“Of course I do, yet at the same time, I really don’t. I don’t belong in his world even if he offered.” She ripped the wrapping paper.
“Aren’t you going to wait until Christmas to open your presents?” Taryn moved the remote control away from Aidan as he tried to grab it.
“Hell no. I would die of curiosity. I just won’t tell him.” Then she paused in grinning and felt a lump appear in her throat as she realized what was in the box. “OMG. It’s Harrison Ford’s original script, signed by him. I’m going to die. I’m literally going to die.” She felt like she was having heart palpitations. “OMG. This had to cost like a hundred grand.” She actually felt faint and she waved her hand in front of her face.
Taryn’s mouth dropped. “Seriously? Holy crap, don’t let the baby grab it!” She scooped her son up and held him tightly to her chest. “That is an insane gift. That’s not a “just friends gift”, Harper Marie Harrison.”
She was too stunned and excited to object to her sister-in-law dragging out her middle name. “He’s rich, Taryn. This doesn’t mean that much to him. Sure, it’s a seriously generous and thoughtful gift, but it’s probably more like a thousand bucks to you or me.” When she said it like that, it still wasn’t a friend gift then. She had never, in the entirety of their friendship, spent more than fifty dollars on a holiday or birthday gift for Ellie.
Taryn just eyed her. “Uh-huh. What are in the other boxes?”
She was almost afraid to find out. One box was a hot pink lightsaber. “Oh, pretty.” The third box was Leia’s slave costume. “Um…” She felt her cheeks flush.
“Isn’t that the bikini thing Carrie Fisher wore when she was chained to Jaba?”
“Yes. I’m not sure why he would send me this.” There was a card tucked among the packing peanuts and she opened it. It simply said:
Go cosplay crazy at the convention.
Merry Christmas
xxx
Stryker
“So when you’re in LA, where he lives, he wants you to wear a hoochie costume. And you think he just wants to be friends?”
“I don’t know if I have the guts to wear this. I’m not usually into the super sexy costumes.” It made her very uncomfortable to be almost naked under fluorescent lighting. She was confident in her cuteness, not in her sultry sexiness.
“That’s your first thought? Not that he spent like a bajillion dollars on you?”
“I’m trying to ignore that part.” She was. It was a little overwhelming. It was frankly too generous. She couldn’t accept all this from him because it made the scarf she had knitted him for Christmas look utterly ridiculous. She had unfortunately already shipped it so he was going to know she was lame. That she couldn’t equal his gifts.
Then again, her gift hadn’t been expensive but she also had one million knitting projects that she had started and abandoned over the years. His scarf was the first one she’d completed in months. It was because he meant a lot to her. The bright spot in her day.
“There’s one present left,” Taryn helpfully pointed out.
“I see that.” Her heart was pounding and her mouth felt dry. What else could there be? If Ewan McGregor popped out of that box she was going to drop dead.
But it wasn’t an actor or an autograph and anything related to her hobby at all. It was a DVD, hand burned, with a note attached to it.
You inspired me.
Reading that, she instantly knew what it was. It had to be a song Stryker had written. “Give me something to play this in,” she said to Taryn, as if they were at Taryn’s house and not her own apartment.
“Doesn’t your laptop have a DVD player?”
“Right.” She jumped up, surrounded by torn wrapping paper, her nephew busy squeezing one of the pieces in his chubby fist. Grabbing her laptop off the kitchen counter, she slid the DVD in. It felt like forever before the music started but when it did, tears welled in her eyes.
It was a ballad. His voice was tender, aching. It was about a girl. The girl with the power over him. The power to steal his heart. She promptly burst into tears. Her nephew jerked, eyes widening, like she had startled the crap out of him. Aunt Harper wasn’t known for sobbing like a hot mess.
“Is this about you?” Taryn whispered. “Holy moly, Harper… he’s in love with you. A rockstar is in love with you.”
She kind of thought that’s what it meant but she wasn’t sure if that was what she wanted, what she craved, or what was reality. “I don’t know if he is or not. I just know that it scares me either way.”
“Why? Can I ask a really rude question?”
That was promising. “Sure.” She was focused on the music anyway.
“Why are you so afraid to grow up? Yes, you have a job and an apartment, but you’ve been turning men away for years who might actually be husband material. And your decorating is like a college dorm.”
Taryn was right- that was a rude question.
“Why does being a grownup mean you can’t have movie memorabilia? Who decided that? That’s stupid and I’m sorry, I love my mother, but I don’t want to be her. She gave up her funky when she married my father and I’m never doing that. Love me, love my Leia buns. But you’re right, I have chosen poorly with men. It’s not intentional.”
She was so confused right now and she couldn’t even call Stryker because he would know she opened the box.
“I just want you to be happy.”
Harper gave her sister-in-law a smile. “I am happy. I’m just not your idea of happy. I don’t need your skinny jeans and your half-marathons and your perfect suburban house with the perennial garden and the wine club to be happy. That’s your thing, not mine, and you’re good at it. But you do you and I’ll do me.”
“You’re right.” Taryn looked contrite. “I’m sorry. But for the record, I think you should do Stryker.” She gave her a grin.
Harper didn’t know what she should do.
But she did know what she wanted to do. She wanted to do a stagedive into Stryker and his bed. “Do you believe in fate?” she asked Taryn. She had been thinking about the concept a lot in the last two months, especially with what Ellie had been going through.
She had expected some kind of reassurance or an enthusiastic nod. Taryn just shrugged. “I don’t know. I believe more in creating your own future. You know that I met your brother at a mutual friend’s wedding. What you don’t know is that I never got his information that night. He was only vaguely interested. I stalked him online and ferreted out our mutual interests and included him in a group invite to go cycling for charity. I masterminded our second meeting. And it worked.”
For the first time since she’d heard the doorbell Harper was actually distracted from her own love life. She felt her jaw drop. “Are you serious? Does Brian know that?”
“Nope. He thinks I just invited him because he liked cycling, not that I intentionally targeted him because I thought he was hot.” Taryn grinned at her. “It wasn’t like I manipulated him. I just… created an opportunity.”
For fate to actually work. That’s what Harper thought. Because something like meeting Stryker Evans and becoming the closest thing he had to a best friend, had to be destiny.
Now she just needed to give Fate a nudge.
Chapter Five
Stryker spotted Harper immediately curbside. He had intended to park the car and go in to the airport and be waiting for her, but as usual LA traffic had wrecked his plans. So when she called him and said she was already outside he felt like a jerk having to just roll up and grab her, but it would be easier than hiking six miles across the parking garage. She was standing there waving enthusiastically and he immediately started grinning. Harper was wearing tight jeans, boots, and a giant fuzzy hat. She was as usual, adorable.
He pulled over and threw his car into park and got out. “Hey! How was your flight?”
She said, “Long and boring but yay, I’m here!”
He needed to hug her. He had to hug her. All he had been thi
nking about for weeks was the feel of Harper in his arms and now here she was and he couldn’t wait one more second. “You’re here and I’m really damn glad.” He wrapped her in a big hug. “I’m glad you had ComicCon plans.” He was also glad that Ellie had canceled on attending with Harper because now he not only had Harper all to himself, she had agreed to stay at his apartment to save on hotel costs.
His master plan to convince her they needed to be a couple and naked in his bed together was phase one. Everything hinged on this weekend. In the two weeks since Christmas, which he had spent in the company of his bandmates, he had done a lot of thinking and soul searching. He loved his career and he didn’t mind spending holidays on the road. But he wanted someone to come home to. And he wanted that someone to be Harper. She was everything to him and they hadn’t even had sex. They’d shared exactly one kiss. But she was his It Girl. He felt it with total certainty and when he’d opened the Christmas present she’d sent him and he read the note that the scarf had been knitted by her, he had realized beyond a shadow of a doubt he loved her.
Now he just held her close and breathed in her scent for a second before releasing her. “Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi.” He bent over, because kissing her seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t back away and his lips pressed her in a soft brief kiss.
When he pulled back, she looked bewildered, but not upset or disgusted. He squeezed her hand and reached for the bag she was dragging behind her. “Are you hungry?”
“Duh.”
That made him laugh. “I’m cooking you dinner if you can wait until we get to my place.”
“I’ll make a valiant effort.” She stood by the trunk as he lifted her suitcase into it. “By the way I know I’ve said thank you but now that I’m here with you in person, I just want to say thank you again for all my Christmas presents. Especially the script and the song. That was really very generous of you, Chris.”
Stryker froze. She had called him Chris. Did that mean what he thought it meant? She had told him the night they met she could not call him Chris because that would make their relationship real and she hadn’t since. Not once. Until now. He studied her expression, searching her for a clue, confirmation. She had a sly smile on her face. “It was my pleasure.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“No.” His car was still running and any second now a cop would be busting his balls for blocking the loading zone, but Stryker didn’t give a shit. “I wanted to because I wanted you to understand how important you are to me.”
Her cheeks turned pink and she whispered, “You’re important to me, too.”
He wasn’t saying enough. He had more feelings than what that made it sound like. “Harper, I think what I want to say is that sometimes you meet someone who makes you look at yourself and realize you need to be a better man. That she is so amazing and honest and worthy of love that you know you need to step up and be that guy for her, even when you don’t deserve it.” He cupped her cheek. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time and I want to be more than just friends. I know you’re afraid to lose our friendship by crossing that line but I’m not dicking around here. I mean this. I want you to be my girlfriend, I want to plan a life together.”
A driver laid on a car horn right behind him and the smell of exhaust fumes wafted over him. He realized this was not exactly the best place to declare his feelings for Harper but he felt like he’d had a lid on them for two months and there was no holding them back.
“I didn’t even have to put the slave costume on,” she said, sounding amazed. “I was planning to later, you know. I was going to make you see that while I think I was right to hold off before I don’t want to hold off anymore. I want to be with you, too. Even if it’s crazy.”
Stryker bent down and grabbed her in a bear hug and lifted her off the ground, elation washing over him. “Are you serious? This is what you really want?”
“Yes. Absolutely. You are all I can think about.”
That gave him immense satisfaction. “Now all I can think about is you in a slave costume.” He was hard just thinking about her in that scrap of fabric. He’d been hopeful he would get to see her in the outfit when he bought it but it had seemed more optimism than anything else. “So we need to get home.”
Harper didn’t speak. She just jumped in his car and slammed the door behind her.
The new year was starting off with a bang.
Normally Harper let nothing interfere with her filling her stomach regularly but the minute she walked into Stryker’s apartment he was on her like white on rice and she wouldn’t have had it any other way. She had spent the two weeks since Christmas psyching herself up to telling Stryker she wanted to take their relationship to the next level and he had gone and beaten her to the punch.
She was not going to complain.
He had her in his arms, kicking the door shut with his boot, the minute she walked into the apartment. She barely had a chance to notice that Stryker lived in the most boring, stark, lacking-in-personality place she’d ever seen before he was kissing her. Dang, the man knew how to kiss. His lips were perfection, stroking her to instant desire. His tongue swept over hers and she tightened her grip on his shoulders. The months of anticipation made them both wild with abandon and she pulled back so she could yank the knit hat off her head and drop it to the floor. She was burning up with heat, and it wasn’t the Southern California sun.
“You taste so good,” he murmured. “I’ve been wanting to do that forever.”
She didn’t even have time to respond before he was kissing her again with such fervor that she felt dizzy. “Take me to bed,” she demanded. She wasn’t sure she could stand another minute.
“Seriously? Don’t you want me to cook you dinner first?”
He was clearly teasing her because he was already unbuttoning her shirt. His dexterity from playing the guitar was evident in how quickly he had her flannel top undone and yanked open. His thumbs strummed over the swell of her breasts. She sighed in pleasure. “No, I do not want dinner first. I want you.”
Stryker shocked the hell out of her by scooping her up off the ground and carrying her in his arms across the room. “I’m going to eat you.”
“You’re insane,” she told him. But she was thrilled. She knew him as a man, as a friend, and now she was going to know him as a lover. It made her feel gleeful. But when he settled her down onto his bed, and brushed her hair back off her cheek, the look in his eyes touched her soul.
“I love you,” he said.
And she believed him. She didn’t know what the future would hold or how they would work out logistics, but she didn’t care. Because her fantasy was reality and was smart enough to grab it with both hands. “I love you, too.”
Then she watched him yank his shirt over his head and she stared in amazement at the glory that was his naked chest. She traced all of his tattoos while he undid her bra and teased at her nipples.
“That’s the best news I’ve had all year.”
“It’s only January fourth.” She lifted her backside so he could peel her jeans down.
Stryker laughed. “Leave it to you to point that out.”
Then there was no talking as they explored each other with hands and lips. Harper lost track of the time but by the time Stryker rolled on a condom and pushed inside her, she was begging him to complete her. She was wet and swollen and in desperate need of the release that only he could give her. When he joined his body to hers, she shuddered, suddenly wanting to cry. This was her best friend and the man she loved and now they were connected in the best way possible.
When she came he gave her a look so tender, she dug her nails into his back and lifted her hips to drive him to completion with her. Stryker groaned and then he was there too, thrusting so hard her head slammed into the wall behind her. When they were both panting and in stunned satisfaction, Stryker rolled onto his back and took her with him. She was splayed over his musc
ular chest.
This was where she belonged.
“The force is strong with you, Han.”
He lightly smacked her backside. “Call me Chris.”
Love this story? Check out a sneak preview the last book in the mini-series, Finding Chris Evans: The Ever After Edition
Finding Chris Evans:
The Ever After Edition
By Elizabeth Bemis
Get a sneak preview of the last novella in the Finding Chris Evans mini-series!
Buy it Now
Chapter One
On a perfect day in autumn, surrounded by both her favorite people in one of her favorite places, there remained one more way Ellie Mittelstadt’s world could improve: a little touch of whimsy...
“Oh, look! There’s a fortune teller!” She dragged her sister, Jenna and her best friend, Harper Harrison, toward the colorful tent in the middle of the Haralson Fall Festival’s midway.
It was the first week of the eight-week long, weekend-only festival-slash-farmer’s market and Ellie loved just about everything about it. The smells of apple cider, spiced nuts and fried fair foods vied for her attention with the carnival barkers hawking their games and the music from the rides—where else could you hear Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight than on the Flying Bobs ride? The local townspeople were out in full force, selling their handicrafts and baked goods—and acting as giddy as the tourists who made this the carnival of rural Minnesota’s fall festival season.
As they approached the fortune teller’s tent, a tall, trim man exited, pulling a baseball cap down low on his forehead against the bright glare of the sun, effectively obscuring his face. Ellie frowned as a strange chill shot up the back of her neck, despite the unseasonably warm temperature they’d been having that week. The man ducked around the side of the tent and disappeared before she could get a closer look. Did she know him?
Finding Chris Evans: The Rockstar Edition Page 5