: Lily Clements
: Kiss Me Louder A Rockstar Surprise Pregnancy Romance
: Publishdrive
: 9798905166181
: 1
: CHF 3.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 400
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Three weeks embedded on his tour. Eight months later, she's keeping his secret.


June Ashby has been a music journalist for six years. She has covered eight bands on the road. She has never broken her one rule—don't get involved with the subject— and she is not about to start now, even whenResonance hands her a cover assignment and three weeks of embedded access on tour with Hollow State, a rock band at the most public crossroads of their career.


Cal Rhodes is the band's frontman. He's thirty-four, tired of being on, terrified of becoming his absent father, and writing the most honest song of his career in voice memos at one in the morning between cities. He has not let anyone close in six years. He notices the journalist with the camera in the wings on the first night of the tour and tells himself he is going to be careful.


Neither of them is careful.


Three weeks of forced proximity. A song calledKiss Me Louder that everyone is going to hear. A condom that breaks in a Pittsburgh hotel room. A promise Cal makes in advance of any reason to make it. A cover article that publishes to a thousand strangers asking whether the journalist got too close to her subject— and a phone call from June's bathroom floor that Cal isn't expecting and doesn't know how to be ready for.


By the time June lands at her own front door in Portland, she is carrying two secrets the article didn't print. By the time Cal finishes album five in Athens, he is going to have to decide whether his Pittsburgh promise was a sentence he said or a sentence he meant.


Kiss Me Louder is a literary-leaning rockstar romance about a journalist who learned the wrong things on assignment, a frontman who finally figured out what he was writing about, and the four months of trying-and-failing-and-trying again that became the rest of their lives.

CHAPTER ONE


Static


*June*

The venue smelled like concrete and old coffee. June showed her credentials to the third security guard in ten minutes—Bridgestone Arena didn't mess around—and followed the labyrinth of backstage corridors toward the production office where she was supposed to meet the publicist. Her camera bag pulled at her shoulder. She'd been up since four to catch the flight from Portland, and Nashville's humid spring air had hit her like a wet towel the second she stepped outside the airport.

She'd photographed bigger shows than Hollow State. She'd written about more famous bands. But she'd never been given three weeks of access to one of them, and the assignment carried the kind of weight that made her checked-bag feel heavier than it was. Hollow State mattered right now in a way that felt specific to this moment in music: a rock band that had cracked mainstream success without completely selling out, at least not yet. *Long Static*, their fourth album, had confused casual fans and thrilled the die-hards. The label was reportedly furious. The band was supposedly fracturing. Resonance had given her seven thousand words and a cover slot. Her editor had said, on the phone two weeks ago, *don't write the press release, June.* She had said she wouldn't. He had said *I know you won't. That's why I'm sending you.*

She found the production office. A woman in her forties with perfect hair and a clipboard intercepted her before she could knock.

"June Ashby? Vanessa Crane, Shore Point PR." The handshake was firm and fast."Let's walk and talk. I have Cal doing a radio spot in twenty minutes."

June followed Vanessa back into the corridor, pulling out her notebook. Vanessa launched into the brief without preamble: access granted for three weeks, interviews scheduled through her, all photos subject to approval before publication, off-limits topics included Cal's personal life, contract negotiations, and what Vanessa called"interpersonal dynamics." June nodded and took notes and kept her face neutral. She'd been through this before. Publicists always wanted control. Her job was to get the story anyway.

"The bus leaves for Asheville right after load-out tonight," Vanessa continued."You'll be on the crew bus initially. Separate from the band. We'll see how it goes." She stopped walking and turned to face June with a smile that didn't reach her eyes."I read your Resonance archive. You're a strong writer. Just remember—these guys have been grinding for eight years. They deserve fair treatment."

"I only write fair pieces," June said.

"Good." Vanessa's phone buzzed. She glanced at it, frowned."I have to grab Cal. Soundcheck's in an hour. Paul Torres, the tour manager, will get you situated. He's the one who actually runs this thing."

She disappeared around a corner before June could respond.

June found catering—a folding table with coffee that tasted like it had been brewed yesterday—and then found Paul Torres, who turned out to be a wiry guy in his late thirties with kind eyes and a radio clipped to his belt. He gave her the real tour: where the buses were parked in the loading dock, where she'd watch the show from (stage left, wings, don't get in the crew's way), where the bathroom was that didn't require a five-minute hike. He handed her a laminated pass on a lanyard.

"All-access. Don't lose it. Also don't abuse it." Paulie grinned."You seem normal, which is more than I can say for half the press we get. You need anything, find me. I'm the one with the headset looking stressed."

June liked him immediately.

By three-thirty, the arena was still empty but no longer quiet. Crew hauled gear across the stage. Someone was testing the lights in rapid flashes that made June's eyes hurt. She walked down the center aisle with her camera, the space vast and strange without bodies filling it. Twelve thousand seats. The band had been playing rooms this size for two years now, ever since *Steady on the Wire* turned them from a name people knew into a name that filled arenas.

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