RUTHLESS: The Complete Rockstar Romance Series Boxed Set
Page 45
"Me too," I said. "Me too."
Chapter 24
Scarlett
There was something about waking from a migraine that always made me feel brand new. Like a cool breeze was blowing through my body from the inside out.
I opened my eyes, marveling at how easy it was. The light did not pierce my eyeball like it had before. In fact, the room was dim and oddly green tinted. The silence was nearly deafening--the absence of ventilation systems and buzzing light fixtures and groaning pipes. The symphony of hotel rooms everywhere was silenced.
I rolled over to my side. I was lying in the center of a king-sized bed, the first bed I had slept in in three nights. My head was clear, my migraine gone. Stretching out for the sheer joy of having enough room was the best feeling in the world.
"There she is."
His voice came out of the darkness, and the cool relief I was feeling slid into warm anticipation. "Were you watching me sleep?" I wondered, smiling at his shadowy form in the corner.
He stood up and came over to me. "At the risk of sounding like a complete creep, yeah," he explained. "They've got us on lockdown, waiting for the evacuation order. You were...kind of out of it. So I stayed."
The rush of affection was so strong that I had to move and sit up, lest I throw my arms around him and kiss him until we both were breathless. "Whoa," he chastised me, "slow down. How's your head?"
"I'm all better," I said. "It wasn't that bad."
"Bullshit. I saw how much you were hurting. Don't minimize it, Scar." He stood up. "You need more water and another Tylenol," he declared, walking over to his bag.
I laid back down. It was an odd feeling, allowing him to care for me like this. I felt helpless, but more than that, I felt...undeserving. Every instinct I had cried out to tell him to stop, that I was fine, that he needn't go to the trouble. That was how I was wired, but there was also no denying how nice it felt. To let him take care of me.
He was the only one who ever had.
"Here." He extended the pills in his open palm. The warmth of his skin...I wanted him to close his fingers around my wrist and pull me closer. He was a dim shadow, but that made his nearness so much easier, so much more...welcome.
"Can you walk?"
"Yeah."
"Come with me. I want to see something." He closed his fingers around my wrist. Just like I wanted.
The hallway outside of the room was pitch black but for the eerie glow of the exit signs. "They cut the power," Keir explained. "I don't think the elevators are working. Can you make it up the stairs?"
As long as he held my hand, I could make it anywhere. "Yeah," I said.
"Hold on tight."
"Okay," I smiled.
He led us up two floors. "I think it's over here. Right, here we go. We've stayed here before; I remember this view."
"Are we allowed up here?" I asked breathlessly.
He shot a grin over his shoulder as he pushed the conference room door wide open. "No, probably not. But who's stopping us?"
I looked over my shoulder, certain that at any moment, some nameless authority figure would appear around the corner and catch us. "I don't see anyone," I said warily. "But they probably have cameras, motion sensors..."
"Everyone is busy hunkering down before the hurricane, Scar." He grinned widely and held out his hand. "Everyone just assumes we have more sense than this."
"Do we?" I asked as he closed his hand around mine. It was warm, strong, dry.
He looked down to where we were connected. "No." He shook his head. "Does that bother you?"
I couldn't help it, I licked my lips. Each atom in my hand, my skin, seemed to reach out towards his, wanting to cross the nanometer of space that separated us.
Keir nodded at my unspoken agreement. "That's my girl," he said.
My girl.
Was I his girl? Had I always been his girl?
The conference room was dark, just like the stairwell, but strange, greenish light seeped in through the barricaded windows. It was enough to light our way past the folding chairs and tables.
"Here's a good spot," Keir called. I saw the shadow of his arm, then felt him pull me closer. I inhaled sharply as he pulled me down to where he crouched. Only his face was lit by the light that seeped in through the crack in the shutters, but it was enough for me to see that his eyes glowed with wild, gleeful light. "This is why," he said, watching the storm intently.
"Why what?"
"Why I insist on taking a bus." He drummed his hands against his thighs. "We could totally take a plane now, do a hub tour, just fly out from the hotel to our show and fly back." He shook his head like a metronome. "But then you don't get to see shit like this. You stay in one place, only seeing the inside of a fucking hotel room, and never get out to see where you are. You could be anywhere and nowhere at once. Everything is beige and hygienic and you miss out on this." He gestured, taking in the storm, the coast, the dark of the conference room...and me. "The wild, different parts of the world. This is such a goddamned big country, and I finally have an excuse to see it all."
As he spoke, I was acutely aware of how close I was to his body, how simple it would be to just turn my lips towards his cheek, brush them against his stubble. It didn't even have to be deliberate; I could swear up and down that it wasn't.
But it definitely would be. That night, after his show, I had been drunk, wild, with rock music pulsing through my veins. Now, I was stone cold sober and hollowed out by a migraine. Right now, even breathing felt like a conscious choice.
Kissing him would be no accident.
I realized in that second that he had trailed off from talking, but I could not have told you when he actually stopped.
He was looking at me.
"You know," he said. His voice was lower. I felt myself stretch closer, not wanting to miss a single word. "We've been on that bus for two weeks now, but this is the first time we've been alone."
Why was I biting my lip?
"Not true." I couldn't stop staring at his lower lip. It wobbled slightly, like he was ready to smile. Or laugh. "There was this morning." I was so close to him now that I couldn't see his entire face in one glance. I could only catch it in snatches, the angle of his jaw, the flick of his tongue.
"This morning you were essentially comatose. Doesn't count."
"It doesn't?"
"No. I like you upright, Scarlett Sawyer." His lip trembled again, and this time I knew he was about to laugh.
"Do you now?" I teased.
"Well..." His voice was even lower now, full of dangerous promise. I knew exactly what I was doing when I agreed to come up here with him. There was no pretending anymore. There was no pretending I didn't need this more than I needed light and air. There was no stopping what was about to happen.
And I didn't want to stop.
"Maybe I should rethink that statement," he murmured.
His lips were there, right there, just a tilt of my head and...
I startled like I had been touched with electricity, the searing jolt traveling down my spine and curling like a fiery serpent around my core. I felt my stomach drop away as tendrils of fire sizzled among my skin. He was kissing me. My God, how he was kissing me. My whole body broke out into a simultaneous hallelujah chorus because Keir Wilder was finally kissing me the way he always should.
Five years. Five fucking wasted years.
I heard a sound, high and keening, and realized it was coming from some deep place within me. Keir made a sound of his own, the sound of someone barely holding it together.
Then he was moving--over me, his arms around me, his knee prized between my legs, nudging them apart as he laid me back onto the conference room floor. Shafts of green light pierced the gloom, tiger striping his torso as he tore his T-shirt over his head and flung it somewhere into the dark.
"I can't, I'm not... Fuck..." He trailed off into a series of guttural curses as his fingers delved under my shirt, marking places that had been claimed as his so
long ago. I felt my back arch upward, wanting his hands everywhere, needing, needing so badly.
When his lips crashed into mine again, I sighed and screamed at the same time. If it were possible to have an orgasm just from sheer relief, I would be having multiples of the most earth shattering, mind melting kind.
"Slow down, Scar," he said. His voice was a gruff order, and I couldn't help but yelp in dismay.
"I don't want to be slow," I whined. "I don't want, I need..."
"Did you think I took you up here just for a quick two-pump high school fuck?" His tone was teasing,but his eyes were not. "Five years I've waited to have you again. I still remember every single part of that night. You know that, right, Scarlett? I fucking memorized you. Your body is my goddamned Bible. And I mean for this to be a fucking religious experience."
I started to say something, or tried to, but my words were lost in a long guttural moan as his fingers moved down below the waistband of my jeans. "You're so ready," he said, and I could hear but not see the smile on his face. "Have you been wet and ready for me this entire tour?"
"I can't... When you do that," I moaned as his thumb found my clit. One thing I could say about waiting so long--Keir had definitely learned a trick or two the past five years.
"Because I'm not too proud to say that I've had a raging hard-on this entire time. Put your hand right there, you feel it? You've got me like a fucking diamond."
He wasn't lying. The length of him, pressed tight inside of his jeans, was impossibly hard, and frighteningly familiar. I knew what it would feel like. Just as I knew how his breath would sound if I took it into my mouth. I knew exactly how his cock would feel, sliding it across my lips, circling my tongue around the head. I licked my lips, already tasting him as I closed my fingers around his length.
He groaned and swatted my hand away impatiently. "What the fuck did I just say about making this last, woman?" he growled. The light caught the smirk on his face, and I laughed, then let out a small moan as his thick finger slipped inside of me.
"Are you laughing at me?" he teased. I heard the stitches popping in my seams as he yanked my jeans down over my hips. "Keep laughing, I want to see how long you can keep it up."
I laughed again as he tickled my ribs then moaned again when his tongue found my center. "You're a goddamned sadist," I gasped,then rolled side to side, laughing hysterically as he tickled me some more.
"I've got to get my revenge somehow," he murmured into my clit.
Any regret I would have felt when he said that dissolved away when his tongue found me. The wind hit the side of the hotel like a freight train, but I was caught up in a hurricane of my own. Arching my hips to meet his tongue, I tried to hold back my screams, but he only moved faster.
He was right, he knew my body like his Bible, and he turned the pages with expert fervor, wrenching me headlong into screaming mindlessness after seemingly seconds. From somewhere outside of myself, I heard his cries--delighted growls and gasps that were becoming more and more animalistic the harder and faster I came. I closed my hands around his forearms, desperate to keep from falling, positive that I could start flying away at any moment. Keir grumbled something unintelligible--cry, a grunt, a curse--and suddenly I heard the jingle of his belt buckle.
I reacted just like Pavlov's dog at the dinner bell. Shooting upward, I aimed to take him into my mouth, but instead, he covered my lips with his. I could taste myself in his stubble, glistening on his lips. His fingers were still moving down there, slow and fast, slick and slippery.
Chapter 25
Keir
I'd be lying if I told you I didn't plan this. Luring Scarlett off to someplace where we could be alone? Fuck, that shit was practically part of my DNA at this point. Pure fucking instinct.
But once I had her? That still was a fucking surprise. I wasn't lying when I told her this was a religious experience for me. Taking off her T-shirt was like Christmas morning wrapped up in some kind of sacramental celebration. Seeing her body--smooth, strong, shapely--stretched out below me? Yeah, I planned this, but even I couldn't have imagined how good it would be.
When she came under my tongue, fucking angels started singing in my ears, and when she dove for my cock, as eager to have me as I was to have her? Well, let's just say I didn't give a shit about the hurricane that bore down on us. I could fucking die right now and have absolutely no regrets.
"I need..." Fuck, there was barely enough blood flow to my brain to be able to complete that sentence. "I need to be inside you now."
I had a condom, somewhere; yes, I planned this after all. But in my eager haste, I nearly tore the thing to shreds. The mesmerizing sight of Scarlett's breasts heaving up and down, the rosy flush that danced across them,visible even in the low light...fuck, I felt like a virgin all over again.
I also wasn't lying when I said I remembered every single part of her body. So slipping inside of her, hearing her soft, satisfied cry as I sank into her, up to the hilt... That shouldn't have been such a fucking revelation. But five years is a long time, and as I started to move, I realized that the girl--no, the woman--below me, the one who wrapped her legs around my waist and urged me higher, deeper, faster, she wasn't the same girl I had fallen in love with.
She was better.
I was better.
This was better.
Too soon,I could feel it, the white heat gathering at the base of my spine. I tried to hold it back, tried to have more, give her more, give her everything. I didn't want it to end, never wanted it to end. I wanted to hear her cries, feel her clutch against me, gripping me from the inside out, calling my name--a song, a moan, a cry that shattered and broke--and suddenly,we were both falling, falling. I felt like I'd always be falling, but when I reached out my hand, Scarlett, fucking Scarlett, was the one that was holding me.
I'd never been much of a crier, but this--this was enough to bring a sting to my eyes.
Chapter 26
Scarlett
For once in my life, the thoughts stopped. For one beautiful, blessed breath, I was free. Free of watching myself, of checking myself, worrying over how I was being perceived. Because I knew exactly what I was right now.
I was loved.
He didn't say it. He didn't have to. It was in the way his eyes glistened a little. The way he blinked twice and then darted a glance to the right, overwhelmed.
I was there. I felt it too. The words bubbled on my lips, waiting to be said, shouted, screamed. I love you, holy shit, I love you, and now I finally get it. I fucking get it now, Keir. And I don't want to let go of you. I want to be like this forever. I want to do what we just did, over and over and over.
Emotions welled up, and I was afraid the tears would start falling, but instead, I started laughing. Laughing with sheer, irrepressible glee.
"Keir Bear."
"Huh?"
"Babe, I can't breathe."
He glowered down at me. "Are you seriously laughing right now?"
The wind buffeted the building, sending a swaying shaft of light moving from his chin to his eyes, and I could see that he was just as delighted as I was. "Sorry, I'm sorry. It's just... I'm remembering something a friend of mine said. About sex."
He pulled a face.
"No, it's relevant, I promise. She was making fun of me because I had never had sex 'just for fun' before." I grinned. "But that? That was pretty fun."
He slid back. "What do you mean you'd never had sex for fun? I feel a bit wounded here."
I sat up, closing my arms across my breasts. "Back then, it was wonderful. But...it wasn't fun."
"I don't understand."
"Think about it. We were teenagers, Keir. You were practically the first boy I ever saw, much less cared for, much less fell in love with. I had nothing in my head but fairytale notions of love forever and I was too damn immature to realize that wasn't what we needed."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah." Suddenly it seemed so clear, so imperative that he understood. A revelation t
hat hit me like a ton of bricks. We needed a do-over. Put the past where it belonged, behind us. "What we needed to do was have fun."
"Fun?"
"You know...fun? You've heard of it, right?" I teased him, bopping him lightly on the nose. He growled and nipped at my finger. "Don't you want to just have fun with me? Don't you know how to have fun?"
"You think I can't be fun, huh?" The way his eyes were so dark made my heart bang around in my chest. "I can have fun with you, Scarlett."
"Good." I grinned. "Show me. And I'll show you. Let's be teenagers again, but the right way this time. Without all the seriousness and the sadness. I want to play with you. I want to date you. I want this, us together again, but I want us to be...fun. I grinned up at him. "You're a Wilder, right? I want to be wilder too." I knelt up, pressing his hands to my breasts. He whistled sharply through his teeth, then took the taut peak of my nipple into his mouth. I groaned through my smile, arching my back to him and closing my fist around his hardening length. "Let's just be wild!"
*****
We came downstairs to find the bar overrun with drunken celebration.
"It's a miracle!" Twitch crowed, leaping up onto the table and pointing two fingers at us.
"What the hell is going on?" Keir demanded. His hair still stuck up in tufts where I'd had it in my fists as he drove into me the second time, but everyone around us seemed too drunk to notice our goofy grins and my bowlegged walk.
"Storm switched paths!" Twitch announced with so much pride it sounded like he did it himself. "Somebody somewhere wanted the show to go on."
"The power of prayer!" Balzac grunted.
Keir brought his lips to my ear. "See? Hellfire and damnation didn't rain down on us. We're free to fuck like that as much as we'd like."
I rolled my eyes. "You're terrible," I whispered.
"Funny, you weren't saying that a minute ago. Come on, walk a little straighter. Everyone will know."
I socked him in the arm, laughing louder than I think I'd ever heard myself laugh before. And it suddenly struck me once again how much I liked him.