Head Over Heels: A Rock Star Fake Marriage (Southern Temptations Book 2)

by Roxy Wynn

  He handed me a napkin. “Clean yourself up, Mate.” He scanned the room and when his gaze settled on a group of women, he smiled. “You are a famous rock star, you can do better than a single mum and her bastard son.”

  “Oliver, I haven’t hit you in twenty years, but I will do it right now if you call him a bastard again.” The last time Oliver and I got into it, I was ten and mad at him for stealing my candy. I beat him bloody then, and I would beat him bloody now.

  Setting his drink down, he adjusted his tie and continued. “Apologies, Mate. All I’m saying is that now is the time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Shag some girls. Get out there and forget about this one.”

  “I can’t just forget about her.”

  “Well, not completely. But get over her enough so that you can move on. Use the painful memory as a subject for another Station Girl and get out there again.”

  He signaled the bartender over again. “You see that group of women? Get them another round, and another for my associate as well.”

  I glanced over at the four women sitting at a round booth. The were perfectly fine looking, maybe a little too much makeup, but Oliver wasn’t deterred.

  “You’re using me right now? That’s what this is, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “All I want is for you to give me a hard time again. You haven’t stopped by my office to flirt with my secretary, or done anything to embarrass me today. It’s not like you.” He scoffed. “I haven’t had the urge to strangle you once since I sat down.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem, Ollie. I need to grow up.”

  “Bollocks. Now grab that drink and follow my lead. I’ll show you how a real man woos a woman.”

  I winced and rolled my eyes, but decided to follow him just to see what he would do.

  “Well, aren’t the lot of you lovely?” He said to the table. “Now, I bet you girls are all in university. Am I correct?”

  They nodded and giggled, as if my old mate was the funniest, most clever Brit in the world. Slimy bastard finally figured out how powerful his accent could be on women.

  I took a spot at the end of the booth, keeping my distance, while Oliver regaled them with his stories of ‘discovering’ me.

  “You see, Alfie didn’t even know how good he was,” he said to his captive audience. “I got him on Music Makers, you know.”

  They stared at me, star struck, but wary of my unkempt appearance and drunken demeanor.

  He continued. “I said, ‘Alfie you must do something with this amazing talent of yours.’”

  The stories continued for the better part of an hour while the girls fawned over him. If I felt anything at all like my normal self, I would have shoved him aside and told the story of how he shit his bed in Scouts and was so embarrassed he cried, but I didn’t. Instead, I continued drinking and feeling sorry for myself.

  Eventually, the red head seated next to me began to fancy my dark, slovenly appearance. “Hi, I’m Rachel,” she said, extending her hand. A limp shake was all I could muster. “You look sad, darlin. Everything alright?”

  “Fine. Everything is right as rain. In fact, I really can’t complain.”

  She erupted into a fit of laughter over my ridiculous rhyme. Great, now I’ll have to continue with polite chit chat. I pleaded to Ollie for help with my eyes, but he gave me a thumbs up and put his arms around the women seated on either side of him.

  “Well, aren’t you a silly billy!”

  I shook my head. “No. Not today. Today I am a broken man…”

  “Nonsense,” Oliver interrupted, waving his drink in the air. “Alfie is just a little under the weather, nothing to concern yourselves with. I think he needs to go upstairs to his suite and lay down. What do you gorgeous women think? Should we go with him?”

  The girls cheered in unison, including Rachel whose hand somehow made its way to my knee.

  I was confused. “How did you know…”

  “Know you were staying here? Where else would you go? Your girlfriend left you.” The girls ‘awww’d in unison. “That’s right, kicked him out on his ass. Now he’s staying here. Is it true the room has a hot tub?”

  I was bored with this. Bored with Oliver. Bored with these dreadful women. I wanted to be home with Sarah, playing dinosaurs with Bailey.

  “That is correct,” I said, nodding. “A hot tub and a balcony overlooking the city. It’s a regular sex palace.”

  Rachel squeezed my thigh and pressed her breasts into my arm. Was that supposed to be a turn on?

  “Right, ladies, let’s head upstairs so Alfie can get some rest. We can all take care of him, have a slumber party!”

  Was this what he meant by enjoying the fruits of my labor? If that’s what this was, I wanted no part of it.

  I handed him the key to my room. “Go on, take the whole circus with you,” I said, waving them away. “I’m going to finish my drink. I’ll join you momentarily.”

  Oliver, took the three girls who stood, in his care and escorted them up to my room. He would destroy it, no doubt. At least in my womanizing days, I kept a certain standard. I didn’t just pick any old fanny that came on to me.

  Unfortunately, Rachel was still seated half in my lap, staring at me with her over drawn lips and exposed cleavage.

  “You coming up?” She asked, her hand caressing my back.

  “Oh, yes. Absolutely. Run along now and join them. I need to go get another shot of medicine from my friend the bartender, I’ll be up momentarily.”

  She nodded and took off to join her friends in my room, leaving me to finish the last of my drink in peace. When I was done, I left a hundred dollars on the table and took a cab back to my house.

  Or at least it was my house for three more days. After that, it was going right back on the market.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sarah

  “Mommy!”

  The cry woke me from my junk food induced slumber. Had I been dreaming? Where the hell was I?

  As I stared at the ceiling, everything came flooding back. We were safe with Chrissy and Jax, in the adjacent guest bedrooms set up for us if we ever needed a place to crash.

  I stayed silent for a moment wondering if he was talking in his sleep or if he had a nightmare, but when he cried out a second time, for Alfie, I ran to him.

  His room here wasn’t nearly as fun as his room at Alfie’s, and that made me feel like shit. When I signed the papers on the condo, I made a silent promise to recreate that room to the best of my abilities. I would somehow figure out a way to make a dinosaur slide, and an epic playroom.

  And, I was going to make sure he had more fun, damn it! No more of this stern mom stuff. While leaving Alfie was heartbreaking for me, it was Bailey who suffered the most, like I knew he would. He was always going to end up paying the steepest price.

  “Don’t worry, Little Man,” I said, crawling into his bed and cradling his small body. “It’s okay, mommy’s here.”

  When I kissed his forehead, he was hot and sweaty, but that was nothing new. If Bailey was anything like his dad, he had a big sweaty road ahead of him.

  “Did you have a bad dream?”

  He nodded and cuddled himself into my arms, burying his face in my hair.

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  He shook his head quickly, so I continued rocking him, hoping he would drift off again soon. “Mamma, can we see Alfie tomorrow?”

  “Sorry, Pipsqueak. We need to pack our things, remember?”

  No matter how many times I explained to him we couldn’t see Alfie, he kept asking. How were you supposed to explain to a kid they couldn’t see their friend anymore? A person they looked up to who only treated them with kindness.

  It was something I figured I would need to do once he became a teenager and started mooning old people and smoking, but he was too little for that now. I wasn’t prepared.

  I’m a monster. A guilty person who betrayed him.

  He nodded again, wrapping a strand of my hair around his
fingers. It was a coping mechanism, something he had done his entire life.

  “I’m so sorry about all of this,” I whispered again.

  Some day I would explain to him that this was the exact reason I hated dating and stayed single for so long. The stakes were too high. Giving Bailey a false hope of having a dad in his life was a shitty thing for me to do, I saw that now.

  From now on, you’re the only guy in my life. Promise.

  I rocked him until his breathing slowed again, and then gently unraveled myself from his sweaty death grip. Once, I knew he was out, I stepped back into the hallway. As much as I wanted to go back to sleep, I would just end up tossing and turning, so I headed to the kitchen for a glass of warm milk instead.

  Of course, the second I entered the kitchen, I found Chrissy’s ass poking out of an open fridge door.

  “Hungry?” I asked, scaring the shit out of her.

  “Asshole,” she hissed at me from behind a drumstick. She placed her hand over her heart and took a moment to breathe. “You scared me. Yes I’m hungry. I’m always hungry. Being pregnant is a whole new level of hunger I never knew existed.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “You want a drumstick?” She asked, offering me an old bucket of the Colonel’s special recipe.

  I waved it away. “No thanks, I just wanted to make some warm milk. Bailey had another nightmare.”

  She handed me the carton, and turned on the kitchen light. “Poor little dude. I bet he’s having a tough time right now.”

  I nodded and poured the milk into a pan, setting the heat on low before sitting at the table.

  “The worst part is that he called out for Alfie. I can’t even tell him why he can’t see his friend anymore. He doesn’t understand. How do other single moms do this? The ones who have a constant revolving door of boyfriends?”

  She shrugged and handed me a worn out Garfield mug from her cupboard, before diving into a second drumstick.

  “I’m a mom, I never should have gotten him mixed up in that. Alfie lane is a mess. He’s a womanizer, he’s careless, and he has no concept of what it takes to raise a child. What was I thinking?”

  The more I unleashed, the more I started to realize that warm milk wasn’t going to cut it. There has to be some bourbon around here somewhere.

  “Maybe you were thinking about how good it felt to live a little.”

  I scowled at her, but I couldn’t come up with a rebuttal, no matter how hard I tried. She continued, chewing away at her meat, not concerned about hurting my feelings.

  “I love you, but you are so highly wound,” she said through a mouthful of chicken. “I’m surprised you don’t shit diamonds.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, your kid hasn’t been born yet. You don’t understand that constant worry, but you will.”

  “Don’t blame it on Bailey,” she said, shaking the drumstick in my face. “That’s not fair. To him or you. This is how you’ve always been. You’re the smart one. You’re the business mind. You’re great at solving problems, but the other part of that is you take shit way too seriously. So he took Bailey to the fair, so what?”

  “So what? I didn’t know where they were…”

  “Yeah, I get it. He fucked up. Once. You said yourself how good he is with him. How patient he is when teaching him how to play guitar, which he wouldn’t bother with by the way if he really was a shit head.”

  When my milk just started to bubble, she pushed me aside and removed the pan from the stove, pouring the contents into the mug, and tossing the pan in the sink.

  “Do you think you could find it in your heart to admit you might have over reacted just a teensy bit?”

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “I will admit nothing”

  “Not even to yourself?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “It would be a real shame to throw away something great because you’re a stubborn bitch. I would hate to see that, not just for your sake but for Baileys. Alfie made you happy. He made you laugh, and it would be a damn shame to deny Bailey seeing his mom happy and in love.”

  She had a point. Jerk.

  “Give me that drumstick.”

  Instead of taking a fresh one from the tub, I wanted to punish her for telling me something so obviously true, it terrified me. When I bit into the deliciously salty flesh, my eyes rolled back in my head.

  “Does chicken have tryptophan or is that just turkey?” I asked, ignoring her tough love completely.

  “I think it’s just turkey.”

  When I finished my snack, I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand and took a sip of the warm milk. It was tasty, but I knew now, no matter how well it was supposed to work, sleep wasn’t going to happen for me tonight.

  “This is good, but its definitely not a cinnamon roll, I said. “You think you could do that thing where you sweet talk Jax into getting one for us?”

  Without missing a beat, Chrissy aimed directly for my heart. “Only if you promise to call Alfie.”

  I grimaced while sipping my milk and weighing my options. Call Alfie and beg for his forgiveness, or choose my kid and keep him sheltered until he was in his thirties, safe in my basement?

  “You know I’m right on this.”

  “Fine,” I said, relenting. “After we’re settled tomorrow, I’ll call him. No promises, though.”

  She clapped her hands, feeling very proud of herself. I hated to admit anything, but the girl knew me better than I knew myself.

  “I’ll go wake the bear,” she said, tossing her third drumstick aside. “He’s definitely going to demand a blow job for this, so it’ll be a few minutes, but I’ll send his ass to Ruby’s for a fresh roll.”

  I laughed. Poor Jax, having to deal with Chrissy’s hunger pangs. I felt horrible being complicit in this one in particular. “You really don’t have to do that.”

  “Please! I’m literally stitching together a human being, who will tear itself out of me any day now. The least he can do is get up in the middle of the night, enjoy a relaxing blow job, and get us some snacks.”

  “You know birth doesn’t happen like that, right?”

  She shook her head and made a disgusted face. “I have no clue. The birth video was too scary, I turned it off and watched The Truth About Cats and Dogs instead.”

  I leaned down and rubbed her baby bump.

  “Boy, are you in for a surprise.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sarah

  After having my eye on the top floor condos in the Ruby’s building, I finally got my hands on one. Of course, I had to negotiate with Jax on some upgrades, but once Chrissy put her foot down, he installed the claw foot tub I requested no problem.

  At seven sharp, the movers came and loaded our boxes up to bring them to our new home. The idea that the two of us could have our own spot, no mom, no Chrissy, and no Jax was awesome.

  While the movers retrieved boxes, I tried cheering Bailey up by telling him my plans for his bedroom. “What do you think about painting a big dinosaur mural,” I asked, trying to keep my tone light and fun. More than anything, I wanted him to be happy.

  “Why can’t we go back to Alfie’s house?” He asked in a quiet voice.

  I took a deep breath, and sat down next to him on the floor. “Hey, we talked about that.”

  “I know, but why? Why can’t we see him?”

  Now I know where ‘because I said so’ came from.

  None of my tiptoeing around the issue was working. My kid was worse than a lawyer. “We just can’t right now.” Trying to shift his attention to his pterodactyl, I picked the stuffy up and tried flying him through the air, making ridiculous dinosaur noises.

  “But why?”

  “Because I said so!” I snapped, dropping the pterodactyl.

  Why am I such an asshole?

  His face scrunched up and his gaze dropped down to the carpet, tracing the weave with his finger, ignoring me.

  “I’m sorry, boo,” I said, ru
nning my hand through his dark curls.

  God damn it, did I really have to admit Chrissy was right? That would break me. I told the pregnant monster I would call Alfie today, but I never promised a reunion. I never once said I would call him and profess my love, that would be crazy. If she inferred it, that was on her. I only intended to touch base, see how he was and maybe discuss a hands-off friendship.

  But when I stared at my baby, I realized that would never be enough. Bailey deserved to have a happy family full of people who adored on another, not a bitter mom afraid to let him out of her sight.

  By the time we got the all clear from Jax the movers had dropped everything off, my crew assembled at Ruby’s for the unpacking party.

  In the office, Tiffany, Kenneth, Jax, and myself talked shop while Chrissy had Bailey by the hand, picking warm cookie bits off a sheet tray and popping them into their mouths.

  “Try not to eat too many cookies,” I yelled to Chrissy. “I don’t want either of you puking in our new home on move in day.

  Ignoring me, he popped a stray chocolate chip into her mouth. “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “I agree Chrissy,” Jax said, shocking us all. Tiffany and Kenneth took a step away from him, looking anywhere but at the pregnant ball of rage holding my child’s hand.

  Chrissy cackled. “Guys, I’m not mad. I was just have a bad case of pregnancy brain. I have a lot of emotions bubbling up inside of me right now.”

  It’s a trap!

  Kenneth exhaled loudly and relaxed. “Thank the lord. You’ve been so all over the place lately…” Tiffany quickly pinched him and he stopped talking.

  “Great. Now let’s go upstairs and get us unpacked,” I said. I took Bailey’s hand and a chocolate chip cookie for the road, and led us around the side of the building. The construction on the main entrance was still ongoing, so we didn’t get the grand experience of seeing Jax’s vision, but as long as we had a roof over our heads, I was happy.