Page 28 of Wild

The hotel door opens behind her and Erin feels the warm air from inside hit her back, but she also picks up a kind of static electricity that raises the hair on her arms and makes her turn around without knowing what she expects to see.

Mia is coming through the door with one of her bodyguards. She's wearing torn jeans, an oversized hoodie, and her hair tucked under a cap with the Wild tour logo.

"Hey, Dooley," the singer says as she passes.

Erin can't manage a response fast enough for Mia to hear it before she boards the bus, because she's still rooted to the spot, trying to push out of her head the image of the woman she saw leaving the suite last night — but even more than that, the sound of the moans she heard through the door, which have taken up permanent residence somewhere in her brain, along with the certainty that Mia was the one making them. In the moment, she wasn't able to place it, but later, at the gym, she immediately connected that low, husky tone to the same voice Mia used during the concert in one of her songs — when the music stopped, the lights dimmed, and she sang a chorus a cappella that left the entire audience spellbound.

"Ready?" Noah's voice makes her jump.

She turns and finds him at her side, dark hair messy, wearing athletic clothes and his over-ear headphones.

"Yeah," Erin says, giving him a smile, and finally gets on the bus.

A lot of people are already seated; some she recognizes, others she can't even place if she's seen them at all. She says a quiet hello and heads up to the second floor, where the space is much more open and there aren't as many rows of seats as on the lower level.

"All the way to the back," Nell says, jerking her thumb over her head.

She's sitting in the first section of seats because she likes a clear view of the road. Erin nods and walks to the end, where a door clearly leads to Mia's room. She knocks a couple of times and waits a few seconds.

"Come in, Dooley," she hears from inside, as if Mia already knows she's the only one who'd dare bother her this early.

She opens the door and finds her sitting on a twin bed, back against the wall, legs stretched out, phone in hand. She's taken off her cap, her sneakers, and her hoodie, so most of the tattoos on her arms are on full display. Erin isn't particularly fond of needles pushing ink into skin — she doesn't have any herself and they don't usually catch her eye on other people — but Mia Wilder has so many they've become a kind of signature, and it's hard to imagine her without them.

"Sit wherever," Mia says, gesturing toward the bed and the two armchairs by the window at the back of the bus.

Erin chooses the bed. She sits down beside her and takes her wrist without a word, checking her pulse.

"Did you sleep?" she asks before she starts counting.

"Some, yeah."

Erin raises an eyebrow.

"How many hours?"

"I don't know, Dooley — four? Maybe three. It's hard for me to sleep after a show, I already told you," Mia says drowsily, opening her mouth into a yawn she can't hold back.

"Did you smoke last night?"

She lifts her head from her phone and focuses her blue eyes on Erin — the edges red from tiredness and, most likely, from the joint she smoked after the woman left her suite.

"Yeah, one. Sometimes it makes me sleepy, sometimes it just takes the edge off."

"Nothing else?"

Mia's gaze hardens.

"No, just that, I already told you. You can talk to Noah if you don't believe me. I don't have access to anything — I don't even know how to roll the damn thing. He preps it for me on show nights only."

"Did you eat breakfast?" For some reason she can't explain, Erin believes her, though she doesn't rule out talking to Noah about it, because plenty of patients lie to their doctors and the more she understands Mia's lifestyle, the easier it'll be to treat her.

"A watered-down coffee with about a half liter of water. Disgusting, by the way," she adds with a grimace.

"Coffee isn't food. I'll have a light breakfast and a big bottle of water brought to you, and more coffee if you want it. You should drink the bottle over the next three hours — you lost a lot of fluid through sweat last night and you need to replace it."

"I'll try."

Mia watches her for a second. Erin is still sitting beside her in her cargo pants — olive green this time — and a plain black T-shirt. Mia takes in her arms, the lean line of muscle that defines them, that serious expression paired with those ash-gray eyes and full lips that are never wet but always look so damn good, and her mouth goes so dry she's pretty sure she'll need more than one bottle.