One More Time - Ali Parker Page 0,15

of reaching the level of success that Destitute has. And you get to do it alongside your brother and some of your best friends. How does that feel?”

“How does that feel?” He arched a pierced brow at me, the silver bar catching in the light and throwing prisms onto the wall beside us. “You seriously asking me that?”

“I am. How does it feel to be doing all of this with your brother and your friends?” This was the start of my edgier questions, and I could tell that Caleb sensed there was something coming his way. His eyes narrowed, his hands fisting where he’d tucked them into his elbows, and the angle that he held his head at shifted.

“It feels great. Better than doing it with a bunch of strangers, I guess.” He was definitely being cautious now. It was time to start springing the real questions on him, the ones this interview was about.

Caleb had agreed to playing up this angle, of course. So he must’ve been prepared for it. Or so I would’ve thought.

“If you’d been doing it with a bunch of strangers though, you wouldn’t always be in your brother’s shadow.” He clearly hadn’t been prepared for that.

Caleb paled, and his jaw clenched tight. Something sparked in his eyes, and his demeanor turned to stone. “I’m not in anybody’s shadow. Jared and I do different things in the band. It doesn’t work that way.”

His words were spoken in a low, scathing voice, and his tone was clipped. I was a little taken aback by his reaction because it didn’t look like he was playing an angle. His open hostility made it look like this was the way he really felt about Jared and his position in the band.

If this was him acting up an angle, he should’ve pursued a career in acting, not in music—and he was fucking great at music. Deciding it was time to ease up some on the throttle, I backed off a bit and tried to dig deeper into who he was as a person, instead of risking getting shut down straight off the bat with that line of questioning.

“That’s true. You two are both masters at your own game. Moving away from the band for a sec, let’s talk about you. Caleb Larsen. You’re young—”

“Not that young anymore,” he interjected. The corners of his mouth lifted into a ghost of a smile. It was a rare moment of levity that I had not experienced with Caleb as of yet. Strangely, it suited him.

I smiled what I hoped was a winning smile and continued. “You’re only twenty-seven. I think most of our readers would agree that’s relatively young. So okay, you’re young, successful, not bad looking. You must have scores of women chasing after you, yet you’re notoriously quiet when it comes to your romantic history. Tell me something about it, your past romances.”

“I’m not quiet about it. There’s just nothing to say. I don’t have a romantic history. I have fuck history.” His eyes grew darker, and he uncrossed his arms, leaning forward slightly as he said it. I caught a whiff of his scent as he rolled his chair just a little closer to mine.

Soap, the kind in the men’s section, and undertones of another masculine scent I couldn’t place pervaded my senses. It was heavenly, though I had a feeling this guy was no angel.

If any other man had told me that he had a “fuck history” instead of a romantic one, I would’ve been ticked off as hell, but it was different with Caleb. The way he said it was like it was a foregone conclusion or a fact of life that he had no control over.

For some reason, everything about him, from the way he smelled to the way he was looking at me, carefully watching me react to what he had said, wasn’t annoying. It was turning me on. Big time.

There was something about this moody bad boy that was drawing me in, something magnetic that I couldn’t quite ignore. I didn’t know what it was, and I wouldn’t have known how to describe it even if I did, but it was there as tangibly and definitely as the table we were sitting at. Since this was my first time alone with him, I’d never noticed it this intensely before, but I was definitely more than crushing on Caleb Larsen.

I shifted in my seat, trying to draw my attention away from the dull ache starting up between