Taste Me Read Online Free Page B

Michael, the band’s incubus lead guitarist, said something that made the group guffaw once again. Clangs and curses echoed from the industrial kitchen as the last pots and pans were washed. Plastic cups and bottles clacked as one of the closers pushed a huge broom across the darkened dance floor. Behind the bar, backlit liquor bottles gleamed like rough-cut jewels, and glasses clinked as everyone’s drink orders were filled. Sound bounced off every surface, hitting the back of her skull with the subtlety of a nail gun. She wanted to plug her ears. Put on her headset. Scream for silence.
    But if she let herself scream, she wouldn’t stop. So she breathed deeply, tried to push the noise, the panic, into the background. Focus on something else, anything else. Her eyes cruised over the plum-colored walls, nearly black in the shadowy light, and locked on to the most dominant thing in the room: the sculpture that surrounded the stage and formed most of the club’s west wall. Steel, aluminum, and pewter undulated three stories to the ceiling, in a functional piece of art that cleverly directed sound from the stage out into the performance area. It was gorgeous, and both Architectural Digest and Audiophile had featured it in their magazines.
    “Toasts!” Tansy, their valkyrie bassist, called from the far end of the table with a glance at her watch. “Let’s get this show on the road, people!”
    Scarlett smirked. Tansy’s bondmates, gorgeous twin vampires, were probably waiting up for her. Naked, in bed.
    “Stephen, here’s your—where’s Stephen?” Flynn asked as he strode from the back carrying the bottle of absinthe the drummer preferred.
    “He didn’t feel well and went home awhile ago. He’ll meet us at Crackhouse for brunch before sound check,” Scarlett said, referring to the other business housed in the Sebastiani Building. Her best friend Sasha Sebastiani managed both Underbelly and Crackhouse Coffee, and they also shared one of the building’s penthouse apartments with Scarlett’s sister Annika. “But he left me his toast.” She waited for the table to quiet down, for Flynn to fill a delicate glass with the glowing green liqueur. Scarlett raised it. “To groupies.”
    The toast was so like Stephen, and so not like Scarlett, that laughter rolled.
    “He’s the reason the tour bus smelled like sex all the time,” Tansy grumbled. “On the next tour we need to have a ‘no sex on the bus’ rule.”
    “You can’t be serious,” one of their roadies said. “Good luck with that.”
    “You and your rules,” Michael said with a roll of his eyes. “You’d have to wallpaper it from stem to stern to cover all the places Stephen’s had sex on that bus. And then he’d just find places no one had thought about yet.”
    “Those damn socks of his. Jesus, he’s got some foot funk,” Joe, the vampire who played rhythm guitar and keyboards, chimed in. He raised his creamy Guinness. “Here’s to clean socks.”
    “To 3:00 a.m. greasy spoon breakfasts!”
    “To room service!”
    “To Nessie, who got us here safely!” “Nessie” was the band’s nickname for their workhorse tour bus, which had covered over 50,000 miles on this last tour, with only one stop for repairs outside Calgary.
    A cheer went up. “Hear, hear!”
    “To the next tour!” someone called. Everyone groaned again. Scarlett laughed as she was expected to, but her gut bubbled in warning. “Let’s finish this one first, okay?” she said. “We do have one more show to go.” And she was dreading it.
    Flynn appeared at her elbow again and lifted the bottle of wine, but she put her hand over the top of her glass before he could pour. “Nope, I’m cutting myself off.”
    He peered at her. Too closely. “Good call. Ready to call it a night?”
    “Yes, yes, yes.” A yawn escaped, and she shivered through her layers. “Brrr. It was freezing when we left the hotel in Chicago this morning, and when we pulled in tonight, it was hot