Secret Confessions: Backstage - Yanis

By Lexxie Couper

An all–access pass to Sex, Love, and Rock 'N Roll. Because what happens on tour doesn't always stay on tour...

From Australia to the world…

Chicago. The last stop of their wildly successful US tour sees Australia's biggest rock band, The Screaming Tuesdays, in sultry, summertime Chicago to play two sold–out shows. But the stage is not where the action is, and no one knows what goes on behind the scenes...

Never send a woman to do a man's job. Yanis Drakos lives for his job, and nothing and no one will get in the way of what he wants. Especially not Carson Swift, the dominant, officious, distracting, alluring, entirely too enticing tour manager who clearly needs to learn a lesson about who's in charge.

Secret Confessions: Backstage
Reading order:

Yanis–Lexxie Couper
Theo–Zaide Bishop
Kelly–Shona Husk

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781760378110

Lexxie Couper

Lexxie Couper started writing when she was six and hasn't stopped since. She's not a deviant, but she does have a deviant's imagination and a desire to entertain readers with her words. Add the two together and you get erotic romances that can make you laugh, cry, shake with fear or tremble with desire. Sometimes all at once. When she's not submerged in the worlds she creates, Lexxie's life revolves around her family: a husband who thinks she's insane, an indoor cat who likes to stalk shadows, and her daughters, who both utterly captured her heart and changed her life forever. Contact Lexxie at [e-mail], follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lexxie_couper or visit her at www.lexxiecouper.com where she occasionally makes a fool of herself on her blog.

Book preview

Episode 3—Yanis

What the hell do you think you’re doing?

At the question—uttered in a calm, modulated tone bordering on humoured—Carson Swift looked up from her iPad and the over-crowded calendar page on its screen.

I’m playing Angry Birds, she answered with a curl of her lips to the man standing in the doorway of her Chicago office. "What are you doing?"

Yanis Drakos regarded her with a dark gaze as calm as his voice. As unperturbed as his expression was, however, as poised as his body language, the Australian was pissed. She could see it in the slight knotting of his jaw muscles.

Without waiting for an invitation, he crossed to her desk, his immaculately cut, charcoal-grey Hugo Boss suit doing exactly what he knew it did: make him look like a man completely in control of every facet of his life.

Carson ran her gaze over him, taking in the slick blackness of his short hair, the Mediterranean brown of his skin, the defined fullness of his lips, the broad expanse of his shoulders…and lower.

There’s nothing, she went on, letting her inspection linger below his waist for an obvious beat before returning her focus to his midnight-black eyes, as enjoyable as knocking an arrogant creature off his pedestal.

Yanis’s nostrils flared. Nothing? He slipped open the button of his jacket and lowered himself into the chair opposite Carson’s desk, resting his right ankle on his left knee. "I fear there are things in your life you are doing wrong, Ms Swift. Or…things being done poorly to you."

The innuendo behind his statement wasn’t lost on her. Nor was the sheer magnetism of his presence. Not for the first time, Carson acknowledged the man was unlike any band manager she’d dealt with.

Also not for the first time, she acknowledged he was the walking embodiment of sexy male arrogance. The epitome of the Alpha male as defined by all those trashy romance novels she’d read as a deluded teenager.

In her line of work as a tour agent for damn near every A-list performer in the U.S. she met a lot of conceited sex-god Alpha males. Yanis Drakos made them all look like awkward adolescent boys. Sexier than a man had a right to be, and so sure every thought he had, every word he uttered, was important. He’d argued with her every step of the way organising the US leg of The Screaming Tuesdays’ world tour. Every venue she suggested, he counter suggested. Every marketing plan, every promotional graphic, every goddamn city, he questioned her. Flustered her. Got under her skin to the point where she spent long hours at night pacing her bedroom, or hotel room, or office, picturing his smug face over and over and wanting to smack it. Picturing his perfectly combed hair and wanting to mess it up. Picturing his precisely knotted tie and wanted to tug it askew.

It was no wonder she enjoyed irritating him so much. Ruffling his feathers. Sexier than sin or not, he wasn’t the end all and be all of mankind. She was no longer the deluded teenager who swooned over smug Alpha males after all.

Explain to me, Yanis fixed his gaze