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 clutching his waist, my palm slips against his muscled back, and my pulse tries to accelerate as our chests remain welded.
Phoenix pinches my chin. My eyes snap onto his intense gaze, and he says, “He better never meet me.”
My smile edges higher. “What are you going to do?”
“Hit him.”
“You’ll have to get behind my brother. He’s decreed Lex talionis ever since he heard.” Off Phoenix’s confusion, I add, “It means an eye for an eye in Latin.”
“Which brother?”
“Eliot.”
“I already like him,” he states so simply, as if that’s not the best news of the day. Because there is no realm where I could be with someone who’d hate Eliot. It would be a death knell to this partnership. I know it’s why I haven’t brought Phoenix around him yet. Because if I really wanted to, I could’ve found a way.
His eyes graze my mouth again, and I’m the first to step out of his strong embrace because it’s starting to feel like too much. Heat is buried in my chest as I tear away from him.
I go to the mixing table and mentally repeat, He’s just your drummer. He’s just your drummer. The strain in my muscles isn’t helping me back to reality. It’s just a blistering reminder that I am ridiculously attracted to Phoenix.
I sit on the leather stool and spin toward him. “So you weren’t meeting with Gage behind my back then?”
“No.” He takes off his hat and frisbees it onto the nearby couch. “I walked in maybe five minutes before you.”
I can’t watch him rake both hands through his hair. I need to focus on the music, not the thought of him in any position other than behind a drum kit. Whirling around to the monitors, I grab the mouse on the pad.
I’ve worked with a sound engineer and mixer in the past, but I found out Phoenix took college courses related to both and spent a lot of time using the software on his own. He’s just as good as they were, but it’s better with him. He hasn’t made me feel guilty for requesting tweaks, and he’s willing to hear me out just to understand my vision.
We’re not financing this album ourselves, so the label has the right to tell us no and assign us a mixer of their choice.
But we’ve both fought to have ultimate creative control, which means doing whatever we can ourselves. After many, many email threads and a few phone calls, Riot Records relented here and there.
They’re letting Phoenix mix the record. It was a huge win for us.
Though seeing him yawn into his fist, I wonder if maybe it’d been a mistake on some level. “For your information, I could’ve pulled an all-nighter with you,” I tell him while I scroll through his mixes. “It wouldn’t be my first.”
“Did it occur to you that I didn’t want my singer sounding like he choked on a frog when recording backing vocals today?”
His singer. Get used to that, Tom Carraway. “My voice sounds flawless no matter the hour.”
“I see your ego never left the building,” he says in annoyance, standing behind me but a little to the right. Then he bends forward to peer at the monitor in front of us. He puts his hand on mine, moving the mouse for me, and he might as well have just incinerated me. The strength of his callused palm on top of my hand is striking match after match against my neck, my face—every inch of tender skin.
“If you keep breathing like that, Tom, I’m going to get hard. Stop.” His angered voice is a forceful stroke against my cock.
Fuck. “I’m breathing normally,” I defend. “And I’m just sitting here, Phoenix. You’re the one holding my hand.”
He lets go—no, actually, he doesn’t just let go. He pries my hand off the mouse and takes over. He clicks into the third track. “Start with this one.”
I try to relax. “That’s the one with extra reverb?”
He turns his head just slightly, and our lips are one perilous inch away. “You listened to it already?”
I think I say, yeah. I want to add how I listened to all of them the minute he sent the link, but I’m not breathing. I feel delirious.
Phoenix is rigid. He’s stopped moving for once. Until he wets his lips, then he faces forward and backs away from me like I’m a bomb. “Fuck,” he mutters.
I peek backward, just to see him palm the erection bearing against his pants. Damn.
His eyes knife me. “Shut the fuck up.”
I’m smirking. “That’s what you get for closing in on me. Keep your distance if you don’t want a raging hard-on.”
“Don’t act like you didn’t want me there.”
I flip him off, about to press play on Track Three when the door whips open and both Jeremy and Gage enter the booth.