Resisting the Musician (a Head Over Heels Novel) (Entangled Indulgence) Read Online Free PDF Page B

there were those shoes. Not that Dash usually noticed such things, but these had been something else. Black, witchy, with heels like silver daggers. The things had made his balls shrink as the heels’d clacked sharply against his floor.
    That had nothing to do with the shoes , his subconscious shot back.
    His subconscious was dead right.
    For Lori Hanover, with her bluster, her self-righteousness and her va va voom, could have stepped right out of the ugly blur of his last days with the band and right into his very nightmares.
    “What was she selling?”
    Dash jerked back to the present. “Trouble.”
    “Ahh. Why do I get the feeling that you paid up?”
    Dash gave up sanding, instead gripping the sand paper wrapped around the sharp edges of the wood. His gaze kicked to the pale pink envelope uncurling inch by inch atop a pile of filthy rags. Inside it sat a secret, a song.
    The urge to hold his confidences close to his chest was a powerful one. His right to live a life unaffected by the whims of others was his bedrock. But this was Reg. He could trust the man with his life.
    Already had.
    He’d been wild there for a while. If not for Reg yanking him back, he’d be living a very different kind of life. If any at all.
    He turned an inch on the stool, searched for the words that would have felt impossible an hour before, and said, “What would you say to my writing again?”
    Reg’s eyes widened before a grin broke out across his face, adding creases to the creases. “Do you really have to ask?” Then he glanced out the door. “For her?”
    Dash nodded.
    Reg whistled long and low between his teeth, then shoved the entire contents of the paper bag from the local bakery toward Dash. “It’s a hell of a lot to take on just to get a date.”
    Dash laughed. “Lucky, then, that I have no intention of asking her on one.”
    “Why the hell not? Did she have an Adam’s apple I missed? I bat for the other side, but even I could tell she was lovely.”
    “Reg—”
    “What? It’s not a silly question.”
    “You know I can’t go there.”
    “Can’t is a long time,” said Reg, shifting on his chair and giving Dash his armchair-psychologist face. “Firstly, you can. At one time I remember the women used to go rather ape-shit for your rugged good looks and that you enjoyed it plenty. And secondly, it’s about time you should. It’s what we are put on this planet for.”
    “And yet, I remain unmoved.”
    It had taken Dash four arduous years to get to a point where it felt like the life he had was one he deserved. It was a life of quiet, of time, of simple pleasures.
    His hounding days were done.
    Thrown out with the career that had made those ways as easy as pie. Getting mixed up with a woman of Lori Hanover’s ilk? He might as well give it all away right now.
    Plowing on, he filled Reg in on the bare bones of the deal, knowing he could trust it wouldn’t go an inch further.
    “Do you even want to do this?” asked Reg.
    Hell no. “It’s for Jake. It felt…like I should.”
    “But if it wasn’t for Jake?”
    Even being for Jake, the idea of stepping just a toe into that world again made his stomach turn. But he owed the man much more than a song.
    As for Callie, she’d seemed a sweet kid, and Dash had no trouble believing the tabloids would be delighting in giving her a hard time. It was the nature of the game—attracting the kinds of people who loved you exactly as much as they hated you. Like human leeches, they stuck by you so long as they could get something out of you. And if you decided to stop playing the game…?
    Like it had been inevitable since the moment he’d seen her standing on his porch, in her thousand dollar dress, and two hundred dollar haircut, and those brutal shoes—the kind that could pierce a man’s sternum with a well-timed kick—Dash found himself dragged back into the eddying memories of a part of his life he’d long since thought left in his dust.
    For Lori Hanover was the