Never Leave a Rockstar (Never Trust Book 4)

by Sarah Darlington

  Why did that thought hurt my chest so much?

  Because it did. Like a two-ton elephant sitting on me.

  Shit. I could not fall for Ollie. I wouldn’t let myself. Now that he was better, I had to go back to focusing on Rhett or whatever else I could, as a means to not focus on Ollie.

  Only problem—I’d been thinking about Rhett less and less each day. Truthfully, I was tired of that chapter in my life. The same-old monotonous bullshit. I guess I’d been tired of it for a long time. It just took getting stuck on this island for me to see how much I wanted to move on to something different.

  I just didn’t want that something different to be an interest in Ollie. I wouldn’t do that to myself a second time. When I got off this island, I was going to quit Chancy’s Claw, have the surgery I’d been putting off, and maybe even go to community college. Do something else with my life. Anything else with my life.

  Ollie left the shed. And I didn’t follow him. Instead, I lay back on the bed of palm leaves. I closed my eyes. It had been too many days of restless nights, worrying about Ollie’s health. Now that I knew he was going to be okay, I was going to be okay.

  We’d eventually get off this island. I had faith in that. The dock and its new construction gave me hope. At some point, at some time, someone would come visit this island. Probably to purchase it. I only had to wait and survive until that day came. And in the meantime, I’d work on not letting Ollie into my heart. That was as important to my survival on this island as water.

  Sometime later, Ollie popped his head inside the shed. “You okay?” he asked me. He brushed a hand over the beard he had growing. The scruff looked damn good on him. Like with each passing day the island was turning him more attractive. Now, with a little color in his cheeks, and his brown eyes set on me, he might as well have been squeezing my heart with his bare hands.

  “I’m good. I’m just trying to rest.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Alright. I’m going to try to do some stuff.” His eyes drifted down, over my body.

  From my chest all the way to my cheeks, I felt heat creep over me. I hope Ollie didn’t notice. Because one look, and he’d made me blush. Kind of pathetic.

  “You have so many bug bites, Luce.” He sighed. “I hope they don’t scar.”

  Scars were the least of my worries. “Then I’ll just get more tattoos. You can pay for them since it is your fault we got stuck here in the first place.” I already had a big tattoo designed and planned for the post-double mastectomy scars I knew were coming. A few bug bite scars seemed small in comparison.

  A smile moved over his lips. He hadn’t smiled much in days. “Deal. You know, the tattoo on your neck was the first thing I noticed about you. But the one on your hip...” He moved his hand to his lips, and he bit down on his knuckle. “Damn. I try not to look at the one on your hip. Get some rest. I’ll figure out dinner.”

  He stepped away, out of view, leaving me with several questions swirling in my head. Dinner? More island grapes, I assumed. I’d been living off those and coconut meat. The tattoo on my hip? He noticed that? It was kind of hard not to, though. It was my biggest.

  I tried to rest after that. I lay still for maybe another hour, listening to him move around the area outside the shed. But then I smelled something that made me jump straight out of bed.

  Smoke. Fire!

  Holy shit.

  I jumped out of bed, out of the shed. Ollie had done lots in the time I’d been trying to rest. He’d cleared the area around the shed, made a pile of the man-made objects I’d found on the island, and he’d dug a small pit a few yards away. Actually, his pit in the sand had two holes that looked connected under the sand. In one of the holes he’d started a fire.

  “You’re amazing,” I said, dropping down in the sand beside the hole with the fire.

  “Don’t talk just yet.” He was slowly blowing on the fire, helping it grow. “I only half know what I’m doing. Hopefully I can keep this going.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Yeah, see this.” From his shorts pocket, he pulled out a shell. “It’s a snail. They’re all over the rocks that are a little further down the beach. Can you go collect as many as you can? We’re eating them for dinner.”

  I reached out and touched his arm. “I hope those aren’t poisonous.”

  “Me fucking too. But I doubt they’re poisonous. I need to eat. You need to eat. We have to take a chance. We need more than grapes.”

  I stood up, ready to run for the beach and the snails.

  “Luce,” he said before I went. “Thanks again for saving my life. I really owe you. Hopefully this dinner will be a start. I’m sorry about the girls on my boat. I shouldn’t have had them there when I knew you were coming. I actually had them there because I knew you were coming. But that’s beside the point.” He shook his head. The whole honesty thing on him really did a number on my resolve not to let him into my heart.

  “What do you mean you had them there because you knew I was coming?”

  Because I’d flown on the plane ticket he’d purchased for me, and I’d taken the taxi he had waiting for me at the Nassau airport. The driver had driven me straight to his mini yacht. I walked onto that boat expecting only Ollie. Unsure if the invitation he’d extended me was a ‘friend thing.’ Or if more might come from a weekend alone with him. I still didn’t know what would have happened had we been alone when I first saw him.

  But I’d walked in on him close to almost fucking the two girls who ended up kidnapping us. So yeah, that was a big part of why I didn’t want to ever trust Ollie. But at the same time, the whole thing had felt strange, almost staged.

  “I invited those girls, knowing you were coming, because...” He stood up, ignoring his fire. “Because...” He sighed. “Because the way I feel about you frightens me. It still frightens me. I was putting up a wall, I think, inviting them over. Trying to be my normal jackass self and push you away in the last minute I had before you arrived.”

  “You said you forgot I was coming.”

  “I lied. I knew when your flight got in. It was a coward move. And I think you deserved the truth about it.” He sighed and sat back down. “That’s not important, though. The snails are important. Could you go get them now? Before I fuck up this fire.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  I stepped backward, doing as he asked, running down toward the ocean. But all the while my heart was screaming at me. It wasn’t just my tattoo on my hip he liked about me. The friendship that we’d formed before this whole predicament started meant more than I’d given credit to it.

  A hell of a lot more.

  ~ CHAPTER 13 ~

  OLIVER

  Luce came back with the snails. She’d gathered a ton of them in an empty coconut husk. We had to cook them in something. So we spread them out in a few objects. Some in water in a big clamshell I’d found on the beach earlier. Some in an old tin can. And the rest just on top of the coals facing up.

  After we cooked them for what felt like forever—because I wanted to make sure we completely cooked out any parasites—we used Luce’s earrings like toothpicks to get the meat out of the shells.

  I sat back with my portion of the tiny snails. She sat back with hers.

  “The fire’s keeping the bugs away,” she muttered as she took her first bite. “Which is amazing. And these aren’t bad, actually.”

  I took a bite. After eating nothing in days, the snails tasted damn delicious to me. We ate in silence until they were gone. Which felt like a matter of seconds.

  I lay back in the soft sand, my hands behind my head, staring up at the pink sky. The sun was sinking fast, otherwise I would have worked at making a second snail batch. I watched the embers floating up into the air with my heart pounding for absolutely no reason at all. Well, there was a reason. The reason was sitting on the opposite side of the fire from me.

  “If I can keep the fire going all night, then tomorrow we should spend the whole day catching things and cooking them
. I’m still starving.”

  “Good plan. I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  I smiled. “Me either.”

  For a small moment, I loved being on this island. Between the sun setting, the soft breeze, and the gentle sound of the ocean—it was paradise. The company—even better. This was a million times more therapeutic than therapy had been. I mean, I still wanted sex with Luce more than anything. The idea of being inside her was all I could think about, nine minutes out of ten. But could wanting her sexually be only part of my addiction? It didn’t feel that way. I wanted more than just once this time.

  “I think I have a problem with my lifestyle,” I decided. Maybe that was it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s lonely. Different cities all the time. Sex with strangers all the time. Did you know I have someone who manages my Instagram? Just my Instagram. He follows me around, takes pictures of me when we’re on tour. He chooses the pictures that best fit my image and he uploads them. He even writes the captions. Everything about the way the world sees me is orchestrated.”

  “Interesting.”

  I sighed. “When we aren’t on tour, I send him pictures and he still manages it. People expect a certain image from me, through online pictures, and he gives that to people. So he’s probably been posting for me like everything’s normal.”

  Luce chucked. Her smile touched those pretty blue eyes of hers. “Well, that won’t help us off the island.”

  I smiled with her, staring at her from across the sand and the edge of the fire. “Nope. It certainly won’t.”

  “So who’s the real Ollie Mills then?”

  I shrugged because I wasn’t exactly sure. I sat up, my back was covered in sand now. I awkwardly started working at brushing it off, trying to bend my arm in a way it wouldn’t go.

  Luce stood and moved around the fire. She sat next to me, very close to me. And she helped me. She brushed the sand off my bare back. Her touch was gentle, slow and deliberate, moving across every inch of my wide frame. She lingered at my shoulders—by this point the sand was gone. Her movements were kind, caring, a little unexpected. My heart pounded so hard; it was practically shaking my body.

  She pulled back, and her eyes met mine. “I’m lonely, too. I have my family. I have my friends at work and my friends in town. I’m always busy, but I’m lonely too. All my life I’ve fit into a certain box, been the girl I’m supposed to be. I think that’s why I love my tattoos so much. They’re a single step outside that box. You’re outside that box.”

  Was I?

  Her eyes were so blue, so intense. They screamed with a hidden pain behind them. I couldn’t help myself. I only wanted to ease her pain, my own, and satisfy the pull between us that had never been greater.

  I cupped her face, and I kissed her.

  A tender kiss.

  This wasn’t about taking. It was about showing her exactly how much I liked her. But her lips were hard and closed, very hesitant. She didn’t want this. She didn’t lean in to me. She didn’t do anything that indicated she was enjoying this.

  So I pulled back, breaking apart inside, angry with myself for misreading that so poorly, for trying to take something from her she wasn’t ready to give. I guess I’d misinterpreted that completely.

  She breathed in sharp. Then, before I could catch my own breath, she practically lunged at me. Her hands went to my face, yanking me closer. I tasted her then. Her mouth opened to mine the second we came together.

  God, she felt amazing. The most powerful rush ran straight through my body. The first hit of a drug I’d never experienced before. It was fucking incredible. She tasted like fucking hope.

  She moved closer into my lap, straddling me, pressing her body as close to mine as it could get. The kiss turned greedy fast. Kissing Luce was everything I expected it to be—a hot explosion. Until it wasn’t. Until she quickly moved off me, standing so many yards away.

  I just sat there—turned on and confused, wanting desperately to have that drug again. “Not good?” I asked.

  She made a little noise, half a laugh, half a squeak. It told me that it was, indeed, very good for her.

  “Shit,” I whispered, breathing, running my hands over my face. “Um.” I scrunched my eyebrows. “Shit.” I couldn’t get my racing heart under control. I couldn’t even out my feelings. She wanted me, but she wasn’t on top of me? What did that mean?

  “I’m going to go get the water glass,” she said, so calm like nothing had just happened. “We should drink the rest of whatever collected today. And then I’m going to bed.”

  What? Bed, now? I couldn’t tell if that was an invitation. It didn’t feel like one. I followed because I wanted to see exactly how she had the bucket set up for collecting water.

  It was genius, really. The moment I saw it I remember learning how to do it in Boy Scouts all those years ago.

  The big bucket she must have found had saltwater in the bottom. In the middle sat the one glass we had. Over the top was some kind of plastic material—like part of a tarp. She’d secured the tarp and placed a rock in the middle above where the glass was. Condensation formed on the inside and dripped down into the cup.

  The glass was nearly full.

  We shared the water, taking turns taking sips. The tension between us was thick enough to choke on. Afterwards, according to her it was bedtime. I gave the fire a little more wood to keep it going for the next few hours. I’d have to wake up and add more at some point. Then I went inside the shed. It was actually kind of cozy. It smelled like cedar, and the entire floor was covered in palm leaves. I patted around on the ground, making sure no snakes or critters had decided to make this their home, too. Tomorrow I’d have to remember to do this earlier in the evening, so I could see better.

  Nothing had made our home their home, and so I waited for Luce. She’d gone off, I assumed to use the bathroom, but it took her a long while to return. I’d almost decided to go off and find her, when she came inside the shed. She crawled in the open space and lay down beside me. She kept a couple inches of space between us.

  I didn’t dare cross the imaginary line. She’d have to if she wanted to. But the way she broke away from me earlier felt like a no.

  “It’s so hot.” She stood up suddenly, opening the shed door wide. It wasn’t that hot. I’d been comfortable. It wasn’t any cooler outside the shed. “If I leave the door open, the bugs can get in. If I leave it closed, then it gets hot.”

  Then she plopped down next to me, nearly on me, groaning in frustration. Her breath came in sharp inhales and exhales.

  I felt her move to sit up, possibly to mess with the door again. I moved too and caught her hand. I pulled her back to sit with me. “Just leave it. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Ollie—”

  “Just try to relax with me.”

  She sat with me. For several long minutes we sat, my heart racing, my palms sweating.

  Eventually, I lay back down. It was late now. We both needed sleep. Finally, she lay with me. This time, her body curled into mine.

  “See—not so hard,” I muttered.

  She made a noise in her throat, burying her face against my skin. I felt her hot breath on me, and it sent heat pumping like mad through my veins.

  I wanted to touch her, enjoy her, connect with her. But Luce wasn’t just some quick fuck. I was in this for more than that. So even though she had her perfect little tits pressed against me, even though I was so hard it was painful, even though I think she wanted me—I didn’t touch her.

  I only held her.

  ~ CHAPTER 14 ~

  LUCE

  All night I slept snuggled against Ollie’s side. I freaking cuddled with Ollie Mills. Of all people, Ollie Mills. His body was warm and smelled like sunshine. Even when my arm fell asleep from being on my side on the hard floor, I still didn’t roll away from him.

  I didn’t even like to cuddle. I wasn’t that type of person. I preferred my sleep and my circulation over so much physical co
ntact. But I’d made this exception, and somehow enjoyed it, with Ollie.

  I woke up with the first sound of the birds. They liked to start squawking even before the sun rose. I inched away, left our shed, and went down by the ocean. I stood with my toes in the cool sand, watching the sun come up.

  That kiss with Ollie—damn, I could still feel him on my lips. It took my breath away. It made me want to let all control go and be physical with him. My body screamed for it. But every bit of good sense inside told me that it was a stupid road to go down. That he might give me a few fantastic orgasms, but not much more than that.

  “There you are.” I heard Ollie’s voice behind me, hoarse from sleep. My body immediately went on high alert. “You okay?”

  “Yep.” I kept my eyes on the ocean. “Just watching the sun come up.”

  “You want me to leave you alone?”

  “No.” That was the problem—I didn’t.

  He stepped closer. I felt his nearness. He put his arms around my shoulders, swallowing me in a hug from behind. I pinched my eyes shut, touching his forearms. God, he felt good. By now, I was so familiar with his scent that it had become its own sort of drug. The nerves all over my body were buzzing knowing he was there.

  “Ollie,” I muttered. I suddenly felt shaky. Because I’d just made up my mind. I wanted to be with him, right here right now on this beach. I knew this decision had consequences, but the desire I felt was stronger. I’d face the repercussions later.

  He made a noise, squeezing me a little closer. “Yeah?”

  “Could we suspend reality while we’re stuck on this island? I mean, it almost feels like time has slowed and stopped anyway. Do you feel that at all?”

  “I guess. I was trying to figure out this morning if it was Wednesday or Thursday. And I couldn’t remember.”

  “Thursday.”