Blame It on the Bass (3 page)

A woman who wore her snug denim jeans, thigh-high black boots and black satin corset like she meant it.

Levi blinked, his stare fixed on the woman on the stage.

Holy shit, she was his high school girlfriend.

Chapter Two

Sonja Stone was a fan of old-school hard-rock power ballads. The kind that made you throw back your head and belt out the lyrics in spectacular fashion. The kind that made you pour your every damn emotion into those sung words. The kind that never went out of fashion, no matter what the DJs tried to say.

Old-school rock sung by sexy-arsed rockers. Rockers, not kids in skinny jeans and pastels. Rockers. Men. The kind whose balls had dropped years ago. The kind that sang about love and sex because they’d actually experienced it. None of these pubescent boy bands who wouldn’t know what real heartache was if it bit them in the arse. None of these volatile rappers who sang about beating women and shooting cops. Rockers who sang rock music.
Real
music.

Of course, this taste in music had nothing to do with the fact she’d dated a bass player for the last few years of her high school life, a bass player who’d gone on to become one of the best in the world. Her love of rock had started long before then. Her twenty-two-month turbulent relationship with Levi Levistan had just kind of…cemented it, that was all.

It wasn’t like she pined for him. Not really. And the reason she always selected Nick Blackthorne songs when she hit the karaoke bars had nothing to do with the amazing bass line throbbing through them and everything to do with the fact Nick Blackthorne’s music was incredible rock full of raw simmering emotions on a volcanic-eruption scale.

Which was handy, given the only time she did do karaoke was when she needed to blow off some serious steam. Like she did tonight. Holy fuck, she wanted to kill her boss.

Big time.

So instead of running the risk of spending the rest of her natural life behind bars, she’d stormed out of her office at Hot Nights Publications, Australia’s most successful publisher of scorching-hot erotic romance, gone home, donned her karaoke gear and made her way to her new favourite singing haunt, Do Re Me.

Which was where she was now, singing a Nick Blackthorne song—her fourth of the evening—singing away all the frustration of having her git of a boss tell her the only way he’d offer a contract to the amazing submission she’d read that day was if she submitted to him. In the bedroom.

God, he was never ever going to let her forget that one stupid office Christmas party where she’d had one drink too many and let him kiss her under the mistletoe. With tongue. Urgh.

Following the words of “Glass Houses” on the large screen behind her, she began the chorus. Damn, she loved this song. Loved belting it out, uncaring of what the rest of the bar’s crowd thought of her voice—which wasn’t too bad. Loved the meaning behind the song—trust is hard to repair when shattered by hypocrisy and communication is vital in any relationship. How many boyfriends in her past had broken her heart because they went berserk when she checked out another guy nearby, or commented on a bicycle rider’s lycra-clad butt as he rode past them, even though said boyfriend was constantly eyeing out other women?

The chorus swung into the last verse and, closing her eyes, Sonja pulled out all stops. The last verse was the most powerful, a wretched pleading for understanding when all love was lost.

She didn’t need to watch the lyrics change colour on the screen to know what to sing. She knew the words to this song off by heart.

Knew them. Lived them.

And as always, when she sang her whole body thrummed with an elemental charge. It was the closest she ever got to arousal these days. Too many men had left her wanting. Only singing good rock seemed to do it for her now. When she finished this song, she’d hurry home, fire up her vibrator and bring herself to orgasm. Two if she was lucky.

The words of the song tore from her throat, slid over her tongue. She gripped the mic, moved in time to the music, pressed her thighs together and lost herself to the moment. Fuck, that was an incredible bass riff, right there. Levi Levistan had
always
known how to give a song a throbbing vein.

When the last of the music faded away, the bar broke into raucous applause. Sonja opened her eyes, grinned at her audience and flipped out a cheeky curtsey. The karaoke crowd in Sydney was a tightknit community who supported each other’s escape in singing. Sonja was one of their own and their response to her rendition of “Glass Houses” added to the carnal ache in the pit of her belly.

Awesome rock, an appreciative crowd and quality sound. Sonja’s idea of—

A man stepped up to the stage, trim beard, blue-lens sunglasses and a baseball cap doing nothing to hide who he was. “Care to do a duet with me?” he asked, smiling up at her.

“Holy fuck.” The expletive fell from Sonja louder than she’d intended, caught by the mic and amplified around the bar.

Levi Levistan chuckled. “I’m pretty certain those were the same words you said to me the last time we spoke.”

Sonja stared down at him. Words refused to form in her mind.

“When you dumped me?” he offered with a smile. “The night before the year-twelve formal?”

As if she could forget. She’d cried for close to a week after she’d walked away from him and spent the time she
wasn’t
crying taking it out on her mum, her dad, her brothers, her best friend. Almost two years of on-again-off-again dating, the hottest sex she’d ever had—ever—combined with the most conflicted arguing about damn near everything, and finally she’d had enough. Levi was every girl at school’s fantasy, quite a few of the teachers’ as well, going by the looks they gave him when they didn’t think anyone was watching, but she couldn’t take not knowing what was in his head or his heart any more. She’d called it quits the night before he was to graduate and all he’d done was clench his jaw and give her a silent nod.

A nod.

She’d shoved his chest with all the strength in her body and demanded he show her
some
kind of emotion. When he hadn’t, when he’d just looked at her with those dark, dark eyes of his, she’d thrown up her hands, cursed at him and stormed away.

Relationship over. For good.

And now here he was. Looking at her once more, blue lenses not even close to diminishing the impact of his direct dark gaze.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Who is it, Sonja?”

The shout from the shadows of the bar jerked Sonja’s stare up from Levi.

“No one,” she shouted back, shielding her eyes with a steady hand from the bright lights illuminating the stage. “Old boyfriend, is all.”

“Is all?” Levi’s humoured echo of her dismal drew her attention down to him again. Lips twitching, he cocked an eyebrow. “Is all?”

Sonja nodded. “Is—”

“Shit, that’s Levi Levistan!” The instant the stunned shout filled the bar, a scowl fell over Levi’s face. He tensed. His jaw bunched and his nostrils flared.

Sonja remembered how much he’d hated being the focus of attention back at high school. She’d often suspected that was why he’d become a bass player rather than lead guitarist, why he’d let Billy Collins be the front man of the garage band the two of them formed at sixteen. As a rebellious, pimply fourteen-year-old girl with tissues in her bra—oh, the naive innocence of youth, believing bigger boobs would solve all her problems—it had puzzled her why such an amazing guitarist who looked so fucking hot hung behind a lesser performer. And then, a year later, she’d met his parents and understood.

Well, as much as a young teenage girl with a happy family life could. It would take another ten years or so for her to fully appreciate what living with such passive-aggressive criticism did to a person’s psyche, why he’d never been capable of truly opening up to her. By then Levi Levistan was Nick Blackthorne’s famous bass player, dating models and actresses and other performers, and Sonja was a broke university student looking for any kind of job to pay back the debt her degree in English Lit had accrued.

“Levi Levistan?” a different voice called from the other side of the bar. “Really?”

“Is that really Levi Levistan?”

“That’s Levi Levistan, right? The guy that just won an Oscar for that DiCaprio movie?”

“Levi Levistan?”

“Who’s Levi Levistan?”

“Do you really think it’s Levi Levistan? Wanna get his autograph?”

“Quick, get a photo!”

“Reckon I should kiss him?”

“Are you sure it’s Levistan?”

The excited whispers in the bar grew to a rumble louder than a chorus in less than a heartbeat. A flash fired somewhere nearby. So did another one. The tension in Levi’s body grew absolute. Sonja stared down at him, remembering the ache in her chest she’d experienced at the breakup. Remembering the explosive rapture of their sex, his kisses. Remembering the way he used to make her come, over and over again, with the mastery of his hands, his tongue.

She let out a wobbly breath, extended her right hand to him and grimaced. She was going to regret this. She could tell right now. “Come up here and sing with me, Stan,” she murmured, using the name she’d called him throughout their entire relationship.

He gazed up at her, gratitude and relief pulling at the discomfort in his face. He wrapped his fingers around hers and, as it had the very first time he took her hand in his, in the school yard during lunch when she’d been fifteen and he’d just turned seventeen, her pussy constricted and throbbed with instant, impatient need.

Sonja scowled. God, she really was going to be giving her vibrator a workout when she got home from this.

Without a word to Levi, she gave his hand a sharp tug.

He vaulted up onto the stage with minimal fuss, his movements fluid and far too sexy for Sonja’s peace of mind. Straightening beside her, he brushed down the fronts of his thighs with two slow swipes, his dark eyes never releasing hers.

“Old boyfriend, is all?” he repeated on a whisper, teasing her earlier dismal.

Sonja let her lips curl into a mocking smile. “You’re lucky I even remember you.”

He grinned, plucked the mic from her left hand and tugged her closer to his body. “Levi—” his voice caressed her wildly unstable lust, “—Levi Levistan. I think we dated once, right?”

Before she could answer, he twisted a look over his shoulder toward the karaoke MC standing openmouthed at the control deck on the side of the stage. “Anything by Nick Blackthorne?”

The MC’s head bobbed up and down. Fast. Frenzied almost.

Levi swung back to face Sonja. “Ready?”

She shook her head.

He laughed. And right there and then Sonja knew he was going to break her heart again. It might very well happen the second their duet finished and he went back to his famous life. It might happen before the sun rose if she was lucky enough to buy him a drink. But at some point, she was going to be crying over him again. Because Levi Levistan had never been one for laughing often, or aloud. When he did, when he
truly
gave himself to the happy response, his laugh was aural Viagra.

Long before she’d fallen in love with his sexual prowess or his musical talent, she’d fallen in love with his laugh.

The very laugh he was giving her now.

Sonja closed her eyes, ground her teeth and, with the same sense of fatality she’d existed in every day of their teenage romance, threw herself into the moment.

Fighting what she’d felt for Levi was never, ever an option.

Opening her eyes, she fixed him with a steady gaze. “All right, let’s—”

The music for Nick Blackthorne’s “Whispers in the Night” began before she could finish. And before she could steal herself against what was to come, prepare herself, shield herself, Levi opened his mouth and began to sing.

Her knees buckled. They always had when he’d sung back in their dating days. His voice was husky and a little scratchy, like he was always recovering from a sore throat. But damn, when it flowed from him in song that rough quality gave the words a rawness unlike any other.

Like most bass players, he rarely sang solo. It was a fucking shame, in Sonja’s opinion. She knew why it was the case—Levi wanted it that way—but the rock world needed to hear more of his voice. She wasn’t just being biased. That was the way it was.

A soft nudge in her ribs made her blink.

Levi grinned at her, mirth dancing in his eyes, music throbbing about them in a tempestuous beat. Music. Just music.

Heat flooded Sonja’s cheeks as the realization she’d yet to sing a note slammed into her. Jerking her mic up to her mouth, she opened her lips and damn near spat out the lyrics…from two lines ago.

Levi laughed incredulously while singing the
correct
lyrics, making the words sound far more devilish than Sonja suspected Nick Blackthorne had ever intended.

The audience laughed along with him and by the next line, also sung with jovial perfection by Levi, Sonja finally caught up and joined in, losing herself to the music. And Levi’s company. When compared to being with Levi, rock didn’t stand a chance.

Oh yeah, you’re about to get your heart broken again, aren’t you, woman?