by Vicki James
When the two of us came, hard and frantic, we collapsed into a pile on the floor, his back taking the force of the fall.
He pushed my hair behind my ears and trailed his fingers up and down my neck as he studied me.
“And so it begins,” he whispered. “The real adventure. How long do I have you for?”
“For now… two weeks.”
“Just two weeks?” His brows knitted together. “That’s not enough.”
“I said for now, greedy. I have to go back after that. I have a business to run, and that business doesn’t stop just because I’m unable to resist the love of my life.”
“The love of your life, huh?” He smirked lazily.
I pressed a finger down on his chin, making those swollen lips I loved so much, part. “It’s always been you, superstar. It always will be you. Now we just have to figure out how to navigate the technicalities of us. This first hurdle was always going to be the hardest part for me. Now I’ve done that…”
“... you can do anything.”
“One step at a time.” I kissed him, and he kissed me back, but there was no urgency in this kiss. It was lazy and almost sleepy, our lips loose and our eyes closed as we ran fingers through hair and over damp skin and tight nipples.
I loved all of his kisses, but those slow, effortless ones were my favourite, and so I indulged in the very things I’d spent years avoiding thinking about. For Danny Silver, I became an addict again, knowing we had all the time in the world this time to get it right. I was going to overdose on every fantasy I’d ever had about him, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about any of it. Not even when his manager, Billie, banged on the dressing room door to remind him that he had a show to get ready for that night. The two of us rolled over, laughing, and Danny’s kisses drifted down my stomach until he was pushing my legs apart and pinning them down so he could taste me.
No, I definitely didn’t feel guilty then.
Not even for a second.
“You’re still not going to tell me?” I asked from the back seat of the car Danny had called for. Paris whizzed by in front of me, different shades of bright white lights twinkling away beyond the blacked-out window I was currently looking through in awe.
“No.”
I turned to take him in. He wore that white T-shirt he’d been wearing during soundcheck, teasing me with the defined edges of his chest muscles. His hair was scraped back and had been since the show finished. Watching him come alive on that stage in front of so many screaming fans had been a moment I wouldn’t ever forget. Not because of the sheer volume of people in there chanting his name, but for the way he couldn’t stop himself from drifting to the side of the stage I was standing at. His smile was wider than ever before, and his eyes were alive with wicked promises of what he was going to do to me again once we were alone.
Jules and Billie had both agreed that that show had been one of the best performances Front Row Frogs had ever played, and I hadn’t missed the not so subtle wink Jules had sent my way when that statement had been made.
As soon as it had finished, Danny had taken my hand and told me we were forgoing the after-party… and then I’d been guided into the back of this fancy car.
“Is this how it’s going to be from now on?” I asked, watching him as he faced forward, not looking at me or giving anything away. “You bossing me around and telling me what’s happening all the time? I don’t get a say in anything.”
“Pretty much.” His lips twitched.
“That’s not going to work for me.”
“You’ll come around.” Danny side-eyed me, unable to stop his smirk from rising. “Trust me, Zee.”
I did, and he knew it, too. Damn him.
Ten minutes later, the car pulled up outside a fairly ordinary-looking building—if any of the beautiful architecture in Paris could be called ordinary—with no lights or neon signs announcing where we were or what the building stood for.
There was no point me asking him to give any more clues. He’d made his stance perfectly clear, so I waited for the driver to open the door and for us both to get out before I turned to Danny and waited, faking patience.
He took my hand in his and guided me to a black door that had a control panel on the side, and he never once looked at me when he opened the little Perspex door to type in a six-digit code. A green light lit up the panel, and I heard the lock click open. Danny reached for the handle and guided me inside what looked like a residential block of very fancy flats.
We made our way over to a lift, and up to the tenth floor, which looked to be as high as we could go. The two of us stepped out into a modern corridor, with plush black carpets, grey walls, and fancy art dotted everywhere. Danny pulled me along, his strides slow and controlled until we came to another door, and he opened it to reveal a staircase.
He waved his hand in front of him and gestured for me to go through. I did as I was told, muttering under my breath about his smug silence before Danny let the door close behind us, and he took my hand again, guiding us up a concrete flight of stairs until there was another door.
“Let me guess. Narnia?” I offered sarcastically.
“Even better.”
The moment he revealed what was beyond that door, I stepped out onto the flat roof with the walled-ledge around it—one that looked just like our roof back in Hope Cove, only this one was decorated with fairy lights.
Slap bang in the middle of the skyline was the Eiffel Tower, twinkling away like it had been placed there for nobody else to enjoy but me. The sight of it stole my breath, and I slapped a hand to my chest as I walked closer to the raised edge that kept us safe. My hands fell to the cool brick.
Danny’s hands slid around my waist, and his chin came to rest on my shoulder.
“Two weeks to show you as many of the world’s best rooftops as I can,” he said with a small, contented sigh. “It’s not as much time as I’d like, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“It’s so beautiful.”
“Yeah,” he breathed against my neck, and I had a feeling he wasn’t talking about the Eiffel Tower or the bright, romantic lights of Paris. “Beautiful.”
“I don’t want to blink and miss a second of it. Let’s stay here all night.”
“Whatever makes you happy.”
“It’s perfect,” I whispered, both at Danny, and at the Eiffel Tower. My hands slid around his arms, and I squeezed him tight in the midst of my own fairy tale, feeling like someone new, yet still the same girl I’d always been.
“I’m going to make you so fucking happy, Zee. I’ll do it right this time. I’ll never let you go again.”
Tearing my eyes away from the view, I turned in Danny’s arms and pressed my back against the ledge, trapping myself between my two favourite sights as I wrapped my arms around his waist and tugged him against me.
“I can’t regret a single thing that happened because all of it has led to this. You’ve no idea how happy I am at this very moment. All of the bad things I thought had ruined my life only made it better in the end. Nothing, not one thing, could make it better.”
Danny’s handsome smile was breath-taking, and he reached up to push my hair behind my ear before he buried his fingers in the thick of it and pulled my head back, making my lips part as I looked up at him.
“Nothing?” he whispered.
I shook my head in his grip.
“Then maybe I should leave it as it is and ask you to marry me some other time.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, the pinch of my heart making a jolt of electricity shoot down to the heat between my legs. The silence lingered, and while I paled, Danny’s smile only grew as he lowered his lips to mine and brushed them together, breathing me in.
“She loves me… she loves me not… she loves me… she loves me not—”
“She loves you,” I breathed out.
“She’s happy…. she’s happy not… she’s happy… she’s happy not.”
“She’s happy.”
His lips curled against mine. “She’ll marry me… she’ll marry me not… she’ll marry me… she’ll marry me not…”
“She’ll marry you.”
Danny’s smile faded, only to be replaced by desire and gratitude, before he closed his eyes and whispered, “She’ll marry me, too.”
A small laugh bubbled, and I tugged his waist closer to mine, desperate to inject him into my veins. “Yes,” I croaked.
“Hell, yes.” He beamed, right before I was swept off the ground and spun around in his arms, with the Paris skyline dancing away around us.
I didn’t need to spend another year or decade convincing myself of his love. I knew. Deep down, I knew. Time hadn’t erased or diluted anything between us. The tests we’d faced had only made that love grow. Our time apart hadn’t broken who we were as a couple. That time apart had been the very thing to show the both of us that the world had a lot to offer, sure, but nothing that could beat being in each other’s arms.
Foolish decisions are only foolish when they don’t work out, and the only certainty I had in life now was knowing that Danny and I were going to work out, no matter the obstacles and bad decisions put in our way.
The simple shop girl and the irresistible rock star.
I guess our bumpy story was always meant to come to this ending on a rooftop in Paris.
I definitely wasn’t going to argue with that.
Epilogue
Danny Silver
One Year Later
“And this one?” I asked, eyeing her from across the kitchen table as I hit play on the track of my Spotify playlist.
Daisy looked up at the ceiling with innocent blue eyes and a furrowed brow. Fourteen seconds passed before she clicked her fingers at me, and her face lit up with a smile. “Hotel California, The Eagles.”
“Well done.” I tipped my head.
“Give me another.”
“You don’t listen to the first few bars of Hotel California and just turn it off, you maniac.”
“You do when your irresistible fiancée does this.” Daisy shuffled her vest-top down and squeezed her arms together to reveal a cleavage that instantly made the smile drop from my face, and the fella in my jeans wake up. “Another one, please, superstar.”
“Good God.” I swallowed, and my finger hit play on another track, while my eyes stayed lost in Daisy’s tits.
“Some Might Say, Oasis. Easy.”
She dropped her arms and let her vest rise back up, making me blink and shake my naughty thoughts away. Although, around Daisy, they were never really gone. I loved all her looks—she could make a potato sack look like high-end fashion—but my favourite was the one she wore while sitting opposite me in her little home. Her flannel jammie bottoms and her cute berry coloured vest top showed off all the perfect curves I couldn’t get enough of, while still reminding me of just how utterly fucking adorable this woman was. All while her platinum diamond engagement ring—picked in Paris the day after she agreed to spend forever with me—sparkled on her ring finger.
“Another?” she reminded me.
I looked up at her to see her brow raised at me. “Oh, erm. Sure.” I shook my head again and hit another song.
“Sweet Home Alabama, Lynard… argh, give me a second…” She slapped her hand on the table. “Lynard Skynard.”
“I don’t know how you forget that band’s name every single time.”
“Because it’s a stupid name.”
“Wash your mouth out.”
“It’s almost as stupid as Front Row Frogs.”
“I already told you, Toilet Seat Toads was taken.”
Daisy huffed out a laugh, and I flashed her a smile that I knew had the same effect on her as those tits had on me. This guess-the-intro game was her favourite to play after a year of me surrounding her with so much music that she was now becoming an encyclopaedia of the greats. Halo, Fletch, Archer, and Theo had given her a hard time those first few days on tour, asking how on earth a woman of her age could be so uncultured when it came to music. After throwing a tantrum that only made me want to throw her on the bed and devour her, she’d begged me to teach her some musical history.
Now, here she was, able to put me through my paces more often than not. You didn’t issue a challenge to a woman like Daisy Piper and expect her to lose.
She was nothing if not determined. The butterfly had emerged, and she had wings that were confident and blinding.
We played this game most mornings, whether laid in bed in Paris, Munich, Rotterdam, Milan, Miami, or LA. In the last twelve months, Daisy had travelled the world with me while also juggling her business. Granted, she’d hired staff to help her now, but she was a home bird at heart, no matter how much she kept pushing this new adventurous side of herself. After too long away, she’d say she needed to stumble back home to see her family and Gina, and I’d let her go.
I fucking hated letting her go now.
Flashbacks to all those times alone in hotel rooms, not knowing where the hell I was or what day it was, would flash through my mind every time I watched her walk away.
All those times I’d pined for her.
All those notes I’d played in her honour without her knowing a thing about any of them.
The dreams I’d had of her face, quickly followed by the regret of the last memory I had of her looking at me like she hated me, too. Daisy hadn’t been in my life physically, but she’d been with me every step of the way. She’d always owned my mind.
There was no doubt that this woman loved me again now. She showed me in ways I hadn’t known possible. But there was always a little niggle in the back of my mind.
What if she didn’t come back?
What if someone got to her while I wasn’t there, and they made her realise she’d been a fool to run back into the arms of the very guy who broke her heart?
What if she finally saw sense?
What if she finally realised just how damn beautiful she really was?
Those doubts were washed away the second I’d see her name lighting up my phone screen, and when I’d hear her voice, whispering sweet promises of all the dirty things she wanted us to try as soon as we were back together.
Oh, yeah. My girl had become vocal, able to use her sexuality to get me to do, well, any-fucking-thing she desired.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, breaking me from my daydream.
I blinked up at her. “You.”
“Anything good?”
“Always.”
She guessed a few more songs correctly, and I let out a yawn after being kept awake all night.
“My man is tired,” she said, tilting her head as my yawn tailed off. “Do you want to take a nap before the wedding this afternoon?”
“Do we have time?”
Daisy glanced at the clock on the wall. “We don’t have to be there until 2:30 p.m. That gives you a couple of hours before we need to shower and get you looking your finest. Not that you don’t look divine right now, sitting there with those washboard abs on display.”
I glanced down at my bare chest and the loose, grey jogging bottoms that Daisy seemed to be obsessed with before I looked back up at her. “Can’t I just go like this and make that nap a three-hour one instead then?”
“And have all the other women staring at you? I think not.”
“It doesn’t matter who’s looking at me when I’m only looking at you, Zee.”
It was little, sincere one-liners like that that had become her weakness. I meant every one of them, too. She was up and out of her chair in no time, making her way to me. I moved the chair back, and she swung her legs over my waist, straddling me and making sure her pussy rested just over my dick… which was now waking up and paying attention, all right.
Zee wrapped her arms around my neck and rocked her arse back and forth in a gentle rhythm that was barely noticeable to the eye… only to the guy suddenly rising in my pants.
“I beg you not to show anyone else this naked chest,” she sai
d seductively.
I gripped her hips and tensed everywhere. “What’s it worth?”
“Me. Naked. On this small table. Up against that window. Over there on the counter. On the floor, in the living room, on the stairs… wherever the hell you want me.”
“On your knees?”
“My favourite.” She smiled.
“Christ, you ruin me, Zee.” I looked down at the point where we were connected, already desperate to tear what little clothes we had on and push her down until she wrapped those sweet, warm lips around my cock. Glancing up, I was already panting. “What about Ben’s wedding?”
“You’re thinking about that when I’m promising you your favourite thing?”
“Hell, no. I just don’t want you to have any regre… oh, that feels so fucking good.”
I closed my eyes and let my head fall back, my fingers digging into her harder. Daisy dropped her lips to my neck, and she placed teasing kisses there that made my skin prickle and my balls burn.
“What will it be, Danny? Shall we make it to Ben’s wedding on time, or should we run a little late and have a lot of fun beforehand?”
“Fun,” I rasped. “Lots of fun.”
“Yeah.” I felt her smile against me. “Screw responsibility.”
So we ran a little late to Hope Cove’s wedding of the year. We made it just in time to see Ben marrying some woman whose name I couldn’t remember after a whirlwind summer romance that had made his whole world sparkle like he was permanently living in Paris.
Some loves take a second to grow like Ben and his soon to be wife. Then there are others, like mine and Daisy’s, where it had taken years apart to become absolute.
As I stood there in my black suit, white shirt, and my grey tie, I couldn’t keep my hands off of the exposed skin on Daisy’s back. She wore a stunning pale lemon dress that fell over her knees in pleats, hugged her chest perfectly, yet left her toned and tanned back on display.
The vows were made on Harbour Beach, with the sun on our skin, the sea in our view, and the wind blowing through our hair, and all I could think about as Ben found the love of his life and committed to her for eternity was…