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“Cash for good behavior,” he said.

She nodded. “Enough to let me stop touring and write full-time, at least for a year or two.”

He hated the idea that she’d only come back for the money. Some stupid, hopeful part of him had thought she’d come back because of him—for him.

And yet… she’d worn the earrings.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” he said.

She chuckled in disbelief. “Could have fooled me.”

“You’re not the only one who got hurt, Luna,” he said, hating the way his throat thickened around the words. “You left me.”

Her eyes went wide, green and sparkling in the moonlight. “Is that how you remember it?” she whispered, blinking as her irises turned glassy. With a small shake of her head, she marched past him towards the entrance to the restaurant.

Just before the door closed behind her, he murmured, “I remember everything.”

Chapter Three

Beckett situated himself on the king-sized hotel bed—one pillow behind his back, another under his knee, the bag of ice room service had delivered carefully balanced on the swollen, scarred joint. His sweatpants provided poor insulation against the cold, but he relished the frozen sting on his overheated skin. Tomorrow they’d be back on the tour bus, driving through the night to their next destination, but tonight he was going to enjoy the shit out of having a room to himself. No snoring Zach in the bunk beneath him, no distracting tour manager in the private room at the back of the bus.

His worn paperback copy of Restless Hearts sat on his bedside table, colored pens and his glasses neatly stacked on top. He shouldn’t read it again. He should watch a movie, play some stupid match-three game on his phone—anything other than re-read that particular book.

He’d read it at least ten times since it was released.

After Kat and Midnight Storm had parted ways all those years ago, she’d gone on to work for other bands, running tours for the label as if she hadn’t once been Storm’s right-hand girl. But he knew she’d done more than that. She’d also become a romance novelist, penning love stories backstage and between shows. Her first book released just before everything had gone to shit—for the band and for his relationship with Kat. By the time she’d agreed to join Midnight Storm for their comeback tour a decade later, she had at least twenty novels to her name. And he’d read every one. Multiple times. But none so many times as Restless Hearts.

He adjusted the ice on his knee and glared at the worn paperback, the edges of the cover soft from repeated handling. The tattooed cover model stared back at him.

“Fuck,” he muttered, reaching over to swipe the book and his trio of colored pens from the bedside table. He slid on the thick black frames his stylist had gone crazy over. Frames a little too similar to the ones the hero in Reckless Heart wore when the heroine found him reading in bed after their first night together.

The book fell open to the chapter he couldn’t make himself stop rereading. The margins were covered in his angular handwriting, the most heartbreaking sentences underlined. Each annotation a confession.

He flipped the pages until he found the passage he was looking for, the one that had echoed in his head the moment he’d crawled out from under the stage earlier that night and caught sight of Kat standing in the wings, a familiar pair of pearl and diamond stud earrings winking in the light. There, on page 295, the hero watched helplessly from the rumpled bedsheets of a hotel bed—not dissimilar to the one Beckett lay on at that very moment—as the heroine tore a similar pair of earrings from her lobes and slammed them down on the dresser.

Beckett pulled off the cap of the purple pen with his teeth and circled the description of the delicate studs. I knew you kept them, he wrote in the margin, squeezing the words between the other notes he’d already left her. Why did it take three months and fourteen days for you to wear them on this tour? Did something change to make you wear them again? Or did you think I wouldn’t notice? I always notice you, love, especially when you’re wearing jewelry I gave you.

On the bed next to him, his phone lit up with an incoming text message—an incomprehensible string of letters and emojis from Jackson. Beckett glanced at the clock on the bedside table. One o’clock in the morning. Typical. He’d finish icing his knee and then he’d go down the hall to his brother’s room to make sure he took a couple Advil and chugged a Gatorade before going to bed.

He flipped to the next page of the book, his eyes skipping over the heroine’s explanation of why she had to leave. He didn’t need to read it again. He knew it by heart. Someday he knew he’d be able to read that scene without the burning, tearing sensation of scar tissue that refused to soften, the stubborn knot of it inflexible beneath his skin. He saw their final moments in each one of the on-page break-ups Kat had written, his inability to let her in repeating itself over and over, his own personal purgatory.

But unlike their story, each of her fictional couples found their way back, more cautious, perhaps, but no less in love. When Kat had agreed to join the tour, there was a moment he thought they might also find their happy ending.

But that was three months and fourteen days ago.

Only one month left, and if he’d learned anything from her books, one month hardly seemed like enough time to set right a decade of hurt. Not that he’d even know where to begin.

But she had kept the earrings. She’d worn them knowing he’d see them. That had to count for something.

Another text, this time a single question mark.

Beckett sighed and set the book down as he called his brother. Jackson answered on the fourth ring, a wall of sound assaulting Beckett through the phone.

He sat upright in bed, the sudden movement engulfing his knee in flames. Hissing against the flash of pain, he clamped his eyes shut. “Where are you?”

“I fucked up, Becks,” his twin slurred. “Fucking paparazzi everywhere.”

Ice water flooded Beckett’s veins. “Where are you?”