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She pressed her lips together and gave a sharp shake of her head as she took a slow breath, struggling to maintain her composure.
“What do you want from me, Kat?”
“Nothing. I don’t want anything from you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You want to fight? Then let’s fight. You want to talk? Let’s talk. But can we please stop pretending you don’t have anything to say?”
Her face fell, the anger sliding away and leaving behind something raw, fragile and soft. “I’m working.” She glanced over her shoulder towards the area where Beckett knew Rodney would be waiting for them.
He adjusted the buckle on his belt, just to have something to do with his hands that wasn’t touching her. “Later, then.”
She huffed out an exasperated breath. “Is that a threat?”
“No, Luna. It’s a promise.”
Chapter Sixteen
“When we get to Wichita, let’s check the angle of the confetti blower. I don’t want it blowing back on stage every night like it’s been doing,” Kat said as she closed the lid on the equipment case that would carry her mobile office setup to the next tour stop.
“It’s the air conditioning,” John, the head special effects technician, said as he wound a cable around his elbow.
“Let’s see if we can get around that somehow. All that confetti on the stage is a slipping hazard.” She patted John on the shoulder. “See you in Kansas.”
Kat checked her watch. The sooner she got Midnight Storm off to the next item on their itinerary, the sooner they’d be safely back on the bus en route to Kansas, the sooner Kat could shake off the buzzy, off-kilter feeling that had plagued her for the last hour.
Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, she and Beckett had locked eyes across the expanse of stage and rigging, and she’d felt it—that lasso around her sternum, the tug of being caught in his orbit. A cosmic force, inevitable and too powerful to ignore. For the first time in years, she let herself surrender to it, dizzy with the gravitational pull of his attention. She’d been off balance ever since.
Her heels echoed in the concrete tunnel of the arena’s backstage hallways as she rounded a corner and rapped her fist against the green room door, not pausing for acknowledgment before pushing inside.
“You can’t just ignore the first three movies. They’re canon,” Nico said, looping his arms around the waists of the two blondes—sisters by the look of it—sitting on either side of him on the leather sofa.
“But they’re not the first three movies. They’re actually numbers four through six,” Zach argued, most of his attention focused on the picked-over charcuterie board on the catering table.
“If you go by release date–”
“Which I do.”
“—but if you go chronologically in the story, they’re the first three.” Nico turned to Jackson, exasperated. “Tell him you can’t just ignore Phantom Menace.”
“I met Natalie Portman once at a party in LA. She’s even hotter in person,” Jackson said from the armchair in the corner as he strummed his guitar, barely acknowledging the twenty-something redhead sitting on the arm of the chair and gazing at him adoringly.
“Hey, Kat,” Zach said before popping a grape into his mouth. “Looking good today.”
“She always looks good,” Logan said.
Jackson glanced up from his guitar with a hazy smile. “Give us a twirl.”
“Enough,” Beckett barked as he stepped out of the bathroom, rubbing a towel over his wet hair. He threw the towel back into the bathroom with more force than was necessary. “Stop ogling my fiancée.”
Kat prickled at Beckett’s possessive demand and spun her engagement ring around her finger. Funny, he had no trouble staking his claim when it wasn’t real.
“This is your fiancée?” one of the blondes squealed. “Let’s see the ring!”
Reluctantly, Kat held out her hand to the two women, who shrieked in delight. “Ohmigod, it’s even bigger in person,” the second blonde gasped.
