Taking On The Billionaire (Redhawk Reunion #1) - Robin Covington Page 0,16

and there’s a table up front for our guests.”

Tess gripped his arm, tugging him back to get a little more info. “Whose guests? Who are those people?”

Adam grinned, his smile contagious and de-aging him about a decade. Tess caught her breath, grateful to have saved this revelation for now, this time and this place. He was so damn cute, sexy, so excessively fuckable. Agreeing to indulge in this thing between them was looking like one of the best mistakes she ever made. Now she only wondered how long this gig would go before she and Adam could get back to one of their places and a horizontal surface.

“It’s my band, The Double E’s!”

“Your what?”

“My band.” He winked at her. “Didn’t you ever wonder why I have drumsticks all over my office?”

Tess had wondered but had figured that they were his version of those fidget widgets, something for him to mess with as he let his mind solve all the problems at Redhawk/Ling. And even though she’d purposefully left some things in his life unrevealed, once again Adam Redhawk had surprised her more than she’d considered possible. The drumsticks constantly lying around in his office weren’t props.

It looked like Adam Redhawk was a secret rock star. Sweet Lord, this was a sexy tidbit she really didn’t need to know.

“Why the Double E’s?” she asked, tugging on his arm as he moved to head to the stage.

“We started playing together at Stanford. It seemed like a good name for a bunch of electrical engineering majors.”

She watched him stride across the room with palpable excitement, and up onto the stage where he traded high fives and back slaps with the very-average-looking-not-a-rock-star-among-them group. They looked like a group of electrical engineers. Engineers who played in a rock band the second Tuesday of every month.

Adam eased behind the drum kit, reaching down to grab a set of sticks and twirling them between his fingers. Tess laughed, startled by the tap on her shoulder.

“I knew I should have bet on it.” Justin Ling was smiling, waggling his eyebrows up and down like the idiot he pretended he was. “I would have cleaned up.”

Tess wasn’t fooled by his usual court jester act but she was thirsty. “I have no idea what that means but I know you don’t need the money from that bet to buy me a drink.”

“True enough. But let me get one for you. I’m just going to put it on Adam’s tab anyway,” Justin answered with a grin, motioning for her to follow him over to the bar. He was slim, tall with an athletic build and possessed a presence that made the crowd part like the Red Sea. Once more she was thrown by the difference between Adam and Justin: one made every effort to fade into the shadows and the other was disappointed if the spotlight wasn’t bright enough.

It was starting to get crowded; what looked like students piling in to fill the bar, all yelling drink orders and staking out claims to tables. It wasn’t a dive but it wasn’t a trendy Silicon Valley bar either. This had more of a local vibe; a neighborhood place where regular people came to meet friends and hook up. And from the snippets of conversations she was picking up, they were excited to see the band.

Justin traded high-fives with the bartender and shouted their order, only waiting a minute to have their drinks served. He grabbed the two bottles, nodding toward a table in front of the stage marked with a reserved sign on it. They settled on the stools, both taking sips of their beer as they watched the band warm up.

“Thanks for the drink.” Tess saluted Justin across the table. “Now tell me more about this bet you didn’t take.”

He waggled his finger at her. “I’m not sure I should tell you. That might be breaking the ‘wingman code.’”

“What the hell is the ‘wingman code’?” Tess asked, glancing over when the band started a short sound check. “They aren’t bad.”

Justin threw a look over his shoulder at them and shrugged. “They don’t suck.”

“And you’re his best friend? High praise.” Tess poked him in the arm to get his attention back to answering her question. “What is the ‘wingman code’?”

“It means that I shouldn’t tell you that I almost bet Adam that he would eventually bring you here. You see, if I told you that I told him he was interested in you as more than an independent contractor and that I