Love in Tune by Caitie Quinn

LOVE IN TUNE

    ONE

    THIS WAS NOT MY NIGHT. I'M not sure what night was my night, but this sure as anything wasn’t it.
    When I had signed on with Naked Prozac as their Tour Logistics Manager I imagined the glamorous life of living on the road. Have an adventure! Travel! See the country! Rock and roll, baby!
    Yeah. No, not so much.
    Somehow glamour and adventure turned into nightmare babysitting.
    Spoiler alert: Never take a job where the person you have to babysit is, bigger than you, crazier than free climber, and pays your salary.
    “Melissa, I’m for real.” The irate voice on the other end of the phone was pitched higher than my five-year-old nephew’s. “Have Dalton on the bus by three am, or you’re out the door. I don’t have time to worry about the little things along the way.”
      “Right, Lenny.” You conceited wad of ego. Misplacing the tour’s rock star is such a…little thing. “I’m on it.”
    He snorted on the other end of the line. “Get on it, but keep your hands off the talent. You know the rules. That is not the it I want you on.”
    “Right.” I fought back a sigh. There had never been a moment I’d been drawn to His Majesty—I mean, Dalton. To my daily mortification there was a body of hotness with a stronger gravitational pull than his. “Because I’ve been throwing myself at him since I came on board.” I hit the call end button.  
    I was usually a sweet, patient girl. My last boyfriend broke up with me because I was too nice. I’m pretty sure after the day I’ve had, that wouldn’t be a problem. My last nerve was fried and my body was dive bombing off the caffeine and post-show adrenaline buzz.  
    Between Lenny and His Majesty, I’d been dealing with so much testosterone it wasn’t even funny.  
    I wove through the backlot chaos to the lead bus hoping against hope that my lost lamb had taken a six-pack and a groupie and gone looking for some privacy. But, when I pounded on the door, the driver-slash-bodyguard-slash-runner opened it right away.
    “He’s not in there, is he Buck?” I wouldn’t put it past His Majesty to have Buck lie to me. “Because I wouldn’t have to bother him. I could just let him be and we could move onto the next town with him happily doing whatever it is he’s doing in the back there. All quiet like. Right?”
    “No, ma’am. He’s really not here. He came on, grabbed a guitar, and headed back out.”  
    “Without you?”
    “Yup, dude headed over to the bench over there. Went and started strumming away. Then a little Toyota pulled up and they sped off.”
    The look on my face probably said, Have you lost your ever-loving mind? Because, let’s just get this straight, the most high maintenance rock star on the planet, the one who never went anywhere without someone to wait on him, just took off in the middle of the night with a guitar, no one to pay for anything because God forbid the man might know how to carry his own credit card, and he got in of all things… A Toyota?
    “Buck. How stupid do I look?”  
    Buck was smart enough to not answer that.
    I glanced down at my phone, scrolling through my Google alerts, twitter hashtags, and anything else that might tell me where he’d gone. The entire world was my Rock Star Tracking Device…but tonight was oddly quiet.
    “Did you see the driver? Was it someone he’d just take off alone with?”
    I turned to study the street. I had no idea how a car could have gotten through security without a pass. Which meant he was either musician-napped by pros or he’d arranged this ahead of time.
    I missed something.
    “He wasn’t by himself.”
    “What?” I spun back to Buck, hoping to hear some good news.
    “He wasn’t alone, Mel.” He looked over my head as if he didn’t want to tell me the rest. “He was with Kyle.”
    Well, hell.

TWO

    KYLE MacLEAN
    Kyle was the bane of my existence. The man knew just how to play the game. Anything His Majesty Dalton wanted to do, Kyle was up for.