Dare (The Dare Trilogy) (17 page)

This made Cam laugh but he still declined. When Johnny glanced across at Dianne, she shook her head nervously. “Ah, well,” Johnny said with apparently sincere regret. “Perhaps later.”

A sudden stiffness in Cam’s shoulders alerted Dianne to the fact that they had been joined by someone else and, looking past him, she saw Darius leaning between the seats. “You two can certainly catch up later,” Darius said, his eyes glittering strangely. “I think I’d like to find out a little bit more about these people on
my
tour.”

Taking a couple of steps backwards, Darius flopped into one of the seats beside another table as Cam and Dianne sat down more cautiously across from him.

“It must be much more pleasant for you,” he leered at Dianne, “having a little luxury. I don’t know for the life of me how you tolerate that deathtrap you’ve all been pootling around Europe in.”

“It’s not so bad,” she replied quietly. “I quite like helping out with the driving.”

“Oho!” Darius exclaimed. “So they’ve been getting you to do the driving, have they?” He shot a glance across at Cam. “From what I hear, you’ve been getting quite a lot of riding in as well.”

Cam scowled at this and opened his mouth to say something, but Darius cut across him. “Anyway, should you ever feel the... desire to join us on tour, I’m sure I could find a place for you.” As he spoke, he leaned across and slid one hand beneath the table, squeezing Dianne’s thigh and making her jump, a fact that made him laugh.

Because Cam was so tense beside her, she felt rather nervous in this situation. Before she could say anything, however, she felt a movement beside her arm and, looking up, saw Elizabeth staring down at her with a wry expression on her face. The other woman slid in across Darius’s lap and onto the seat beside him—which at least had the good fortune to force him to remove his hand from Dianne’s leg. Cam blushed slightly as Elizabeth sat across the table from him, a fact which made Dianne furious for a moment. In an attempt to calm her temper, she decided to try and change the subject.

“Cam says we’re going to spend a few days in Berlin.”

Darius nodded, his eyes flickering across to Cam again at the mention of the other singer’s name. “Yeah,” he agreed. “We’ll start the East European leg after that, so we’ll play a couple of gigs in Berlin and have four days there in all.” He grimaced as he said this.

“What’s wrong?” Dianne asked.

“Oh, it’s just that some of those bloody places are shitholes.” He looked irritated as he spoke.

“I don’t know,” Dianne replied. “I’m looking forward to seeing them.” Elizabeth laughed at this, causing Dianne to frown.

“She’s adorable, isn’t she?” Darius said to his companion, talking as though Cam and Dianne couldn’t hear them.

“Absolutely,” Elizabeth purred. “So naive. I’m sure we could show her a lot of sights she’s never seen before.”

Darius’s laugh was so filthy at this that Dianne turned her head away for a few seconds. When she realised that the motion behind her was one of the German women bobbing her head up and down on Johnny’s lap, she turned her face back to Darius once more.

“Anyway,” he continued, addressing Dianne directly now, “most of those cities are bloody dumps. We should be doing an American tour now, but not until we’ve pumped up sales in Europe first
—blah-fucking-blah.”

“Things not going so well, then?” Cam asked. Something about the tone of his voice caused Darius’s eyes to narrow.

“Much better than you’ll ever know, lover boy,” he growled. When he looked back at Dianne, his smile was as false as a reptile’s. “We’ll take Europe by storm and then it’ll be onto the States. You’ll see.”

“Don’t get too angry with him, Darius baby,” Elizabeth cooed, placing one hand on his knee. This made Darius snort.

“You’re lucky,” he said, his eyes flashing between Cam and Dianne. “Lizzy here has an interest in you. She wants to hear if all those rumours are true.”

“What rumours?” Cam asked cautiously.

“That you’re hung like a horse and there’s a pretty little present in the end of your cock that makes all the girls howl with lust.” Darius turned his focus to Dianne. “Perhaps you can enlighten us.”

Dianne failed to reply, but as she blushed Darius let out another laugh. “I knew it!” he said triumphantly. With a smirk he looked back to Cam. “Perhaps the two of you could put on a show for us
—it’d be a damn sight better than your performance on stage.”

Cam was riled by this and about to speak but Dianne grabbed hold of his hand and squeezed it, causing him to look at her instead.

“Look at them,” Darius continued. “It must be so sweet to be in love—and so boring.” As he leaned across the table conspiratorially, Elizabeth reclining in the seat beside him and staring with hooded eyes at them, he said quietly: “We should get together, the four of us—you know, for some intimate time together. Elizabeth here could show you a few tricks. Who knows? If you’re up to scratch, I could make a special place for you on tour. I can be very generous.”

As he spoke, he leered and reached forward with one hand to hold Dianne’s which lay on the table. The touch of his cold fingers was a shock to Dianne and she nearly pulled away from him but held herself in place, despite the fact that her own skin was crawling.

For the next few hours, the two of them endured Darius’s monologues as they drove towards Berlin. Fortunately, the lead singer of Optima seemed more concerned to have an audience for his long-winded speeches for all that he had claimed to want to get to know them. For most of the journey, Dianne attempted not to glower at Elizabeth who curled her red lips in a sardonic smile whenever she saw the younger woman looking at her. For his part, Cam seemed to wish he was a million miles away.

With typical lack of forethought, Darius gave no instructions as to where his two guests were to be dropped in Berlin: indeed, for an hour or so he seemed to have lost all interest in Dianne and Cam when they had failed to react with suitable enthusiasm to his suggestion for an impromptu orgy. As such, after the rest of Optima and their hangers on—including Johnny looking considerably worse for wear, half-supported by the two German women he had spent most of the time with—had cleared the coach, Dianne and Cam found themselves lost somewhere in the heart of the city.

“Wait a minute,” Cam said with a sigh. “I’ll phone Tony and find out where we’re meant to be going. Hopefully they’ll have made it there already.”

The phone rang out a couple of times but as soon as Cam spoke into it he held it away from his ear. Even at this distance Dianne could hear the Irishman shouting angrily.

“Okay, okay,” Cam said, attempting to be as reassuring as possible. “I’ll sort it out when I get there -” He interrupted himself as Tony launched into another diatribe. “Jesus, Tony! I’ll do it as soon as I get there. Just tell me where you are!”

Eventually he managed to extricate himself from the call and looked towards the bright blue sky above the tall buildings that surrounded them. “Give me strength,” he muttered.

“A problem?” Dianne asked. She was torn: in recent days, there had been no repeat of the disasters from their first night in Paris, but she was unsure how much she wanted to stay on the tour if such problems were going to recur. At the same time, she felt deeply for Cam: seeing Elizabeth again had roused her anger, but after several hours on a coach with Darius
and his malevolent companion she realised that Cam was simply embarrassed by the other woman’s presence.

He shrugged. “Nothing too bad, I hope. I think Tony was just venting off after listening to Dan whinge on for hours. It seems the hotel doesn’t have air-conditioning, and our bass-player’s sensibilities are unable to endure such privations.”

As they walked down the Kurfürstendamm, the long street of shops, hotels, bars and clubs that radiated away from the heart of Berlin, Cam was somewhat grumpy but Dianne put aside for a moment any sense of anxiety. The wide road was flanked by a mixture of elegant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings interspersed with cooler, modern shop fronts, with people walking along the busy thoroughfare and occasionally gathered at eateries that lined the pavements. Everyone—and everything—seemed relaxed, with the inhabitants of the city enjoying the summer air.

Not that Dianne’s mind was entirely on this pleasurable experience, soaking up the atmosphere of Berlin as they continued on their way. “You said you went to school with him,” she said after a while, putting into words a thought that had been with her for several days now.

“Who?” asked Cam, looking at her with a slightly goofy look as he tried to focus on what she had said.

“Johnny. You said you’d been at school with him.”

He smiled at this, though Dianne couldn’t help but notice there was a slight sadness to his expression. “Yeah, little Johnny McIntyre.”

“Little?” she scoffed. “If he’s your idea of little, I’d hate to meet a giant in the world of Cam Fraser.”

This made him laugh. “He was a late developer, was John. I knew him pretty much from when he started school—not that it was difficult. We both lived in pretty small towns and villages, and there was only one school for miles around. He used to be bullied mercilessly at one time, but when he hit—oh, I don’t know, ten, eleven?—he started to shoot up and people left him alone after that. And then his good looks started to shine through and he was very popular with all the girls.”

“So you had to stand at the sidelines jealously?” Dianne teased, sliding her hand through the crook of his arm.

Smiling, Cam shook his head. “We were both terrors together,” he said, then, remembering who he was talking to, he shook his head. “But you don’t want to hear about that.”

For a second, Dianne felt her heart clench inside her chest and agreed with him. But only for a second. Her curiosity had the better of her.

“What was he like, when you and he went round together?”

Cam thought about it for a second. “Actually, he was pretty damn shy. Lived for his music. We were inseparable at one point, but that was a decade ago
—even longer now.” His eyes looked towards the horizon as he became lost in old thoughts. Reviving himself from these, he shook his head again. “I went away to university, but Johnny was just nuts about his guitar. He always told me—anyone who’d listen—that he was going to be the best. None of us believed him at the time.”

“And he proved you all wrong.”

“I guess he did.” Cam’s smile was fixed, a little rueful.

“He doesn’t look the shy type,” Dianne added after a while, thinking of his behaviour on the bus with the two German women.

“Oh, he’s grown very good at putting on a front. You have to do that with Darius, I guess. It’s do what Darius says or find your own way in the world.” Cam did not try to disguise the bitterness in his voice.

Dianne held back the rest of her questions as they turned off the main thoroughfare into a side road. To one side was a six-storey high building, the front white with wide doors and windows, a sign announcing that it was the hotel they were looking for.

“Well, it doesn’t look
so
bad,” Dianne said as they stood before the steps. Certainly had she been booking a place for herself, her own budget would have stretched this far: it was just a shame not to be treated a little more extravagantly. She thought of Darius’s comment that she should join him and travel in style before squashing the idea guiltily.

“Not so bad,” Cam agreed hesitantly. He looked down at Dianne and pressed her hand, a slightly shameful look on his place. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“Not for the first time I think I’ve dragged you out here on false pretences. This was hardly what you had in mind when you joined us, I’m sure. Hell, it’s not really what
I
had in mind.”

“Don’t be an arse,” she told him affectionately, pressing her face to his arm. “I would never have dared to go on a trip across London. Anyway,” she added, smiling shyly, “I’m enjoying being with you.”

He said nothing in response to this, but she saw his bright blue eyes glisten slightly. Then he looked back at the entrance and took a deep breath. “Come on,” he said at last. “Let’s see what the damage is.”

The hotel was not as bad as Tony had led them to believe, being a family-run affair that may have lacked the mod cons but was clean and neat. Going to the reception, Cam quickly established that the rest of Black Ark had already checked in.

Taking the lift to the second floor and checking that their bags had been dropped off there, Cam suggested that Dianne remain in the room while he went and found the other band members. Agreeing readily enough, Dianne took off her jacket and looked out of the window as she heard the door close behind her. At the far end of the street she could just make out the Kurfürstendamm, still busy as the afternoon rolled into the evening, though few people made their way down the side street where the hotel was located.

The room itself was as neat and clean as the rest of the hotel, but somewhat bare, lacking even a TV. It was also a little muggy but Dianne did not mind an open window in place of air-con, letting the noises of the city drift in alongside the cooler air.

There was, at least, an en suite, though it was somewhat small containing a shower rather than a bath. She wasn’t so fussed about that, though she wondered if Dan’s irritation was not so much that the hotel itself was basic as the notion that he wasn’t being treated in the fashion he expected as a rising rock star. Not for the first time she was grateful she had fallen in with Cam and not the bass player, though she had a hard time conceiving any woman being interested in the miserable Mancunian.