“This is all new to me,” he says. “This business is new, and this relationship is new. Both of which are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. But I’m going to trust in this. I’m going to trust that it’s all going to work out for both of us.”
I let my head fall forward so it bumps into his chest, and I heave out a sorrowful sigh. “I’m so sorry. I handled this badly tonight.”
“I kind of liked the jealousy though,” Evan teases me.
“Liar,” I tease back and look back up at him. “But I promise… I’ll try to be better at handling that.”
He grins at me. “I’m sure you will. Now can we have makeup sex?”
“Absolutely,” I say with a laugh, and then step into him for full-body hug. “It’s the only reason I left in the first place. For the makeup sex.”
Evan gives a grunt of disbelief and picks me up. He turns and tosses me onto the bed on the other side of my suitcase, then starts to crawl his way over it toward me. “If you ever leave again without telling me, I’m going to tie you up and redden your backside.”
A warm thrill of pleasure goes through me at the thought of that, and whoa… I’ve never thought of being spanked as being sexy before.
Perhaps I need to be a little more disobedient in the future.
CHAPTER 19
Evan
I open my eyes, lift my head from the couch, and look past the sleeping black dog at my feet.
Yup… Emma’s still at her desk, face leaning toward the laptop, and intently reading something.
With an internal sigh, I close my eyes again and try to take a nap. I’ve found that a quick twenty to thirty minutes of sleep the afternoon of a show does wonders for my energy to keep me going. And while I’ve not found the couch on the bus to be any more comfortable than before, and would probably be able to fall asleep if I just went back to the bedroom, I don’t want to miss an opportunity if Emma decides to take a break from work.
If that is the case, then well… there is any number of things we could do. Go for a walk. Drink a cup of coffee and talk. Or my preference… I could take her back in the bedroom and fuck us both to an amazing orgasm.
But I’ll take anything really.
After the last show tonight in L.A., we’ll be moving on to San Francisco, then off to Portland, then Denver, followed by Chicago. While I’m enjoying this concert tour immensely, I’m really missing Raleigh and a somewhat normal life. A life where perhaps Emma and I can go on more dates. Where I can work on my music during the day while she pours over contracts or some shit like that. At night, we could cook dinner together, hang out, and watch TV, and well… of course, we’d fuck before going to sleep.
In the morning, I’d cook her pancakes before work and send her dirty texts during the day so she didn’t get too buttoned up on me.
Fuck, I want those things a lot, and I didn’t realize just how much that lifestyle would appeal to me until Emma came into my life. I can even see past that to perhaps marriage and children. Yeah… I can see a lifetime with her for sure.
But for now, I’ll settle for a bit of her time this afternoon, because I find myself spending every moment together with her as an opportunity to reassure her doubtful sensibilities. Emma trusts me, but I need her to trust herself and what we have. So I need to continue to make sure she sees what we have is the real deal.
“Evan,” Emma says with excitement, and my eyes pop open to look at her as my head rises up again.
She swivels the chair to face me and points back at her laptop. “We’ve got an offer to settle.”
“The copyright case?” I ask as I push up to a sitting position, slightly dislodging Sirius from my feet. The pup opens his sleepy eyes, yawns, and then lays his head back down on his paws.
“Yes,” she says as she throws a thumb over her shoulder at the laptop. “The senior attorney just emailed me. He’d received all of my discovery requests I mailed last week and said that before he spent time and his client’s monies answering them, he wanted to make some effort at settling.”
“Did he say how much?”
She nods at me. “One hundred thousand.”
“For each band member?” I ask to clarify.
She shakes her head. “Total. For all of them.”
“Holy shit,” I say in amazement. “You must have scared them shitless with those questions you sent.”
She grins at me, her cheeks flushed with excitement. For while a hundred thousand dollars seems like a lot of money, it’s really not. Not compared to the millions I’ve made off the songs in dispute. And Emma and I have spent a lot of time talking about what I wanted to accomplish with this lawsuit, and first and foremost was my integrity and that of my music. I was never going to admit that they held the copyright with me to the creation of the music.
But it didn’t mean I wasn’t willing to offer some money to make them go away, with a confidentiality requirement demanding the suit be dismissed with absolutely no discussion as to the terms of the settlement or if there even was a settlement.
“What about the confidentiality clause?” I ask.