***

For the next forty-five minutes, I sit in the hotel’s business center, canceling all my credit and debit cards. It’s a pain in the ass because it’s so late, but I finally get it done and order replacements to be delivered to my apartment in L.A.

By the time I’m ready to go upstairs to Wyatt’s room, I’m so exhausted that I practically drag myself across the lobby, and I lean against the wall of the elevator as I ride up to the fifth floor.

The door to Wyatt’s room is propped open with the hotel’s binder that’s filled with information about local restaurants and the cable channel lineup. I pick it up as I go inside, and then I lock the dead bolt and throw the binder on the chair by the door. I follow the hum of the pipes into the bathroom, walking into a haze of fog from the steam.

Wyatt pokes his head out from behind the shower curtain while he’s scrubbing shampoo into his scalp. “You. Naked. In the shower. Now.”

“You. Caveman. Go screw yourself.” I shed my clothes anyway and kick them under the sink. I take his hand and carefully step into the shower. I recoil at how hot the water is, but he pulls me to him, shielding my body from the stream, as he adjusts the temperature.

“It took you fucking forever.” He lathers soap over my breasts, testing the weight of each, as his thumbs trace around my nipples. His hands move to my belly button, and when he glides a soapy finger around it, I shiver. “Thought you forgot about me.”

He’s echoing my sentiments from earlier tonight, and I smile slightly. “No, that’s impossible. I had to cancel my cards linked to Lucas’s accounts before someone steals all his money, and he decides to strangle me.”

“He’s too busy with Red to notice anything, except for her pus—”

I flare my palms down his slick abs and his toned V to grab his cock. This must catch him off-guard because his lips part. “I don’t want to hear things like that about my brother.”

Wyatt laughs but then asks in a serious voice, “Did you get everything handled?”

“That idiot stole my ID, too.”

He bends his head, so he can run his tongue around my lips. “You know what has to happen, Kylie,” he says. I start to move my fingers away from him, but he closes them back around his length. “It’s not like Lucas is expecting you back anytime soon—who knows how long he’ll be in Nashville. So ... you know that you’re coming with me tomorrow, don’t you?”

Yes, I know. I’ve known that’s how things would go down the second Officer Townsend mentioned my credit cards, and I realized there was no way I could board my flight tomorrow. I study Wyatt’s shit-eating grin. “You planned this, didn’t you?”

“For some motherfucker to screw you over? No. But for you to come with me? Yes. That was my plan all along.”

“And the fact that someone broke into my hotel room makes it easier for you.”

He pins me against the shower wall, hitching my leg around his waist, and I let go of his erection, so I can grip his tattooed shoulders for support. Water is beating down on my face, but I don’t blink as I wait for him to answer.

“Did you really think I’d give you up so easily, beautiful? Did you think I’d let you go without reminding you why you fucking fell in the first place?”

I swallow hard and nod.

Before he lowers his mouth to mine, he shakes his head in disappointment as he murmurs, “Then, you must not know a goddamn thing about me.”

Chapter Six

Generally speaking, I hate the way the insides of rental cars smell. I don’t know anyone who gets excited about the stale musk scent of dusty vacuum cleaner and Windex. But when I open the Suburban’s passenger door early the next afternoon, I pause. And I inhale. This particular vehicle smells like Wyatt’s cologne, Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male. I bend and put my nose closer to the seat. This time, I breathe in the scent as deeply as my lungs will allow. He must have spritzed some all over the leather when he was loading our bags.

A shiver courses down my spine.

“Are you...” Heidi’s voice coming up behind me startles me, and I jolt up to see her and Cal walking up to the Suburban together. As I shuffle away from the car, he gets inside, moving all the way to the back row, but Heidi doesn’t budge. She raises her thinly arched eyebrows and slips her hands into the front pockets of her floral-print skinny jeans. “Holy shit, Kylie, you’re sniffing the seat.”

“No, I—”

But she pokes her head into the car and breathes in. “Ooh, that does smell good. Wonder what you’re thinking about right now?” She climbs into the Suburban through the back door and plops down in the middle seat, folding her skinny arms across her chest. Cal snorts from the row behind her, and even though her eyes narrow dangerously, she ignores him. “This will be fun,” she says to me, a little too cheerfully.

Instead of holding back the nervous laugh building in my chest, I let it out as I slide my sunglasses over my face. There’s nowhere near enough sunshine today to need the oversized aviators, but they’ll help me sleep on the ride. At least, that’s the plan.

“I sure as hell hope this’ll be good,” I say.

“There’ll be music. What’s not fun about music?” Heidi asks.

Cal says something to her from the backseat, and though I’m not a hundred percent positive, I’m pretty sure he said, “And the dicks attached to the guys who play it.”

Whatever it is was, it earns a hissed, “Fuck you,” and the bird from Heidi.

Biting the inside of my cheek, I rub the back of my neck. I’m already dreading the fact that I’ll be forced to listen to Heidi and Cal’s back-and-forth until the end of the week, which is three days from now.

When I spoke to Heidi about my plans to travel along with Wyatt and Cal this morning, she promptly volunteered herself for the trip. I was quick to point out how unnecessary it is for her to spend her free time with me on the road, and of course, she was quick to argue, claiming that not tagging along isn’t even an option.

“You don’t have to do that, babe. I don’t have a choice, but you do,” I tell her. “Catch your flight and get back to sexing up drunk guys.”

She responds by ripping her itinerary into tiny pieces and dropping them into my hand. “You’re stuck with me now.”

“You do know that you can just print another one, right?”

Flipping her chestnut waves over her shoulder, she presses her lips together. “It’s...what? Only four days, counting today? And it’s not like the phones are going anywhere. It’s my fault that you have to be with them, so I want to go.”

Though I should have, I didn’t tell her the sad, twisted reality of it all.

A part of me is thrilled that I’m going along for the ride and ecstatic that I’ll have these few extra days with Wyatt just so I can get everything off my chest. Even if he will be busy driving and performing the majority of that time, we’ll have the opportunity that was taken away from us last night.

But then, a part of me aches inside because I know that prolonging my time with him will just slice open my heart a little more. He didn’t tell me the exact plan for this trip until this morning, and when he did, I was speechless for a long time.

The first leg of our trip is the same route that we took eight years ago when I realized that I loved him. It’s the same route where I went from the girl who coped with her insecurities by physically hurting herself to the woman who’s spent the last several years carving deeper emotional wounds into her body.

Wyatt’s breath on my neck separates me from my thoughts. I face him with a forced smile on my face.

“Ready?” he asks.

I tip my head back before I answer him, glaring up at the overcast sky through my sunglasses. “Yeah, I am.” Taking a small step toward the car, I say, “But fair warning—if you end up asking me to chauffeur you around, I might break that pretty blue Kramer of yours over your head.”