A Seductive Melody (The Kelly Brothers Book 5) by Crista McHugh Read Free Book Online

it as far as I can tell.”
    She choked on her whipped cream–topped hot chocolate. Her face reddened as she struggled to catch her breath. “Are you flirting with me?”
    “Are you bothered by it?”
    She didn’t answer, but he caught a hint of a smile before she covered her mouth with her coffee mug. “How was your week?”
    “It sucked.” He expected her to ask him to elaborate or maybe try to tease out some details why it sucked, but she continued to watch him with the expectant arch of her eyebrows without saying a word.
    When the silence stretched into a minute, the heat climbing along the base of his spine forced him to shift in his seat. He turned away before she saw how uneasy he’d become from such a simple question.
    Sucked didn’t begin to describe his week. Between struggling to find the music without giving in to his muse and dealing with the constant phone calls from his mother and older brother Adam, he could feel the cracks forming in his thin shell of sobriety. He couldn’t sleep, not without waking up in a cold sweat and wishing he had a bag of Sweet Dreams. Instead, he was left with visions of finding his best friend wide-eyed in death with a needle still in his arm and a craving to make it all go away.
    He ran his hand over the tattoo on his left arm and repeated, “It sucked.”
    “You’re nearing the one-month mark, right?” After he nodded, she continued, “It’s like a New Year’s resolution, staying clean. Some people succeed, but most of us hit that first speed bump around the one-month mark. You go through the Super Flu and swear you will never touch the stuff that makes you feel so rotten ever again. You come out feeling renewed by this vow and empowered by whatever drove you to come clean. But little by little, the day-to-day pressure of reality begins to wear on you, and your resolve starts to crumble. The void you once filled with heroin becomes larger and larger until it consumes you. And around the one-month mark, you’re faced with the choice of do I give in and get high, or do I find something else to fill the void?”
    She had no idea how fucking accurate she was.
    “All of us started using to fill that void, and it’s different for each of us. But once you identify it, then you can come up with ways to fill it without getting high.”
    “I doubt sweets will do it for me.”
    She gave him a soft laugh that deflected the pessimistic sting of his words. “They don’t do it for me, either.”
    “Then what does?”
    She set her mug down and stared at the plate. Like last week, she engaged in the repetitive motions of stabbing, smashing, and scraping the cake crumbs with her fork. “For me, it was finding some sort of purpose for my life. I wanted to be more than a spoiled, airhead heiress.”
    “And are you now?”
    “Depends.” She looked across the table at him, the silent plea in her eyes echoing louder in his mind than any words she’d spoken.
    Part of him wanted to bolt from the table, but the rest of him took some small comfort in knowing she understood what he was going through. No one else did. Not his friends. Not his family. Not his agent or producers. The only other person he’d reached out to was his younger brother’s assistant, Sarah, and that was only because she knew the best places to go for detox.
    But Becca had been there. She’d gone through this hell and seemed to have her shit together now.
    Unlike him.
    A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face, and he leaned forward on the table, his eyes lowered. “Where do I start?”
    “At the beginning.”
    A single note of bitter laughter rose from his throat. “I started using because my best friend did, and I looked up to him.”
    He waited for her to mock him for being a lemming, but instead, she said in a choked voice, “And did he inspire you to come clean, too?”
    “Yeah.” Finding Ty dead was the cruelest form of wake-up call he’d ever experienced.
    He glanced at her to gauge