New Adult Romance Box Set

by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose

  Make it up to you? I can get you front row seats.

  My mouth, already full of red Skittles, dropped open. I only closed it again to keep all the candy from falling onto the floor. I think my eyes held the question—are you serious?—when I turned to him, because he smiled and dropped me a wink.

  Glancing back at Woodall, Dale grabbed the pencil, daring to scribble again on the table.

  #?

  For a minute I felt faint again. There was a buzzing in my ears.

  Instead of risking the table again, I grabbed my purse, digging through and finding a red pen. I reached over and took his hand, feeling calluses on his fingers as I turned it over, the touch of our hands making my body sing, so I could write on the back of it: Sara 263-3231

  When I drew a fat, red heart around it, he smiled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Hey, thanks for the ride.” Dale looked at me over the red-and-Bondo-colored hood of my Dodge Dart in the late afternoon sunshine. In the light, his dark hair was a thick, blue-black—not unlike a certain rock star—and it made my heart skip in just the same way. The flash of his smile showed that dimple again, like a secret wink. “I’m sorry I got your notebook thrown out.”

  “Forget it.” I opened the driver’s side door, tossing my notebook and purse in the back seat. “You got it back, that’s all that matters.”

  We’d spent half an hour after class spraying the tables with Windex and wiping them down with paper towel. I was worried about Aimee. I was supposed to meet her in the parking lot—I was her ride home. Dale offered to skip out and find her, risking Woodall’s wrath, but I wouldn’t let him. If I turned up missing, I knew she would catch a ride with Carrie and Wendy, if she didn’t make the city bus. I’d just have to hear about it later.

  Woodall gave us both an extra assignment for good measure but had been thankfully called to the main office over the P.A. before he could finish his lecture. That’s when we grabbed my notebook, leaving the Windex and paper towels on his desk, and took off. Practically running through the empty hallways, we broke out of the back doors like two prisoners escaping a maximum security prison.

  “Free at last!” Dale shouted, pumping his fist in the air, making me laugh as we made our way across the practically empty parking lot toward my beat-up car.

  “So where to?” I asked as Dale got in and immediately went for the radio.

  “Kensington Gardens.”

  “What?” I turned to him, stunned. The coincidences just kept on coming!

  “The apartment complex. Over on Wisteria.”

  “Yeah, I know. I live there.” I pulled out of the parking lot and turned right, heading toward home.

  “I know.” Dale settled on the classic rock station, beginning to flip through the cassettes I had tucked into the console. “You laid out a lot this summer at the pool. Black and white bikini?”

  “Oh.” I blushed. Our apartment complex had a pool and Aimee and I had spent a lot of our summer spreading ourselves with her “homemade goop”—a mixture of coconut and baby oil and God only knew what else—and working on our tans while we ran the batteries out on her boom box listening to Tyler Vincent. “Yeah, that was me.”

  “And that was your friend, Aimee, with you?” Dale assumed. I just nodded. He was listing my cassettes under his breath as he looked through them. “U2. Duran Duran. Madonna. Rick Springfield. And of course, Tyler Vincent. Do you listen to anything that isn’t Top 40?”

  “What’s wrong with Top 40?” I protested, feeling defensive about my music choices. “I never saw you at the pool.”

  “I had a busy summer.” He opened the glove compartment, finding more cassettes inside, starting to flip through those too. “No time to swim.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Getting my band up to snuff.”

  “Your band?” Did the similarities to Tyler Vincent never end? “What sort of band?”

  “You like the Dead Kennedys?” He glanced down at his shirt, pointing. “The Cure? INXS?”

  “Ummm…” I shrugged. I’d heard of them, but that was about it.

  “Oh that’s right, you like Tyler Vincent.” He was teasing me, grinning, and I told myself to take it lightly, not to overreact, but I hated it when people made fun of Tyler Vincent.

  “Don’t do it!” he begged me. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!”

  “You know you look like him.” I changed the subject, glancing up at the red light we were stuck at, waiting for it to turn, trying to keep my cool, but the hair on the back of my neck was standing up.

  “Nah, he looks like me.” His eyes—a decidedly devilish blue—narrowed slightly at my comment. The light still hadn’t turned and we looked at each other across the console. I didn’t like to be teased about my thing for Tyler Vincent, but from the look on his face, he didn’t like to be compared to him either. It was a brief, tense moment. “Is that why you offered to give me a ride home instead of making me call a cab?”

  “No, it was the front row seats you promised.” I stuck my tongue out at him as the light turned green and I gave it some gas.

  He laughed. “Touché.”

  “You must know someone at Ticketmaster,” I mused. The thought of front row seats to see Tyler Vincent seemed almost too good to be true. Was he telling me the truth? “Or the radio station?”

  “Yeah, I know someone,” he agreed, going back to his search through my glove compartment. “Hey! The Violent Femmes. There might be hope for you yet.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So you obviously don’t play any Tyler Vincent.”

  “Occasionally.” He made a face. “We have to do some covers, because the crowds want to hear familiar songs. Some day I’m going to perform my own.”

  “So punk rock?” I prompted. “Like the Dead Kennedys?”

  “Yes and no.” Dale closed the glove compartment, giving up. “I spent most of last summer in Seattle and you wouldn’t believe the music coming out of there. It’s like hardcore punk mixed with heavy metal and something else, like its own thing. You’ve never heard anything like it. That’s what I do. What I write, what I play.”

  “Where can I hear you? Are you playing clubs?”

  “Some, when we can get the gigs.” Something about his energy had shifted. He wasn’t so cool and casual and who-gives-a-crap anymore. “We’re auditioning for MTV’s Battle of the Bands. By then we should have it all together. I hope.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.” We were coming up to Kensington Gardens, three stories high, red brick face, windows like dark eyes. It reminded me of a prison, even with the tall white columns in front, and my heart always sank when I pulled into the parking lot.

  “Well, I got these guys together this summer,” he admitted. “We’re working hard, but the band I had back in Maine… we’d been together for years.”

  So he had lived in Maine—Wendy had been right.

  “But you moved to New Jersey,” I reminded him.

  “I know.” He sighed, looking up at the apartment building in front of us, and I wondered if I looked just as forlorn when I contemplated its red brick visage. “Up until today, I couldn’t tell you one good thing about living in this hellhole.”

  I nodded, fully agreeing with his assessment. “Wait… what happened today?”

  He turned and looked at me, a question in his eyes, a half-smile playing on his lips, like he thought I must be kidding him. “I met you, duh.”

  “Oh,” I replied stupidly, feeling even dumber than I sounded, but he didn’t seem to mind. His gaze moved over my face, lingering for a moment on my lips, and I licked them nervously, attempting to change the subject. “So why did you move here?”

  Dale glanced back at the apartments, looking up and waving to someone standing in a window. “My dad got a job teaching at Rutgers. He couldn’t turn it down.”

  “Rutgers?” It wasn’t Harvard or Yale, but it was still pretty prestigious. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m at the stupid academy.” Dale
hooked a thumb in his belt, drawing my attention there to the silver studs as he leaned back in the passenger’s seat with another sigh. “If I get my high school diploma, my dad can send me to Rutgers for free.”

  I blinked in surprise. “That’s quite a deal. A degree from Rutgers for free?”

  “I don’t plan on going to Rutgers,” he replied flatly, giving me a dark look.

  “What do you plan on doing?” I asked, although I had a feeling I already knew. He didn’t respond but the answer was written all over his face. He didn’t just look like Tyler Vincent—Dale Diamond wanted to be Tyler Vincent. Or some cooler, funkier version of the rock star, I could only assume, from his Dead Kennedys t-shirt and his ultimate disdain for my cassette collection.

  “Let me guess,” I smirked. “You want to be a rock star?”

  “I gotta go.” He reached for the door handle and I felt my stomach clench into a ball, suddenly sorry I’d teased him.

  “Hey, wait.” I grabbed his arm. It was warm and muscular and the touch was electric. When he looked at me, my breath went away. I had never had such an instant attraction to someone and it scared me a little. “I didn’t mean anything. I think you’d make a great rock star. Hell, you already sort of look like one. I like rock stars. Remember?”

  He relented a little, giving me half a smile, but not enough to bring out that dimple in his cheek.

  “Do you have a car?” I inquired.

  He shook his dark head. “I sold it last year to pay for a new guitar.”

  “Do you want a ride to the academy?” I offered. I had to pick up Aimee, of course, but she was just down the road. I tried to imagine her reaction when I showed up with Dale Diamond in the car.

  I patted the dashboard of my Dodge Dart affectionately. “I know my baby here is old and temperamental, but she’s transportation. I worked all summer at a Dairy Queen to buy her. Four hundred bucks.”

  “You got taken.”

  I laughed and he rewarded me with a real dimple-making smile.

  “So, do you want a ride on Monday?”

  “Yeah. That would be great.” He looked down at my hand, still touching his arm. “Hey… can I still call you tonight?”

  “If you want to.” I suddenly wanted him to, very much.

  “I want to.” He got out of the car.

  I didn’t believe in fate. Strange coincidences happened all the time, but it was all just random, nothing we could control. That’s what I told myself as I watched Dale go into the building.

  But I didn’t quite believe it anymore.

  I heard it before I even got out of the car, and everything inside of me went silent. I sat there for a moment, hating to go inside. Hating him.

  I gathered my purse and notebook and opened the car door. I was glad Dale lived somewhere up on the third floor and had already gone in. I didn’t want him to hear this. I didn’t want to hear this. Dried leaves crunched under my feet as I walked toward the apartment building door. There was one lone tree at the side of the building. It looked as lost and forlorn as I felt.

  Inside the building it was a little warmer. Just down a short flight of steps and beyond that plain white door, a monster waited. The yelling got louder. I hated coming here every day, to this dingy building, with its rust-colored carpet and peeling walls. I remembered a time when there was a house to come home to, before the stepbeast had lost his longest-running job. Then there was a succession of lost jobs—and this place.

  To descend the stairs and go inside would just put me in the middle—again. It was a place I’d been in all my life. I should be used to it. What was it like for Tyler Vincent’s only daughter, Chloe, to come home every day? She was in her last year of high school—just a year behind me, although I was still stuck in school too.

  I spun the fantasy out in my head—

  She would come home from school, driving her brand-new Mustang, red with black interior, grab herself a snack from the kitchen, talk to her mom for a minute, and then head to her room. On her way, she would peek in and say “hi” to her dad—if his sign, “Do Not Disturb, Madman At Work” wasn’t out. He would be in his studio, writing, strumming his guitar. She would talk with him for a minute, munching on her apple, about her day, about his song, about life in general. Giving him a peck on the cheek, she would say, “Oh, Dad!” when he mentioned how old she was beginning to look and how he was going to have to invest in a shotgun and a porch swing soon.

  I sat down on the stairs, unable to think anymore through the bitterness or see through my tears. His voice reverberated in my head.

  “You can’t do anything! Jesus Christ! Are you that stupid? I can’t hear you!”

  My hands pressed against my ears and I hung my head between my knees, feeling weak. You’d think I could get used to it, but it always made my stomach churn and my ears ring.

  “What? What did you say? What did you just say to me? Fuck you, bitch! Get your ass over here!” He went on, and he would continue, berating her, making himself feel superior.

  I heard my mother’s voice—a little voice, a mouse voice, a scared little-girl voice.

  “Honey, you never asked me to do that. I would have, if you’d told me, but you never did.”

  No Mom, I thought, shaking my head. Don’t be a hero. Don’t be brave. You won’t get away with it.

  “Don’t tell me what I told you! Are you calling me a liar?”

  “No, but I—”

  CRACK

  Sudden, like a gunshot, or a whip.

  And my mother’s tears, always her tears.

  And mine. I cried for her weakness, for my own, wondering if there were people out there who lived normal lives, or if everyone hid things like this behind closed doors, behind scarves and sunglasses.

  Tyler Vincent doesn’t.

  That much I knew. He was known for being a family man, his wholesome image part of his celebrity. Just a normal everyday guy, living in his hometown in Maine, raising a family, who just happened to be one of the biggest rock stars who ever lived.

  His kids never sat outside and wished him dead.

  I was pretty sure of that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I opened the door slowly, bracing myself. This was the worst part. If I could just make it to my room, my haven, I’d be safe.

  “Well, where have you been?” He didn’t look away from the TV, although his words were directed at me. “You can’t just waltz in here anytime you want to.”

  I looked at him, sitting in “his” chair, remote control in hand, a cigarette in the other. He looked at me now, but he didn’t glare and that was good. It meant he wasn’t going to keep me. This was just a show of power.

  “Sorry, I was at Aimee’s,” I said softly, the door snicking shut behind me. This was a lie. I’d simply waited out on the stairs until the yelling—and the crying—had stopped.

  “Well, you can forget about dinner.”

  “Did I miss it?” I hadn’t been out on the stairs that long!

  “No, but you can forget about eating it.” He flipped the channel and puffed on his cigarette.

  “You were late.” He turned back to the television set.

  It was my dismissal. Thank God.

  “Yes sir,” I mumbled anyway, just in case he thought about it later and decided I hadn’t been humble enough to suit him. I made my way past his chair, glancing into their room to see my mother lying on the bed with an ice pack on her eye. She appeared to be asleep.

  I opened my door at the end of the hall and sighed in relief when I shut it behind me. I dropped my notebook and purse and laid down on my bed.

  I made it. I was safe. Well, relatively.

  It felt good to relax, to let my guard down a little. This was the only place in the world I could “be myself.” This room was me, completely and totally me, from the pictures of Tyler Vincent wallpapering the walls, to the Tyler Vincent cassettes I had lined up on the shelves.

  I looked around and wondered how long it would be before I could g
et out of here forever. My ticket out was sitting on an easel in front of the window. Like everything else in my room, it was Tyler Vincent. This was special though. This was the painting that would get me out of here—I hoped. I had taken my favorite picture of Tyler from People magazine and made a portrait of it.

  The original picture was one of Tyler and his daughter, Chloe, in a warm embrace, her cheek resting against his black t-shirt. They were smiling, happy, and it looked as if the photographer had snapped the picture a moment too late, because instead of looking at the camera, they were half-looking at each other, their eyes locked, and the look in their eyes was of something secretly hilarious, some inside joke. The love there made me ache all over. The warmth between them was almost tangible, all the love in the world caught in one single look.

  I had painted Tyler exactly as he was, but instead of Chloe, I had done a self-portrait, putting myself in her place. The painting was almost finished. I just had a little work to do. I contemplated getting out my paints and brushes, since I was going to be in here all night without any supper. Thankfully I had a stash of granola bars in my closet and a whole case of apple juice. Pete—the stepbeast—drove a truck delivering juice and he stole it from work.

  I got myself a granola bar and some juice, my stomach rumbling its thanks as I ate, looking through one of the brochures from my night stand. I’d flipped through it so many times, the edges were ragged. There was a Bulldog on the front, near the words “University of Maine at Orono”—Tyler Vincent’s alma mater. Inside, though…I opened the slick, folded sheet of paper, staring at the words: “Maine Difference Creative Competition. Open to writers, musicians, painters, photographers—artists of all creeds.”

  I double-checked the prize, as I had a hundred times—an all-expenses paid scholarship to the University of Maine to the top winner in each category, and an invitation to an open house to see the campus and accept their award. The keynote speaker was, of course, Tyler Vincent himself, whose music career had started, of all places, in a Maine university. I folded the brochure up, carefully tucking it fully back under my alarm clock.