He grinned even wider as he reached for her hand and gave it several good, hard pumps. “I’m James. It’s my job to keep Drew safe.”
Resisting the urge to rub her shoulder socket after he let go of her hand, she smiled back at Drew’s security guard. “It’s lovely to meet you.” Of course, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she had to fight the urge to groan out loud. Lovely to meet you made her sound like she was an eighty-year-old grandma rather than a twenty-two-year-old woman.
“I’ll let Drew know you’re on your way.” James pulled out his phone and sent a quick text, probably also letting Drew know he should expect a supernerd backstage. “Welcome to the madness, Ashley.”
As she walked down the hall in the direction in which James had pointed her, she mused that Drew’s bodyguard really was a lovely man. And though he’d just referred to touring with Drew as madness, the truth was that he’d helped make her feel a whole lot less nervous about being here.
Ever since the night she’d introduced herself to Drew after one of his shows and realized just how ridiculously good-looking he was in person, she’d been more than a little anxious. Going on a rock tour at all was a huge leap away from her normal life, but going with Drew?
It might very well be madness.
Ashley took a deep breath and tried to push her nerves away as she walked through the door at the end of the hall. A group of women were all talking and laughing at once, obviously still on a high from the show. She didn’t see Drew at first and thought maybe she was in the wrong place. But then, when the crowd parted to reveal him standing in the opposite corner of the room, she swore it was as though everything slowed down and then went completely still as Drew looked right at her.
His eyes held hers with a look so intense, and so full of heat, that she actually forgot how to breathe for a moment.
Oh God. He was beautiful. So beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him.
The record label didn’t need to put makeup on him to make him better-looking in pictures. They didn’t need to put him in special clothes or cut his hair a certain way to make him attractive to the masses. All they needed was for him to smile...and the person he was smiling at felt as though she was the center of his entire world. Like he would live and die only for her.
A woman’s super-sultry voice saying, “Drew, can you do a really special signature for me?” broke Ashley out of her frozen stance by the door.
Drew held Ashley’s gaze for another moment before turning to the woman. “Sure,” he said, his smile easy now, rather than intense. “Where do you want it?”
Before Ashley knew it, the woman had pulled her tank top up—and off! All the way off, so that she was standing completely topless in the middle of a room full of strangers...and the rock god she was obviously hoping to entice with her bold move.
To Drew’s credit, he didn’t so much as blink. Not even when the woman moved way too close to him and said, “You can write your name anywhere you want on my body. Absolutely anywhere.”
Ashley was still busy trying to pick her jaw up off the floor when Drew quickly scrawled his name with a black Sharpie on the side of the woman’s ribs, about as far from her breasts as he could get while still writing on her skin the way she clearly wanted him to. And when he picked up the woman’s shirt from the floor and handed it to her, saying, “Thanks for coming to my show tonight,” Ashley could see that the last thing he wanted was to make the woman feel bad that he was rejecting her advance. Even though he clearly was.
She had never seen someone take off a shirt so fast...or put it back on so slowly. She could only imagine the way she’d be fumbling with the fabric if she tried to pull off a move like that. Not that she ever would, of course. Besides, her father would kill her if he found out she’d ever done anything like that.
Charlie Emmit had told her he wanted to come to the show tonight to say hello to Drew. But Ashley had known the real reason her father had wanted to come—to go over a huge list of all the potential dangers he wanted Drew to protect his daughter from.
Ashley and her father were usually of like mind, but this time she’d put her foot down. She wasn’t going to allow him to drop her off on tour as though she were a little girl heading to her first day of kindergarten. Instead, she’d promised him that she was going to be smart and safe, just the way she’d always been.
They were two peas in a pod, both of them rational and practical. So unlike her mother, Camila Emmit, who hated lists and rules. Her mother loved music and poetry, but numbers made her go cross-eyed. For the fifteen years she’d been married to Ashley’s dad, her mother had been a blur of colorful flowing skirts, laughter in the house when she was happy, yelling reverberating off the walls when she wasn’t, and a smell that Ashley realized as a teenager was pot.