Fame & Obsession (Lords Of Lyre Book 1)

by Cora Kenborn

  “Phoebe, you’re safe—you had a nightmare.”

  My voice felt scratchy as I worked for the one word in my brain. “Where?” I whispered. The breath on my shoulder became heavier, and my hands clawed at the sheet pooling beneath my bare chest.

  What the hell was going on? Where was I?

  “Hey…”

  I finally turned toward the voice. Soft jade eyes stared back at me, patiently waiting for me to offer an explanation for the crazy—as if I actually had one. Still trying to process it myself, another realization dawned on me.

  I was in bed with Julian Bale.

  I wiped a shaking hand across my dry contact lenses and tried to bring his face into focus. After a few moments, wild morning-after hair came into view, attached to a strong, eagle-tattooed chest propped up on equally decorated muscular arms. Even with my entire body still shaking in nightmare aftershocks, I took one look at him and my heart skipped.

  “I…it’s…I don’t…”

  He stared with pinpoint precision, his choppy hair flopping forward. “Bad dream, huh?”

  I sucked in a big breath and nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not in the least,” I said, clutching the sheet tightly around me. I attempted to sit up when a soreness between my legs halted all movement. I stared at the sheets as it all came rushing back to me in a sudden wave of wrongness. The fighting, the kissing…the sex. It was wrong on so many levels, but so good at the same time.

  Everything contradicted itself. Up was down, right was wrong, black was white, good was bad, and naked was…well, naked. And Julian Bale was very naked.

  With a heavy sigh, he ran trepid fingers through his unruly hair, succeeding in making it stand almost straight up in a strangely sexy way. “Phoebe, shit.” He stared at the plain white wall in front of him. “I hope you don’t think—”

  “I’m fine.” I assured him.

  He seemed nervous, a word I never associated with him. “Things happened really fast last night, and I usually don’t…I had a lot to drink, but I told you I’m clean. I mean, I always make sure that I…shit…”

  Gazing at him, it hit me what all the nervous stammering meant. “Me too. It’s all right, Julian. I’m on the pill.”

  He let out a harsh breath. “Oh, thank god. I—”

  The words lodged in his throat as I flung myself at him, landing with a forceful thud on his chest. I gave him just enough warning to catch me as we both tumbled backward on the bed. He wasted no time seeking my mouth, arms tightening around my waist.

  I had no clue what I was doing. Since I left my apartment yesterday, I’d been making everything up as I went along. My body seemed to have a mind of its own, and his touch seemed to chase my demons away.

  The demon.

  My heart pounded as his mouth disappeared, dipping into the crevice of my neck as tiny sucks trailed down my skin. My eyes drifted closed, fingers running through the scruff on his chin and cheeks—the sting making my palms and desire come alive.

  He rolled us across the bed, pinning me underneath him, full lips trailing a hot line of kisses down the center of my chest. All I could do to keep from losing my mind was to throw my head back and sigh his name repeatedly.

  “Christ,” Julian mumbled against my sternum. “Nothing should be this good.”

  I was so caught up in my own lustful greed—my selfish frenzy to keep the monster in the darkness—that I allowed him to continue his descent. I lost myself, going to a place where flesh ruled common sense, and all I had to do was feel.

  The moment his bottom lip hit the edge of the first jagged roughness, we both stilled.

  I heard the double gasp, and for a sickening moment, I thought one had come from Julian. Then, as two tears rolled silently off of my cheeks, I knew they’d both come from me.

  I waited for it. I felt his nose dip, his top lip graze where his bottom lip had been. I knew his eyes were following and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Four more tears followed the trail and I didn’t even bother wiping them away.

  “What…Jesus,” he whispered as his fingers lightly trailed over the wide puckered slashes. “Phoebe, what happened to you?”

  “It’s nothing.” I kept my eyes plastered to the ceiling, counting the dots in the molding.

  “Bullshit. This is not nothing. Talk to me.”

  Wrestling out from underneath him, I dragged myself to the opposite side of the bed and searched the floor for my dress, remembering he’d ripped it off last night. Jerking the sheet off of the bed, I cocooned myself in it and tried to look anywhere but directly at him. He sat up on the edge of the bed, his hard eyes narrowed, stark-ass naked and not giving a damn.

  “Look,” I began, waving a hand in the air. “Last night was fun, right? We got carried away. So, we’re good. No strings.” I cleared my throat and pulled myself together. “I’m going to fix my dress and call Gage. I don’t think I should be getting in a taxi like this.”

  “Stop.” His sharp command froze me.

  “Really, you don’t—”

  “I said stop. Stop everything, right now.”

  “I’m not what you want, Julian.” I clutched the sheet tighter. “There are things you don’t know—horrible, nasty things.”

  He paused, remembering something. “Is this about your father?”

  Bitch-ass reporter.

  “Julian, why do you have to push so hard all the time?” I begged, feeling his indignant stare at the back of my head, all but daring me to move.

  “Because it’s fucking impossible to walk away from you, that’s why!” he roared through thinly held anger. “So there are things I don’t know. There are things you don’t know too. People have secrets. Shit happens.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand, princess”

  “I can’t deal with this right now,” I announced, moving to the edge of the bed.

  “Phoebe, you’re not going any-fucking-where.” With an authoritative tone, he grabbed the back of the sheet and pulled me easily across the middle of the bed. Once I was underneath him, he untangled the sheet and ripped it off, exposing me.

  Trapped, I fixed my stare on the ceiling again as the tears rolled. “Are you happy now? Get your eyeful?”

  I felt his fingertip gently trace the first scar on my hipbone. It was the second wound and I remember it feeling like a swarm of bees stinging all at once. Lifting his finger, he moved it directly above my belly button and traced the longer one. That was the third one—the one that brought me to my knees—the one that nicked a branch of my superior mesenteric artery. The one that almost made me bleed out next to my shitty 2005 Chevy Malibu.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  A strangled cry tore from my throat. “Shut up, Julian. You already fucked me. You don’t have to work for it anymore, all right?”

  He lowered his mouth and softly kissed each one, making sure he didn’t miss a single scar. Seven in all. Seven ugly, white, ripped shards of skin from my navel to my pelvis. Reminders of the night everything was taken from me. They’d been my cross to bear, literally and figuratively.

  “I have to go.”

  “Not yet,” he said, moving lower. His kisses became impatient, raining down while his hands trailed behind him. My skin ignited for him without my permission. His lips moved to my hip and kissed the first scar he touched once more, and my head sank into the pillow as his exploration found its destination.

  All I could do when his mouth latched onto my core was grab the pillow above my head and squeeze it for dear life. I sensed him smiling the exact moment he knew he was about to push me over the edge. Flattening his tongue, he sent me tumbling off of the cliff I barely held onto. I grabbed the headboard with both hands and screamed his name, melting into violent tremors. As I forced air into my lungs, he slid up my legs, trailing kisses up the middle of my stomach.

  Tracing the side of my neck, he nibbled
behind my ear. “Your scars are beautiful,” he repeated roughly.

  ***

  I scanned the room until my eyes found their intended target: a red dress tossed carelessly on the floor beside the bed. Dressing as best I could, I grabbed my phone and purse and sat on the couch with my head in my hand, dialing.

  “Is it all I’ve ever dreamed of and six inches more, baby doll?” Gage answered sleepily.

  “Not now, okay? Can you borrow a car and come get me? I can’t take a cab. I’ll explain when I see you. I’m at the Jameson Hotel in SoHo.” I hung up and dropped my face into my hands.

  “It’s five o’clock in the morning.” Julian accused, leaning against the doorframe of the bedroom with an irritated scowl on his face. “You were just going to bounce without saying anything?”

  I pulled my legs under me and hugged my knees like an anchor. “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought we were past this, Phoebe.”

  Words failed me again, and I stared at my toes like an idiot. He mulled something over in his head, and I kept my mouth shut, waiting for him to say whatever he needed. I deserved it. Sleeping with him was a line I should never have crossed.

  The waiting was killing me, so I tried appeasing my own insecurities by transforming from a spastic booty call into his appointed, break of dawn autobiographer in the blink of an eye.

  “Where did the name Lords of Lyre come from?”

  “Are we really doing this now, Phoebe?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Humor me, okay?” I begged. “I’m trying not to have an anxiety attack here.”

  He studied me for a moment. “It’s from a high school mythology lesson, junior year.” He abruptly abandoned his irritation as he geeked out. “There was a journal piece written in the fifties about Greek civilization called Hymns That Are Lords of the Lyre. It argued that the loss of music impacts all parts of life. There’s a specific passage that states, ‘Music was everywhere in Greek life, and no performance of drama and almost no poetic recitation, no formal public religious act, no major social occasion, and few athletic tournaments lacked its presence.’”

  “You’ve had that whole passage memorized since eleventh grade?” I teased.

  His face flushed. “Yeah, but I bombed chemistry. We’re all mythology geeks at heart. I remember coming home and reciting that entire passage to my mom. I think she was just shocked I’d actually learned something after hanging out with Zane.” He snickered to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “After that, my mom stopped harping on me about playing the guitar all the time.” He scratched his thickening beard. “She wasn’t against it, she just thought it interfered with school too much. The fact that I could memorize all that, and ace an English exam, calmed her down about my future.”

  “What did your dad say?”

  His smile dropped and he fidgeted with the loose threads in the chair. “My dad died when I was three.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I don’t remember him much. He died in a parachuting accident during a routine plane jump,” he explained. “We were based at McGuire Air Force Base in Hanover, right outside of Trenton. When Dad died, Mom moved Ryker and me to Bergen County to be near her family. We’ve been there ever since.”

  “Ryker?” I asked.

  “My little brother. He was a baby when Dad died, so he has no memory of him at all. Mom was adamant about keeping his memory alive for us, so we’d go out to the field behind the house every military holiday and we’d stick little flags everywhere. You couldn’t even see grass. She called it our Field of Honor.”

  “You have a lot of layers to you, you know that?” I tilted my head as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Don’t spread it around. I have an image to uphold,” he joked, deflecting the pain in his eyes. “So what about you?”

  I stiffened. “What about me?”

  “Any traditions in your family?”

  Not unless you counted assault and battery as a tradition.

  “No.”

  “Not even a holiday tradition?” he prodded. “Something special with your parents, maybe?”

  I thought for a minute. “Strawberries,” I blurted out.

  “Come again?”

  “Strawberries,” I said louder, curling my feet underneath me in a protective position. “My mom would always take me strawberry picking on special occasions. My sister hated the heat, so it was just something my mom and I did together.” It was pathetic that that was the best memory of my childhood I had to share.

  “That’s it? That’s all your memories?” he said, casting a pitying glance at me.

  “Do you live with your entire band?” I hated pity, and the conversation was leading to somewhere I didn’t want to go with him. Thankfully, he didn’t push me.

  “Just two. Ty drums and Zane’s our lead guitar. I play rhythm guitar.” He smiled as if he read my mind. “Tanna’s our bassist, but she’s just nineteen. Plus, she’s a girl, so she has her own place with some friends.”

  I shifted a surprised glance his way. “You’re not lead guitar?”

  He eyed me intently. “You wouldn’t guess by appearances, but Zane’s a poetic master.”

  “Poetic dick, maybe,” I huffed, and placed my feet on the coffee table. “If he’s the same asshole who made me want to drown into a puddle of piss and die that first night.”

  “Don’t put much thought into stuff Zane says.” He laughed. “He has a thing with outsiders.”

  “You’re not that damn famous.” Immediately, I covered my mouth. The words slipped out before I could stop them. “Oh my god, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that!”

  He laughed. The sound echoed in the quiet room. “Yes, you did. And you’re right. We’re not world famous…yet.”

  Awkwardness settled between us again. “Did your other guitarist live with you? The one who died?”

  “Yeah, but he had a serious girlfriend, so he was never around.”

  “Why didn’t he just move in with her?”

  “Her family is devoutly Catholic,” he explained, moving to the chair beside me. “Living together before marriage is a huge sin.”

  I snorted. “As opposed to a li’l sin?”

  He threw his palms up. “I don’t know. A no-no is a no-no when it comes to Catholic sex. People do it, but don’t talk about it.”

  “That’s a crock of shit.” I rubbed my temple, cursing myself for cracking the door to my past in front of him.

  He smiled. “Are we bashing religion, Miss Southern Bible Belt?”

  “Are you serious?” I rolled my eyes. “I caught half of my town doing the motel drive of shame Saturday night, then the same assholes would show up at church on Sunday morning, singing hymns about faithfulness and sin.” A shadow fell over the room. “People are such hypocrites.”

  He watched me intently. “Hypocrites, how?”

  I didn’t like where this was going. “You know, always saying one thing and doing another. Hypocrites.”

  “You sound like you speak from experience.”

  “What if I do?”

  “Tell me,” he urged, reaching toward the coffee table and trailing his fingers up my leg.

  I held my bottom lip tightly between my teeth as we gazed silently at each other. Something in his face hit me as familiar to what I’d seen in the mirror the past three years. I carried around the guilt everywhere I went. It both intrigued me and scared the hell out of me to see the same reflection in him.

  I knew innately he was trying to coax a one-sided confession out of me. Reaching across the armrest, I covered the hand that rested gently on my leg and held my ground. “I’ll tell you if you tell me.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he said, closing his fingers around mine.

  “Why do you expect so much out of me and give me so little of yourself, Julian?”

  “You don’t understand.” He braced a hand on the back of his neck.


  I slanted my body toward him. “My dad ruined my family when I was sixteen.” The words blurted out, to my own surprise.

  Lowering his hand, he averted his eyes. “Go on.”

  A laugh bubbled through me. “I don’t think so, Julian. You can’t expect me to cut open a vein with nothing in return.”

  “We’re just not at a place where I can talk about it,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just what I have to do.”

  “Fine,” I said with a quick, affirmative nod. Holding my dress together at the nape, I stood and faced him. “You do what you have to do—and so will I.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  White light seared through my eyelids and burned my retinas. Groaning, I pulled the comforter over my head and rolled over. I wondered what it would take to make NASA send a rocket to blow the fuck out of the sun. Before I could think it over, the blankets were jerked off of me.

  Still face down, I reached for the sheet resting below my hip. “Hey! What the—”

  “Oh, no you don’t, Snoring Beauty. Sleepy time is over. It’s wakey time, and you, baby doll, have some in-depth dishing to hand out.”

  I sighed into my pillow. I couldn’t deal with this right now. “Go. Away. Gage.”

  The bed dipped with his weight and he scooted in beside me. “If you think you’re getting out of this after I had the starring role in Driving Miss Shamey at the crack ass of dawn, you are one queen short of a drag race. I had to borrow Parker’s mom’s car, you know.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” I offered, my voice muffled. I rolled my eyes into the pillowcase as he continued to bitch about the car. “I’ve had a shitty night, Gage. I said I’d make it up to you, all right?”

  “Geez, could you make getting pounded by a rock star sound less like a vagina mining?”

  Picking my head off the drool-soaked pillow, I narrowed my eyes. “Vagina what? Ugh, you know what, never mind. I’m too exhausted to care.”

  “You are in serious breach of roommate code here, Pheebs.” He pouted while resting his tablet on his lap. He reached a hand to my nightstand and pulled something off of the glass top.