The tennis table was leaning against a wall in the games room; I held our whiskies while Finn unfolded it, and fetched two racquets and a ball from a box on the shelves to my left.

"Are you any good at this?" Finn asked, taking back his glass and handing me a racquet.

"Not really. Are you?"

He gave me a rueful grin. "Not really."

"At least you won't make a complete fool of me," I said.

His grin widened. "Just because I'm bad doesn't mean you won't be worse."

"Oh, that's fighting talk."

We took up positions at each end of the table, and Finn tossed the ball up and down a couple of times.

"If you're trying to intimidate me, it won't work," I said.

"Do you know the rules?" Finn asked.

"Nope."

"Good. Neither do I."

"We can make them up as we go along," I said.

"Sounds like a plan."

I lost track of how long we played, and our attempt to make up the rules soon devolved into a free-for-all to see who could hit the most balls at the other. Finn absolutely kicked my ass, and I didn't care. We were having fun. We taunted and teased each other, and surly rockstar Finn seemed to have disappeared entirely.

"Okay, okay, I give up," I declared, tossing my racquet onto the table and raising my hands.

Finn cheered, pumping his fists in the air.

"I'll get you next time," I said.

"If we learn the actual rules, maybe you will."

We grinned at each other, and warmth fluttered in my stomach.

"You hungry? It's probably about dinnertime," Finn said.

"Food sounds good."

"You okay with prawns? I've got a great batch of jambalaya in the freezer."

My stomach growled, and I pulled a sheepish face.

"I'll take that as a yes," Finn said.

We stopped by the storage room to pick up the jambalaya, then headed into the kitchen. Finn fetched two folding chairs from a cupboard, set them up in front of the island, and urged me into one. He poured me another drink, then turned to the counter behind him to prepare the food.

Sipping my whisky, I studied him. He moved quickly and efficiently, grabbing a large saucepan from a cabinet and bumping the door closed with his hip, swivelling to fetch the bowls and cutlery, pulling the lid off our dinner and dropping the frozen contents in the pan.

In every interview or public appearance I'd seen, he'd had a guarded look about him, like he was constantly ready to run, and he'd worn that same expression when we'd first met, but there was no trace of it now. In some ways that was more erotic than the half-naked Finn that had got me all hot and bothered this morning.

The food heated up quickly, and Finn sat opposite me while we ate. It felt more like a date than eating pasta in the living room yesterday.

Every now and then, Finn drummed his fingers on the table, a less aggressive pattern than earlier, and my gaze was drawn again to that skull ring.

"Can I ask you about that?" I pointed with my fork.

Finn glanced down at his hand. "What, my ring?"

"Jude has one just like it."

"We all do, Jude, Darius, Rhydian, Cole, everyone who toured together." Finn swallowed. "Darrell had one too."

"Why did you get matching ones?"

"I don't know, really. Seemed like a good idea at the time," Finn said. "China's the odd one out. She did get a skull ring, but not the same as ours because this one only came in men's sizes. Her fingers were way too small."

My gaze moved higher, over the jumbled tattoos on Finn's arms, a smashed guitar, two skeletons kissing, the words FUCK OFF printed in bold letters along his forearm, and wondered which ones had just seemed like a good idea at the time, and which ones he actually liked. He must have regretted some of them because he'd once had a naked woman on his bicep, cupping her own oversized breasts, and that had since been covered up with a cluster of stylised roses. Why he'd covered her and not the weird flying dick tattoo, I wasn't sure, but he probably had his reasons.

I paused on a tattoo just above his left elbow – the word Momentum with a large red X through it.

"What you told me about leaving Momentum, during that interview, was that true?" I said.

"Why wouldn't it have been?" Finn asked.

"I think you were trying to live up to your rockstar image. I think you were giving me what you thought I wanted to hear."

Finn's expression flickered. He looked down at his bowl. "I first auditioned for Starfinder as a solo artist. I always wanted to be a rockstar, and I knew that the show was more geared towards pop music, but there wasn't a rock alternative. That's why I chose Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home" to sing, because it's such a fantastic song but it's not so heavily rock that pop listeners can't enjoy it too. The other guys in the band all entered with pop songs – Boyzone, Take That, Westlife, all that kind of thing. That's what they wanted to be."

"My mum still loves all those boy bands. She loved Momentum too," I said.

"Your mum has shite taste in music," Finn said with a grin.

"It would break her heart if she heard that."

"I'll make sure I'll never say it to her face."

Finn didn't seem to notice that he'd just implied he might meet my mum one day. I noticed.

"Anyway, the other guys in the band ended up resenting it, same as me, but not always for the same reasons. They never felt like they were being forced in a direction that they didn't want to go in and, unlike me, they never objected to being called a band. It didn't matter to them that all our songs were written by teams we rarely met, or that the instruments on our tracks were played by far more talented people. Yeah, we all had good voices, but let's be honest, we were chosen for our pretty faces as much as anything. If one of us had been ugly, it wouldn't have mattered how good our voice was – we wouldn't have been put in that band. Momentum was massively successful. We won more awards than I can remember, we travelled the world, and we made millions. But it all felt so, I don't know, so undeserved."

"Where are your awards anyway?" I asked.

I'd expected them to be displayed in the living room or music room, but there'd been no sign of them when I snooped.

Finn's mouth hardened. "I put them in storage. I don't want to get rid of them because, no matter how I feel about it now, Momentum was still a huge part of my life. But I don't want to look at them every day."

"So the other guys were happy being in a pop-group and you were the only one who wanted something different?"

"Pretty much." Finn took a sip of whisky. "Momentum was entirely manufactured, nothing authentic about us at all, and I've never felt like that with rock-bands. Yeah, there are clones and knock-offs, but even that never feels as mechanical and false as some of these popstars."

"Why did you agree to join?" I asked.

He gave me an oh please look. "I was sixteen and being offered the opportunity of a lifetime, even if it wasn't exactly the opportunity I wanted."

"Fair point."

"It wasn't even just the fakeness of it. It was how controlled we all were. Charles Palmer was our manager at the time, and he wanted us to maintain a squeaky-clean image at all times. We had to be family-friendly, we had to appeal to the tween girls, we had to be sexless, viceless fucking Ken dolls. No smoking, no drinking, no tattoos, no scandals, only dating the right kind of girl, et cetera."

I toyed with my whisky glass. "Is that why you went off the deep end when you left the band?"

Finn smiled, but it was tight at the edges. "I was going off the deep end before I left the band."

"Really?"

"You didn't know that?"

I grimaced. "I'll be honest with you, Finn, I never liked Momentum's music so I don't know much about them."

Finn gasped and clutched his chest. "You didn't like my plastic, puppet band? I'm shocked. Shocked."

"I'm not into pop music."

His smile warmed. "That's what I like to hear."

"Hold on, Elle was a popstar. Are you saying you didn't like her music?" I teased.

"I never said it to her face, but I hated Elle's music," Finn admitted.

I couldn't help a giggle.

"Maybe it's a good thing I never told her." A note of bitterness crept into Finn's voice. "She might have killed me too."

"How quickly did you realise you weren't happy with the band?" I asked.

"Part of me was disappointed from the beginning. I knew I had a good voice, so to be told I wasn't good enough to stand on my own but instead had to be part of a group was a bit of a kick in the teeth." Finn stood up and collected our empty bowls. "Another?" he asked, looking at my empty glass.

"Sure, thanks."

Finn refilled our glasses, and we moved from the kitchen to the sofa. This time, Finn sat closer to me.

"I got over that disappointment once I realised the group had become famous pretty much overnight," Finn continued.

"It was that fast?"

"It wasn't fame like we had later on, but yeah, Starfinder was at its peak, and anyone who got through became a celebrity. Suddenly I was getting recognised on the streets, and girls were all over me, and trust me, that goes to a teenage boy's head real fast."

"That's not surprising. It would probably go to my head too." I snuggled further into the sofa, my hand curled around my glass as I listened to Finn.

"In the beginning, being totally controlled by showrunners and publicists seemed a small price to pay for a shot at stardom. Then we won the show, and everything exploded. I didn't have time to think about anything beyond learning lyrics and music video routines, and trying to remember where we were performing or doing photo shoots. My entire life had been turned upside down – one moment, I was an average Irish lad, going to school and dreaming of bigger things, the next I was a superstar. That kind of high – it's like being on drugs. But by the second year in the band, I was starting to chafe at the restrictions. You can't offer teenage boys the world on a plate but then tell them they can only experience pre-approved, pre-scripted parts of it. You can't market them to screaming crowds of horny teenage girls, but then tell them they can only date the ones selected by management. You can't treat them like they're above the law, but refuse to let them even drink. It was a disaster waiting to happen," Finn said, fiddling with his leather bracelet.

"Did the other guys feel the same way?"

Finn made a waggling gesture with his hand. "Yes and no. They still rebelled, but they were more subtle about it. They smoked weed, but they made sure to do it in their hotel bathrooms, so no one outside the team knew. They only drank in private. They were okay with having girlfriends chosen for them because they always ended up with hotties."

"But that wasn't enough for you."

"Hell, no." Finn thumped a sofa cushion. "Rock music has always been about freedom to me. The deranged hair metal gods of the eighties did it right, and that's what I wanted."

"The deranged hair metal gods of the eighties also suffered a lot with alcoholism and drug addiction," I pointed out.

"Yeah, but as a kid, you don't understand the reality of that. You see these wild, crazy guys stomping around in black leather, beautiful women hanging off their arms, and the world at their feet, and you think, yeah, I want to be just like that."

I wondered if he still wanted that. His first two years out of Momentum had been legendary – drunken punch-ups with other musicians, flashy purchases, an endless string of paparazzi shots of him high out of his mind, his rapidly growing collection of tattoos, his parties with other rockers, including Angels & Demons – but he'd been a lot quieter lately.

When Jude had decided to officially introduce Camden to his friends, he and Elle had thrown a party at his loft, and I knew that Finn had been invited, because I'd been at that party too, desperate to meet him. He hadn't shown up. It wasn't the first or the last time he'd bailed on an event that a younger him would have been tearing up in true rock 'n' roll style.

Maybe he'd realised, just as Jude had, that there was more to life than drink, drugs, and women.

"The more I was told I wasn't allowed to do something, the more I wanted to do it." Finn lifted his glass to his lips, ice cubes clinking, and my eyes couldn't help lingering on the movement of his throat as he swallowed. I'd never thought of guys swallowing anything as being sexy before, but on Finn, it was.

"Management told me I couldn't smoke cigarettes, so I wanted to smoke pot. They told me I couldn't smoke pot, so I wanted to drop acid. They told me I could only date girls who fitted Momentum's image, so I wanted to go and fuck a string of crazy groupies. They told me I couldn't get a tattoo, so –" Finn broke off and gestured to his arms.

"I started becoming more hostile to my manager, to my team, my bandmates. I was rude to the press, sullen in interviews, I stopped putting in effort with live performances. Once I left Momentum, there was nothing stopping me, and I lost control for a while. In hindsight, there were a lot of things that I regret." His expression turned rueful. "Including some of these absolutely shite tattoos."

"They're not that bad," I weakly protested.

Finn chuckled and pointed at me. "Don't give me that crap. I've seen the way you look at them."

And I'd thought I'd done a good job of hiding it.

"I'm not offended," Finn added.

"Good."

"Eventually I'll get more of them covered up."

The logs in the stove crackled, drawing Finn's attention. The fire was dying low, casting flickering shadows on the floor. Finn pushed himself to his feet and grabbed more logs from the basket.

I took the moment to appreciate his denim-clad ass.

Finn turned, and I snapped my attention back to his face. The dim lighting cut his features into harsher angles, and shadowed his eyes, making them look even more intense, and suddenly it felt like there wasn't enough air in the room.

I swallowed.

"We've still got the rest of the evening to kill," Finn murmured.

I'd happily spend it ogling him, but that was a pretty one-sided activity.

Something sparked in his eyes, and my nipples tightened in response. The way he stood there, framed by firelight, his stare dark and penetrating, dredged up all my filthiest thoughts. It was getting very hot in here.

"I've got an idea to pass the time, but it's been a while. I don't know I'm any good still," Finn said.

Had his voice dropped lower, or was that my imagination?

My heart started to race.

Finn couldn't be talking about what I thought he was . . . right?

I tried to speak, but my mouth was too dry.

Slowly, his eyes fixed on me, Finn started to advance.