Series: Cobalt Empire Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 220
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
I’m staring Phoenix down.
He’s cutting me with his narrowed gaze.
Gage’s chair squeaks. “I’ll leave you two to it. Be back in ten.”
The door shuts. Phoenix bows forward on his stool. His flexed forearms on his legs, hands clasped together. His dark hair curls around his ears beneath a backward baseball cap. “What’s your deal?” he says tightly. I watch his attentive eyes rake up my body and land hard on my face.
I like when he crash-lands on me. I don’t like this feeling rampaging through my body, and I can’t tell where my tumultuous emotions are stemming from. It occurs to me that I might be in the midst of a tantrum, and the thought immediately shutters my nervous system. I am shutting down.
Dialed to zero.
“You better talk,” Phoenix demands with heat.
“Or what?” I blink. “You’ll rip the words out of me?” I’m about to add, go ahead and try, but the banter just scalds my throat. Nothing else leaves my lips.
Phoenix rubs his mouth, then pushes off the chair. “I’m not doing this with you today.” He’s on his feet.
It’s a slash across my chest. Surface wound. Heart still impenetrable. A knife can’t sink that deep in me. “Then don’t,” I say.
“I won’t.”
“Fine.”
“Great.” He leans stiffly against the glass window that separates the control room from the tracking room, and he threads his arms. Drumsticks poke out of a pocket in his black cargo pants. Tension carves his six-four, lean-muscled frame the longer I stay silent.
My lips are glued shut. My fists buried in my jean jacket. My pulse on a fast descent to where I almost feel faint.
Phoenix looks unnerved, as if my quiet disturbs and torments him with each passing millisecond. Then he asks, “What’d I do?” I notice the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows harder. “Tom.”
I wait for the ensuing insult, the trigger he loves to pull and aim at my bulletproof body, and I like when he tries to strike. So I’m more thrown when he doesn’t.
18
TOM COBALT
“Tell me. Please.” His growl sounds tortured and blistered in frustration. “What did I do?”
Everything about Phoenix is scalding hot, and it scares me just how much I like that too. Because he’s started to feel different. He’s started to feel like the one.
The one who will create legendary music with me.
The one who can put up with me.
The one who doesn’t want to pack up and toss in the towel.
The one who’d let the towel strangle him before he ever gave up.
It is gut-wrenching—thinking he’s just like everyone else. That maybe I am so impossible to work with, not even Jeremy’s other problem child could handle me.
I can’t pick up my feet. Can’t move. “I don’t know, dude,” I mutter.
“You do know. You came in here looking like I backed a Mac Truck over your Gibson.” He knows it’s my favorite guitar. “So what the fuck did I do?” He bows toward me, arms still crossed tensely, maintaining the death-grips of eye contact.
I intake a sharp, painful breath. “You’re trying to ice me out—”
“What?” His arms break apart like he needs to hold on to something, but the desk is to his right, not behind him. So he roots his hand to the back of his skull, then inhales slowly.
“Dude, I’ve been through this before. It’s not the first time someone scheduled a studio session early and told me to show up an hour late. Just so I couldn’t be involved in the arrangement because I’m too ‘uncooperative’—and that…” I work my jaw. “That was the last time I saw Warner.”
My old bassist. We formed The Carraways together.
The day Warner and I fought still feels like two hands wrapped around my windpipe. Like a boot thrust against my sternum. Like my back cemented to the hard earth.
I don’t want to go through that again.
Especially not with Phoenix.
He drops his hand with a deep exhale through his nose and a clenched jaw. The flame in his eyes never extinguishes. His intensity is strangling me because I’m more off-kilter than normal. More unbalanced. More…vulnerable.
Then he charges forward.
I flinch backward.
He rocks to a complete, excruciating stop only inches from me, and I can’t tell who’s battling to intake more breath, me or him. He’s unblinking, his nose flaring, as he says, “If I put my hands on you, it will never be to hurt you. You understand that?”
I feel that. “I didn’t think you were going to hit me.”
Phoenix’s deep, dark caring look barrels into my core. “Then why’d you raise your arm to block your face?”
Fuck.
I smear my hands over my face, then I inhale, exhale. “It’s not you.”
“What’d this Warner piece of shit do to you?” Phoenix asks tightly. “Other than be a little bitch and go behind your back?”
“I told you I’d tell you lat—”