Chapter 1

Nolan

The arena locker room crackled with unspent energy. I grabbed my guitar and strummed a few random chords, experimenting more than anything.

But it wasn’t enough.

I’d been edgy for the past hour. Normally it wasn’t like this before our band, Pushing Limits, took the stage. Usually I could clear my head of everything that didn’t belong there before the show began. Then all that mattered was the music and the fans.

I closed my eyes and pretended the stale air didn’t smell like hockey players fresh off the ice after an intensive workout. Instead, the room reminded me of sugar cookies. A room from my distant past.

The random chords transformed into the melody I’d been playing around with for the last two days, after I’d managed to sneak off somewhere quiet.

“Dude, that’s really good.” Mason drummed along, tapping the beat on his knees.

I stopped playing and cracked open my eyelids, the moment over.

The tattooed drummer draped his arms around the shoulders of the two groupies cuddled up to him. “Hey, why’d you stop?”

“He’s right,” Jared said, eyes gleaming like those of a pirate who’d just discovered buried treasure. “You’ve been holding back on me.”

I returned the guitar to its case and propped it next to me on the wooden bench running along the wall. “Sorry, that’s all I’ve got so far.” Which was a huge amount compared to what I’d written over the past few months. Touring wasn’t exactly productive for songwriting.

My phone buzzed in my rear jeans pocket. I removed it and checked who’d texted me. Brandon, my best friend from back home.

Call me! It’s important.

I ignored the text and shoved the phone back into my pocket. I’d deal with it later, after the show.

Resting my head against the cold concrete wall, I closed my eyes again. Exhaustion sat on the bench beside me, ready to crash the party as the five of us prepared to go onstage. And it wasn’t just hanging around me. I’d seen it on the guys’ faces for the past few weeks. The next stop on this touring train? An extra-long break with a side order of sleep.

Giggles broke out across from me. I peered through half-closed eyes at Mason and his friends. The blond groupie sitting next to him pushed herself off the stained orange couch and walked over to me, her gaze ripping the plain black T-shirt and jeans off my body.

Not that I was much better.

Her tight Pushing Limits T-shirt, which she’d cut into a tank top, revealed cleavage a guy could easily get lost in. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mason had already tried.

“Hi, Tyler. I’m Rachel.” She sat next to me and rested her hand on my stomach, just above the waistband of my jeans. My muscles instinctively tightened for a second, then relaxed.

I cocked my head to the side and gave her the lazy grin Mas had dubbed my panty-dropping smile. Hey, whatever worked. “Hi, Rachel. Ready for the show?”

“I’d say,” she practically purred. “You’re my favorite singer. And guitarist.”

I leaned in and murmured against her ear, “Well, thank you.”

She sucked in a sharp breath, her fingers curling into my stomach muscles, taut from years of pushing myself to the limit when I worked out. “Wow, you’re fit. And hard.” The last word came out as a seductive exhale.

Chuckling, I stood. Unlike Mason, I never fucked just before a show. The moment I hit the stage, I was raw energy. Fucking before that would only dull the edge.

I glanced around the room. Mason was busy with the brunette now on his lap. Jared and Aaron were talking to a roadie, Jared flipping a guitar pick between his fingers and across the back of his hand, like he always did just before a show. Kirk was chatting with another groupie who had sweet-talked her way backstage. All the guys were preoccupied, none paying attention to me.

“Maybe I’ll see you after the show,” I told the blonde. I grabbed my black sports bag from the floor next to my feet and walked to the far end of the bench. Fortunately, she didn’t follow me. She returned to the couch, smiling to herself.

I unzipped the bag and removed the laminated photo. The picture was slightly battered between the two plastic sheets, the result of me not having had the foresight to laminate it sooner. Along with my acoustic guitar, which I used for a few songs during the show, I always brought Hailey’s picture with me onstage.

A lifeline.

The one nobody knew about.

In it, we were sitting on my bed, both of us seventeen years old. Hailey was holding my guitar on her lap, trying to play it. I was straddling her from behind, repositioning her fingers on the D chord for the tenth time. Hailey was laughing because no matter what she did, the chord always fell flat. That’s when my mom had snuck into my room and snapped the photo.

It was the only one I had of Hailey. It was one of the few possessions I’d taken when I escaped my hometown six years ago. Hailey’s picture was the only thing that had kept me going all these years.

The dressing room door opened and a roadie entered. He scanned the occupants until his gaze narrowed in on me. “Mr. Remar wants to talk to you.”

“Now’s not a good time,” I told him, slipping the photo into my back jeans pocket.

He shrugged, not having a response, because ultimately it didn’t matter if this was a good time or not. If the president of the record label wanted to talk to me, I’d better move my ass and be there five minutes ago. Both the roadie and I knew that.

The guys all made a move for the door. The roadie put his hand up like he was directing traffic. “He only wants to speak with Tyler,” he said, referring to me.

I shook my head. “If it has to do with the band, then he needs to talk to all of us.”

“You already planning your solo album?” Mason said, laughing.

Jared raised an eyebrow, either echoing Mason’s question or silently asking me what this was about. Hell if I knew. Yes, I was the lead singer for Pushing Limits, but the band belonged to both Jared and me. Not only had we created the band five years ago, we’d cowritten half the songs on our debut album. The rest I’d written on my own.

The roadie’s sigh was the long impatient sound of someone with a million things to do in the next five minutes. He didn’t care either way what we did. He was only the messenger. He’d let Remar chew us out for ignoring the request if that was what we chose to do.

“Can you bring my guitar if I’m not back in time?” I asked Jared, the member of the band least likely to forget my request.

He nodded. Then one corner of his mouth quirked up. “Good luck.”

“God, I hope I don’t need it.”

He patted me sympathetically on the back as I walked out of the room, but he didn’t look too disappointed to be missing out on the fun with Remar.

I followed the roadie down the hallway, past the back of the stage. From the sound of it, fans were piling into the arena, screaming and chanting the name of our band as well as the headlining band, Crazy Piper. This was the heart of the building, the love of music pulsating throughout.

Backstage was a rush of people, still preparing for the show. Two bulked-up guys kept a stern eye on things, ever ready for fans trying to sneak backstage. One security guard nodded at me as I walked past, which was more interaction than I was getting from the roadie. He was too busy yapping on his phone about his love life, or lack of, to remember I was with him.

We rode the elevator to the second floor and walked down a surprisingly empty hallway. His cowboy boots clacked against the tile, the sound echoing against the dull brown walls. In contrast to the noisy energy in the dressing room and the arena, here the energy was nonexistent. Sucked away. Forgotten.

If it hadn’t been for the roadie talking animatedly on the phone about some lusty brunette he had the hots for, it would’ve felt like I was being escorted down death row. But while I might’ve felt like sleeping for all eternity, I suspected that wasn’t the reason for my impromptu visit with Remar.

The roadie stopped at a plain black door. The phone in my back pocket buzzed again. I managed to ignore the temptation to check it.

Before I could ask the roadie if this was where I was supposed to meet Remar, he knocked on the door. There was a muffled reply, and the roadie opened the door. He waved me in, then left me to face the three men in the room alone.

Ronald Remar was seated at the opposite end of the long conference table. Two suits, whom I vaguely recognized from our first meeting, flanked him. The tall skinny man had on wire-rimmed glasses, while the dumpy guy looked like he’d been dragged back from his Mexican vacation, where he had taken great pride in getting a bad sunburn. His short white hair was clipped close to his skull and matched Remar’s hair perfectly.

The president of the record label waved for me to move closer, but made no indication I should sit.

“You wanted to talk to me?” I didn’t know why, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t like what he had to tell me. Especially since my bandmates had been excluded from this little get-together.

“That’s right, Mr. Kincaid,” Remar said, choosing to use my real name instead of my stage moniker. To the rest of the world, including my bandmates, I was Tyler Erickson.

“The label has decided, based on the tour’s success and the success of your last two singles, to move up the release date of your next album,” Remar explained. “We want to strike while the band is still hot.”

I frowned. “How much earlier are we talking about?”

He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the table, hands interlocked. His silver Rolex gleamed in the overhead light. “We’ve booked the studio for December twenty-seventh.” In four weeks. Three months ahead of schedule. “We’ve been extremely lucky to land Daniel Maynard, thanks to his recent divorce.” A satisfied smile slithered onto Remar’s face, as if he personally was responsible for the demise of the producer’s marriage. Although I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been. Rumor had it Remar was on wife number five. Presumably he knew a trick or two about wrecking marriages, especially his own. “You do know who Daniel Maynard is, right?”

Just the greatest producer in the United States when it came to rock music. He had produced the albums of some of my favorite bands, and they’d all gone straight to the top of the charts, every fucking time.

I nodded. “I do.”

“Good. Then you understand how important this opportunity is for the band. And how important it is that you’re ready to record the album come December twenty-seventh. We’ve managed to book him for a week. Then he won’t be available until the following October. Is it correct to assume you’ll be ready?” His tone indicated the question was rhetorical. We would be ready or else our contract would be canceled. That was why the two suits were here: to remind me that if the album wasn’t ready when the label expected it to be ready, we could say goodbye to the record deal.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be ready.”

“Perfect. Make sure that you are.”

I waited for him to say something more, maybe give me a reason why he wanted to talk to only me instead of the entire band. But after a few seconds it became clear I’d been dismissed.

Relieved to escape the chilly regard of everyone in the room and get ready to do what I lived for, I headed for the door.

“And before I forget,” Remar said in the tone of someone who was incapable of forgetting, “there’s a reporter here from Rock News. I granted her a brief interview with you and the band for after your show. Please don’t disappoint her.”

“No, sir.” I hoped she didn’t mind interviewing five guys coming down from an adrenaline high. Five guys who tended to forget their filters while coming down from the high, Mason being the worst of us.

And since when did Remar book our interviews? Our publicist was responsible for that, the same way she was responsible for making sure the world knew me only as Tyler Erickson. Although that wasn’t an especially tough a job, even with social media. Thank you, Mom, for being so gung-ho to home-school me.

Pushing the thought of Remar from my head, because there was no point in trying to figure out anything to do with the man, I left the room. I respected his decisions. So far they hadn’t been wrong. But next time I saw him, I’d make sure he understood I wasn’t the boss of the band. It was a democracy. The band and the music weren’t just mine. They belonged to each of us, each adding his own vision to the mix.

No sooner had I shut the door behind me than my phone played a classical tune. What the hell? I pulled it from my pocket, mentally kicking myself for letting Aaron borrow the phone. Only he would have reprogrammed it to play classical music.

I checked the screen. Brandon. Again. He knew I had a show tonight, so for him to be this desperate to talk to me meant that whatever he had to tell me was damn important.

“What’s up?” I asked, half wondering if it would’ve been better to ignore the call the way I had ignored his texts.

“Shit, Nolan. I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“Yeah, got that. Sorry. Had to meet the president of the label for a little powwow.” I pressed the elevator down button. “What’s such a big deal it couldn’t keep?”

“It’s Hailey.”

My heart slammed against my rib cage at the urgent sound of his voice. What about Hailey?

“She’s in a coma.”

©Stina Lindenblatt 2016

Now available in ebook and print

This One Moment is a standalone romance. All the books in the series can be read in any order.