“So you’re not disappointed?”

“Disappointed? How could I possibly be disappointed?”

He leaned in close, lost in Melanie’s eyes. When his lips brushed hers, a familiar longing stirred deep inside him. He rubbed his lips over hers once, twice, and then angled his head to take the kiss deeper. Melanie opened her mouth to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Her fingers brushed the row of spiked hair down the center of his head, and she froze. He tugged back to look at her and found her eyebrows drawn together.

“I’m still not used to this,” she said, pressing a hand down on his spiked mohawk and watching it spring back up.

“You don’t like it?” he asked, hoping it didn’t become an issue for her, because it was a trademark of his stage persona, and he was currently on tour. When he wasn’t on tour, he let the sides grow and cut off some of the length so he looked halfway tame, but he’d never gone to what most people would consider a normal haircut when he was out on the road. He knew the dragon tattoos on either side of his scalp didn’t tame his look any, but those would be there for the rest of his life. If she was going to dump him for his appearance, she should probably do it soon.

“I like it,” she said. “I’m just not sure what to cling to when you kiss me. Last time you didn’t have it spiked like this, so I had some soft hair to hold on to.”

Oh, was that all?

“I’ll wash it after the show,” he said. “You can run your fingers through it then.”

“I didn’t mean for you to stop kissing me,” she said. “I’ll just cling to your shoulders for now so I don’t prick my fingers.”

He chuckled at her expression. She looked as if she had solved some mystery.

“I shouldn’t do that,” she said.

“You can cling to my shoulders as much as you want,” he assured her.

“I mean I shouldn’t analyze everything. The night we met, I was thrown off guard. I tossed caution to the wind, but now that I’m here with you and you’re more familiar, I feel sort of…”

“Uptight.”

She flushed. “Yeah. Exactly.”

“I have just the thing to loosen you up,” he said.

He reached behind his hip and pulled the slim package free from where it had been lodged against the seat.

He held it out to her.

“What’s this?” she asked, glancing from the paper-wrapped package to his face and then back to the package again.

“A prototype.”

Her flush intensified. “Oh,” she gasped. “One of your kinky inventions?”

She looked up at him again, and he nodded, a bit nervous about sharing it with her but mostly excited to try it out.

“Is it new?”

“I’ve been working on this one for a while,” he said, “but I do have another project I started on the day we parted in Tulsa. I hope to reveal that later if I can get the kinks out.”

“I thought the whole point was to work kinks in,” she said.

It took him a second to realize she was joking. He chuckled. “I guess kinks in sex toys are pretty much a given.”

She ran her fingers over the piece of tape holding the package closed. “Am I supposed to open this here?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Well, if you’re prepared to loosen up.”

“I might be,” she said. “Kiss me again while I think it over.”

She needed to be seduced, he realized. He’d expected them to be past that with all the things they’d showed each other through video chat, but he supposed every woman liked to feel as if a man had to work a little to gain her cooperation and attention. Even women who’d been with the same man for a lot longer than a week needed to feel a little hard to get. So perhaps he should have saved his present until after he had her in that disoriented, I-need-your-body-now state. She was always so eager to be open with him on the phone but here in his arms, she seemed almost shy. She turned her head to study the dark glass that separated them from the driver and Nikki. Was that what had her hesitating? Because Nikki was just up front? Perhaps if Nikki had been the sweet, innocent type, Gabe would have understood Melanie’s hesitation to engage in lascivious acts in her proximity, but he didn’t get that impression about Nikki at all. Heck, of the pair, Melanie was the sweet innocent. Maybe she didn’t want Nikki to know she was a whole lot naughtier than she appeared.

“So why did she decide to come with you?” he asked.

“Huh?” Melanie said, turning her attention back to him.

“Nikki.”

“Oh, she wants to hook up with Shade again. Or at least talk to him about why he didn’t call her this week.”

Gabe grunted. “Uh, bad idea. Shade is with someone special now. He’s not going to be interested in Nikki. He’ll undoubtedly hurt her feelings to get his point across.”

“I tried to tell her that. Hell if she’ll listen to me.”

“Maybe I should drop you and Nikki off at the hotel. You can find her a room,” he said, pausing to make sure it was clear that Nikki would not be following them to Austin. Best friend in tow or not, Melanie was his this weekend. He wasn’t going to bow to the impulses of one of Shade’s past lays. “I can meet up with you—just you—after the show and we’ll head to Austin. Our chartered flight leaves at midnight, so we won’t have time to deal with Nikki after the show.”

“You don’t want me at the concert?” she asked, and he couldn’t tell if she was pissed or hurt or just asking a question.

“I do want you there. I want you to be the last person I see before I climb behind my drum kit and the first one I see when I stumble out sweaty and exhausted an hour later. But it’s a bad idea for Nikki to be there. I don’t mean to be rude, but she wasn’t invited, and I doubt that Shade led her to believe she could hope for some sort of relationship with him.”

“I know that, Gabe,” she said, “but what would you have me do? Desert her at the airport? She needs me to look out for her or she winds up in trouble. She’s one of those people who don’t even have to go looking for disaster, it finds her. It always finds her.”

She placed a hand on his thigh to steady herself as the limo turned a corner and accelerated up an incline. The car stopped and the glass behind the driver slid down.

Nikki turned around in her seat and stared at them. Gabe shoved the package containing his little invention behind his hip again.