Caught in the Glow (The Glower Chronicles Book 1) (5 page)

“I’m
fine,
Mom,” I said, and reached across the table to squeeze her hand in emphasis. She squeezed back firmly enough, but the thin bones felt fragile in my gasp. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

She would anyway. That’s what happened when you blamed yourself for losing one person you loved by not watching them closely enough. But at least she respected me enough to ease off when I called her on it.

Her smile turned mischievous as the waitress delivered the bill—which Mom promptly snatched up, ignoring my protest. “I’m not the only one thinking about you,” she said, pulling a few bills from her embroidered wallet. “I was at the Society offices this morning. Mateo asked about you.”

“Mom,” I said with a groan. “You know that’s not going anywhere. We
broke up
, months ago.”

“You two seemed happy together.”

“We were,” I said. “For a while. But, you know, you spend more time with a person and sometimes you realize they’re not what you really want.”

She opened her mouth, and I held up my hand. “I’m not getting into any more detail than that.”

She made a disgruntled sound. “Well, you’re young, you have plenty of time. It’s not as if I’d want you settling down at this age. I still think you should ask for some leave after you’re done with Ryder. Following clients around day and night, doing your college courses over the internet, you’re never going to meet anyone. Not just boys. Friends. Or you could have experiences outside the city—that you picked, not tagging along with some celebrity’s idea of a good time.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. “Let’s see how long it takes me to set up Ryder with more permanent protection first.”

I gave her a hug before she flagged down a taxi, and then headed to the studio. At the thought of seeing Ryder, guitar slung across his chest, lips tipped close to the microphone, a little spark of anticipation tickled through me.

I definitely wasn’t thinking about Mateo anymore. But I was going to have to keep a close eye on that spark. I tossed it back behind the wall before it could flare any brighter.

I was half a block away when my phone rang. Sterling. I paused outside a designer clothing boutique and raised it to my ear.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

“What is going on with your client?” Sterling said, his voice clipped and practically vibrating with urgency. “I just received a call from one of the producers. Getting him into the studio only to have a meltdown won’t earn us any good will with the label.”

A meltdown? I started walking again, the soles of my shoes smacking the pavement. “I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “I was having lunch with my mom—I didn’t think he’d need me right
there
while he was recording.” Glowers couldn’t enter private buildings without an invitation unless they’d already marked someone inside. But I hadn’t been thinking about the trouble Ryder could cause all on his own.

“Apparently he did,” Sterling snapped. “You know how much difficulty we’ve been through with Ryder already, Avery. You’ve got to stay on top of him. You know that erratic and aggressive behavior—”

“—is a warning sign,” I finished for him, my chest clenching. “I know. He’s not marked. I promise.”

“Make sure he stays that way,” Sterling said. “It’s bad enough when we lose a client—worse when it’s someone that young. And from the way the staff at the label are talking... we could lose their faith entirely.”

He hung up. My fingers clenched around the phone for a second before I lowered it. If the record label decided the Society wasn’t serving its theoretical purpose, then they wouldn’t hire us for any of their musicians, and we couldn’t shadow people without some sort of official permission. All those potential Glower targets would be left with no one to watch out for them.

I was coming up on the front doors of the studio when Ryder burst past them, his eyes wild and his mouth twisted tight. In the first instant when his gaze snagged on me, it was as if he had no idea who I was. My stomach flipped.

“Hey,” I said. At the sound of my voice, the clouds in his expression parted just slightly. He turned on his heel, toward the parking lot and the blue Audi he’d driven us here in.

“Don’t ask,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

5.

I
kept my mouth shut until we’d left the Audi in the condo building’s underground parking garage, but as we boarded the elevator, I couldn’t resist making an attempt.

“Is there anything—”

“No,” Ryder said, cutting me off. “Just leave it alone.”

He stood the way he’d driven, his hands clenched, his shoulders braced defensively as if preparing for an attack. I let the issue go. I could try again after he’d had time to wind down.

It was a pleasant October temperature outside, but the penthouse was sweltering when we walked in, the afternoon sun blazing through the windows at full force. “The maid should have switched on the air conditioning,” Ryder muttered, fiddling with the control. He grabbed a bottle of beer out of the fridge and stalked to his bedroom.

I stood for a moment by the kitchen island, sweat beading on my skin.
I
felt wound up, as much as I had when the security guy had confronted me in the club the other night. Something was going on with Ryder—I could see that. Something more than fickle artistic temperament. Something I had to tackle before a Glower latched onto it as an opening. With any negative emotion—pain, anger, fear—they were eager to offer their services as a cure-all. And it’d seem like one up until they dug their claws right in.

But I couldn’t tackle Ryder’s problem until I understood what it was.

I paced the length of the living room a few times as the air conditioning edged back the heat. Through the sliding doors, the sparkling water in the pool caught my eye. I glanced at the hall, but it didn’t look as though Ryder planned to go anywhere any time soon.

In my bedroom, I quickly changed into the bathing suit I’d brought and swept my thick hair back into an elastic. Then I strode onto the terrace. The pool wasn’t deep enough to dive, so I settled for a loose cannonball. The whip of the air and the cool smack of the water brought a smile to my face. I broke to the surface and crossed the pool with a brisk front crawl.

After thirty laps, the tension in my muscles had dissolved into a satisfying ache. I lay back and floated for a while, watching spots of white cloud drift across the stark blue expanse of the sky as I drifted in the pool. The faint prickle of ocean salt in the breeze mingled with the chlorine tang.

When I finally got out, my fingers had pruned, and probably my toes too. I was walking across the rippled limestone tiles to the towel I’d draped on one of the lounge chairs when Ryder pushed aside the sliding door and stepped onto the threshold. He leaned against the steel frame of the doorway with an ease that suggested his mood had improved and gave me an obvious once-over. The path of his gaze traced a warm line down my body, dispelling the remaining chill of the water. The corner of his mouth curled up.

“That’s a suit for soccer moms,” he said. “Scared of showing some skin?”

The warmth turned into a flash of annoyance—and maybe a bit of embarrassment. I grabbed my towel, resisting the urge to wrap it around me to hide my body from his scrutiny. I thought the violet two-piece was about as flattering as any swimwear was going to get on my figure. The long lace-up top gave a little more substance to my chest and the boy shorts bottoms slimmed my hips, while leaving my better assets—legs, waist—bare. By any reckoning, I was more pear than hourglass... unless you counted my shoulders, which were the sort of broad that made strapless outfits completely inadvisable.

Just because I was aware of my limitations didn’t mean I was ashamed of them, though. Maybe my figure wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t a
bad
one either. I pressed the towel to my face and then draped it over my shoulders. “It’s comfortable,” I said, setting my hands on my hips. “I’m not here to show off.”

“That’s a shame.” Ryder tapped his lips with his thumb and then ambled up to me. He stopped just a foot away, close enough that my skin tingled with the awareness of his body. “It wouldn’t take much,” he said. “A couple of inches off here.” His thumbs skimmed in a semi-circle near the lower hem of the top, almost but not quite touching the fabric. If I’d exhaled deeply, he’d have grazed the underside of my breasts, but I’d started holding my breath the moment he’d reached for me. An image flickered through my mind: seeing him out here with the blonde that first day, his hand caressing
her
breast, his lips on her neck. More warmth flooded me.

Ryder’s hands dipped down to draw lines in the air beside my hips. “Another inch or two off here. You could turn some heads.”

Maybe, but that wasn’t the basis on which I bought my swimwear. And it occurred to me, as I fought to steady my suddenly racing heartbeat, that he didn’t really care about that either. He knew how easily
he
turned heads. He was counting on having an effect on me. This was nothing but another little power play.

I gathered up the warmth and the tingle and stuffed them behind the wall inside me. Normally I’d have shot off a snappy retort and walked away. But that satisfied smile and the playful quirk of Ryder’s eyebrows sent a different sort of impulse through me.

“You know,” I said, letting the impulse carry me, “I think you should be more concerned about what
you’re
wearing.”

He glanced down at his fitted T-shirt and jeans. “What’s wrong with them?”

I tugged my towel forward around my neck to make sure it wouldn’t fall when I moved. “Well,” I said, “they’re about to get soaked.”

As I said the last word, I set my hands against his chest—possibly enjoying the feel of the firm muscles beneath my fingers for just a second—and shoved.

Ryder had been standing right by the edge of the pool. He toppled into the water with a splash even more magnificent than I’d imagined. In its wake, he came up sputtering and swiping wet hair from his eyes. Then he started laughing, his amber eyes even brighter than usual as they caught mine. I found myself grinning back.

He launched himself at the side of the pool, sweeping his hand toward my ankle. I dodged him easily. Even as I laughed, my breath evened out and my heart quit its giddy beat. He was still a head-turner—even more than usual now, with that wet shirt clinging to those powerful arms as he pulled himself out of the water—but that didn’t concern me.

I patted the rest of myself down with my towel and then offered it to Ryder. He accepted it with a crooked smile. “That’s the least you owe me,” he said, but his eyes were still amused. As he ran the towel over his dripping hair, the twanging I recognized as his ringtone carried from inside the penthouse.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t have that in my pocket,” he said to me with a waggle of his finger and headed in. I lingered on the terrace a few minutes longer, leaning against the wall’s railing and staring toward the sea, until I was certain that every not entirely professional feeling in me had subsided.

When I stepped into the living room, Ryder was just hanging up. My heart sank. If after the recording session his expression had been stormy, now it held a full-out tsunami. He wiped his hand across his mouth with a jerky motion as if he’d eaten something bitter, not looking at me.

“Bad news?” I said cautiously.

“You could say that,” Ryder said. “My parents are going to be in town tomorrow. We’re having dinner.”

“How’d you end up at Rushfield when you didn’t live in L.A.?” I asked Ryder as we waited for the elevator the next evening. He’d told me yesterday, before holing up in his bedroom with door firmly closed, that his parents were coming from Sacramento, where he’d grown up.

He shrugged, the collar of his shirt bobbing beneath his freshly shaved jaw. A hint of his aftershave lingered in the air: piney with a touch of mint. He’d dressed up a little, a button-up shirt with thin silvery lines through its forest green fabric over his usual dark wash jeans, black monk straps instead of sneakers, shaggy hair slicked back from his eyes. He looked as fine as always—not that I had checked him out or anything—but I was pretty sure I liked the rumpled, casual Colin Ryder look better. Given the stiffness in Ryder’s posture, I suspected he did too.

“Everyone knows that Rushfield is one of the best schools for the arts,” he said. “And everyone knows L.A. is the best place to be if you want to get into show business. So I saved my pennies for a trip down here to audition and managed to get a scholarship ride.”

“And your parents didn’t mind you moving all the way across the state at fourteen?”

“Nah,” he said with a nonchalance that sounded forced. “I was driving them crazy in the house with all the guitar practice anyway. They’re happy as long as I make an appearance when they summon me.”

The elevator dinged, and the door opened. As we stepped in, Ryder peered at his reflection on the mirrored wall and frowned.

“So I guess they’re not much into the music scene themselves?” I ventured.