by Quinn, Cari
And because I’d been drawn to her that morning, I’d left behind the pad that contained all of those complicated emotions. Some about her, some about me, all of them capable of being crafted into weapons.
I hadn’t called Angel to ask her how she’d gotten the song. The first song. I hadn’t even known she had possession of “Never Again” too. I’d intended to call her after I talked to my manager, but then Jamie had called about Lindsey and I’d gone to her without a thought.
The song had been almost meaningless to me beyond how she’d gotten it.
But I hadn’t taken the steps. I hadn’t done my due diligence. Now there was another song, another unauthorized release, even more damnable than the first. I had gotten word about the livestream on the plane over—I had a friend with a private jet, and this had been the first time I’d taken him up on the offer to use it—and I’d watched in horror as she sang the words Lindsey and I had written.
I’d tried calling Lindsey right away, even before Don. Her phone had gone right to voicemail. She’d probably been in soundcheck by then.
So, I’d told myself she hadn’t heard about it. Why would she? She was readying for a show.
A show I’d had no business almost missing in the first place.
I’d sat at home for half an hour after George had taken her to the airport, missing her and wishing I’d just followed my gut and gone with her. Contacting my friend about borrowing his plane—and his pilot—had been a total impulse.
Now Lindsey would think I’d come here to do damage control, when the truth was I’d been pissed at myself for shutting her out for that last little while before she left. I didn’t want to miss her. Didn’t want to care.
But here we were, and she’d just gotten done belting out an incredible song about what an asshole I was. I’d bet good money it hadn’t been on the setlist before tonight either.
Poison? Yeah, I was. Undoubtedly. It didn’t stop me from loving her. From being absolutely dazzled by her performance. Every song was a revelation. Even the ones meant to give me a big old middle finger.
Nothing she’d said had been a lie. But the part about her having no escape…
I should tell her she was wrong.
That I’d let her go.
I could be that magnanimous. If she wanted to be free, I wouldn’t stand in her way.
I just didn’t know if I could physically stay away. She was a bulb in the dark and I was drawn to her inexorably.
To her detriment perhaps.
Despite my recent addition to the all access pass list, my late entrance had left me closer to the back of the VIP section than the front. Fine by me. I didn’t want her to know I was there. Standing in the crowd, hearing their screams, feeling their energy waft over me like a palpable wave.
All of them focused on the woman who’d hijacked my life in the best possible way.
Her bandmates were all part of the whole too. Each of them was supremely talented as well. But Lindsey was the jewel in their crown.
At the end of the concert, I pushed through the teeming audience still riding the high from her music, her voice, her very presence. The crowd made me want to search for the nearest exit. I hated this kind of scene now. Too many people. Too much activity. Too many prying eyes.
I craved the cool silence of my flat with a fierceness that surprised even me.
Fighting my own instinct to flee, I made my way to the green room backstage. I was directed to her dressing room, where I waited in the unlit space that smelled of orchids and jasmine and things that bloomed in the darkness.
Like me. God knows I didn’t know if I was blooming yet, but I was much closer to alive than dead now.
Solely because of her.
The door flew open, the knob hitting the opposite wall. She streaked into the room, a blinding ray of silver even in the dark. What there was of her costume could have illuminated a tunnel. Her hair glistened as she whirled, cursing as she fumbled for the light switch.
And like a cat, I sprung out of the shadows and covered her mouth with my hand, hauling her back against me. My other hand lightly cupped her throat, my signature move with her. The one she loved.
I thought she would know. Would realize it was me. And yes, she’d be pissed, so this way she wouldn’t scream and draw security before I’d even had a chance to explain.
She fought like a wildcat, stomping down on my foot with a fervor that could’ve snapped my little toe. I stumbled back, my spine hitting the opposite wall as she flipped on the inadequate row of lights around the dressing table mirror and stared at me as if I was a stranger.
One to be feared at that.
She spun away but not before I glimpsed the wash of tears in her crystal blue eyes. Tears that ripped into me like tiny shards of glass.
“Duchess.” My voice was hoarse. “I can explain.”
“Really? Can you explain lurking in here like a damn stalker? Can you explain grabbing me in the darkness as if you were about to end my life?”
“Oh, Christ. Fuck. I didn’t think of it that way.” I scrubbed a hand through my hair. “I didn’t think, obviously. I thought you’d recognize my touch—”
“Maybe I would have, had I been expecting you. Had the room not been in total darkness. I can smell you now.” She let out a sob and pressed her fists to her mouth, shaking her head. “Now I know it’s you.”
“I would never hurt you.” Even as I stepped forward, as the words tumbled free, she reeled back as if I’d struck her.
I had. Just not with my hand.
Knowing full well she’d probably push me back, I wrapped her in my arms, drawing her against me. She fought as expected, landing blows that hurt enough to leave bruises. I took them and her tears, flying loose to hit my cheeks as if they were mine too. In a way, they were. I just wasn’t brave enough to cry them.
“I’m sorry, love. I wasn’t thinking.” I buried my face in her mounds of fragrant hair and inhaled her in deep, greedy gulps. “I wanted to disarm you, not to scare you. That was my mistake. I’ve cursed you by loving you.”
“What?” She braced her fists against my chest and shook off my arms. “What did you say?”
I wasn’t even sure. I couldn’t control my tongue any better than the rest of me right now.
“Look at me, you bastard.” She grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged my face to hers, making our eyes level. With her tall-as-hell purple boots, we almost were anyway. She erased the rest of the distance as if it didn’t exist. “I listened to what sure as fuck sounded like you selling our feelings for a song tonight, or even worse, giving them away for free. So, if you just said what I think you fucking said, you grab your balls and look me in the eyes and say it. Say it, Alex, or we’re through.”
“I love you.” I drove my hands into her hair, getting lost in the golden mass of it. And I spoke the words against her painted lips while she trembled. “I love you. I fucking love you with every breath I have. Every heartbeat in my chest. You’re my beginning and my end and all the days in between.”
She closed her hand around the material of my shirt until I was sure the buttons would pop. Just bust at the seams under the pressure. But she said nothing.
I wasn’t nearly through.
“I didn’t give those songs to Angel. Do you think I would’ve done that to you? To us? Even if I’d wanted to trash us, incinerate every moment we’ve been given, I wouldn’t have harmed you even more to do it. I don’t think you’re selling your heart. I was the sell-out, duchess. Me.”
Her gaze was a steady flame, not flickering for a second. The heat behind it spurred me on.
“I loved music, but I loved the attention more. And when it all grew too much for me, I started using. I didn’t know how to give back what they wanted from me. I’m not like you. I don’t fucking shine. You were made for the stage. Your gift is giving back. Because you have everything inside you and more they’ll never ever, touch.”
She turned away from me and braced her hand
s on her dressing table, staring at herself in the mirror as if she didn’t recognize her own face. “That stage is my refuge. The one place I feel safe. The most me. Someone has tried to take that from me. And then tonight, I listened to the words we wrote together come out of a stranger’s mouth. Can you imagine what went through my mind? If we’d been a different sort of couple, I could’ve called you. Asked you what the hell was going on. I should have. But it’s only been a few days that you’ve been telling me anything at all and I don’t trust it.”
“Don’t trust me,” I corrected.
She shifted to face me, and her fierce beauty was staggering. “I do trust you, God help me. I don’t believe you’d lie to me. I do believe you’d run away and deflect and try to fuck me into not caring anymore. You could do it. Far too easily. Know why?” She stepped to me again, toe to toe. “Because I love you too, you bastard. I love you,” she whispered as I crushed her to me.
I kissed her with every ounce of the passion and fury and confusion inside me, all of them fighting for control. Through it all, there was love. That was what had my lips gentling against hers, and the slash of my tongue easing as I reached up to brush her hair away from her face. Then I lifted her onto the dressing table, pulling back to eye her outfit.
To let the possessiveness and jealousy inside me roar to the fore.
“You tried to kill me tonight.” I hooked my fingers in the thin chain that hung all the way down to her belly button. The web of delicate links drew my attention to her beautiful tits on the verge of overflowing their sparkling silver cups. To her tiny waist and down to the skirt that barely covered her pussy and the tops of her mile-long legs. The purple boots capped off her attire, making her even taller.
“You mean in my mind? Because you were definitely dead to me.” She hooked her legs around my hips, easing forward on the table until her barely covered slit slammed into my far too interested cock. “But you yourself? I wouldn’t kill you. I have too many uses for you.”
“That so?” I slanted my mouth over hers, extending the kiss while she rubbed against me, getting that panel of fabric between her legs nice and wet.
Not good enough.
“We did this once,” I said against her lips between kisses. “I fucked you against a mirror.”
“Yeah, try earlier today, Romeo.”
“As if I forgot.” I yanked her off the table and turned her around, gripping her throat as I pushed her right up to the mirror. Her forehead touched it as I spoke near her ear. “This we haven’t done yet.”
I didn’t waste time. I unzipped my pants and released my cock, then pushed aside that impossibly tiny bit of material between her legs. Scarcely anything had hid her from the eyes of the men and women in the audience.
“You get off on that, don’t you?” I scraped my teeth over her earlobe. “Everyone watching you. Wanting you. As I do. I could kill them all for even seeing this much of you.” My hand came down on her ass and she jerked, her hips rolling. Her ass lifting for more. I gave her what her body asked for, spanking her that much harder while she gasped and processed, her suddenly dark, churning blue eyes meeting mine in the mirror.
“I watched you.” I shoved two fingers in her and her back arched. “I was there, watching you sing for them. Your beauty blinded me. Every song you sang, I was thinking of doing this to you.”
Before she could speak, I was on my knees, peeling her open for my mouth. I wasn’t tender. My lips and tongue and teeth lashed at her, demanding as much as she had to offer. Her grip grew white-knuckled on the edges of the table and her thighs shook, but I didn’t stop. Didn’t slow down until she let out a cry and soaked my lips and chin.
Then I rose and palmed my cock, shifting so she could see me stroke myself in the mirror. “For you,” I gritted out. “Always for you. No other woman exists for me. Understand me, duchess? This is yours. I’m fucking yours.”
Her spine bowed when I thrust into her, seating myself deep in one slow slide. Her eyes met mine in the mirror and I gripped a handful of her hair, dragging her back so that her breasts were a full breath from spilling free and her throat was exposed to me. Rocking into her, I switched my grip from her hair to her neck, absorbing her moan as my fingers tightened as if she’d fed it directly into my mouth. I jerked her back against me and fucked into her again and again, rocking the table against the wall with every stroke.
My hand held her still and the wild flutter of her pulse under my fingers and around my cock told me she was there with me, every step.
“I don’t have enough hands to touch all of you,” I panted into her ear.
She got the hint.
Achingly slowly, she ran her palm down over her own breasts, lingering over her nipple. Squeezing her breast over and over, making us both groan. Continuing on and drifting her fingers over her covered pussy under her skirt, the gyrations of her hand telling me she was doing the work I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to maintain my hold on her throat. And she loved that, needed it. Every time I flexed my fingers, she rubbed harder and dropped her head to my shoulder, watching me fuck her from behind through the hazy blue slits of her eyes.
“Get me wet, duchess,” I growled.
As if it was a stage command she couldn’t ignore, she rippled around me, heat exploding through me from the clasp of her pussy. She turned her head and fumbled to take my mouth, kissing me desperately while she tripped into her second orgasm, hauling me ever closer to my own destruction.
The second she stopped twitching around me, I pushed her down on the table. Way down. My hand tightened almost to the point of danger. Her breaths hissed out and her pupils enlarged, but she bucked back against me, urging me for more.
I gave it to her, pressing her down as I drilled into her again and again. She whimpered when I lessened my hold, then pulled back and pushed home one last time, holding her still to take every drop.
“Mine,” she said harshly, pumping backward to lengthen my torment.
Then she licked her lips.
Under my palm, her ass was bright red from where I’d smacked it. Seeing that with my cock still lodged inside her nearly had me jerking to life one more time.
I pulled myself free with a groan that echoed in both of us.
Lindsey stood and winced as she tugged her costume back into place as much as possible. “Save that for later—”
A commotion in the hall caused me to move back and quickly do up my pants. The door flew open and a crazed-looking blond teenager flung himself into the room, his eyes wheeling and landing on Lindsey. “Lindsey, it’s you, it’s really you.”
My first instinct was to pull her behind me. She struggled free just as security burst into the room and strong-armed the kid into submission. He was weeping now, still repeating her name.
“Lindsey, you’re mine. You know we were meant to be together. Tell them. Tell them you’re mine—”
The security guys towed him out of the room, still shouting for Lindsey. One of them came back a second later while Lindsey gripped her throat, her fingers curving over the indents mine had left.
“I’m so sorry, Miss York. There was an issue with one of the radios and he made it through. It won’t happen again.”
She nodded and smiled faintly then let her hand drop. The handprint revealed there seemed like a tattoo etched permanently into her skin. “Thank you, Stewart. Do you know—” She let out a breath. “What will happen to him?”
“He’ll be booked. We have every reason to think he’s trespassed before and could very well be responsible for the green room situation. He won’t be bothering you again.” He smiled reassuringly and stepped back into the hallway.
Lindsey looked at me for a long, humming moment before she took my hand. “Can you stay with me tonight?”
I drew her into the circle of my arms. She wasn’t shaking, but I was on the verge. “Duchess, you couldn’t pry me away.”
Thirty-Seven
A hotel in Richmond wasn’t where I wanted to spend the
night before we moved on to our next venue. I wanted my bed at home. Or even Alex’s bed, with Sarge staring at me with a disdainful expression in his green eye and Brutus draped on top of us like an oversized security blanket with a lolling tongue.
I’d grown accustomed to his place so quickly. It already felt safe to me.
Just as Alex did, which was a minor feat considering his judgment lapse in ambushing me in the darkness in my dressing room.
But he was making up for it.
For the last couple of hours since the overzealous fan had been captured, Alex hadn’t left my side. When we ordered room service, he took care of talking to the hotel staff. When I said I wanted a shower, he’d followed me in to wash my hair and tell me stories about growing up in Ireland. Light, easy, fun stories of him and his da before things had gone wrong.
His mum had never really been in the picture. I couldn’t imagine what that was like. My parents and I weren’t very close, but I knew they were there if I needed them. His mother had just walked away from him without a backward glance.
No wonder he didn’t believe he knew how to love. Although from where I was standing—laying now, in our gigantic bed—he was doing just fine for a rookie.
The lights were off, and we weren’t speaking. Just lying naked, tangled together, our bodies still damp from our mutual shower. We hadn’t had sex again after the dressing room.
Then again, who needed a followup to that?
I drew my fingernail around his nipple. “You chased me down tonight to talk to me about Angel?”
“No. I was on my way to you on a friend’s plane when someone I worked with let me know Angel was livestreaming and had mentioned me.”
“Wait, you were on your way to me before you knew? Why?”
He combed a lock of wet hair behind my ear. “Because I love you.”
Saying nothing, I laid my head on his chest. Could it truly be that easy? Everything between us had been so hard right from the very beginning. Now it was as if some dam had opened up between us and the logjam that had blocked us from being honest was finally moving out of the way.