I blinked up at Cora right before she was going to smack me to get my attention.

“I have to go home.” My voice cracked. I think all of the things that made me who I was were starting to leak out, but I wasn’t afraid of anyone seeing it anymore. I wasn’t afraid of seeing it in the mirror every day anymore.

“Home? Home, like Kentucky? Why?”

“My brother is in the hospital. It doesn’t sound good.”

She got on her knees in front of me and put her tiny hands over mine, where they were resting on my knees.

“Oh no, do you need me to go with you? Do you want me to call Shaw? I didn’t even know you had a brother.”

I just shook my head and let it flop back until it banged against the cabinet door.

“No. My mom took off with some trucker named Earl or Daryl or something. Not like she would come back anyway. Mother of the Year she is not. It’s just me and Asa, and normally really it’s just me, but he got hurt trying to do something right for the first time in his sorry life. Now I have to go back home and hope he pulls through, so I can kick his ass and thank him, in that order.”

She had a look of shock on her pretty face.

“I think that’s the most you’ve ever said to me about your past, ever.”

I closed my eyes and blew out a breath.

“That’s because it’s not a pretty tale and I spend a lot of time pretending it never happened. Only now, it’s right in my face and it caused me to push the only guy I’ve ever loved away. I thought Jet wasn’t right because he made all the old parts of me want to break free and take control of this wonderful life I have here. I think I’ve been punishing myself for things I’ve done in the past. Jet would have been a reward, and I refused to take it, because I didn’t think I deserved him.”

She moved so that she was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me. I couldn’t look away from those odd-colored eyes. The blue on one side was intense and sad, and the brown was dark and filled with sympathy.

“Ayd, I don’t know who you think comes from some kind of Leave It to Beaver background. Rule barely talks to his folks, Shaw’s mom is the Wicked Witch of the West, and Nash hates his mom’s husband so much he moved out when he was just a little boy. Rowdy doesn’t even know who his folks are, my mom took off before I could walk and left me with a dad that conveniently forgot I was a girl every chance he got, and we all know how bad Jet’s dad treats his mom. None of us is shooting sunshine out of our asses, girl, so I don’t know why you think you should suffer alone.”

I wrapped my arms around her neck, and let her hug me back. It was so nice just to appreciate my friend, to know that she was simply there for me. Everything else that was facing me back home didn’t seem nearly as daunting.

“Thanks, Cora.”

“You’re a great person, Ayden, and you deserve the best.”

I pushed my hands through my hair and let her pull me up off the floor.

“I had it. I let it go.”

“He didn’t go far. Just call him.”

“Maybe after I figure out what’s going on with my brother, I can tackle that issue. Asa really might not make it.” I was surprised that the thought choked me up.

“Let me come with you, or call Shaw. You know she’ll drop everything and probably even charter a private jet or something.”

I shook my head and headed toward my room.

“No. I need to do this alone.”

“But Ayd, if something really bad happens, you shouldn’t have to deal with it alone.”

“If something really bad happens, I promise I’ll call in the troops, okay?”

She just watched me for a second, then squeezed my arm. “Promise?”

I hugged her again. “I promise.”

“All right, well, while you pack I’ll call and make you a reservation, and get you going, okay?”

“I adore you, Cora.”

“Well, I am adorable, so that is totally understandable.”

She scampered toward the phone, and I started throwing together everything I could think of into an overnight bag. I called work and told them I was going to miss a few days and called Shaw to give her a quick update. That took longer than anticipated, because she demanded to come with me and it wasn’t until Rule wrestled the phone away from her and told me that he would sit on her until I landed, that I managed to get out the door. Cora took me to the airport, since I was lucky to get a flight out right away, and it only took a few hours until I landed in Louisville.

Being back in Kentucky was like a smack in the face. Everyone moved a little slower and talked a little sweeter, and by the time I was in the rental car on the way to the hospital, I was starting to feel like I’d never left. It was a quick drive into the heart of Louisville, because Woodward was too small to handle Asa in the condition he was in. All the while, all I could think was that Asa had to at least make it until I got there. It didn’t matter what kind of selfish prick my brother tended to be, no one deserved to die alone and scared. I called ahead and found out he was still in the trauma unit and that he was unconscious. It made my skin pebble up when I heard the sadness in the nurse’s voice. Clearly he wasn’t in good shape, and I hated that he was that way because of me.

I didn’t even have to ask where he was when I got there. The admitting nurse was obviously waiting to see if anyone was going to come for the pretty broken boy. Even on the brink of death Asa still had that effect on women. They led me back to a tiny little room and I almost fell over when I finally laid eyes on my big brother.

My larger-than-life brother looked like a broken marionette. There were tubes and wires coming out of him everywhere. I couldn’t see his face because of the gauze wrapped around him. He had a ventilator in his mouth and I could see the unnatural rise and fall of his chest, indicating he wasn’t breathing on his own. Both arms were in heavy casts and his leg had something that looked like a medieval torture device on it. Bad shape didn’t even begin to cover it. He didn’t look human or alive.

I gulped and walked to the bedside. I put a hand over the plaster, on one of his. A doctor came in with a chart and looked slightly startled to see me.

“Are you family? We’ve tried to get ahold of his mother but she said she was in Illinois and wouldn’t be back for a few weeks.”

I cleared my throat.

“I’m his sister.”

The doctor looked at me over the top of his glasses. “You might want to impress upon your mother that the situation is very serious. She might want to get here in case his condition deteriorates further. His brain was bleeding. We put him in a medically induced coma to help with the swelling and to see if we could get it to stop. It’s very touch-and-go.”

I wrapped my hands around the rails of the hospital bed.

“I’ll stay with him. She won’t come back.”

“It doesn’t look good. Even if he wakes up, there is no guarantee he’ll be the way he was before. Frankly, it’s a miracle he survived this long. I’ve never seen a beating like this. He must have made some very bad people pretty angry.”

I closed my eyes.

“He has a particular talent for that.”

“The police are doing a comprehensive investigation. Hopefully, they’ll come up with something.”

They wouldn’t. Woodward was a small town and things didn’t work that way out here. This was just good old-fashioned justice, an eye for an eye, and Asa would be lucky if he survived it. I bent down and kissed him on his thickly bandaged head. I still had all my stuff in the car. There was no way in hell I was going back to that trailer, and it looked like I was going to be here awhile, so I needed to find a hotel close to the hospital.

“I didn’t think we had anything in common anymore, Asa, but it looks like protecting the people we love, even if it nearly kills us, is a Cross trait. We really gotta be smarter than that, big brother.”

Chapter 16

There was a naked blonde in the bed, across from where I was sitting at the little dinette in the hotel room. It was a sad testament to the state of affairs that I was far more interested in the bottle of whiskey in front of me, than I was in her. She hardly spoke any English and had come along with one of the guys in Artifice after the set, but for whatever reason she had been all over me all night, even though I wasn’t remotely interested. Maybe it was the language barrier. I didn’t understand German, and all she seemed to understand was that the more booze I tossed back, the more appealing she became, so there had been an endless supply since coming back to my room.

She was good-looking, tall with a great rack, and had miles of blond hair and pretty, big blue peepers. The problem was, she had all of those things and was in my bed where there should have been an amber-eyed brunette. Part of me was dying to climb in beside her and let the whiskey and a soft girl eliminate the ghost of Ayden for just a minute. Unfortunately, a bigger part of me knew that was only a temporary fix, a fix that would make me feel like shit in the morning, and make the guys in the band worry about me more than they already were.

Being on this tour was wearing on me and I don’t think I was hiding it well. The girls, the parties, the booze and the drugs—it was all a lot to process while I was trying to deal with a broken heart, and no matter what my own guys threw at me or what Dario and his boys tried to tempt me with, it held no appeal. I missed Colorado. I missed the boys at the shop, I missed Cora, and despite everything, I was worried about my mom. There was no hiding the hole in the center of my very being where Ayden should be and it went without saying I missed her most of all.

However, the real reason, the real issue that was keeping me from climbing all over the naked blonde and letting her teach me the German word for Jet, was Ayden. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and couldn’t stop seeing all the things I was feeling reflected back at me in her honey-tinted eyes. I felt so alone without her, and I didn’t for a second think she was going to be waiting around for me when I got back, not even after that kiss good-bye.

So far, the best thing about Europe was the opportunity to see a bunch of really great bands. In every country we stopped in, in every bar we pulled up to, there were underground bands playing. Amazing groups made up of kids often years younger than me, and it made me happy every time we got to hear them play. It reminded me just how much I loved listening to other bands play, loved discovering new talent and getting them exposure, far more than I liked being the one adored and fawned over while onstage. Sure I loved to play, loved to write songs and perform, but I absolutely didn’t want to do this for a living.

Being on tour, no matter where in the world it was, got to be a drag after a while. I wanted my own bed, preferably with a pretty Southern girl already in it, and I wanted a night not spent in a bar, fending off groupies and metal heads. I wasn’t cut out to be a rock star, but I was a perfect fit to make others into one. When I got home, I was going to rebuild the studio and look into starting up my own record label. The idea had me excited in a way the naked blonde could only dream of doing. Luckily for me, the rest of the guys in the band seemed as burned-out as I was.