Read Online Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols - Free Book Online

my trials with these bands were a test to prove I wasn’t worthy—as if I didn’t know this already. Now, here was the final task. I was being given the chance to do the one thing I wanted most in the world: play. The chance was presented to me by a guy so gorgeous, my skin turned to fire when he touched me. And joining a band was the thing I was most forbidden to do, the thing that would ruin my future.
    Sam was still talking. “I thought so when you were dressed like 1956. But now that I’ve seen you for real . . .”
    I walked past him, over the curb and around the tree to the parking lot on the other side, hoping he wouldn’t see how my face had fallen. He hadn’t seen me for real. He never would. That me was gone. Who was the real me anymore, anyway? Had I ever existed?
    All of which was unbearably self-centered. I couldn’t seem to stop focusing on myself these days, and frankly I made myself sick. “What are you saying I look like?” I shot back at him over my shoulder. It came out more bitter than I intended or he deserved.
    “Like you belong with us. Some of the bars on Broadway are really friendly to new bands. At least, it seems that way at first. They have a reputation for hosting the hottest new acts in Nashville, and record company execs wander in and discover bands that way. These bars will let anybody upload an audition video. But I did that last month. They said our sound was there but we needed something extra to bring people in. You are that extra.”
    I turned to face him, leaning against my car and letting the sun-heated metal warm my back through my shirt. The car was a small secondhand Honda that I should have been grateful my parents had bought me. It didn’t compare with the red Porsche Julie had earned, which was sitting in the garage at my parents’ house, hardly ever driven, waiting for her to come home.
    Out with it. It was a simple admission, but every word felt like a knife in my mouth as I said, “I can’t join a band right now.”
    Stopping a few paces across the asphalt from me, he watched me for a moment and narrowed his eyes, as if he could read in my expression how loaded that statement was. How badly I wanted to join his band and play funky Michael Jackson covers on my fiddle, and how important it was to my future that I walk away.
    Nodding, he said carefully, “Sure, you don’t want to commit when you haven’t played with us yet. Come try us out tonight, just this once.”
    I couldn’t. But despite myself, I pictured it for a moment: a night out with this adorable guy, who had reined in his enthusiasm to avoid scaring me off, but whose intense, dark eyes still gave away how desperate he was for this. I winced as I repeated, “I can’t.”
    “You can use our amp,” he said. “Do you have an electric pickup? I can scrounge you up one if you don’t.”
    “I have one.” The equipment to amplify my fiddle had been coiled in my case for the past year, waiting for the son of a Johnny Cash impersonator to sweep me off my feet.
    “Then what’s the prob? Please, Bailey.” He moved forward and put his hand on mine—this time on the hand holding my fiddle case. “I really want to play with you again.”
    If he heard his own double entendre, implying that he might play with me in more ways than one, he didn’t acknowledge it. Hishand rested lightly on mine, putting no pressure on me, holding back the pressure to come.
    I felt myself relax, reluctantly, under his touch. I knew this gig was going to get me in trouble, and I was fully aware of the exact moment I started rationalizing that maybe it wouldn’t. My parents didn’t want me to play in public, yet my granddad had gotten me the mall job. He would let me play with Sam, too, just for fun, just this once.
    Now that I’d decided to take this step, suddenly I realized I might not be able to after all. I let out a frustrated sigh. “What time is the gig? I have to make a phone call around ten.”
    I figured he