugged in his own guitar, as was his habit.
A thunderous roar of sound was the crowd’s reply.
The band responded by launching into a hard rock anthem that had the attendees throwing up their hands and jumping up and down. Heading down the steps and around to the special section in front of the stage to join Molly and Thea, Butch, Casey, and the other security personnel making sure they were safe, Kit allowed herself to get caught up in the music, allowed herself to watch Noah.
For the first time since they’d met, she didn’t have to hide anything.
So she watched him move, listened to him play, and felt her heart thunder as loud as the crowd. “This is amazing!” she said to Molly and Thea.
“I’ve done the festival before, but never like this!” Thea took a few photos with her phone as she spoke, tweeted them. “I’m tagging you,” she said to Kit. “Retweet.”
“Always working.” Laughing, Molly pretended to confiscate Thea’s phone while Kit obeyed the retweet order, then took photos of her own to share.
Thea bared her teeth at Molly’s efforts. “I want everyone to know how my gorgeous man is rocking the festival already.”
“Hey.” Molly elbowed her sister. “That’s our men.”
When the other woman took out her own phone, Kit laughed. Molly had a single social media account that she rarely used, but today she sent out a photo of Fox making love to the mike, captioning it: My guy owning the stage at Zenith. #love
Simple. Perfect. So much what Kit wanted to write, but those words would haunt her when this illusion ended; she couldn’t put her heart out there for the universe to mock. So on the photograph she sent out into the world of a wildly talented man with storm-gray eyes, she just wrote: Noah rocking #Zenith!!!!!!
Chapter 21
They’d kicked off the festival with a fucking boom, Noah thought as he came backstage after the final set. Not thinking about his actions, he hauled Kit close and pressed the side of his face to hers. “I’m starving.”
She laughed. “You’re also sweaty.”
Her hands landed on his bare skin, his T-shirt now the property of whoever it was who’d caught it when he’d thrown it out into the crowd. The intimate contact burned, sending a shock of sexual need through his body.
He pulled back with a jerk that had Kit’s eyes going wide before she blinded him with a Kathleen Devigny smile. “The cameras are still on,” she said without ever losing that smile. “Take my hand if you can’t stand for me to touch anything else.”
She could’ve kicked him and done less damage. Grabbing her hand, he squeezed. “It’s not what you think.”
Her smile remained high-voltage, but her eyes, they were hard and hurt at the same time. “You’ve been very clear, Noah. Don’t worry, I’m not getting the wrong idea. I know you don’t want me.”
He almost laughed because wanting Kit was so much a part of him, there was no Noah without it. But his laughter twisted inside him. Holding Kit’s hand tight, he said, “We’re all having pizza together. I just need to quickly shower off the sweat.”
Kit nodded and they walked to the bus. Soon as he pulled the door shut behind them, she released his hand—or tried to.
He held on. “Don’t.”