Once More With Feeling by Nora Roberts

nothing without things like that, and we’d have ended up hurting each other.”
    She tilted her head and studied him. “Why are you telling me all this now?”
    â€œBecause I realized when I watched you singing that I’ll always love you but I’ll never have you. And if I did, I’d lose something very special.” He reached across to touch her hair. “A fantasy that warms you on cold nights and makes you feel young again when you’re old. Sometimes might-have-beens can be very precious.”
    Raven didn’t know whether to smile or to cry. “I haven’t hurt you?”
    â€œNo,” he said so simply she knew he spoke the truth. “You’ve made me feel good. Have I made you uncomfortable?”
    â€œNo.” She smiled at him. “You’ve made me feel good.”
    He grinned, then rose and held out a hand to her. “Let’s go get some coffee.”
    ***
    Brand changed into jeans in his dressing room. It was after two in the morning, but he was wide-awake, still riding on energy left over from his last show. He’d go out, he decided, and put some of it to use at the blackjack table. He could grab Eddie or one of the other guys from the band and cruise the casinos.
    There’d be women. Brand knew there’d be a throng of them waiting for him when he left the privacy of his dressing room. He could take his pick. But he didn’t want a woman. He wanted a drink and some cards and some action; anything to use up the adrenaline speeding through his system.
    He reached for his shirt, and the mirror reflected his naked torso. It was tight and lean, teetering on being thin, but there were surprising cords of muscles in the arms and shoulders. He’d had to use them often when he’d been a boy on the London streets. He always wondered if it had been the piano lessons his mother had insisted on that had saved him from being another victim of the streets. Music had opened up something for him. He hadn’t been able to get enough, learn enough. It had been like food, and he had been starving.
    At fifteen Brand had started his own band. He was tough and cocky and talked his way into cheap little dives. There had been women even then; not just girls, but women attracted by his youthful sexuality and arrogant confidence. But they’d only been part of the adventure. He had never given up, though the living had been lean in the beer-soaked taverns. He had pulled his way up and made a local reputation for himself; both his music and his personality were strong.
    It had taken time. He had been twenty when he had cut his first record, and it had gone nowhere. Brand had recognized that its failure had been due to a combination of poor quality recording, mismanagement and his own see-if-I-care attitude. He had taken a few steps back, found a savvy manager, worked hard on arrangements and talked himself into another recording session.
    Two years later he had bought his family a house in the London suburbs, pushed his younger brother into a university and set off on his first American tour.
    Now, at thirty, there were times he felt he’d never been off the merry-go-round. Half his life had been given over to his career and its demands. He was tired of wandering. Brand wanted something to focus his life, something to center it. He knew he couldn’t give up music, but it wasn’t enough by itself anymore. His family wasn’t enough, and neither was the money or the applause.
    He knew what he wanted. He had known five years before, but there were times he didn’t feel as sure of himself as he had when he had been a fifteen-year-old punk talking his way past the back door of a third-rate nightclub. A capacity crowd had just paid thirty dollars a head to hear him, and he knew he could afford to take every cent he made on that two-week gig and throw it away on one roll of the dice. He had an urge to do it. He was restless, reckless,