No Place Like You Read online

  “Good,” Zach said. “We talked about starting work on the songs he’s producing.”

  The sting intensified. But she ignored it. “I’ll check the schedule. I’m sure there’ll be something we can squeeze in later next week. Faith was talking about looking for another weekend gig for Nessa and the guys.”

  “Thanks.”

  His smile almost made her feel better about the prospect of letting Eli take the reins on some songs. Almost. Her hand curled into a fist and she made herself relax.

  Zach, at least, didn’t seem to notice. “But you didn’t come here to talk shop. How was dinner? Did Sal and Caterina have a good time?”

  “They did.” She forced a smile. She wasn’t going to explain her evening to him. That was her own personal mess to deal with. She and Zach weren’t at the dealing-with-each-other’s-baggage stage. They were never going to be. “Dinner was great.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “Yet you’re back here with me?” His tone was almost … concerned. And she’d had enough concern for one night.

  “What can I say? It’s that sex god thing you’ve got going on.” She moved a little closer, toeing off her shoes. She’d come here to forget, not to talk. So she was going to have to move things along.

  “Can’t resist me, huh?” Zach said, eyes following the path of her hands as she toyed with the buttons at the front of her dress.

  “Something like that,” she said. “Want to remind me why?”

  chapter eleven

  Leah watched Eli and Zach laughing in the recording booth and tried not to grit her teeth. The two of them had been horsing around for nearly ten minutes, since Zach had finished his first run-through of “Air and Breath” and Eli had left the board, supposedly to talk to Zach about the setup. Instead they’d been trading inside jokes like a pair of fourteen-year-olds, leaving Leah twiddling her thumbs at the board, awaiting instructions.

  After the last week with Zach, knowing the producer’s seat was all hers, for some reason, sitting meekly at the soundboard now, waiting for Eli to call the shots, wasn’t sitting well.

  She leaned forward and pressed the intercom button. “You guys about ready? We only have two days here.” The studio was becoming busier in the lead-up to CloudFest. Every year some of the acts performing at the festival decided to try out the studio Blacklight had made famous. They’d come for a few days, then release a version of an old song—or a whole new song—recorded on the island to go with their appearance. She’d managed to block out chunks of time here and there in the schedule for her and Zach to keep working over the next six weeks or so, but this was going to be the longest continuous block they’d have for some time. And it was Eli who was getting to use it instead of her.

  Eli turned to face her. “Hang on a second,” he said, and then leaned in and said something to Zach too low for Leah to catch. Zach laughed in response and Eli turned back to face the booth window. “Okay, got it. I’m going to change the set up in here a little.” He started to reel off a list of gear he wanted.

  Leah’s jaw tightened again. Zach was using the same guitar he’d been using for the songs she’d worked on with him. The studio was perfectly set up for it.

  “Got that?” Eli said.

  “Yes.” She turned the intercom off. Neither Zach nor Eli had made any move to leave the booth. So apparently she was the one who was expected to go get all the stuff Eli wanted.

  Normally that wouldn’t bother her. After all, it was part of her job. But Zach and Eli both knew the Harper studio well. They’d spent chunks of their childhood here just as she had. They knew where the damn storage cabinets were.

  But they don’t know how everything is organized. She tried to push down her irritation as she walked into the gear room and started pulling things out of cabinets, working methodically. She might be irritated, but there was no point taking it out on expensive equipment. She lifted out the last mic and then made herself take three deep breaths, still feeling twitchy. Stupid, really. She’d known that Eli was going to be at the studio eventually. Zach hadn’t pretended otherwise. He’d told her from the beginning he still wanted Eli to work on a couple of songs. So why was it bugging her that today was the first of those days? After all, they were on the same team. Trying to make Zach’s album as good as it could possibly be.

  And she had no place getting possessive.

  The deep breaths didn’t help much, not even when she took three more and then stretched, taking a final three. Still didn’t help. She glared at the pile of gear as though it was the cause of all her troubles. Maybe that was it. She was just being territorial about the studio. After all, she and Zach had been working with the set up she’d worked out for almost a week now, and it was sounding great. But Eli, almost as soon as he walked through the door, had started wanting to change things. She didn’t know if he’d even heard what she and Zach had done. Maybe Zach had played him the tapes, but if he had, he hadn’t told Leah.

  Or maybe it was the way that Eli just kept asking her to do things for him, as though she was some little helper monkey at his beck and call. Not so easy to just slip back into the sound engineer role, perhaps. Not after a week of being producer.

  The sensible thing to do, of course, would be to march back in there and tell Eli, ever so politely, that he didn’t get to order her around. The guy was only a couple of years older than her after all. Sure he had a few more producing credits under his belt than she did. But she’d known him when he’d been a scruffy kid and then a scrawny pimply teenager. So he didn’t get to lord it over her.

  In fact, maybe she should just take an extended coffee break now. Let Lord Eli do some of the work. She got that he was used to having his orders obeyed. He traveled with Billy on the road, sometimes stepping in as tour manager, so he was used to being a boss. But this was her studio, and really this was partly her album too now, so Eli needed to give her some respect.

  She gathered the mics and other bits and pieces, carried them back into the booth, and shoved them into Eli’s hands. “Here, all yours.” She turned on her heel, and marched back out toward the kitchen. She was halfway through making a cup of coffee before it hit her that the thing that was really bugging her was that Zach wasn’t stepping in to call Eli on any of his bullshit.

  When they had been working alone, he’d been polite and considerate. Sure they had a few clashes about particular sections of the song, but that was part of the biz. But now, with Eli here, he seemed to have reverted into some weird dude-bro mode that set her teeth on edge.

  And while, yes, it was his album, and ultimately he got to call the shots about how things were done. That didn’t mean that she needed to take any crap. It was, after all, her studio. She knew what she was doing, and Zach bloody well knew it after the time they’d spent on his songs. As for Eli, well, she didn’t remember him having this kind of attitude before. Maybe he’d been running around the world with his dad a little too long.

  She poured milk into her coffee and looked around the small kitchen. Dammit. No doughnuts today. The least Zach could have done, if he was going to bring Eli full-of-himself Lawler to work with him, was replenish the doughnut supply. She opened a couple of cabinets, scrounging around to see what snacks might be lurking in their depths. She usually kept the kitchen fairly well stocked, but she had been pretty distracted with Zach lately and had forgotten to stop by the grocery store. Or even notice that supplies were running low. Apparently sex gods scrambled her brain.

  That thought only made her more annoyed, and she sped up her search. The only thing she could find was a half-empty packet of Oreos. She didn’t even like Oreos, but they were going to have to do.

  As she pulled the first cookie out of the package, Zach’s voice said, “Everything okay?”

  She turned and saw him standing in the doorway, one brow quirked. “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”

  “Well, for a start, you look at those Oreos
like you think they deserve complete obliteration.”

  “Maybe I just don’t like Oreos,” she said.

  “I know you don’t like Oreos, you never did. But still, it seems a little harsh to look at them as though they’ve killed a puppy.” He crossed the small room and lifted the Oreos, taking one for himself. “So, how about you tell me what’s bugging you?”

  “What’s bugging me is that Eli is talking to me like I’m a gopher, not the studio manager and his bloody coproducer,” she ground out. “And you’re just letting him.”

  Zach’s brows shot up. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “He just asked you to get some gear,” Zach said.

  “He could have come to help me.” She pitched the Oreo toward the garbage can in the corner of the kitchen. “So could you for that matter.”

  “Eli and I were talking about the songs.”

  “You can talk while carrying stuff.”

  He held up his hands. “Okay. Right. Sorry.” He studied her for a moment. “This is only for a couple of days. Just these two songs. Then it’s back to you and me. I’m not ditching you for him.”

  Was she being that obvious? Ugh. She really needed to suck it up. “I know,” she said. “Sorry, I’m just…” She wasn’t sure what to say, because she wasn’t sure exactly why she was so annoyed.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Zach said, “but I know this time of year is crazy here. You have a lot on your plate with CloudFest coming up and Nessa and everything. I could get another engineer in to work with Eli if you don’t have enough—”

  “No.” She cut him off. “No, I want to do this.” She didn’t want any more hands on the album than was strictly necessary. She took a breath. “You’re right. It’s busy. But I’m fine.” She might be fine if it were just the two of them. Then she could jump him and work off some of this bad mood. But with Eli hanging around, there would be no jumping Zach. Not unless she was ready for everyone to know about them. And that would be just another layer of pressure she didn’t want to deal with.

  “Two days,” Zach said. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder then reached out and tangled his hand briefly with hers. “Forty-eight hours. Or a bit less even. Time will fly.”

  * * *

  Time hadn’t flown. In fact she’d never felt two days move so slowly. It wasn’t the music. That had gone smoothly. Zach worked his magic with guitar and voice—and at least those moments hadn’t been a struggle. Eli knew what he was doing and, to her relief, what he was doing wasn’t a million miles from what she’d been doing with the other songs. One was a little more raucous, heavier, and electric, but it suited the song. The other, “Air and Breath,” fit right in with the style she’d established.

  So no, the music was fine and Eli had relaxed after the first couple of hours and stopped giving orders—which had made her think that maybe he was just as nervous as she had been—and the three of them had worked seamlessly after that. The parts that made the time drag were the parts where there were three of them. Where it wasn’t just her and Zach anymore, and she couldn’t touch him whenever she wanted. They’d recorded late into the night on Thursday—late enough that Zach had invited Eli to crash at the guesthouse rather than drive back to Billy’s place, which ruined any plans she’d had for her and Zach’s time. And now it was after two a.m. on Saturday, and Zach was just walking Eli to the door while she dawdled in the studio, tidying up a little.

  They’d finished recording close to midnight after so many takes of “Air and Breath,” a song about how the singer wanted a girl like oxygen that was so stupidly sexy when Zach sang it that she’d been ready to crawl out of her skin with need. Eli, instead of going home like a sensible person, had sat around as he and Zach tossed around ideas for Zach’s backing band for CloudFest and drank a couple of beers. Leah had joined in the conversation at first but then had started to reset the recording booth, hoping Eli might take the hint and leave.

  It had taken two hours for him to get the idea. And now she was trying not to pace with impatience as she waited for Zach to come back in. He’d gone outside with Eli to wait for his cab almost ten minutes ago.

  She’d tidied away everything that could possibly be tidied away. Well, almost everything. She’d leave Zach’s guitars for him. She opened the piano, sat down on the bench, and started playing the melody from “Air and Breath” softly, checking the sound. The studio pianos were due to be tuned next week, something she arranged maybe more often than necessary, but the sea air was hard on them. This one, her favorite, still sounded sweet, the notes ringing true under her fingers.

  She caught a glimpse of headlight reflection through one of the windows and took her hands off the keys. The last thing she needed was for Zach to come in and find her playing. Playing for Faith was one thing, as was sitting down at the piano to demonstrate how she thought something might go, but her skills were just that—skills. Not the kind of talent that Zach and Faith had that turned their music into that something more that stopped people in their tracks and made them pay attention.

  As Zach came back into the studio, she was closing the door to the booth behind her.

  “All set?”

  “I left the guitars for you,” she said. “Didn’t want to mess with your babies.”

  “I trust you,” he said with an easy smile that turned into a yawn.

  “Yeah, but does your insurance company?”

  “If I put them away, can we get out of here? Back to my place?” Zach said, suddenly sounding more awake.

  Nice to know she wasn’t the only one who’d been suffering. She smiled at him. “I was counting on it.” She tipped her chin toward the door. “Go pack up your stuff.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Zach said. He headed into the booth, humming just loud enough to be heard. It wasn’t a melody Leah recognized—a new song maybe?—and she hit the record button on the board, in case Zach might want to remember it, then went to take the empty beer bottles and dirty coffee mugs to the kitchen.

  When she came back, Zach was still in the booth, sitting on the stool, guitar in hand, picking out a series of chords, face intent as he watched his fingers

  “You’re hopeless,” Leah said from the doorway.

  Zach looked up, those long tanned fingers stilling. Which only made her wish they were touching her, not the guitar.

  “Just passing time. You could come over here and distract me,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?” It was tempting. He was tired and rumpled and kind of irresistible. Especially when she hadn’t had her hands on that body for over forty-eight hours. She reached out an arm and hit the button to kill the recording without looking.

  “Yeah,” he said. He put the guitar down and crooked a finger at her. Her legs moved of their own volition, crossing the width of floor between them before she knew what she was doing.

  Zach rose to meet her, his hands catching her waist as she reached him, pulling her tight against him. He groaned, a satisfied kind of sound that caught her in all the right places.

  “God,” he said fervently. “This has been a long two days.”

  “Very,” she agreed, pushing her hips against him.

  “Want to fool around?” Zach said, hand sliding down to her butt.

  More than anything. But this was the studio.

  “I locked the door,” he added. “It’s late. No one’s coming to check on us at this hour.” He lowered his head to her neck, pressing his lips to the place where he had to be able to feel the thud of her pulse—which was racing way too fast now that she was close to him again.

  “I—” It was hard to remember why the studio was a bad idea. He was right. It was the middle of the night. No one was coming anywhere near the place. And right now, the guesthouse seemed way too far way. “We shouldn’t,” she said, but she knew it was only a token protest as heat spread through her.

  “I disagree,” Zach said. He pushed his hips into her, and the feel of him, hot and hard behind his jeans,
was hard to argue with.

  “Oh, what the hell,” she said and pulled him down to the floor.

  * * *

  It was nearly midday Saturday before Leah made it back to the studio. She hadn’t had enough sleep but she didn’t mind. She’d dragged Zach back to the guesthouse after their initial round in the studio. His bed was far more comfortable than carpet, and great sex was worth a little missed sleep. Hopefully it wasn’t going to take her long to get things set up for Sienna Reese, who was arriving on Sunday. Then she could sneak in a nap this afternoon.

  But when she scanned herself in, the lights were already on.

  “Hello?” she called.

  “In here,” Faith yelled back. It sounded like she was in the main studio.

  Leah tried to summon an I’m-wide-awake-from-plenty-of-sleep-all-alone-in-my-bed face as she headed in that direction. “What are you doing here? Checking up on Nessa’s stuff?” she asked as she reached the studio and found Faith sitting at the board. “Did you find the recordings okay?”

  Faith knew her way around the studio nearly as well as Leah. She couldn’t work the soundboard with the same skill but she knew how to play back a session.

  “Actually, I was snooping on Zach,” Faith said. “He won’t tell me anything about how it’s going.”

  “Maybe that’s because he thinks you’re still mad at him.”

  Faith’s nose wrinkled. “I’m not mad. But that doesn’t mean he’s forgiven. He has ground to make up.”

  “Tough crowd, huh?”

  “Well, you know Zach—give him an inch and he’ll take a mile.”

  “He’s not that bad,” Leah said, then cursed herself mentally. Defending Zach to Faith wasn’t going to make the situation any better. She smiled at Faith, aiming for happy and innocent. “Did you find his tapes?”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Yeah, he has been a bit protective of them. Wanted to keep them on his own hard drive.” It wasn’t entirely unusual. They were just laying down acoustic guitar after all and Zach’s vocals, which they’d probably do again when they got time with the full band. Once Zach decided who he wanted to use as his band. And whether or he wanted to go analog for some of the album. Until then, he wanted to keep everything under wraps, so she’d been happy for him to copy the recordings once he’d assured her he had a decent backup service.