What? What the hell could she say that she hadn’t already?

Even so, she had to literally bite the tip of her tongue so she didn’t say anything else.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped out into the bright sunshine of a Monday in May in Philadelphia.

And started to walk.

*   *   *

“You, my friend, have a death wish. Because if Tru doesn’t kill you, I will for making her life miserable.”

Baz fought to keep a guilty grimace off his face because . . . Well, hell, it didn’t exactly fit the whole bad-boy-rocker image. Then again, he didn’t have much of an image to uphold lately.

He’d taken a stage dive into near death and oblivion about a year before and hadn’t managed to pull himself out of the pit yet. He’d thought the first days after being out of rehab had been bad.

“Baz.”

They had been. They just hadn’t been the worst. The worst had come months later.

He’d fallen into a depression he had no idea how to handle. He’d gotten damn good at covering it up, though. He didn’t think any of his friends had noticed.

Especially not when he kept acting like such a dick to a girl everyone thought walked on water. How she managed it with a stick up her ass was beyond—

“Baz!”

He turned with a death glare. “What?”

Greg didn’t bother to glare back. The guy Baz had come to think of as a pain-in-the-ass older brother raised his eyebrows. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He opened his mouth to say, “Nothing,” but the damn word got stuck in his throat. And they both knew it wasn’t true.

The insane urge to destroy everything in his immediate vicinity made him crazy.

Before rehab, he’d dull it with whatever drug happened to be on hand. Usually weed, or Klonopin, or Ketamine, sometimes acid. None of which he could touch now.

So what he really wanted was a drink, but he couldn’t start in on the liquor just yet. It’d just make him pissy.

He shrugged. “Fuck it. Nothing. I’m going back to the studio.”

Turning, he headed back to where this had all started. The studio Greg had built for him.

The thought stopped him in his tracks. Hands on his hips, he tilted his head to look at the ceiling. The still-unpainted ceiling.

This part of the building hadn’t been completely refurbished yet. For some reason that made him feel a little better. Something the amazingly wonderful Trudeau Morrison hadn’t done yet.

“Fuck.” The word slipped through his tight lips like a bullet. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Through sheer force of will, he unclenched his hands, knuckles cracking, and let them dangle at his sides. Christ, he was one fucking ungrateful bastard.

“Shit, Greg. I’m sorry.”

He couldn’t make himself turn and say it to his friend’s face. Embarrassment fired through his body like a speedball.

Contrary to popular belief, he tried not to be a dick all the time. Sometimes he just couldn’t help himself, though.

Apparently now was one of those times.

As he sighed, he heard Greg walk up behind him.

“Spit it out, Baz. What’s up?”

Greg stopped beside him, waiting.

Baz wasn’t a small guy, but he had to look up a couple of inches to meet Greg’s gaze. Which held absolutely no condemnation.

It took a lot to make Greg angry, and Baz had never actually seen the guy blow his cool. Just being around Greg was sometimes enough to get Baz to chill.

“Honestly? I don’t fucking know.”

He only knew that whenever he and Tru were in the same room, he had the insane urge to needle her until she blew. She was so damn competent, so fucking put together and she made him crazy with her lists and her deadlines and her too-cool looks. He couldn’t resist trying to knock her off that pedestal everyone thought she deserved.

He loved seeing her lose her shit because—

Because you’re an asshole.

Shit.

Greg nodded, as if this was the answer he’d expected all along. “Okay. How’s the score coming?”

Ah, the one bright spot in his life right now. “Might be the best work I’ve ever done.”

“Might be?” The amusement in Greg’s voice loosened the kink in Baz’s shoulders a little more. “Better fucking be. It’s for my film, after all.”

Baz shook his head, then threw a smirk over his shoulder, feeling a little more like himself.

“You know, I do have a pretty fucking awesome career to fall back on, right? I mean, my band’s got fans and gold records and groupies and everything.”

Of course, he hadn’t seen the other four members of Baseline Sins in months.

The last time he and Nik had been in the same room . . . it hadn’t gone so well.

“Yeah, I do know that.” Greg paused. “Maybe it’s time you remembered.”

Greg smacked him on the back so hard Baz nearly pitched forward before he turned to walk away. “Got a meeting in five. I’ll be down to listen to what you’ve got later. Don’t piss off Tru again or she’s gonna cut off your balls.”

Greg disappeared down the corridor, leaving Baz alone in the hall.

Wondering how the hell he’d managed to wind up here.

*   *   *

By the time she got back to the office, Tru had walked off most of her mad.

The ice cream she’d gotten at the coffee shop on Lombard near Thirteenth had helped. Early May in Philadelphia was warmer than she’d expected, which was a nice surprise.

Before she’d moved here with Greg, she’d thought Pennsylvania would be cold. Not at all like sunny Southern California, where she’d dreamed of living all her life.

Growing up in bumfuck Nebraska, she’d promised herself when she’d moved away that she’d never again live anywhere winter lasted from October to April. Pennsylvania qualified, but only barely.

Until last year, she’d never considered moving away from LA. She’d loved it there.

Okay, mostly she’d loved that the temperature never really dropped below seventy and she got to shove her sister’s face in the fact that she was supporting herself in Hollywood.

Screw you, Violet. I fucking made it.

Which immediately made her feel like a total bitch. Still, it wasn’t Tru’s fault that her sister had gotten married during her senior year of college and started popping out kids a couple years later, thereby crushing her childhood dream of moving to New York and being a playwright and living the life of a starving artist.

Shit.

Alright, she totally needed to stop being a bitch, even if no one else could hear her.

And she needed to figure out where the hell she was. Stopping to take stock, Tru realized she wasn’t far from Haven Hotel. Sabrina was working the desk this afternoon, but she didn’t want to bitch to her new best friend about Sebastian. Again.

Sabrina actually liked Sebastian. Hell, if Greg wasn’t in the picture, Sebastian and Sabrina would totally have been a thing because Baz thought Sabrina walked on water. They’d have some adorkable nickname like Sebina or Sabrastian or something equally pukeworthy.

And Tru would have to seriously reconsider her relationship with Sabrina, because any woman who considered that man dating material had a definite screw loose.

Which wasn’t completely true.

Shit. Fuck. Shit.

Stopping at the next corner, she knew she should head back to the office. She had a shitload of work piling up on her desk. As the new managing director of ManDown Films, she handled the day-to-day operations of the company. And she had a shit-ton of things to do.

She also knew if she headed back now, she’d still be too pissed off to work and would probably hunt down Baz and start in on him again.

That left one option.

Rittenhouse Square was only a couple of blocks away so she adjusted her course. Thank god she’d had her phone in the pocket of her skirt when she’d walked out the door.

At this time of the day, there were quite a lot of people hanging out in the park, enjoying the sun and fresh air on their lunch breaks.