stabbed through both eyes and into his brain. Next on his agenda: pain relievers.
“What the hell happened to your face?” Jacob asked.
“I bounced it off some guy’s knuckles a couple dozen times,” Gabe said. “Good times.”
Gabe noticed a bruise on Jacob’s forehead and pointed at it. “And what happened to you?”
“Ex-wife,” Jacob said.
“Bitch.”
“Ball-buster.”
Gabe poked at Jacob’s bruise. “Head-buster.”
Gabe attempted a grin. Jacob grinned back. And the pair of them ended up in a back-slapping bro hug because they couldn’t dissolve into a sobbing embrace like a couple of little girls.
Jacob handed Gabe his key card. “Are you going to bust in there without knocking?”
“Yep,” Gabe said, because he really hoped Melanie had nothing to hide. Strange thoughts had begun to enter his head after several hours of sleep deprivation and the splitting headache from Hell. Thoughts that gave him a real reason to be jealous of Nikki.
The women were still asleep, entwined in each other’s arms like sated lovers. Nikki’s hand rested on Melanie’s breast, and her face was pressed into Melanie’s neck. But they weren’t naked, so Gabe breathed a sigh of relief.
“Well, what do we have here?” Jacob said.
Melanie’s eyes flipped open, and she glared when she recognized who had interrupted her sleep. “What are you doing in here? Get out!”
“Melanie?” Nikki murmured in her sleep.
“This is my room,” Jacob said. “You get out.”
Gabe pressed his fingertips to the center of his forehead. “Not the time to start an argument,” he said. “Mel, why don’t you take Nikki back to my room? I’ll hang here with Jacob if you still need to be alone with her.”
Melanie eased Nikki’s hand from her breast and her head from her shoulder. She slipped from the bed and wrapped her arms around Gabe’s neck. “You can’t possibly know how hard it was to spend the night without you, knowing you were so close yet so far away.”
He did know how hard that was actually, but he wasn’t going to say so in front of Jacob. He did manage a whispered, “I missed you too.” But he wasn’t quite ready to hand her his bro card.
Nikki sat up and stretched her arms over her head. “I guess I got to spend the night in Shade’s bed after all,” she said, her typical flirty smile lighting up the room.
Gabe blinked at her in disbelief.
“Feeling better this morning?” Melanie asked her.
“Yep. All better.” Nikki climbed from the bed. “Is it too late for breakfast? I’m starving.”
“If you want breakfast, we’ll find you some breakfast,” Melanie said. “Why don’t you go get dressed? Gabe and I will be there in a minute.”
Nikki patted Gabe on the ass as she passed. “Give me your key card,” she said.
Jaw on the floor, he handed her his key card and she was gone.
“What just happened?” Gabe asked.
“That’s Nikki,” Melanie said. “Tragedy strikes, she falls apart, I put her back together, and she’s back to normal the next day. Well, for the most part. She springs back quickly, but only if I’m there to help her.”
“That’s not normal,” Gabe said.
“Not in the least.”
“So what the hell happened?” Jacob asked.
They gave him a much condensed story about what had happened to Nikki while she was alone in New Orleans and Gabe’s ordeal with the cage fighter.
“So that dickhead is just gonna walk?” Jacob said.
“With a slight limp, thanks to Gabe,” Melanie said. She traced his bruised jaw gently.
“A very slight limp,” Gabe said.
“I’ll try to get Nikki to press charges,” Melanie said. “Even if he doesn’t go to jail, maybe it will damage his reputation.”
“Is she strong enough to go through that?” Gabe asked.
“Probably not,” Melanie said. “But I’ll work with her. She listens to me.” Melanie laughed. “Okay, that’s a lie. But she wants to please me, so maybe she’ll listen this time.”
“I think she needs professional help. A good psychiatrist.”
“She has one,” Melanie said, “but she insists she likes my therapy better. Nevertheless, I’ll make her an appointment when we get back to Wichita.”
Gabe stroked her tangled hair, and she gazed up at him with weary hazel eyes. This woman was every sort of wonderful, and he had a chance to make her his. He wouldn’t mess it up.
“Do you want to accompany me and Nikki on our girls’ day out?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
Perhaps he’d been a bit hasty. He did get to spend the entire day with Melanie, checking out the local flavor and stealing kisses, touches, and glances from the woman who had stolen his heart. He had to steal moments with Melanie because Nikki never left the woman’s side. Melanie offered him apologetic smiles, but he understood why she indulged Nikki’s every whim that day. Even if it did put a damper on their limited time together. By the time the trio headed to the arena so Gabe could prepare for the concert that evening, he was exhausted. Exhausted from lack of sleep and exhausted from keeping up with two women with a credit card. He left them on the tour bus, eyeing his bunk with weary longing, but went to do his sound check. Maybe he could catch a nap afterwards. And maybe, just maybe, Melanie would join him. Without Nikki.
“Hey, man.” An employee of the arena stopped him as he walked down one of the echoing hallways. “You’re that guy from last night.”
“Huh?”
“Aren’t you the one who tried to beat up Dick Bailey for hurting your sister?”
Sometimes he wished he was less recognizable. Now everyone would know he got his ass kicked by a douche bag. “She wasn’t my sister,” Gabe said. “Just a friend.”
“Some of the other fighters heard what you accused him of and beat the ever-loving shit out of that guy.”
“They did?”
“Yeah.”
“I would have liked to have seen that.” Since he’d mostly been seeing stars.
“You taking him on like that was pretty badass,” the guy said.
“Badass or stupid?”
“Badass,” the guy assured him. “Everyone is talking about it.”
Gabe didn’t feel badass, but he’d take his accolades when he could get them. “Thanks.”
A slight smile on his face, Gabe headed to the stage to beat on something that never hit back.
After sound check, Gabe paused at the top of the tour bus steps, smiling at the obvious closeness between the two friends. Nikki sat on the kitchen counter with Melanie standing between her legs. Melanie’s arms were wrapped loosely around Nikki’s waist, and Nikki’s arms were resting on Melanie’s shoulders, her hands linked together behind Melanie’s head.
“We had fun today, didn’t we?” Nikki said, looking positively giddy with happiness.
“Yeah.” Melanie chuckled. “I think we melted my credit card with all that swiping, but it was fun.”
“Mel?”
“Yeah, hon?”
“I love you,” Nikki gushed. “I don’t think you’ll ever realize how much.”
“I love you too.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
Eyes closed, Nikki leaned forward and kissed Melanie. Not a peck on the cheek. Not a friendly brush of her lips on Melanie’s. A deep, open-mouthed, let-me-introduce-your-tonsils-to-my-tongue, sexually charged kiss.
Suddenly light-headed, Gabe stumbled backwards down the stairs, catching the handrail at the last minute. It was the only thing that saved his ass from meeting the pavement.
Regaining his footing, he stood outside the bus, thinking he should be angry, that he should be livid that Melanie had been hiding her romantic entanglement with Nikki from him. But he mostly felt a ho
llow ache in his chest and unbelievably stupid for not believing the signs. He’d recognized them—and they’d haunted him while he’d lain awake the night before—but he hadn’t believed them.
Apparently he should have trusted his gut.
Friends didn’t have the kind of dependent relationship that Nikki and Melanie shared. No simple friend would put up with Nikki’s drama for as long as Melanie had, not unless she had deep, romantic feelings for her. Roommates didn’t sleep in the same bed, cuddled together like lovers. People with platonic relationships didn’t kiss the way he’d just seen the two of them kiss.
Jesus, no wonder Nikki had kept trying to talk Gabe into a threesome. The two women probably picked up guys and did it all the time. He was just the latest dupe.
Melanie had played him for a complete fool.
And she had actually made him fall in love with her. The fucking bitch.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Melanie pulled away from Nikki’s kiss and stared at her in astonishment.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I told you,” Nikki said, her big blue eyes suddenly flooded with tears. “I love you, Mel. I love you. You said you love me too.”
“Nikki,” Melanie said. “Honey, you’re confused. You’re not attracted to me. We’re just friends.”
Nikki dropped her chin to her chest and whimpered like a wounded animal. “But you must love me, Mel. You’re the only one I care about who has never hurt me. The only one.”
Melanie swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing she was going to have to hurt Nikki now, when she was at her most vulnerable. Melanie was not interested in a romantic relationship with Nikki, and she didn’t know if there was a way to salvage their friendship with this on the table. She should have recognized the signs. She’d honestly thought that when Nikki made sexual advances toward her—and she’d been making them more and more frequently—that she’d just been playing around. It had never occurred to her that her best friend—a woman—could be sexually attracted to her. She was having a hard time processing that reality.
“Do you remember why we became friends?” Melanie asked her.
Nikki sniffed. “You mean when we were little?” she said in a tiny voice.
“Yeah. We met in the park. You were sitting under a bush, sobbing. Remember?”
Nikki swallowed and nodded. Melanie lifted a hand to brush Nikki’s hair back, but thought better of it. She clenched her hand into a loose fist and dropped it to her side. Melanie did love Nikki as more than a friend. She loved her like the little sister she’d never had. Someone to take care of. To defend. To cherish.
“I went over to see what was wrong and you had this huge bruise on your face,” Melanie said.
“My stepfather was an abusive son of a bitch.”
“But that wasn’t why you were crying. Do you remember why you were crying?”
Nikki nodded again. “I had found a beautiful blue butterfly. I held it so gently and stroked its velvety wings. And it died right there in my hand.”
“We spent the rest of that summer chasing live butterflies in the park.”
Nikki smiled. A slightly watery smile, but a genuine one. “And every time you caught one, you’d put it in my hair and say I was beautiful. No one had ever told me that before. Or made me feel beautiful.”
“You are beautiful, Nikki. Not just on the outside, on the inside. I knew it from the moment I saw you crying over a dead bug.”
“Butterfly,” Nikki corrected. “I wouldn’t cry over a beetle. Well, maybe if it was a lady bug.”
Melanie laughed. She so wanted to give Nikki a hearty squeeze, but a line had been crossed, and Melanie knew she had to be careful not to give Nikki the wrong message.
“I was sad when you moved away,” Melanie said.
“Yeah, well, sometimes abusive sons-of-bitches beat your mother to death and you’re sent to live with your alcoholic father.”
The alcoholic father who had sexually molested her for six years, but Nikki didn’t have to say it. Melanie was very aware of Nikki’s past. She just wished she could have been there for Nikki at the time, to help put her back together.
“I thank God that we ended up going to the same college,” Melanie said. “It must have been fate.”
Nikki dropped her head. “Not fate so much as me stalking your social media pages.”
“So you went to Wichita State—”
“To be with you. I never forgot you. Mel, the little girl with the kind eyes and the uplifting words who put butterflies in my hair.” She touched her hair as if she could feel wings flapping against her. “Memoires of those butterflies got me through a lot of very dark nights, Mel, even when you weren’t there.”
Nothing could have stopped Melanie from hugging Nikki then. She crushed her against her chest, squeezing until her arms began to tremble.
“Do you hate me for loving you?” Nikki said dully.
Melanie drew away and cupped Nikki’s face in her hands. She tried not to look at the scab on her lip, because it was a harsh reminder of even more pain that Nikki had suffered, and Melanie couldn’t allow herself to be wishy-washy about this.
“I don’t hate you—at all—I’m just not attracted to you. I don’t love you that way. Do you understand?”
Nikki lowered her gaze.
“I do love you unconditionally,” Melanie said. “I do. Nothing you do will change that. So stop testing it, okay? I’m not going anywhere. You’re my baby sister for life.”
“Are you sure?”
“If I haven’t given up on you by now, it’s not going to happen.”
Nikki laughed. “I’ll try to behave.”
“Just keep yourself safe,” Melanie said. “And if you kiss me again, I’m going to tell my boyfriend to kick your ass.”
“Okay. I don’t want an ass-kicking from a guy with a bad haircut.” She was laughing when she said it.
Melanie glanced around the empty interior of the bus. “Speaking of Gabe, shouldn’t he be back by now? He said sound check wouldn’t take long.”
“You should go look for him. I’ve been hogging your attention all day. I’m sure you two would like to be alone for a while.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” she said. This weekend hadn’t quite been the endless love-making session she’d envisioned. “You okay now?” she asked Nikki.
“I’ll get over you,” she said. “Eventually.”
Knowing Nikki the way she did, Melanie figured it would take her no more than twenty minutes or so to move on. “Stay out of trouble.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Backstage, Melanie asked several people if they’d seen Gabe. The rest of the band was in the dressing room, bull-shitting. Gabe was not among them, and no one had seen him since sound check. They all said he’d been headed to the tour bus with instructions not to disturb him. Melanie knew that he’d never made it to the bus. At least, she hadn’t seen him. Maybe they’d crossed paths somewhere.
When she saw Jordan in a hallway and asked if he’d seen Gabe, he pointed toward the stage. “I think he’s rehearsing.”
Rehearsing? Rehearsing what? When she concentrated, she could hear him playing, sticks hitting skins with such powerful, rapid percussion that it couldn’t have been anyone but Gabe.
She hurried to the stage and climbed the steps to watch him. She stumbled over a cord not yet taped down and then stood to the