by Mia Kayla
I lifted my head to the ceiling and thanked the heavens for this experience.
I needed to enjoy this alone time.
Grabbing a robe from behind the door, I grinned.
It was time to get acquainted with the Jacuzzi.
Chapter 11
Darkness engulfed the room. The curtains were drawn to prevent any city lights from filtering through. When a draft crept up my nakedness, I pulled the sheets closer, turning to see Hawke was not beside me.
Hawke had strolled into our penthouse after his rock-star obligations with flowers and duck confit, a famous Parisian meal. It had been the best night to start off my short European vacation, and I was missing the absence of his warm body next to mine.
Wrapping the satin sheet around my body, I swung my knees over the side of the bed. A tiny sliver of light was peeking through the bottom of the bathroom door. I knocked on the door before turning the knob and walking in.
When I approached, Hawke flipped around.
His eyes widened, surprised at my arrival. “What’re you doing up?”
When I took a step forward, he brought a fist to his back, hiding something, and awareness prickled my skin. The ringing in my ears, coupled with the increase in my heart rate, had me feeling dizzy, but I pushed through it.
Doing drugs—any type of drugs—was a deal-breaker.
“What’s in your hand?” My voice trembled, showing my fear. I’d been here before, years ago with my own mother. I didn’t want another repeat—a repeat of my past.
“What?” he asked, blanching. “Nothing.” His words matched his face, blank as a white canvas, unreadable.
“You asked me once”—I swallowed hard—“if you didn’t write your songs, if that would’ve been a deal-breaker for me.” I tipped my head toward his hand. “If you’re doing drugs, I’m done. I don’t care how much I like you.” I had to step out of this situation before I got in too deep, before I liked him more—or worse, before I fell in love…before I could love him and then feel the need to save him.
The hardest part of retelling an agonizing story was the first few words. I bit my cheek and forced myself to start speaking, “You know about my disappearing father, but my mother…I watched her slowly kill herself with prescription drugs.”
“It’s Tylenol, Sunshine,” he insisted.
My eyes narrowed, and disappointment flooded my insides. The red needle on my bullshit meter was teetering on the far end. “Show it to me then.”
His eyes grew hard. “I’ve watched my mother battle her addiction with coke and heroin and prescription drugs for as long as I can remember. It’s the reason she keeps coming back for money that she is not entitled to. Like I told you before, I’m not going to let anyone or anything control me. If you haven’t figured it out, I am very much a control freak.”
My eyes dropped to his fist. “What’s in your hand?” Naturally, I was too trusting, but I wasn’t naive enough to think that he didn’t have everything at his disposal.
He stepped toward me, reached for my hand, opened my fist, and dropped a pill in my palm before storming out to the bedroom.
My stomach nosedived to the marble floor. Shit!
It was Tylenol.
Great. Just great.
I guessed my bullshit meter was broken.
Anxiety crept up my throat, and I entered the bedroom, ready to beg for forgiveness. He was slumped over on the couch, turning something over and over in his hand. When I stepped closer, I realized it was a guitar pick.
“I got hurt a while back. Fell off a stage.”
I remembered. It’d happened two years ago, and it had made front-page news.
“So, yeah, sometimes, I feel lower back pain and take Tylenol with codeine for it. But I’m not addicted to meds, and I don’t take hard-core drugs. That’s not me.”
His fingers dug into the guitar pick, and he blew out a breath. “I don’t believe in blind trust.” His voice was low and strained and hurt. “I don’t trust very easily. My circle is small, intimate. I don’t even trust all of the band members. I mean”—he shook his head—“not with anything real. Cofi, I do, and Tilton. Everyone else…” His voice trailed off.
“I’m sorry.” I was a step away from him, but he still hadn’t lifted his head.
When I ran my fingers through his hair, he lifted his head, his eyes tired, sad even.
“And you, Sunshine. I trust you. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the fact that you haven’t sold our story to the tabloids yet, or maybe it’s because you don’t push me about my mom. I don’t know what it is, but I trust you, and I just wish you’d do the same for me.”
I inhaled deeply. I’d hurt him, and I knew exactly why. It was the simple things that money couldn’t buy that mattered to him, and trust was one of them.
Our eyes locked, and I swallowed the guilt down.
“Sunshine, I’ve never lied to you,” he said, eyes intensely locking with mine.
“You can trust me,” I promised him. “I’d never betray you. Ever.”
From the look on his face, the way his eyes peered into mine, I knew he believed me. I sat down next to him, and our thighs touched.
“Want to hear the latest one?” He let out a sadistic laugh, one that felt like tiny spiders were nipping at my skin. “Alan paid her off again.”
I’d gathered that much from what I heard on the plane, and I was curious, but I didn’t want to pry.
I rested my chin on his shoulder while he stared blankly in front of himself. “She’s suing me again. Nothing new.”
“For what?”
He exhaled deeply. His exhale was frustrated, tired, defeated.
“Shit, she was so high on our first tour. I doubt she even remembers what went down. When she lashed out at the President of MCA Records, I thought we were toast. That’s when Alan stepped up. He was part of MCA, assigned to us. He knew my mother was the one screwing up our gigs.
I’d emancipated myself from her when I was sixteen. What else was I supposed to do when she’d depleted our accounts to fund her lifestyle?
Now she suing us for unpaid wages because she had originally been our manager.”
I snuggled closer, hating the coldness in his stare, the hate in his eyes, the bitterness in his tone. “What does she want now?”
“The same thing she always wants—money. Now, she’s suing for emotional distress.” He flexed his fingers, forming a fist.
“Maybe you should countersue for the same thing.”
The side of his mouth lifted into his signature crooked smile. “I should, shouldn’t I? But then she’d use the money I’d already paid her to pay me if I won the suit.”
When he rested against the pillows, I followed and lay down. Facing each other, we were so close. I felt the warmness of his breath against my face. The vulnerability in his eyes were laid out for me to see.
“Alan paid her off last week,” he said quietly “I only found out through Cofi. I know Alan keeps me in the dark sometimes, but all I want from him is the truth.”
“Understandable.”
“I mean, I know why he does it. I just hate paying the bitch off all the time.”
Silence engulfed the room, and we stared at each other, his tormented eyes to my understanding ones.
I shifted with unease, needing to break the silence, to make him feel better. That was what I did. It was what I was good at—fixing things.
I unclenched my fists and noticed the tiny pill was still in my sweaty palm. “So, yeah…you still need this?”
After a soft chuckle escaped him, he plucked the pill from my hand and popped it into his mouth, swallowing without water. Then, his look turned serious. “Stay for the rest of the tour. It’s only for the next few weeks.”
If only the world worked like that, where I had no bills to pay and no school application process to worry about.
“You know I can’t. They only gave me three days off.”
He pinched my side, and I yelped.
“No, seriously, I can’t. I have to fly back home the day after tomorrow to make it back to work in time.”
He nodded, but it didn’t lessen the unsettling feeling between us, this feeling that our short time together was already coming to an end.
Chapter 12
When Hawke promised me a good time, he fulfilled.
After his morning interviews, we hit the town, rock-star style.
We left the hotel incognito—hats, sunglasses, and total tourist wear. Even Tilton had his own getup—a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat. It was hard not to laugh at the way Tilton’s hat fanned over his face.
I was sitting in the Suburban, windows down and summer wind blowing my hair in my face. Because of logistics and safety and because Daddy Alan wouldn’t allow it, there were some things I could only see from the comfort of the leather seats of the Suburban, but it didn’t matter because my smile could not be dimmed.
We saw the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées—Clemenceau, and Notre Dame—drive-by-style. I stuck my head out the window, camera in hand, and snapped enough pics to fill two scrapbooks. I wanted to spend my vacation with Hawke, and that was what we were doing. Every time I turned his way, his crooked smile had lit up his face.
The sightseeing from the car was enough for me. Eating takeout in the car was enough for me. Spending time with Hawke was enough for me.
But he had planned so much more.
“Where are we going next?” I asked, shutting my window, as Notre Dame passed our view.
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
I waved an accusatory pointy finger his way. “You’re such a liar.”
“I really don’t.” He shrugged again.
“And the worst thing is, you are so good at it. I wonder if I should believe anything you say at all.”
He ran one hand through his wavy locks. “We’re almost there, Sunshine. You’ll just have to wait for your last surprise.”
My eyes flew to my phone in my hand, searching for the time. It was two in the afternoon, and my stomach churned as the minutes ticked by. Our time together was dwindling down. It was like sitting on your favorite ride at a theme park, knowing that it was going to end. I didn’t want our adventure to stop.
Hawke sensed my sadness because he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you here again.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said, joking with him. “Empty promises.”
When would we have free time? When would he be on tour in Paris again? When would we have another opportunity to tour the City of Love?
Probably never.
He scooted over and pulled me into him, and my heartbeat picked up at his nearness. He gripped my chin to face him. “Next time, it’ll be just you and me. No band. No bodyguards. Just the two of us.”
Impossible, I thought to myself.
But, from the determined look in his eyes, I knew he meant it. He wanted it to be just the two of us as much as I did.
When the car stopped, I leaned over him and squinted through the tinted window to try to make out where we were. When Tilton held the door open to let us out, I took in the sign, and my eyes flew to Hawke’s.
“No.” No way. No way. No way. My voice shook with disbelief. “Cordon Bleu?”
Le Cordon Bleu was a well-known culinary school with branches worldwide. I planned to apply to the one in Chicago. But here, in Paris, the culinary capital of the world, this was where it’d all begun. The original school had been founded in Paris in 1895.
“Sunshine, did you want to admire the school from the car?”
“What?”
“Because I have a private tour scheduled with their head chef. He said you could use his kitchen.”
My mouth fell open. A swarm of flies could’ve flown in and out.
And then it happened.
I couldn’t hold in my excitement. I bounced up and down in my seat like a total lunatic, clapping my hands like I was five, squeeing like I was a teenager. Usually, I was able to hold it together in front of the rock star and keep my cool, but not today. Not when this was the best day ever.
“Oh my God,” was all I could say on repeat.
His crooked smile widened. “Relax, Sam.”
And then I did.
I brushed my hair from my face, totally embarrassed that I had lost my calm and cool demeanor.
He reached for the door and extended his hand. “Let’s go. We’ve got exactly an hour and a half until we’re out of this place, and I have to get to the stadium for sound check.”
I stepped out of the car, and before we walked in, I went up on my tiptoes and pulled back his baseball cap, tenderly pecking him on the lips. “Thank you,” I said.
His signature smile slowly left his face, and lines on his normally smooth face creased his forehead. An unfocused gaze filled his vision, and with a light touch of his hand, he rested his palm on my cheek…but in the next second, the vulnerability I’d witnessed was gone.
He tipped his head toward the entranceway. “Let’s go.”
I let him take my hand as I half-skipped into the entrance of Le Cordon Bleu, hand in hand with Hawke Calvin, rock-star extraordinaire.
The ride back to the hotel was filled with my nonstop chatter about Chef Alain Pepin and his gifted technique in making croquembouche, a traditional French wedding cake. In the US, we would call it a tower of cream puffs. The culinary master had instructed me on how to perfect the crème puffs decorated with caramel and spun sugar. We had filled half of the crème puffs with chocolate and half with vanilla. Then, we’d spun caramel and dipped the puffs in the caramel concoction. The chef had taught me how to stack the puffs in a circular motion and maintain balance and symmetry so that the tower would not fall.
Hawke sat back and listened as I rambled on about Chef Alain’s technique and perfection in the kitchen until we were interrupted again by the ringing of his phone.
He held up a finger and began talking to someone, seemed like Cofi. I could tell Cofi was giving him the rundown, and Hawke said that we’d meet them at the concert.
When he hung up the phone, my happy-happy-joy-joy moment was gone.
Hawke immediately spit out directions, “Tilton, head straight to the stadium. Alan’s shitting himself because I’m not there.” He leaned back, unaffected, and then turned my way. “I’ll have Tilton drop me off first, and then you can get ready and meet me there.”
I glanced down at my stained shirt. Caramel had spilled on the middle of my white baby tee when I was decorating the crème puffs. I didn’t want to part from him, but I looked like a slob next to his perfection, and I needed to change.
“Did you have fun?” he asked.
I nodded, but my smile from earlier was absent because the hourglass of sand that indicated our time together was quickly dwindling down. “I had a great time,” I said, my tone sullen to match my mood.
When he pulled me onto his lap without warning, my heart jumped to the middle of my throat. His fingers pressed against my back, so lightly at first that I didn’t feel it and then increasing with pressure until I felt it everywhere.
“I’m glad you had fun, Sunshine.” A devilish smile graced his face. “I think I had more fun watching you in action.”
I gasped when his velvety tongue outlined my lips.
“Can I hire these hands?” He put one said hand on the thickening bulge between us. “For cooking?”
I laughed because he was not talking about food. The privacy barrier began to lift from the middle of the limo, blocking my view of Tilton, causing my internal temperature to rise twenty notches.
“I think it’s time for my midday snack,” he said, his tone husky with desire.
His touch was hypnotizing, and my whole body tingled under his fingertips.
He guided me to my back while his fingers worked the button of my jeans. Everything with Hawke was a first. First one-night stand. First Paris experience. Now, the first time having sex in the back of a limo. Check, check, and check.
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br /> “Are you on birth control?”
“Yes.” My arousal could be sensed through my voice, and my whole body flooded with warmth.
“Because I don’t have any condoms,” he breathed.
I wiggled beneath him, and my knees fell to the sides. I wanted him so badly, needed him with a passion so strong, I didn’t care anymore.
A moan escaped my mouth when his fingers pierced me, and my wetness met where he touched, my desire for him increasing twofold. There was no doubt I would give him what I very much wanted myself.
“Are you clean?” I asked, unable to control my hunger for him any longer.
My hands moved to the buckle of his pants, unzipping him and reaching for his hard length. The feel of him against my fingertips had my mouth watering, and when my fingers wrapped around his cock, his loud intake of breath sent a thrill right through me.
“I get tested every month, and I’ve never been without one.”
And I decided that I trusted him. Because I did and I couldn’t wait any longer, I positioned him at my entrance, and in one swift movement, he filled me. I gasped at the fullness of him.
A fiery fever rushed within me as my fingers threaded through his hair. His eyes locked with mine before he kissed me deeply. Tongue against tongue. Skin against skin. The electrifying magnetism between us was palpable.
“You feel…you feel so good, Sunshine.” His words came out in broken, husky puffs.
He moved above me with raw, animalistic passion that I had never experienced before—not like I had a lot to compare him to, but still. I wondered if he was like this with everyone or just me. I wanted to believe it. I wanted so badly to believe I couldn’t compare to the rest of the women he’d been with.
When the car parked, his movements quickened, and his deep breathing accelerated. I knew he was close. Close to ecstasy, and I was, too.
The tingling started at the base of my spine, creeping up my legs and to my core. He gripped my ass tighter, indenting his fingers in my skin, as he drove deeper, deeper, deeper inside me.
“I love how you feel. I love you,” he moaned as we both climaxed.