One More Time - Ali Parker Page 0,9
to at night.
The night she was attacked, for instance. That night, he couldn’t have been further away from the cocky rock God who was starting to take questions from the crowd with his usual swagger. A deranged fan of his had accused him months ago of having fathered her child. Alicia figured out that the woman was lying and that it wasn’t the first time she’d made up a story like it, uncovering her true identity. Turned out, she hadn’t even been pregnant.
The fan in question, Madison whose real name was Jenny Green, refused to believe that Jared not only didn’t father her non-existent child, but also that he didn’t want to be with her. She believed that Jared was her soulmate and that Alicia was standing in the way of all that, so she tried to kill my sister.
I still shuddered to think about it, and the very memory had me back to paying attention to Jared, sending him silent mental thanks. He hadn’t let Alicia out of his sight for weeks after it happened, taking her on vacation and eventually practically moving her in with him until the woman was apprehended and arrested. Alicia hadn’t been happy about that at the time.
Of course, she’d never moved out again, so there was that. But my sister had never been happier, and though I knew most of the crowd didn’t know them well enough to see, I noticed all the little looks Jared shot Alicia’s way and her tiny smile when he hit the nail on the head with a question he was asked.
I wondered if Caleb also had a Real Caleb side that he was hiding from the world, or whether only one Larsen brother was part human, part persona. If it was a persona on Caleb’s part, it was a damn good one.
The man hadn’t cracked a smile since they’d walked in, hadn’t answered one question and looked slightly… bored? Or maybe it wasn’t boredom. It kind of looked like he was lost in thought, like he’d checked out of the press conference completely.
“This tour is going to totally insane, sick, off the charts,” Jared was promising when I turned my attention back to him. “Does that answer your question?”
A reporter to my left, a young girl with doe eyes who was fluttering her eyelashes at Jared, nodded and flashed him a smile. I glanced at Alicia to see if she’d noticed the flirtatious glances this woman was sending her fiancé, and sure enough, there Alicia was, glaring daggers at her.
To his credit, Jared didn’t look twice at the reporter, scanning the room and nodding at a beefy man on the other side of the room to indicate that he would take his question.
Maybe he wasn’t as oblivious to the girl as I’d first thought. His next choice of reporter certainly seemed to be bid to appease Alicia and perhaps get a breather from being hit on. The man cleared his throat loudly and checked the notes he’d made in a grease-smeared notebook.
“Thank you for taking my question, Mr. Larsen.” Jared looked amused at being referred to so formally while the man tugged at his collar and rechecked his notes. “Is there any song on this new album that means more to you than the others, and if so, which one and why?”
I barely suppressed a loud groan. I may not have been working at GNM for a long time yet, but I knew my editor would throttle me for asking such a boring question. Those were the kinds of questions asked in radio interviews or the written ones that you submitted for answers.
When you had the band right there in front of you with no holds barred, live access, you had to go for the questions that warranted seeing their reactions as you asked them. Jared lifted a dark brow, the corners of his lips pressing together in a way that told me he was as surprised by the meek question as I was and about to have some fun with it.
“As you know, Mr.—” Jared quickly looked to Alicia, who mouthed Barry. “Mr. Barry, I’ve always said that I write music from my soul. When there’s something inside that wants out, I grab a pen and a piece of paper and let it out. It was no different with this album.”
And there was Jared’s particular brand of media-trained superstar fun. The non-answer, said in such a way that it made you feel like he’d truly bared