Free Bake This! (A 300 Moons Novella) by Tasha Black Page A

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15

Burn This! (SAMPLE)
    J ohnny Lazarus looked out at the crowd.
    He was a handsome guy, he looked at home on the farm with his shirt off, at home on the tour bus, at home in a fancy restaurant with his long dark hair brushing the shoulders of his tux.
    But it was on the stage, with the savage beat reverberating through his body, making his feet feel like they had roots down to the center of the earth, that he felt in his element.
    His band, Somnambulance, was on top of the world, and everyone wanted a piece of Johnny Lazarus. They had always traveled a lot, but this summer’s Outlaws of Rock festival was the longest tour they’d done in ages. It was starting to feel like one long concert, and the drives, hotel rooms and groupies in between were just breaks between the sets.
    Even here in LA, the biggest venue of the whole tour, with thousands of screaming fans, he walked right onstage feeling at home, and unconcerned. He would snap his fingers and the crowd would fall at his feet, no worries. The crew was lean. They had been at this for months and the whole thing ran like clockwork.
    Johnny closed his eyes and breathed in the experience. The huge field laid out before him swam with every scent the human body was capable of producing: sweat and tears, tobacco and booze, arousal and even a hint of fear here and there.
    And the sounds: the shudder and thump of tens of thousands of hearts beating, feet shuffling, howls and sighs and palms slapping, some in perfect time to the old school Metallica cover they were doing, some not.
    Above it all stood the silky smooth feel of the guitar in his hands. Little Ruby, his darling, her strings singing under his fingers. No matter how gritty the concert, little Ruby was always smooth and clean and cool to the touch. She was impervious to the bacchanal. He should have named her Pallas Athena. Except she sang so sweetly when he stroked his fingers against her, it reminded him of something else entirely. So little Ruby was her name.
    He sang into the mic as the crowd screamed along, and who the fuck could blame them? The band was killing it. The song was an old favorite, from back when Metallica was good. And as a bonus, the post- Fifty Shades chicks really got into the master-servant lyrics.
    Johnny had vague memories of his mom listening to this type of music, before… Before the fire, and before everything changed. Before the night she snuck him out and drove all night to the suburbs of Philadelphia to leave him with Kate Harkness.
    “It’s just for a little while, bud, until I can get a job out here and an apartment, okay?” she had assured him.
    Even at age five, madly in love with her big brown eyes and the flowery smell of her shampoo, he had known that wasn’t true.
    And, in fact, she had never come back.
    To her credit, she also hadn’t come back after he got famous. He’d made a point of keeping the name she gave him. So she would know what she had missed.
    The machine gun beat of the drums splattered out and the song ended.
    The whole crowd screamed like crazy, like they never wanted him to stop.
    Well, too bad. It was time for the finale.
    Jazz, the young girl on crew who was in charge of little Ruby during the finale still looked nervous even tonight, the last show. She was probably the only one still feeling the heat, and he couldn’t say he blamed her.
    It was Jazz’s job to grab the guitar out of the air when Johnny tossed her. Then she had to run backstage and protect her until the show was over and Johnny came to snatch little Ruby up fiercely from her arms.
    Johnny had been known to get a little carried away during the final song. And little Ruby was an irreplaceable antique Les Paul.
    Though Jazz seemed barely old enough to be allowed to go on a tour at all, there was a serious look on her soft brown face. Johnny knew instinctively that she would protect his