Tears filled her eyes and she wiped at them with the back of her hand. “You saw them? They’re okay? I don’t even know how long I’ve been here,” she said quickly.
“Shh,” he said softly, patting her hand. “They’re fine. I’m going to take them out for dinner, give you some time to . . . be on your own.”
“I, em, yes, that would be a help. Very kind of you.” She looked at him like he was a foreign object, his unsolicited generosity a curiosity.
“Are you okay? Anything I can do?”
She shook her head and stared out at the garden again. “Not unless you can tell me why my husband has betrayed me in the worst possible way.”
Conor knew he wasn’t the person to talk Celia through this. But here he was, having put himself in the position of trying to help. Still, what could he say?
Celia apparently didn’t really think he had anything of value to add because she laughed bitterly before speaking again.
“Look who I’m asking. The very man who slept with his best friend’s wife without a care for what it would do to anyone,” she said and Conor winced. “Looks like Marty finally caught on to your whole ‘Rogue’ philosophy, then, didn’t he? And I thought I had the good one of you lot.”
There was no use in trying to defend himself or his bandmates. They had all made mistakes. Celia had always been an almost giddy observer to these episodes, enjoying the salacious details as much as any groupie might. She must have felt insulated from it all, with Martin being such a predictable and stable partner. Now this.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m sorry you—”
“I have been a good wife to that man. I have done everything for him and our family. This is an insult to everything I am as a person, and—”
“We’re ready!”
Conor and Celia turned to see Donal, Colm, and Sean peeking at them from the doorframe. They had enough sense to see that this was a situation they didn’t want to fully intrude upon.
“Come here, my lovelies,” Celia said and all three boys reluctantly went to her. One by one, she smoothed their hair and stroked their cheeks. “Have a good time. I’ll be ready with ice cream for dessert when you get back, okay?” she asked brightly. The change in her demeanor immediately brightened theirs, and they happily agreed to the treat.
“Meet me by the door, lads,” Conor said. Once they had gone, he gave Celia’s hand a squeeze but she pulled away from him. “I’m not here to defend him, Celia. I just want to be of some help, okay?”
Celia scoffed. “This is how it was with Sophie, then? You coming to her aid when Gavin hurt her? The knight to her damsel in distress?”
Conor was at a loss for words at this characterization. It wasn’t exactly wrong, but he preferred not to think of it that way. Yes, he had rushed to comfort Sophie when things went wrong between her and Gavin. But it wasn’t in the opportunistic way she painted. He had been deeply in love with her for years and hadn’t been able to keep from being there when she was in need.
“I’m sorry to lash out,” Celia said in an abrupt about-face. Her chin trembled with a round of fresh tears. After a moment she whispered, “Thank you.”
CHAPTER NINE
At the kids’ insistence, Conor loaded them into Celia’s minivan and took them to Milano for pizza. The chain restaurant wasn’t Conor’s first choice, but that didn’t matter. On the way over, he made a call and was glad to get the answer he sought.
Settled at two square tables pushed together and with their order placed, Conor surveyed his charges for the evening. Donal, the oldest at nine years old, had his iPhone out and was madly keying buttons as he played a game. Colm, the middle child, was busy reaching around Sean’s back and flicking him on the ear, then pretending he had nothing to do with it. They seemed normal, like none of the recent news had penetrated their worlds. Until Colm asked about his dad.
“So,” Colm said, “if you’re here but Da isn’t, how does that make him away on tour?”
Conor raised his eyebrows as he considered a response. Seemed Celia had relied on Rogue as the excuse for why Martin was away, but young Colm was too clever to let that go on.
“Room for two more? Or really, one and a quarter?”
They all looked up to see Gavin in front of them. He held his baby to him against his hip.
“Uncle Gav!” the boys shouted in a chorus. They all got up to greet him but promptly gave all their attention, not to Gavin, but to the baby girl he was holding. The boys had been enamored with her ever since she was born.
“Thanks for coming, Gav,” Conor told him. He stood and clapped his friend on the back before bending down to give Daisy a kiss on the top of her head. Her blond hair was ridiculously soft and he couldn’t stop from stroking it, as enthralled by her as the boys were.
“Oh, you’ll be needing this, won’t you?” A waitress appeared at their table with a high chair. “She’s what, days away from a year, I’d guess?”
“Yes, amazing guess,” Gavin replied. He placed the baby in the chair while the waitress, a young blond with delicate features, fussed elaborately over her.
“Is she crawling yet?”
“Been crawling! And she’s taken a few steps,” Gavin said proudly.
“She’ll be off and running before you know it.”
Conor waited out the banter, knowing all the while that the woman hadn’t “guessed” anything. She knew who he was the minute he walked in the door and knew Gavin just as well. Gavin’s baby was photographed and reported on constantly. The waitress would have known her age from the press coverage, not from a good guess. But Gavin was always generous with his fans, preferring to go along with whatever made them more comfortable in meeting one of the world’s biggest rock stars. It was clear to Conor, however, that the woman’s interest in Gavin was more than as a fan. She eyed him so lustfully it made Conor want to shield Daisy’s eyes from it.
“We’re grand now, thanks so much for the help,” Gavin told her.
“Oh, okay,” she replied, crestfallen.
Conor supposed she had hoped they would invite her to join them. Or maybe she’d invite Gavin out back for a quickie, was more like it. Gavin becoming a father hadn’t slowed explicit offers from groupies in the least. In fact, interest in him had increased the more he was photographed caring for his daughter. It was an odd response that Conor hadn’t quite understood, though he had some vague notion of women’s maternal biological instinct being to blame.
“Quick pic before I leave you to it?” she asked hopefully.
“With me and Conor? Sure,” Gavin said.
Gavin drew the line at allowing fans to photograph the baby. Conor saw the woman hesitate. She had a serious thing for Gavin, which happened often enough, but Conor was usually the one women lusted after. With model-handsome good looks, a classic rock star style, and bachelor status for so many years, Conor had been the most pursued one of the band. Times were changing.
“I’ll take a photo of the two of you,” Conor said as he stood.
The woman pulled her phone from the burgundy apron she wore cinched around her waist, prepped it and gave it to Conor in a flash. She then wrapped her arm around Gavin’s waist and snuggled into him, getting as close as she physically could.
“Please take a bunch,” she said with a broad smile and red cheeks.
Conor obliged her and on the last photo she grabbed Gavin’s face and planted a kiss halfway on his lips and cheek.
“Thanks so much!” She retrieved her phone from Conor and stepped away.
“Fighting them off, are you?” Conor asked with a wry smile.
“Babies are chick magnets, Con,” Gavin explained as he sat down. “Better than dogs.”
“Nothing is better than a dog!” Sean said. “Da says we’ll get one after the tour ends.”
“Fantastic. And what kind will that be?” Gavin asked, deftly avoiding the talk of their non-existent tour.
“A chocolate lab! Isn’t that funny, they call the
brown ones chocolate?”
“Better than a shit lab, yeah?” Donal asked with a wicked grin.
Conor laughed, though he knew he should say something to rebuke Donal from such talk. Thankfully, they were once more interrupted by the arrival of their food. It was a different waitress now. Seemed they were taking turns. Though she clearly had eyes for Conor, this one was too shy to impose herself upon him the way the other waitress had upon Gavin, and she soon scurried away.
The boys immediately attacked the hot, gooey pizza and talked among themselves. Gavin kept one hand on Daisy’s high chair tray as she had his index finger clamped into her little fist. He used his other hand to down half the Smithwick’s Conor had ordered for him.
“Look at us,” Conor said in between bites of pizza. “Just a couple of rock stars out with the kids.”
Gavin smiled. “It’s the future for us all. Embrace it.”
“I do.” He leaned closer to Gavin so the boys wouldn’t hear him. “Not sure Marty’s feeling that same way any longer.”
“I’d say he’s outdone all of us with this one,” Gavin replied with an appreciative laugh.
“Or at least matched you, Mr. ‘Caught Red-Headed.’” The quote was straight out of a tabloid story from a few years back when Gavin was in the midst of a bad cocaine habit. He had gone out partying, ended up getting a lap dance from a redheaded stripper, and the result was an incriminating photograph with a pun for a headline.
“Touché.” Gavin put down his beer so he could pull the crust off his slice of pizza. He gave it to Daisy for her to gnaw on and satisfy her teething woes. “How’s Celia.”
“Fucking mess.”
“You have any luck getting through to Marty?”
“No, he doesn’t answer his cell.”
“I talked to Seamus for a minute,” Gavin said. “He’s well and truly at a loss over this. Thinks Marty’s lost his mind.”
“Well, I think we should talk to the boys about this, you know, try to prepare them before their schoolmates start hassling them over it.”
“Good thing they’re on summer break. But, yeah, suppose we can give it a try.”
Conor looked over at the boys and wondered how on earth he was going to make this right with them. Kids meant a whole new level of responsibility and accountability—something he’d be in for before too long.
CHAPTER TEN
“How did I fucking get here?” Martin mumbled.
Ashley stirred beside him in bed, not fully waking. “I drove,” she said and wrapped her arm around his naked waist.
Yes, that was true—though he hadn’t meant it that way. She had driven them straight from the Park Ranger’s office to her place in Berkeley without ever asking if he wanted to go back to Shay’s in San Francisco. Martin had been silent the whole ride, overwhelmed by the certainty that their tryst in the cabin would soon be featured in tabloids the world over. The park ranger who had discovered them seemed to be the only conservative person in all of the Bay Area, a liberal bastion. Once he understood who Martin was, he started making snide comments about Rogue’s “Thoughts and Prayers” song, complaining about the band poking their noses into things they didn’t understand. It was clear that he wouldn’t hesitate to share details of this episode with the media.
Knowing that his infidelity would be public knowledge made Martin sick to his stomach. Celia would die. The betrayal was one thing, but the fact that she would be the focus of gossip would be worse. She had always joked that they were the “sane” couple of the group and that the other guys would do well to follow his lead in how to treat women. This would devastate her.
Instead of trying to find some way to rectify things, however, Martin followed Ashley to the bungalow she rented in the Berkeley hills. It was dark, but he could see it was a freestanding structure behind a larger home. The city lights spread wide in the near distance with the water of the Bay glistening in the moonlight beyond. The night air was perfumed by abundant foliage and punctuated by the chirping of crickets.
Ashley opened one of the French doors. It led right into her bedroom and it was clear this was the entirety of her place. A queen-sized bed and a small side table took up most of the space. A closet half-covered by drapes contained clothes and a mini fridge. An open door revealed a small bathroom. It was a true studio, and Martin felt large in it.
“Do you—”
“I don’t want to talk,” he said, cutting her off. There was nothing she could say that would help the situation. If fact, the only thing that would help was to answer the question she had asked him back at the cabin. The answer was that he wanted to fuck her hard. Very hard. He needed that.
She was reaching for the bedside lamp, and he moved behind her, grabbing her hands and pressing himself to her. He smiled when she caught her breath in surprise. He would show her how wrong she had been to say she needed to take charge.
Grazing his lips against her ear and neck, he reached down and slipped his hand into her pants. He squeezed her ass until she whimpered. He bit the skin at the tender spot where her neck and shoulder met and dragged two fingers between her legs. She was wet where he had so recently had his tongue. It made him crave her all over again, but this time to get his own satisfaction.
In a series of swift motions, he pulled her pants down, unbuckled his belt, and let his own jeans fall around his ankles. He pulled himself free from his boxer briefs and pressed against her, finding the heat he sought.
“Baby, I don’t have any condoms. Do you?”
“Do I need one?” He hadn’t worn a condom in more than twelve years, since before Celia.
“I’m on the pill,” she said. That was all he needed to hear to keep going, and he slid forcefully into her. “Oh, god, you are so big.”
“I don’t need you to talk,” he told her. Especially not about his size. Yes, he knew he was on the larger side. The thing was, that had never been a positive with Celia. She often blamed her lack of enjoyment of sex because of it, though he found that hard to believe. “I just need to fuck you. Hard.”
She planted her hands against the wall and rocked backward against him as he grabbed her hips and thrust deep. Her moans, her body, her scent—everything about her was different and exciting. She made him want to do the things he hadn’t been able to do with Celia. He started by giving her ass a hard spank. Her taut skin turned pink for a second and she cooed rather than recoiled. He knew then that she was up for just about anything, that he didn’t have to rush. Slowing his thrusts, he reached around and cupped her breasts in his hands, feeling the delicious weight of them, caressing them, pinching her nipples, and tugging on her piercing with varying pressure to gauge her sensitivity. Just like the spank, she could not only take it being rough, but seemed to like it. Fuck, he was in trouble.
When he reached down between her legs he found she already had her hand there. That suited him as he could instead grab her hips again and fuck her so hard that his explosive orgasm almost made his legs buckle. He managed to stay upright as she wasn’t quite done and kept pushing her ass against him as her hand worked frantically. Jesus. To have a woman masturbate her way to an orgasm while he was inside her. It was magnificent.
It was just as intensely satisfying the two times he fucked her after that. And fucking was exactly what it was. It was animalistic and desperate and had very little to do with who they were to each other. This wasn’t about leaving his wife for Ashley. She wouldn’t become his girlfriend or even his lover after this.
So, why had he just thrown away his marriage for a shag that meant nothing? As he lay in bed with Ashley in the early hours of the morning, he wondered—aloud as it turned out—how had he gotten here?
The answer was tangled up not in wanting Ashley, but in wanting what she represented. It was the world she opened up to him the minute she picked up that medicine ball and engaged him in a new direction. He hadn’t realized it until then, but he’d been aching for years to find the courage to set off on a different path,
one where he allowed himself to explore his own desires, to question what he really wanted. And it turned out it wasn’t all about wild, uninhibited sex—though, god, that was an incredible thing to experience. It was more about recognizing the stunted existence he had led and belatedly reaching for more.
It bothered him to think of his life with Celia in those terms. She was a good person. He was the one who had changed. And when he forced himself to be honest, he knew he had strayed from his marriage long before this night—emotionally, if not sexually.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Emotional cheating. That’s what Celia had accused him of when she’d found the texts. Martin hadn’t seen it that way at the time, of course. But he and Ashley had gotten close after he’d come to her defense at that group breakfast when James hinted she might be dropped from the tour. It started when she knocked on his hotel room door at eight thirty the next morning. Rogue had performed the night before, and he was in no mood to answer the door, let alone work out. It was their first time playing in the Persian Gulf, and none of the guys had quite known what their reception would be. The crowd had been fantastic, though, with the kind of energy that the band fed off, making for an exceptional show.
Martin lingered at the after-party backstage, enjoying a couple of beers and watching the local Emirati groupies attempt to seduce Conor and Gavin. The women had long ebony hair and liquid brown eyes made more striking by liberal application of eyeliner. Unlike some of their more modest countrywomen, they wore short skirts and tight tops. Like Martin, Conor was enjoying the view but nothing more. Gavin was talking animatedly with James, in his usual post-concert manic state. They all suffered from it to a degree. It was impossible not to get carried away by an audience of thousands screaming and worshipping you. But Gavin always had the hardest time letting it go. He probably wouldn’t get to bed until five or six in the morning.
Shay was down the hall getting a massage from the band’s traveling physical therapist, as was his routine after a show in order to stave off the back spasms he was prone to. Once done with that, he and Martin would head back to the hotel and leave the partying to Gavin and Conor. Martin had always appreciated that Shay was the quiet type who could keep him company in his efforts to stay out of trouble. Even so, they wouldn’t make it back to the hotel until almost one in the morning, at which time, Martin would text a photo of himself in his room to Celia to let her know he had made it. The selfie wasn’t required, but he knew she preferred it. This notifying her of his whereabouts was so routine that he no longer thought twice about it. It took him another hour to come down from the high of that night’s stage performance. A shower, along with a quick wank helped along by thoughts of those exotic groupies, brought him down enough to sleep at two-thirty.
Finding Rhythm (Rogue Rockstar Series Book 4) Page 5