Steady Beat Read Free Page A

seat, his stare tracking the blonde’s path to the bar. “Three or four times, in fact. But Holden’s right. We need to decide if we’re doing this Synergy thing.”
    Noah cocked an eyebrow at him. Samuel snorted in return, the side of his mouth pulling in a small smile. “It’s a good name. Two or more forces interacting in such a way their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effort. Suits us.”
    A peanut struck Samuel in the temple. “Thank you, Mr. Dictionary,” Jax laughed.
    Samuel glowered, although Noah couldn’t miss the fact his smile grew. “Shut the fuck up, Jax.” He turned back to Noah. “So, what did Nick say?”
    Noah slid his gaze to the waitress in the hot pants a few feet away before returning it to his fellow band members. He pulled a deep, slow breath and then leant forward, retrieved his scotch from the table and held it aloft. “Gentlemen, let’s find ourselves a new front man.”
    “To Synergy,” Levi murmured, tapping his beer to Noah’s glass, his smile relaxed.
    Jax grinned, his glass meeting Noah’s and Levi’s above the table. “To rocking out with our cocks out.”
    Samuel laughed, clinking his bourbon against their glasses. “Hell yeah.”
    Noah smiled. He felt calmer already. More focused. Being a rock star truly was the best job in the world.
     
    Being a waitress was the worst job in the world.
    Okay, that wasn’t true. There were worst jobs. Pepper Kerrigan knew that. Inspector of the incoming pipes at a sewage plant would be worse. Cleaning up the horse poo at those medieval dinner shows would be worse. Handing out flyers for discount pork products at a vegan convention would be the pits. But what she was doing right now, waitressing at a bar in New York, was pretty depressing. Especially given she’d dreamed of so much more.
    Of course, dreaming was easy. Almost as easy as failing. And Pepper had made a career out of failing. If she was good at one thing, it was failing. At least that’s what her mother told her. Right up until the time Lulu Kerrigan walked out on her family, leaving Pepper to be raised by her dad. Who, according to her mom, wasn’t good for anything either except “writing shit about shit”.
    Pepper was good at more than failing. She knew that. For one, she had a knack for organizing. But failing was easier. And when you grew up being told you were a failure by your mom, you reached a point where you just accepted that was the case. When you were chronically shy like Pepper was, failure was a lovely safety blanket. One you could wrap yourself up nice and tight in. It had driven Pepper’s extrovert mother crazy. Turned her resentful. Or maybe the resentment had come from the fact Pepper got the shit her dad wrote about and could talk for hours on end about it. But only to Paul Kerrigan. Whenever someone else was around, Pepper clammed up. Withdrew.
    Failed.
    Lulu Kerrigan’s parting advice to her sixteen-year-old daughter was to aim low. “’Cause honey, you’re never going to hit high.”
    So here Pepper was, working tables in a noisy New York bar where the customers didn’t pay much attention to her unless it was to feel her up. All in all, not the future she’d imagined for herself as a young girl.
    But her head was still crammed full of the shit her dad wrote about, and her heart ached with a dream she wanted more than anything, and since Nick Blackthorne’s old band entered the place, the tickle of a plan had begun to form in her soul.
    Her soul refused to believe she was a failure, and right now it was telling her to do something she’d never, ever done before.
    Be courageous.
    She watched the man with the choppy brown hair holding his half-empty scotch high. Noah Holden was the best drummer in the world. This was an indisputable fact. Music magazines and websites proclaimed it often. Her father had mentioned the fact more than once in more than one article on Nick Blackthorne and his band. Her dad had sat her