“Then move on to the next watering hole,” he directed simply, like it was that easy. And it would be with anyone else, though for some unexplainable reason I couldn’t comprehend, it wasn’t with her. I couldn’t get her out of my head. “This state seems to be crawling with hot bitches. We’ll find you some nice piece of ass to tag that will take your mind off the little hellcat.” He patted me on the chest slowly, working his way to tug on my nipple.
I shoved his hand away, making him laugh as he came back at me. He always did that. I had come to believe he liked the piercings more than the women did.
“You wanna suck on ‘em, Reed?” I pulled him into a headlock where his lips were less than an inch from the nipple bling under my shirt. This was me and my bro, wrestling around as we do every day. Always by my side, Reed was my best friend, my brother and my band mate, and no matter what crazy path life pulled us down, his goofy ass had always been there seeing it with me. Even now, with his head clamped between my side and my arm, half struggling to get free.
“It turns you on when I play with them, you sick fuck,” he laughed.
“What’s that I hear about nipples?” an elderly voice asked, startling both of us out of our waggish humor, and causing us to stop and straighten up instantly. As we turned around, there was a short, white haired old-lady in glasses gawking at us. She smirked with a very pleased expression, the wrinkles around her mouth deepening.
“Trev here, ma’am – he’s got sore nipples,” Reed explained sympathetically while he patted my chest. There was a snigger in his voice that made me want to punch him – right in his overused nuts.
“Is that so? Well, I could take a look at ‘em if ya need me too...” Lowering her glasses down the bridge of her nose, she strutted closer to me. Reed turned his head releasing a cough that I knew was masking his amusement.
“I’m fine,” I told her reassuringly, backing away.
“Yes. You. Are,” her granny tone agreed provocatively. That was it—I laughed. Hard. I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and neither could Reed.
“Nana Lulu, are you trying to seduce our guest?” Country’s sweet and sultry voice demanded, saving us from the man-eater. This old cougar was her grandma? This family kept getting better and better with each envious minute.
“No, dear, I’m just enjoying what the dear, sweet Lord blessed my eyes with today. That praying I did last night musta done earned me some pointers with the Almighty. He sure done a mighty damn good job on you two, I must say.” She winked at me and Reed.
“Umm...thanks,” we both said together, unsurely.
“He didn’t make ‘em like this back in my day or I’d still be married.”
I found this situation to be entirely too funny. Hilarious as hell actually, but I began to feel slightly violated as her wrinkly eyes continued to fuck me up and down openly. I wondered how it was making Reed feel. Knowing his sick brain he was probably getting turned on.
Getting elbowed in the arm, he leaned next to my ear and whispered, “The piece of ass to rid you of the hellcat.”
I choked on my spit, then offered him the same elbow to the gut, but I placed mine a bit lower in his rib. He hunched slightly, grabbing at the now sore spot. I smiled – it served his sick ass right.
“Isabel, you have two very handsome young men here to choose from. Which one ‘ers gonna have the glory of being the future father to my great grandbabies?”
I began to choke again and I didn’t know if it was on my spit, tongue or the word babies.
The smile Country was giving her Nana Lulu vanished, leaving her face washed with many shades of red, all the while shaking her head and running her hands down her face in embarrassment.
“Neither,” she answered briskly.
“Can’t you see I’m not gettin’ any younger?” She fluffed at her cotton white hair. “Believe it or not, little lady, I ain’t gonna live forever, and I want to see my great grandbabies before I kick the bucket and y’all stuff me in a box. So you and Addie get a move on in the baby making department.”
“I would be more than glad to help her out in the making department in any way I can, ma’am,” Reed offered happily, grinning a full on ear-to-ear smile. I shot him my death stare, but he didn’t notice since he was too busy eyeballing Country’s desirably slender body.
I should punch him in the throat.
“You see there, sweetie? It’s that simple. Now you and Addie get to that piano and sing me a song.”
The entire baby making talk and my anger toward Reed quickly faded at her telling Country to sing. “You sing?” I murmured, frowning.
“Sing? Good lookin’, she can blow your sexy undies right off that fine as—”
“Nana,” Country scolded. “Cool it with the dirty talk, ‘kay? I don’t want any babies and I don’t think we’re going to sing this year. But hey, Trevelin and his friends sing. They’re actually a famous band. Maybe we should have them sing something instead.”
“I only come here to hear your sweet voice. Now get your pretty ass to that piano. Your future husbands can sing to me later.”
I now knew where Country got her spunk. This old woman was something else. She actually had me blushing while my heart faltered in protest to her plural use of the word husband.
I didn’t consider myself worthy of Country or husband material, but the sinking feeling of her spending the rest of her life with someone other than me pissed me off to no end. I couldn’t say why, but just the thought made my body burn in a raging, jealous inferno.
I might be a celebrity and I might make enough money that it would appease most, but I knew Country was too good for me. She grew up in a perfect Mary Poppins world, having things handed to her left and right, where as I grew up in the hoods of Chicago, fighting to just scrape by. We were two different creatures from two different worlds, and rather than sending me back to where I belonged, it made me want the little green yard and even the annoying as shit singing bitch that floated around on an umbrella, as long as I had Country.
I reached for her hand when her Nana left the room, needing to feel her warm skin, her touch. Her gaze dropped down at our locked hands, hers so tiny in comparison to mine and so soft to the touch. It fucking pissed me off that it felt so right yet so wrong at the same time.
I gestured in the direction the crazy old lady had left. “Quite the granny you got there. Is that normal behavior?”
Pulling her hand free from mine with many emotions clouding her summery eyes, I instantly felt naked. Completely bare.
The cloud cleared as quickly as it appeared as she twisted her beautiful face in the direction her Nana retreated in. “What? Biting like a starved animal?” She sniggered. “Yeah, pretty much. What she just said to y’all is nothing compared to some of the other stuff she has said.”
It gets worse than that?
“Like what? I gotta know this shit.” Reed crossed his arms, stepping closer to us with a grin so large it would put the Joker from Batman to shame.
Country looked at us and smiled. I hate that smile!
“Okay, for instance, I went with her a few months ago to Express Lube to get the oil changed in her car and she told the guy helping her that she, ‘had other things beside her car that he could lube’.” Both Reed and I threw our heads back in laughter. Country snickered along with us. “Oh, and this one time at McDonalds, the boy behind the counter asked if she wanted her meal supersized and she said, ‘Honey, I like more than my meals supersized.’ I felt so sorry for the poor boy.”
My cheeks ached from laughter, and I went to ask something else, but a voice from the other room yelled. “Isabel, get your fanny in here and sing me a damn song!”
Country rolled hers eyes with a sigh then headed in the direction of her impatient cougar of a grandmother.
Reed and I followed her into a room that had a grand piano placed between two large windows. Addie was already seated at the piano and Country soon appeared with an acoustic guitar. The sight of her
with a guitar draped around her body made my heart and cock twitch simultaneously.
“I honestly think since our rock star guests play for a living they should be doing this, but Nana Lulu wouldn’t have it. So here ya go.”
Her family hooted as she began to strum the guitar. Seconds later Addie followed behind with a melody from the piano. My skin had never been assaulted with chills by anyone’s voice until now. She seemed to be putting my body through a lot of firsts.
Her voice was soft, almost a whisper at first, while she sang about ‘How Country Feels’ and it got stronger as the song went on. She started it off by looking right into my eyes as she sang about being raised on an asphalt farm and never hearing a rooster crow. That moment I knew she was singing the song to me. She even turned some of the words around, making them her own to better fit the situation at hand.
She was right.
I did want to experience how Country felt. In an entirely different way than what the song depicted though. I could get lost in her and not immerge for days. But I brushed off my raging wants, trying not to give a shit about how bad I would like to fuck her for a week straight.
I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get to me, and I also knew that I needed to follow Reed’s advice and find some ass soon, to fuck all thoughts of Isabel Morgan out of my mind. It was going to be hard and it was going to take a lot of willing ass to curb this insatiable appetite I had built, but that was the only way I knew how to stop this madness. It was what I needed to do.
Country was like a sweet, beautiful cherry blossom that everyone admired and loved for its beauty, and I was the person that would end up destroying it, turning that stunning blossom into a bleeding heart.
Chapter Five
Izzy
Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t as bad as I initially thought it would be – if you leave out the horrific incident when I caught Nana trying to seduce Trevelin and Reed. Although the looks on their faces were priceless. If only I could have read their thoughts, I would probably still be laughing right now.
The expression on my face was probably pretty priceless too when she started talking about me reproducing with one of them. I hope she wasn’t serious, but then again she was my Nana Lulu, and she was always serious about everything. I tried not to hurl in that moment at her outlandish nonsense. Then she had to call them my future husbands—again puking was a thought.
The woman was bonkers. She had totally done gone off her rocker. As bad as I didn’t want to sing in front of the rock stars, especially Trevelin, she firmly insisted. I particularly loved the shock on his face when he heard my voice, and I felt pleased when his thick, amazingly sexy eyebrows shot skyward when he realized the song I was singing was secretly dedicated to him. I believe he found it fascinating. I gave myself points for that one.
Then there were my cousins that gushed on and on about how hot he was. Like I didn’t already know that. And what the heck was that prickling sensation that shot through my entire body when he took my hand? It was as if his hand was a set of jumper cables and he was jump starting my libido into overdrive. Well, it did its job – I think – if wet panties count.
“I can’t believe you did that. Singing that song to him was fantastic! What has gotten into the laidback Izzy?” Addie snickered as she pulled the covers back on the bed. “He likes you, ya know.”
“I did it because of that stupid name he calls me, and this is probably the first time he or the others has ever been stuck in the south without an expensive oceanic view. He just ticked me off, and no, he doesn’t like me. He just likes the idea of me joining his groupie fan base. That is so not happening. My panties are totally off limits to him...and Reed,” I said, snarling through my nose.
“If you fuck him I will forever envy you!” she squealed, jumping up and down on the bed. I rolled my head along with my eyes. Of course she would, and she would have done slept with him by now if...why hadn’t she?
“Have at him. I just said that’s not happening.” I looked at her blatantly, pulling the blankets over my legs.
She snorted. “Puh-lese. You like him too. You can’t hide that from me.”
“And just how did you come to this conclusion?”
“Well, you are all snap-happy with him and the fact that I catch you staring at him all the time. It’s okay, Iz, it’s totally normal to want to jump a hot guy’s bone.” She winked with a goofy expression, and I had a feeling what bone she was indicating. I wonder if she even knew it wasn’t an actual bone? Probably not.
“He is very good looking, I won’t fib about that. But looks don’t get you everything. I have values, and I’m not going to stoop low enough to become another notch in his ever long fuck-me belt. Those radiant pale blue-green eyes of his under those dark eyelashes are simply gorgeous though. And those eyebrows—I mean, what man has eyebrows like that?” I lay back on my pillow with my arm under my head. “And that blond messy hair that hangs across them, just asking to be yanked on. Oh, don’t get me started on his tattoos.”
Addie turned on her side, listening to my surmounting unchaste analyzation of the handsome man that won’t stop stalking through my head.
Propping her head up with her hand, she looked at me with a smirky smile. “You so wanna fuck him,” she accused delightfully. I laughed, then cut it short, realizing I had indeed dreamt about him more than once.
“I might have had a few dreams that ended that way, but you can’t say you haven’t either.”
“Actually, I tried to get the real deal. I made several moves on him already, and he plainly told me he wasn’t interested. Trevelin Knight totally has a thing for you, Izzy,” she announced the last sentence excitedly as she reached over to flip the table lamp off.
“Well, I’m not interested in him. You know I don’t go for the egotistical, big-headed type. Throw famous rocker into the mix and it’s a definite no-freakin-way.”
“You are absolutely insane. I’m taking you first thing Monday to have your head and libido examined.”
That was the last thing Addie said before she fell asleep. I tried my best to shut my thoughts up long enough so I could fall asleep before she started her loud, nightly pig calls, but my pondering brain wouldn’t allow it.
Again I found myself lying awake, trying to figure out how Addie and I were going to get our foot through the entertainment door. She had suggested backup singing like our momma did, but I really didn’t want to start out that way.
Yeah, we could ask the Knight Raiders for a favor, but I didn’t want to owe them anything. That would make me seem desperate, and that I was not – not yet anyways.
I tossed and turned a few times, smothering myself with my pillow while trying to block out Addie’s obnoxious sounds. Just when she shut up long enough for me to slightly doze off, dark eyebrows and light turquoise eyes with a sinfully sexy tattooed body started doing naughty things in my head.
My eyes blasted wide open right as Addie almost rolled on top of me.
Not this again!
When I shoved her off and she immediately rolled back into the same position I’d just shoved her from, I jumped up and grabbed my pillow – again – to head for the couch.
I won’t lie. Last night I slept like a baby, and the fact that I did so while being held by Trevelin was an unsettling thought I couldn’t shake. The truth was I wanted him to do it again tonight, and I despised myself for wanting such, but I enjoyed it.
As I slowly creeped down the stairs, I rounded the couch to find him lying in the same spot where we had slept the night before. One of his arms was thrown over his head, causing his smooth, tattooed skin to be stretched taut over his muscles. I took a few seconds to study the artwork since he was asleep and wouldn’t know of my outright ogling.
Mesmerized, I stared at a huge black and gray tattoo on his side that I’d noticed the first time I saw him without a shirt on. It was an image of an actual human heart engulfed by a constricting snake that had its body wrapped around it, squeezing
the life out of the bleeding organ. Parts of the snake’s body disappeared where my eyes could no longer venture, leaving me eager to know where the darn thing ended. His arm that was slung over his head portrayed a collage of endless art along with the other that was half hidden under the blanket. Each shoulder held the image of a large, jagged star that contorted with the bulk of his muscle, and just above his shoulder was the writing on the side of his neck that caught my attention the day I met him. I quietly leaned in, reading, ‘Dream Big, Live Small, Don’t be Afraid to Fall’ in small, fancy script. Keeping quiet, I wondered why he chose those certain words as I stepped back to admire the rest of his sleeping form.
His dirty blond hair was a crazy mess that caused the corner of my mouth twitch, and I was damn near hypnotized by the two sparkling barbells gleaming in each nipple. The blanket he was using had begun to drape entirely too low over his waist – so low, in fact, it appeared he might not have anything on underneath. Still, I couldn’t see where the darn snake ended.
Regardless to how sexy he looked, I hoped to everything holy he had on boxers. For multiple reasons. Mainly sanitary purposes for my couch. I brushed that thought aside as my eyes traveled to the V of muscle at his hips, scanning every inch of flesh exposed. Every artistic image inscribed into his skin. Strangely enough, I wanted to touch them. Run my fingers over every single swoop and beautifully crafted depiction.
I resisted as I took notice of his other hand that was hidden beneath the blanket, placed in a certain area, and by the sight of it, that area was classified as a very private location.
He holds himself while he sleeps!
A small laugh escaped from my mouth. Quickly, I cupped it with my hand to hold back the sudden tantrum of noise dying to escape, though my effort failed as misty, turquoise eyes popped open to my unexpected burst of amusement.
“Were you watching me?” he asked sleepily, pulling up on one elbow while he rubbed at his face with the other hand.
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