Frightened or no, she couldn’t keep hiding all night. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, then walked out of the stall, washed her hands, and headed into the club.
She found Lee sitting at the table and talking to the others. He smiled at her, and she felt a pang of guilt. “I think I need to head back,” she said. To Craig, “Make sure everybody gets home in one piece, yeah?”
Lee touched her arm. “You okay?”
She smiled, but wasn’t sure how convincing it was. “I’m fine. I’m just knackered. Long day. I’m sorry.”
“Let me walk you back.” He slid off his stool.
“No, no, it’s fine. Really. Stay. I’ll see you tomorrow night.” The last thing she wanted to deal with was another advance from one of the Wheeler brothers. She kissed his cheek and slipped away. She caught a glimpse of Lucas still on the dance floor, wrapped up in Maggie and the new guy—if anything, more so than before. He had, it seemed, moved on.
Cathy stopped her before she got all the way to the door. “You sure you’re okay? I saw—”
“Oh God. Lee didn’t, did he?” Gwen wanted to crawl into a hole.
“Maggie was keeping him pretty busy, looked like.” She leaned closer. “Listen, Lucas is just trying to make you jealous. Maggie’s not going to let him take that guy home. It’d be a disaster.”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going on.”
A raised eyebrow told Gwen what Cathy thought of that.
“I’m fine,” Gwen said.
Back at the hotel room, Gwen put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, grateful tonight’s suite had two bedrooms. She needed a shower and a few hours of sleep. Then she should be able to think clearly again. And God, she needed to think.
The hot water did wonders, and she stepped out of the shower feeling more human, but sleepier than before. She shut the door to her bedroom behind her and crawled into bed, not bothering to find any clothes.
As soon as she closed her eyes, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She started tingling everywhere, thinking about his breath against her throat, the tickle of his hair against her skin when he leaned over her. Gwen rolled onto her back with a grumble, but her hands had other ideas. Her mind replayed scene after scene: Lucas kissing her in the green room, unbuttoning her shirt as he kissed her throat—that still hurt, the look in his eyes at her disfigurement—and then on the dance floor, first watching him kiss a very pretty man, then imagining him kissing her with the same fervor.
If she’d said yes, she and Lucas would be on the other side of that door right now, in his bed, or maybe right here, in hers. Would there be a third? But no, that wasn’t what she wanted right now. She wanted him, and just him. He would be talkative. Using that voice to an unfair advantage.
“I can’t wait to taste you,” she heard in her mind, as she dragged the fingers of her right hand up her thigh, shifting her knees up and apart. “God, you’re so wet for me,” as he slipped his fingers into her panties. She tried to go slow, but couldn’t. Gwen spread her legs and teased one of her fingers between her lips. She was wet, because of him. She focused on stroking circles around her clit, imagining his tongue, imagining long dark strands of hair dragging over her thighs.
This was going to be over fast. Gwen’s pulse pounded in her temples as she rolled over onto her belly and shoved her other hand down between her legs. With Lucas’s voice still murmuring and groaning in her ears, she started riding her fingers, slowly at first, pushing the first two in while she stroked her clit with her other hand.
She imagined straddling him, pinning his hands to the bed while she fucked him, stripping away his cocky bluster to reveal the wide-eyed man who got so aroused by her pushing him off her lap and twisting his arm. She wondered if he knew, if he’d tapped that potential to give over control. God, the very thought—she wanted to give him orders, to overpower him, to see him fall apart underneath her. Gwen’s hands were drenched as she pushed three fingers in, still not enough, still not Lucas, overwhelmed and compliant beneath her.
When she came, she buried her face in her pillow to muffle the cries. Gwen thrust and writhed against her hands, curling the fingers inside her to send the pleasure spinning out of control throughout her body. Finally she went limp and drew her hands back up, wiping them on the sheets. She was too tired for more and the hot water of the shower and the sheer relief of physical release combined into a potent sleeping potion, one that had her asleep before she could even turn onto her side.
When her alarm went off the next morning, she opened her eyes and groaned. She crawled out of bed and pulled on her robe. The thought of facing Lucas after last night made her quiver inside. She wanted him; she’d demonstrated that to a room full of people. Even if the entire affair turned awkward and weird, it might still be worth it. She opened her door and stepped into the living area.
The door to the other bedroom was open. Lucas wasn’t there. His bed hadn’t been slept in at all. Shit. She scrambled for her phone, dialing Craig’s number. After three rings, he answered.
“Craig, you were supposed to get everyone back last night. What happened to Lucas?”
“He’s not with you?”
“No.”
Craig yawned loudly and Gwen could hear an alarm go off in his room before someone smacked it. “He’s probably still with Maggie. He went to her room when we came back.”
Gwen felt a sudden sick lurch of her insides. “Oh right. Do me a favor, make sure, yeah? I don’t want to have to tell my sister I lost her biggest star.” She hung up and tried not to think about what else she might have lost.
***
Craig confirmed that Lucas had spent the night with Maggie. He didn’t confirm if there was a third there, and Gwen didn’t ask. Rather than risk running into him doing a walk of shame, Gwen decided to have a real breakfast, with real coffee. With all the equipment already set up from the night before, she didn’t have much to do before sound check. May as well take advantage of it while she could. She ran into Cathy at the elevator.
“Hey, Gwen!” No one should be that cheerful so early in the morning. “I was about to go for a run. You wanna go with me?”
A run would burn off some of this unpleasantness in her head, but she didn’t want to go back to the suite to change clothes. “I was thinking breakfast instead. I hear the café across the street has actual coffee.”
“Get thee behind me, Satan.” Cathy laughed. “How’s the food?”
“I don’t know, probably greasy and delightful.”
The elevator dinged. “Okay, but we’ll still tell Craig I went running.”
“My lips are sealed.” The floors blinked past, and Gwen studied the elevator floor. “Sorry if I woke you this morning. When I called.”
“We were already awake. Or I was.” Gwen didn’t need to look up to know Cathy was watching her. “Everything okay?”
“Hm? Yeah. I think I drank a little too much last night.”
“Aha—that’s why you’re looking for coffee.”
Gwen forced a smile. “You caught me.”
The elevator dinged again at the ground floor, and they walked out together. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that someone might have foolishly spent the night with an ex last night.”
“Nope, not a thing.”
They hit a lull at the café, giving them several tables to choose from. The coffee was as authentic as advertised, and Gwen had about made up her mind to inhale a plate of hash browns and eggs.
Cathy looked over the menu. “So last night, when I said he was trying to make you jealous …”
“Yeah, I think you might have been wrong about that.”
“I’m still not convinced I was,” she said. “I’ve never seen him chase anyone as hard as he’s chasing you. And I’ll tell you something—except where music is concerned, he is a lazy, lazy man.”
“I’ve noticed.” They placed their orders, but Gwen’s appetite had vanished. “So you’re sayin
g I made him work too hard, so he went for something easier?”
“No no, that’s not what I’m saying. For him to chase this long means he’s interested, really interested.”
“Was.” Gwen drained her coffee cup. “So you and Craig. After all this time, have you ever talked about—I don’t know—getting married, settling down? I can’t imagine this sort of life goes well with raising a family.” As a subject changer, what it lacked in subtlety it made up for in effectiveness.
“Oh sure,” she said, taking the hint. “I’m still pretty young, and Craig has an ex-wife. No kids there either, thank God, but we’re both a little skittish, you know?”
Gwen was about to commit a cardinal British sin and ask too many personal questions, but better that than answer them. “Please tell me to butt out if this is too intrusive. I noticed—um, after shows—he still—”
“Flirts backstage?” Cathy toyed with her coffee cup. “I’m not crazy about it. The good thing about touring together, though, is that I know for a fact it doesn’t go beyond flirting.” The smile she gave Gwen looked authentic enough. “We’re together nearly twenty-four-seven; when would he have the time?”
“True.” The waitress brought their food, and the aroma of fried potatoes brought Gwen’s appetite roaring back. “Although I imagine that’s trouble enough on its own.”
“Hey, if a relationship can survive being on the road, it can survive nearly anything.”
***
They arrived in Detroit late enough to have the night off. Gwen planned to take full advantage: propped up in bed doing as little as possible before falling into a solid twelve hours of sleep. After D.C., she’d offered to swap rooms so Lucas and Maggie could share the suite, but they’d both given her such odd looks she didn’t mention it again.
She arrived to the sound of the shower running—again—and a demolished bedroom where Lucas had already been through, pillows strewn everywhere.
They hadn’t spoken in the three days since Washington, D.C., beyond what politeness required. He and Maggie didn’t act any differently around each other, as far as she could see—and she couldn’t help but watch. She tried to forget the whole mess and focus on her job.
She set her bag down near the small desk and kicked off her loafers, wriggling her toes with a sigh. The sofa pulled out into a bed, according to the front desk clerk, but she didn’t bother, sprawling out on it instead. Her eyes had just closed when the bathroom door opened with a rush of steam.
“What’s the plan for dinner?” Lucas asked from the doorway.
“The others are going out. I was going to order a takeaway.”
“You can open your eyes now. I’m not naked.”
“You prat, I was trying to nap.” Gwen opened her eyes anyway. “Going out with the rest of them?”
Lucas shrugged. He wore a soft, worn T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants. Not clothes for clubbing or going out. “It’s Detroit. Boring.” He pulled on a dark blue robe and started to close it.
Something in the tone of his voice caught Gwen’s attention. An underlying tremor gave his words the lie, as did the mirrored tremor in his hands. Barely there, but enough to make knotting a dressing gown tricky. “Bad night?” she asked.
Another shrug. “Not bad enough that you have to babysit me. Go on and do whatever you had planned.” The vulnerability in Lucas’s profile as he rifled through the desk contrasted with the cocksure, spoilt brat who normally wore that face.
“I had nothing planned but some crap American telly and some sleep.” She paused. “I can … go, if you’d rather be alone.”
“No, stay.” Lucas flopped on the chair opposite the sofa and stared at the ceiling. “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything. What did you do in Afghanistan?”
Gwen snorted. “You don’t care about my army stories.”
“Sure I do. Tell me all about what you did for Queen and country.” He flashed a short-lived grin. “Where in Afghanistan did you serve?”
“Wherever the 16 Air Assault brigade went.” Gwen stretched back out on the sofa, pillowing her head on her hands. “Kandahar near the end.”
“Was that where you were shot?” He asked so carefully, so cautiously, she couldn’t resist.
“No, in my shoulder.” Something soft and square hit her in the face. “Thank you,” she said with a grin, and propped the newly acquired pillow behind her head. Some of the tension between them dissolved. “I was a disaster after that. What about you? What were you doing a few months ago? I spent September in hospital.”
Lucas laughed, a low, unhappy sound. “So did I. Only I didn’t get a morphine pump.”
“Right. Are you—how are you coping?”
The silence went on long enough she didn’t think he’d answer. Finally he said, “Some days, the only thing that keeps me from going back is the thought of going through withdrawal again.”
“Bad?”
“Not like the poor bastards coming off heroin. Bad enough, though.”
Gwen didn’t know what to say. Finally, she formed the question she really wanted to ask. “You’d done rehab before, yeah?” She’d watched Sam try to quit drinking so many times, but something in that last time clicked. “What made this time different?”
“I don’t think I really did rehab those other times.” She stole a glance at him and found him still focusing on the ceiling. “I think I sat through it because it was the thing to do, or because someone told me to. This time felt different.”
“How so?”
He heaved a sigh. “It just—it was. I met this guy, older. His name was Tom. Must’ve been pushing seventy. He said he’d been in rehab eight or nine times before, but he kept winding up back there. I don’t want to be him.”
“You won’t be,” she said, softly.
“No, I won’t, because at the rate I was going, I would have died first.” His voice was full of broken edges, and it was as if she could hear something seeping in through the cracks. “He used to be a musician too, turns out. He knew—well, it doesn’t matter who he knew, but she didn’t get a second chance. Said I reminded him of her.”
“I’m glad you decided to change.”
“I had to change or die.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
After a moment, Lucas said, “I need to know something.”
“Okay,” Gwen said cautiously.
“Is that why you keep pushing me away?”
“The drugs?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I’m not exactly proposing here. I’ve never been boyfriend material,” he said, then grinned at her, vulnerability hidden once again, “but I’m excellent one-night-stand material. Or, you know, a couple of weeks.”
“What about Maggie?”
“Maggie? And me?” Lucas chuckled. “God, not in years.”
“But I thought—the other night—”
“You were jealous,” Lucas said.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were. You thought I spent the night with her—”
“—you did spend the night with her—”
“—and that’s why you haven’t talked to me for three days.” Lucas snorted breath out. “Gwen, nothing happened. We were both tired and I fell asleep while we were talking.”
“What about that guy?”
“She ditched him before I got to her room. If you want to know what happened before that, you’ll have to ask her. Yeah, definitely no jealousy happening,” he added with a smirk.
“I’m not jealous. Besides, you’re one to talk.”
“Liar.” His voice, softer than she’d ever heard it, sounded much too close. Gwen rolled her head to the right against the pillow, and there he was, crouched next to the sofa, eye to eye with her. “Come on. What are you afraid of?”
Shit shit shit. She swallowed and rolled over onto her side, propped up on one elbow. “Not you,” she finally said. “You’re a wreck.” The words were harsh, but the
tone of her voice wasn’t. “We’d be a nightmare together.”
“We’d be amazing together, and you know it,” he said. With a flex of his knees, he closed the gap between them and covered her mouth with his own.
She pulled away at first, then parted her lips and slid her hand around the back of his head to pull him closer. His mouth opened against hers, his tongue teasing its way between her lips, tasting faintly of toothpaste. He nudged her onto her back and crawled up next to her, giving her a moment to war with her better judgment. This was a terrible idea, but God, his mouth was positively criminal.
She broke the kiss, heat rising in her cheeks. His hands to either side of her head, he crouched over her and lowered his mouth to one of her cheekbones, tickling his hair across her face. She reached up to brush it away, and instead tangled her fingers in the long strands, pulling his mouth back to hers, arching up off the sofa to get closer. The skin of her belly tingled as his hands trailed under her T-shirt. She collapsed back and he followed her, licking and biting up the side of her neck while he pushed the thin cotton of her shirt upward.
“We shouldn’t,” she said, the last word cut off as he bit at her collarbone through her shirt.
“Stop thinking.”
She laughed, breath catching. Hand trapped beneath her T-shirt, his long fingers dragged over her skin under the band of her bra. Their mouths met again in a slow, easy slide. She pushed her hands into his hair and tugged. With each tug she felt a corresponding twitch in his cock where it pressed against her thigh.
“And here I thought you were angry with me all this time,” he murmured against her mouth.
“I was.” It was hard to talk and kiss at the same time. “You’ve been a brat for a week now. Tempted to find a way to punish you—”
The Farther I Fall Page 7