Roadie (Rock-Hard Beautiful Book 2)

by C. M. Stunich

  “Not really, no,” Ran says, continuing his exploration with this tortuous slowness that's fascinating to watch but which quickly drives Pax up the wall—especially when I turn the cock ring on and slip it in my mouth. I lean down, sweeping red hair across the tattooed song lyrics on Paxton's midsection, over his nipples, and then I start to kiss.

  My lips press against his ear, the vibration strange and foreign on my tongue. I use it to lick a hot line down his inked throat, along his jawline, even to part his lips.

  “Bleeding hell,” he curses as I make my way lower, suck his nipples into my mouth and watch in satisfaction as his hips arch up off the bed. Ransom really does whip him then. And again. And again. The more times he does it—hitting Pax's tight, flat belly, his shaft, his balls—the deeper and more pained Paxton's moans become.

  Ransom and I pause to make out, his hand teasing me, slipping two fingers under my panties and fingering me until I'm trembling again. Just before we pull apart, I slip the cock ring from under my tongue and into his mouth, and he hands me the flogger.

  “What the fuck are you two doing?” Pax snaps as Ransom scoots down and starts to lick and suck Paxton's cock. I swear, his storm grey eyes roll back into his head with pleasure.

  Me, I lay back on the bed, my cunt facing Paxton, and I slip the handled end of the flogger beneath my panties and inside the insatiable heat of my body.

  “Damn it, Lily,” he whispers, voice rough with pent-up pleasure and need.

  I keep myself propped on a single elbow, moving the toy slowly in and out, watching Paxton's grey gaze get heavy-lidded as Ransom services his cock.

  The orgasm that hits him reminds me of an earthquake, breaking him in two, one half for me and one half for Ransom. That crack down the middle spills some of his old hurt and pain into the air, lets it drift away in the sex tainted haze of the night. He comes hard, right into Ransom's mouth as I finally lay back and finish myself with one hand on my clit, the other still thrusting the toy into me.

  Afterwards, none of us moves for a long time.

  Ransom has tilted his body so that his head is near mine, the rest of him draped horizontally across the bed, across Pax's legs.

  We both leave him tied up while we recover.

  “What are your parents going to think of the inevitable viral video of us making out?” Ransom asks after a good ten minutes has passed in silence.

  “I guess we'll find out when we visit them,” Paxton says, drawing Ran up and onto his elbows.

  “You're visiting them?”

  “When we play London, yeah. We all are.”

  “I'm meeting your parents?” I ask, surprised. I watch as Ransom moves up to the headboard and lets Paxton free. I guess he's not one to leave his lover tied up while he makes a run for it. I almost smile at that, but then … Pax's parents. Holy shit. “They're not going to like me, are they?” I ask as Ran groans.

  “They've never liked me,” he says, but not like it really matters to him. “I guess now they'll probably like me even less.”

  “I'm counting on it,” Pax says, sitting up and stretching his arms above his head. “But forget about that. What about right now? We're staying the night here and leaving for New York tomorrow. That gives us plenty of time if you guys want to go out.”

  The door slides open and I look over my shoulder to see Copeland leaning against the doorframe.

  “I think we'd rather stay in,” he says, and then he slips into the room and onto the bed.

  Michael and Muse aren't far behind him.

  The next morning, I get up before anyone else is awake, bolstered by the fact that Ransom had zero nightmares last night. Zero.

  I sneak down the hall and get my new digital drawing tablet out of the bag, opening the box and powering it on. Without a single scrap of clothing on, I climb back into bed and draw the tangled sheets and sweaty naked bodies of the men around me. All five of them are out completely, and all five of them are most assuredly one hundred percent nude—and most assuredly one hundred percent male.

  The sprawling mess of masculine beauty around me makes for an interesting sketch, this charged image that I spend almost two hours on before I hear a faint knock at the door.

  “I'll get it,” Muse says, his face pressed into a pillow, but I just sweep some of his silver-black hair away from his face and give him a small peck on the lips.

  “I can get it.”

  I throw on yet another random assortment of clothes from the mess on the floor—Cope's white linen pajama pants and Muse's zip-up sleeveless hoodie. He might like to wear it completely unzipped, but I drag the metal together all the way to the top, over the fullness of my breasts, and then head across the heated wood floors to answer the door.

  It's Octavia.

  “Good morning,” I say softly, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning my shoulder into the wall of the bus, my feet planted on the metal stairs. “Do you need to talk to the boys?” I wonder if she's going to lecture Ran and Pax about last night, or maybe ask them questions, maybe ask me questions.

  Instead, all she does is hold out a pair of keys.

  “Michael asked me last night if he could borrow one of the label's trucks. We'll need to hook up the trailer and tow it later, and with that attached, there's all sorts of extra liability issues …” Octavia sucks in a deep breath, but she doesn't look directly at me as I reach out and scoop the keys from her palm. “Anyway, I rented a minivan. It's not as … impressive as the truck”—we both pause and look across the sun warmed pavement at the ugly truck with painted flames—“but you can use it to do … whatever you were planning on doing.”

  We both smile a little at the disparaging of the poor hideous truck.

  “This is my official apology. I'm not very good with, well, this kind of stuff, so there you go.”

  Octavia turns like the conversation is over, as brisk and businesslike as usual.

  “Don't you want to talk to Pax and Ran?” I ask, but she just shakes her head, ponytail bobbing.

  “Do you?” she asks, looking back at me. I think I see her cheeks color slightly. “Weren't you dating one or both of them?”

  I smile.

  “I still am.”

  Octavia turns around at that and blinks several times, putting two fingers up to her temple.

  “Do I want to know?”

  “It's definitely a triple X rated story,” I say, clutching the keys tightly in my hand, “but if you want to hear about it sometime, I can give you the modified version.”

  “Well, tonight's my last night. Tomorrow, my colleague, Tamasin Perez, will meet us in Montréal and take over management duties there. Don't worry though—I already made arrangements for you to travel with the band. You shouldn't have any problems from here on out.”

  “Does the label know why you're leaving?” I ask and Octavia lifts her chin slightly, clearly a prideful women. Maybe that's where some of that aggression comes from? From fighting so hard to get to the top, to stay at the top, from dealing with sexism and bullshit. I just wish she hadn't used all of that anger and vitriol on me.

  “No. I just said we were having creative differences and that the boys would like a new manager. I have a friend in personnel who made the switch really easy for me. I don't know how you did it, but thank you for keeping Paxton from calling in a personal complaint. What I did to you … could've ended my career.”

  I tap my pink fingernails against the metal wall next to me.

  “Is it too late to change your mind?” I ask, praying like hell that I'm not going to regret this.

  My quest for forgiveness with Kevin got me into some serious trouble, but then again, the woman did rent me a minivan.

  “Paxton will never let me live this down,” she says, but her voice has this quiver, and I swear, before she turns her head away from me, I see the slightest shimmer of tears at the edges of her eyes.

  “Why don't you let me worry about Paxton?” I ask.

  Octavia pauses for a long
moment.

  “Do you want to come have coffee with me?” she asks, shocking the hell out of me.

  “Can I come, too?” Copeland asks, surprising me when he comes up behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders. I didn't even hear him come out of the hallway. “I'm dying for something besides whatever that canned shit is that Michael and Pax buy.”

  “Certainly,” Octavia says, taking a deep breath, clutching her clipboard and tablet to her chest. “I hope you don't mind if I drive.”

  She walks away with that haughty swagger that bothered the hell out of me when I first met her. But her hands, where they were wrapped around the clipboard, those were trembling.

  “She's so fucking lonely,” Cope says as soon as Octavia stands up to grab her coffee from the counter. “That's got to be it, why she acts the way she does.”

  He leans that magazine worthy face of his on the palm of his hand, one elbow propped on the table, his smile soft and affectionate as he glances over at me.

  “That's what I thought, too,” I whisper as I tuck my own mug close and gaze at the intricate coffee foam design in front of me. It's almost too pretty to drink. Somebody at the counter got creative and drew a flower with six petals. Wouldn't it be nice to think that fate was looking out for me from the surface of my coffee? After all she's put me through, the bitch basically owes me. “That, and I think she's had to fight tooth and nail to get where she is. I think she might've felt threatened by me? I'm not sure.”

  “Do you really think asking her to stay is a good idea?” he asks with a slight nonjudgmental shrug. “I mean, what she did to you was seriously fucked-up. Anyway, she's one of very few women in my life that I haven't liked straight off.”

  I smile at him. His insatiable need to be the white knight is funny to me. On the one hand, it's who he is, what he lives for. On the other, it's the thing he's most afraid of because to him, success and failure are synonymous with life and death. With Cara, maybe even with his mom, that actually proved to be true. I just need him to know that I'm different.

  “I think she's just one of those people you have to get to know first,” I say as Cope looks down at his own foam design, a fairly intricate skull and crossbones. Now I hope that one isn't a message from fate. “Do you think Paxton will freak when he finds out I asked her to stay?”

  I lift my gaze up, pan across the row of paintings on the wooden wall to our left. Apparently this is a café/art gallery. Cute idea. I guess I know why Copeland picked this place out.

  He picked it for me.

  I pick my coffee mug up and let my lips obliterate the foam design, drinking it slowly and savoring the deep rich notes of chocolate against the bitter background of freshly ground beans. It tastes a little bit like heaven, I won't lie. Only nowhere near as good as Pax's mouth after he'd swallowed Ransom's come.

  “I don't know. Maybe. But he likes you, so you might just be able to convince him to get over it.” Cope winks at me, running a hand over his auburn hair. The ring in his lower lip shines silver in the sunshine peeping through the window behind him. “If you really believe she deserves this second chance, I'll stand by you. Maybe now that she's given up her attachment to Pax, I'll get along with her better? She does always make fun of my books though. That could be the reason we never really clicked.”

  I grin at him, this crazy fluttering inside my chest that has nothing to do with the fact that we'll be leaving for New York City soon, that after the show tonight I'll be heading home.

  Home.

  To the place where Dad took his last breath, where his soul left the aching shell of his body for the last time, fled to greener pastures. I don't know what I believe in exactly, but if there's a heaven, he's there. If it's rebirth, then I hope he's a goddamn prince.

  Right now, in this second, all my butterflies are for Copeland Park.

  He's dressed in jeans—of course—with a loose black tank featuring some of Harper's art. This particular shirt has the convertible with the five guys in it, the sketch white instead of black this time. He's got those same black cord necklaces with the pewter charms on them, and white sweatbands with black sketched hearts.

  “The convertible …” I start and Cope cringes.

  “Paxton had just bought a brand-new Porsche Boxster,” he says, tapping at the side of his mug with one of those long fingers of his. “Chloe borrowed it that night to take Harper out.”

  He doesn't have to say anything else. I'm done asking questions about the art.

  Well, okay, maybe that's not true. I'm actually beyond curious to find out why the hell Paxton would want to use this stuff in his shows and as his album art when it represents one of the worst tragedies in his and Ransom's life.

  “Sorry,” Octavia says, sitting down beside us with her drink. It's completely drenched in chocolate sprinkles. Like, I can't even see the whipped cream through the deluge of brown bits. “They served me the wrong drink and I had to have it remade.” She sweeps her hand over the slicked back surface of her brunette hair, looking almost naked without her signature headset on.

  It's funny, seeing her sitting there complaining about her drink, and then witnessing the messy spray of chocolate sprinkles. I feel like I'm seeing a hidden side of Beauty in Lies' manager.

  “While you two were getting dressed, I made some calls. Frankly, it'd be a lot easier if I just stuck around and continued my duties. If things don't work out by the end of the tour then I could work side by side with Tamasin in Seattle for a few weeks to get her up to speed and ready to work on the new album.”

  “I like that,” I say, sliding my hand under the table and onto Cope's thigh. His jeans are holey as hell, so it's easy for me to dip my fingers into the denim and find his bare skin. He curls his hand around my wrist and gives me a comforting squeeze.

  God, he's so fucking easy to be with. I really do feel like we've been dating forever.

  “Like a trial period,” I add as Octavia watches us with a sharp as hell gaze, like a hawk or something. At the same time, I feel like she doesn't quite get what's going on between Cope and me, like maybe she's never been with someone who took her breath away with a single smile. “I'm sure Pax can get used to the idea.”

  Octavia looks down at her drink and then picks up the spoon from the side of her plate, grabbing a heaping pile of whipped cream and sprinkles and putting it to her lips.

  “I didn't know Paxton was gay,” she starts and I laugh; I can't help it. Her pale brown eyes flick up sharply.

  “He's not gay,” I promise as my body flushes and I suck my lower lip into my mouth for a second, teasing Copeland's bare thigh and making my charm bracelet jingle. On my opposite wrist, the fresh burn of my tattoo reminds me that I'm still here, that I'm still alive, and that I want to fucking feel it. “Him and Ran just … Well, how's the media handling the news?”

  “Oh, they love it,” she says, leaning back, taking another spoon of sprinkles with her. “They also liked seeing you onstage with Michael. You're all over the internet today.”

  “Thank god I haven't checked my phone then,” I say as Cope sips his drink and watches me. It's like he can't take his eyes off me. I like that, especially considering I can barely pull my gaze from him. This little tingle starts in my belly as I imagine living in Seattle, going out to coffee with him, having tea in the mornings with Muse, going to dinner with Michael. The one thing I am going to miss though is having us all together. “I wonder if my stepmother's seen it yet?”

  “Is that who you're going to see tonight?” Octavia asks, and it's like she's shot this arrow of ice into my heart without even meaning to.

  “Actually, no. I'm going to pick up my dad's ashes from my empty childhood home.” I hope I don't sound bitter when I say that. Although, to be honest, I am. I am a little fucking bitter that my stepmom cleared out several lifetime's worth of items without consulting me, dumped my shit in the living room, and then abandoned a sampling of my father's ashes like a punishment against my sexual sins.

&n
bsp; “I'm sorry to hear that,” Octavia says, and she sounds genuine about it, too.

  Cope scoots his chair a little closer to me, slipping his arm around my shoulders and giving me one of his famous hugs before I even realized that I needed it. I reach up a tentative finger and find a few stray tears sneaking down my cheeks.

  “Um,” I start, clearing my throat, my mind, trying to emotionally prepare myself for what I know has to happen. The final goodbye I never got to have. The last visit home. An ending to an entire chapter of my life. “Why did you want to have coffee with me?” I ask finally, trying to get to the root of this visit.

  “Because you said you wanted to be friends,” Octavia says, looking up like she's a little surprised at my question. Her genuine reaction is what seals it for me. She did and said some horrible things, but so did Pax to Ransom. And look at them now, right? Octavia seems like she has everything under control, but there's a weird, slightly awkward person hiding inside of her just like there is in all the rest of us.

  “I think that's a great reason,” I tell her, leaning into Cope, closing my eyes and breathing in the sweet scent of freshly brewed coffee and new denim, the bright scent of laundry detergent.

  “So,” he starts, taking over the conversation for me, giving me a moment to breathe, “I saw the schedule you emailed out last night for the next leg of the tour. What are the three days of personal time penciled in after the London show?”

  Oh. Shit. That's right.

  We're all going to meet the Blackwells together.

  If they're anything at all like their son, this should be interesting.

  With light traffic, the drive from Philadelphia to New York is just over two hours. Factoring in time to get to the venue, park the buses and trailers, and set up the generators, it's still barely noon.

  There's another package for me from Roger Monet—the crazy magic shop guy that I used to work for—that one of the roadies drops off at the bus door shortly after we park. He probably sent it a while ago, but all our mail for the last week was forwarded here to pick up today.