Even if it was only temporary.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“We are going to cause all kinds of mischief.” He stopped so abruptly that she almost tripped into him. When his thumb stroked her cheekbone, she leaned into him. “We’re going to feel alive.”
Willow closed her eyes and smiled. “God, I love the sound of that.”
His lips brushed hers so quickly she didn’t have the chance to respond.
When they finally stepped outside, Luke let out a string of expletives. “Holy fucking shit on a stick. It’s freezing.”
Willow looked up at the occasional flake of snow fluttering around them and laughed. “It’s February in Detroit. You’re wearing a sweaty T-shirt. Of course it’s cold.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, her cropped T-shirt offering even less protection.
“Smart arse. Where are you staying?”
“The Shinola. It’s not too far.”
Luke flagged a taxi down and they climbed inside. “Okay. First, Willow Warner. It’s a terrible idea leaving with a stranger. We really need to know each other by the time we get to the hotel.”
Willow turned in the seat. “How do you suggest we do that?”
Expecting him to make a move, to touch her or kiss her . . . anything that would introduce them physically, he shocked her by leaning back in the seat. “We bypass all the boring stuff. Like, does it matter if you know what my favourite colour is? Here’s my first question. If you can only take one memory with you when you die, which memory would you take?”
Wow. She wasn’t expecting depth. “I don’t know. Maybe . . .” She tapped her lip. What about the time she passed a hundred million subscribers? Or perhaps it was the first movie she’d starred in—
“Warner. Get on with it. We’ll be there before you answer. Gut answers only. What memory?”
“I know. A day at the beach in Malibu, with my best friend, Riley, and her French bulldog, Tallulah. She dug so many holes she fell asleep on the blanket and snored for an hour.”
Luke grinned. “Riley or Tallulah?”
“Tallulah, obviously. What about you?”
“The Christmas I got my first drum kit. Still have that kit in a cupboard at home. Okay, next question. What’s on the top of your bucket list?”
“Umm. Oh, these are tough. I want to take the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Vladivostok. It’s the longest direct train journey in the world, I think.”
Luke raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. Adventure. Okay, I want the band to make the cover of Rolling Stone. You ask one.”
“Favourite book?”
“Boring. Try again.”
“If you think books are boring, we can’t be friends.”
“Do you have to be friends to be lovers? Oh, shit. That’s a good question. Do you?”
“Why do I always have to answer first?”
Luke grinned. “Fair point. No. You don’t. You have to be attracted to someone.” He ran his fingertip along the neckline of her T-shirt, across the rise of her breast. “There needs to be a spark. Something simmering. But friends? No.”
Her brain was shouting yes, but the sensation of his finger on her skin and the way his voice rumbled was short-circuiting her decision-making functions. “I think it helps.”
Luke removed his finger. “Fair enough. You need bail. Who do you call?”
“I could pay my own bail and not have to bother anybody.”
“Fair play. I like a financially independent woman, seeing I’m practically broke. I’d call Alex. He couldn’t afford to bail me out on his own, but I’d trust him to raise bail by getting everyone to chip in.”
“But all that,” she said, gesturing back toward the stadium.
“Huge misnomer that bands with record deals are swimming in cash. What you did for us was incredible, using our song like that in one of your videos. You’ve no idea how much it helped us. But we are a long way from being loaded. We’re all up to our eyeballs in debt we need to pay down. Fingers crossed that will improve once the album is out.”
“What one line someone has said hit you the hardest?” she asked.
Luke opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it, before rubbing a hand over the bridge of his nose. “He’s gone, Luke.”
“Luke.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
“Good question,” he said briskly, obviously not wanting to dwell on his answer. “You?”
She remembered the agent who had dropped her at thirteen. “Perhaps if puberty had been kind to her, she would have been fine, but look at her.”
“Who said that to you?”
“Someone who doesn’t matter.”
They pulled up outside the hotel, and Luke paid before he climbed out and took her hand. The street was quiet as the cab drove off. Willow darted for the door, and he followed her inside the lobby.
“Wait,” Luke said, stopping her from heading to the elevators. “I want to tell you what I know about you.” He cupped her cheek, and she pressed a kiss to his palm. “You’re at your happiest with sunshine, friends, and dogs who snore. The simple things in life are more important than things money can buy. But you have an adventurer’s heart. You want to travel and see the parts of the world less travelled. You want to escape the mundane. You love to read, which I won’t hold against you. You’d prefer there to be more than just lust before you sleep with someone. You’re independent in what you want to do and the funds you need to do it. But you’re lonely. Because if you really needed to be friends with someone to sleep with them, you wouldn’t be here with me. And maybe that lack of confidence comes from some dick-for-brains judging your looks for who knows what reason.”
For a moment, Willow was speechless. She was happy when there was simplicity. And she did want to escape. Escape the life her dad had created for her where she pumped out content like a machine. All of it. Her social media platform had helped overcome some of her insecurity, but she was lonely. “How did you . . . ?”
“What do you know about me?” he asked.
She thought back to his answers. “Your music is important to you. Your favourite memory is your drum kit, and you aren’t selfish, because your bucket list was something for the band to achieve, not just yourself. That feeling is reciprocated by the rest of the band, because Alex would help the others organise your bail, and you know you aren’t on your own. You don’t like reading, which I suggest is because you were always an active child. It takes a brave parent to buy a child a drum kit. And I’m guessing the words that killed you was that someone. Music, love, family, loss, parents are all interconnected. Which is also why you believe friendship isn’t necessary for sex. Because, then, feelings don’t get involved.”
Luke leaned forward and brushed her lips with his, gently at first, then more deeply as his tongued touched hers. “We aren’t strangers anymore.”
“No. We aren’t.”
“Are we friends enough?”
She knew more about what was important to him than anything about the friends she hung out with at home. “Yes.”
“You still want to go to your room with me?”