SailtotheMoon by Lynne Connolly Read Free Book Online Page B

noodling useless riffs at
some pub, or his precious Band on the Wall, or some other fucking place. Then an
adolescent boy, begging for attention. He’d received it, sometimes, and others,
his dad had totally ignored him. Sometimes he’d had more attention from the
whores who’d helped them spend the dosh in the good times. It didn’t help to
know most of it was the drugs and drink. Without them, on those rare occasions
he’d tried to kick the habit, his father had turned into a real parent. Or what
passed for one in a deprived area like Hulme.
    As Zazz, he surrounded himself with friends, salted away a
fortune, created all the safeguards he wanted, and it still wasn’t enough.
Would never be enough.
    He turned off the shower and swiped a towel over his eyes.
Her scent assaulted him. He must have picked up one she’d used earlier. Swift
as a knife slicing through clean air, anger rose to replace despair. Anger had
always been his friend.
    Dropping that towel in favor of another, he dried himself
roughly and went back into the bedroom to find a pencil and paper. If he
couldn’t sleep, he’d work.
    Chick knocked at six. He knew it was Chick, because nobody
else would be up in the middle of the night. Six a.m. was the middle of the
night to most musicians.
    Chick closed the door, and without asking, crossed the room
to the coffeemaker, making himself busy filling that, and the kettle. He
switched both on. “Tea or coffee?”
    Zazz grimaced. “Make it coffee. I didn’t get much sleep. I
could do with the extra caffeine.”
    The big man didn’t speak again until he’d set two steaming
mugs of fragrant coffee on the small table that lay between the two chairs the
room offered. He sat in the vacant one after brushing away the pile of crumpled
paper Zazz had thrown there. “You don’t usually make them cry.”
    He looked up from his pad, his fingers tightening over the
pencil. “She cried?”
    “Oh yeah. I gave her a drink before I got a car to take her
home. It wasn’t the sex that made her cry, was it?”
    He shrugged. “You know me. Casanova, that’s my middle name.”
    “No it’s not. It’s Matthew.”
    Few people knew his real name, and all of them—except
two—were in this hotel tonight. Chick had recognized the name, forcing Zazz to
reluctantly tell him the truth, but Chick had helped him a huge amount,
concealing his identity and confusing the increasingly insistent media. Because
the other reason, the one Zazz never let himself believe—the kind of media
attention the band was getting right now was brutal. Too much for his father to
put up with. And if they found out he was the son of the legendary Jimmy
A—despite what Laura had said, a lot of people remembered him—they’d swarm.
    Chick spoke in a slow, quiet voice, the opposite of the
tones he used in public, usually strident, often louder than anyone else. But
Chick had many facets to his personality and nobody knew all of them. “When I
saw you together, I was going to ask you if you wanted to talk to her, and then
you hit on her. I thought fine, you could sort it out for yourselves. But you
didn’t, did you?”
    “There was another Laura there tonight. You told me a Laura
was looking for me, and I thought I’d just dodged her.”
    “And you didn’t ask for last names.” Chick laughed. “Just as
well you didn’t talk to the other Laura. She’s a vicious bitch. Writes for one
of the tabloids.”
    “Redtops,” he corrected automatically. “We call them redtops
over here.”
    “Yeah, whatever.” Chick waved aside his correction as the
distraction Zazz had intended it to be. His and Donovan’s English-isms kept
Chick in stitches, when he was in the mood. He wasn’t in the mood now. “You
said no. I thought you might, but you said more than that, didn’t you? And you
fucked her.”
    He couldn’t prevent the reminiscent smile curling his lips.
“She fucked me. In more ways than one.” He lost the smile. “She knew who I