by Nalini Singh
Barefoot and shirtless, he was just yummy.
And as she now knew, the man wasn’t all talk. Holy hell, he was definitely no gentleman in bed. There, he was pure, raw sex… and a sweet tenderness that made her feel cherished even while they were doing the most carnal things. A silent sigh escaping her, she visually traced the lines of text running vertically down the back of his left shoulder.
It was the first time she’d had a real look at his tats. Unlike the other guys, he never took off his T-shirt onstage and had never agreed to do a magazine profile where he was shirtless. He’d been photographed shirtless while on the beach, of course, but like most paparazzi pictures, those images didn’t have the level of intricate detail that would showcase his ink.
At first, she’d figured his choice was smart brand management; as the man crowned the Gentleman of Rock, he had a unique place in the market. He was the first rocker Thea had had as a client who’d been offered endorsement deals by luxury watch companies and designers who specialized in top-of-the-line shirts and suits.
He rarely accepted those offers, though the one campaign he’d done had been through-the-roof successful. Everyone wanted to undress the sexy rock star who wore button-down shirts and turned up to events in finely tailored suits. The idea of what lay underneath drove women nuts.
Now that Thea had seen, felt, what was underneath, she wanted to tell those women to eat their hearts out. The man was certifiably hot. He was also shy on a deeper level than even she had initially understood. His clothing choices had nothing to do with brand management—that was a happy accident—David just wasn’t comfortable being half-naked in public.
It was adorable and sexy at the same time.
Thea was quite happy to keep this view her own private visual feast.
“Do you all have that tat, the lines from your first hit song? I’ve seen Fox’s and Noah’s in photo layouts.”
“Abe’s is on his lower back,” David told her. “Same side as mine.” When he turned toward her, she saw the other vertical lines she’d noticed in bed—when he’d so magnificently thrust into her.
Placed on the lower right of his abs, it was music, a beat she couldn’t quite figure out. Not yet anyway. He also had a small anchor inked on his left bicep. That one she knew about—it was in honor of his grandfather, who’d been a seaman all his life and had died in a fishing accident when David was eight.
The final tattoo was a tribal design that circled his upper left thigh. It was covered by his jeans now, but she remembered the bold lines and curves of it. “Where did you get the thigh tattoo done?”
“New Zealand.” His eyes met hers, more brown than gold in this light. “I had to do something to stop obsessing about when you’d reply to my memos.”
There went those butterflies again. “I almost pulled out my mother’s prized hybrids instead of weeds, I was so distracted by your memos.”
That made his smile deepen. Turning back to the stove, he stirred the sauce. Thea gave in to her need and, jumping off the counter, went and kissed his shoulder. “That sauce smells divine.” The guys ribbed David about his skills in the kitchen, but they all pulled up a chair at the table anytime he was cooking.
“My dad taught me this recipe,” he said. “I used to make it to help him and my mom out when I could see work had exhausted them. Had to stand on a chair to reach the supplies, I was so fucking short.”
His words were amused, but they made her heart twist. “You’re a good man, David,” she whispered. “A good son.”
A touch of color on his cheeks, he shrugged. “They sacrificed a lot to make sure I grew up right, had every chance. I promised myself that when I was a man, I’d make sure they never had to work that hard again.”
With every word he spoke, he proved himself the man she’d always believed him to be, a man of honor and loyalty. The only thing she didn’t know was if that extended to his woman. Thea wanted to trust him, but she’d known too many good men who treated their women differently. But she wanted to believe. So much.
Seated in David’s car the next day, Thea felt deliciously used. David not only had serious moves, he had serious stamina. The man had kept her up most of the night, made her scream and beg before he fucked her so hard she could still feel his cock inside her. The tactile memory made muscles low in her body twinge, as, toes curling, she took in his dark blue shirt and black pants.
“I just want to unbutton you,” she said. “And unzip you so I can suck on you.” She hadn’t gotten around to feasting on him because David kept distracting her with the sinful things he was doing to her body. The way he touched her, the way he looked at her—she’d never felt so beautiful, so desirable, so heartbreakingly cherished.
“We are not turning around,” he said on a groan. “My parents are expecting us for lunch.”
Passion doused and stomach in knots, the butterflies sulking, she slumped back in her seat and fussed with the red and gold silk scarf she’d paired with jeans and a simple but pretty white top over which she’d thrown her jacket. “Next time, don’t give me a love bite if we’re planning to see your folks,” she muttered in an effort to fight her nerves. “Or mine.”
“I like nibbling on you.” He squeezed her thigh. “Hey, it’ll be fun.”
She put her hand over his. “It’s the guilt,” she said. “I’m not used to lying to my parents—and I don’t want to start out by lying to yours.” Yet all the reasons why she didn’t want to drag either family into this fledgling relationship remained.
“We won’t lie,” David said. “My folks will make up their own minds about who you are to me.” His eyes locked with hers. “I think it’s pretty damn obvious.”
“Light’s green,” she said huskily, fighting the urge to crawl into his lap and kiss him.
As it was, she squeezed his hand to bruising tightness as they walked down the hallway to his parents’ large apartment. “What if they don’t like me?” she suddenly blurted out.
“They already love you.” He squeezed her hand back. “Why are you so nervous?”
Because you matter. More than any man has ever mattered. Part of Thea kept waiting for something to go horribly wrong. “We’re here,” she said and knocked on the door before she chickened out.
It was pulled open a few seconds later by Mrs. Rivera. Dark-eyed and dark-haired and as petite as Thea’s own mom, the older woman took one look at them and, crying out in open glee, hugged Thea, then kissed David on both cheeks. “At last you bring home a girl!” she said, her hands on either side of his face as he bent toward her. “And you bring home my favorite girl of all!”
David laughed. “Thea was nervous you wouldn’t like her.”
“David!” Thea elbowed him.
Beaming, Mrs. Rivera released his face and took Thea’s hand. “Come inside.” The vibrant yellow of her dress swirled around her knees. “His pa’s just taking the rolls out of the oven. Vicente!”
Mr. Rivera came out of the kitchen, a big, solid man with salt-and-pepper hair and David’s eyes. “There you are,” he said, as if Thea had just popped out for a minute.
She was engulfed in his embrace an instant later, his scent holding echoes of cinnamon and other spices, the way he held her so reminiscent of her father’s hugs that her remaining nerves faded. “Thanks for having me to lunch,” she said to them both afterward.
“Pfft.” Mrs. Rivera flicked a dish towel at her, having had it hanging over her shoulder. “Come into the kitchen with me. We’ll leave David and Vicente to talk.”
Walking into the spacious room painted in warm cream tones with accents of deep, autumnal orange, Thea said, “What can I do to help?”
“Nothing. Just stay here and talk to me.” Mrs. Rivera stirred something on the stove. “David’s favorite chili.” Her eyes twinkled. “So, you finally took notice of my boy.”
Skin flushing, Thea leaned back against the counter, hands braced on it. “I always noticed him,” she admitted. “I just… wasn’t in the righ
t place to do anything about it.”
“Ah, the other one, hmm?” Alicia Rivera shook her head and went over to toss a bowl of salad sitting farther down the counter that held the tempered black glass of the built-in stovetop. “I had one like him before David’s father. I still haven’t forgiven Vicente for not finding me first, but he says I had to go through the other one so I’d appreciate him.”
Thea felt her lips curve. “David is wonderful.” Then, because Mrs. Rivera reminded her so much of her own mom, said, “For us, it’ll be about surviving the world around us.”
The other woman’s expression grew solemn. “Yes. Always people poking and prodding and prying.” Switching off the stove, she walked over to Thea and took her face in her hands, her palms warm and soft. “This is good, what I see in your eyes when you look at David, what I see in his when he looks at you. Fight for it.”
Throat thick, Thea nodded. “I will.” With every breath she had.
Mrs. Rivera drew her down to press a kiss to her forehead. “Come on, Thea. Let’s get this food out.”
Conversation flowed so comfortably throughout the simple, delicious lunch that Thea stopped watching her tongue, stopped thinking about the right things to say, and just said what came naturally.
“You know this boy?” Vicente Rivera pointed at David with part of a bread roll. “You know what he did when he was eighteen?”
“Dad.” David groaned. “Thea doesn’t need to know about that.”
“Yes. Yes, I do,” Thea said, laughing at David’s quelling look.
“Here, Thea.” Mrs. Rivera put more chili in her bowl. “Eat it. It’s good for you.”
Smiling, Thea accepted the maternal order. “Thank you.”
“So,” Vicente Rivera said, one arm on the back of his wife’s chair, “he comes home on vacation partway through his senior year and he shows me all these scholarship forms and brochures from fancy colleges. He tells me his grades are in the top percentage of his class and that he’s already started taking the tests to get into a good school. He’s going to become a lawyer, make us proud.”
“A lawyer?” Chili forgotten, Thea turned to David. “You never said you wanted to become a lawyer.”
“That’s because he didn’t want to,” Mrs. Rivera interjected with an affectionate shake of her head while David bit off a roll. “He thought that was what we wanted, that he should become a big professional man, have a nice car, a nice house.”
And, Thea thought, so he could give those things to his parents.
His eyes met hers then, a touch of color on his cheekbones, and she knew he was embarrassed by the story, but she was glad to know it, glad to see another glimpse into this gorgeous, honorable man. Reaching out, she entwined her fingers with his before turning to face his parents once more. “What happened?”
Vicente Rivera was the one who answered. “I dragged him up to the rooftop storage space where we stored his old drum kit and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go take this to the dump.’” The older man shook his head. “I got that drum kit real cheap after I did a small construction job for a deli owner whose son didn’t want it anymore, and David, he loved it.”
David rubbed his face, then smiled. “I did,” he admitted. “We kept it in the rooftop shed so I could haul it out onto the roof and practice without the neighbors getting mad. I almost cried when he told me he was taking it to the dump.”
“And still he agreed!” Vicente threw up his hands. “First time in my life I’ve been so angry with one of my children. I told him—your music is in your blood. You think we want this? For you to live a life you don’t want? We didn’t fight to bring you up right so you could throw your dreams away.”
Thea’s eyes burned at the love in Vicente’s words, in Mrs. Rivera’s expression. “You clearly got through,” she said, unable to imagine David without his music. The passion on his face when he picked up the sticks, when he created the rhythm that held an entire song together, it was electric to witness.
“Of course we did,” Mrs. Rivera said. “He’s always been too responsible, David. You’ll have to watch that.”
“Mom.” David glared. “You’ll be pulling out baby photos next.”
Mrs. Rivera’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you must see, Thea! He was the sweetest baby.”
Chapter 9
By the time David and Thea left an hour and a half later, David was even more in love with Thea than he had been before. She’d treated his folks with warmth and affection, fitting seamlessly into his family like a missing puzzle piece. He could only hope he’d do the same when she trusted him with her own family.
“You realize,” she said, “I now have enough blackmail material for eternity?”
“I’m burning those photos next time I go home.”
Thea’s laughter wrapped him in a thousand silken chains he didn’t want to escape. “I’ve heard the four of you talk about what it was like to be flat broke when Schoolboy Choir first started out,” she said, “but I never considered how tough that decision must’ve been for you.”
That was because David didn’t discuss it. It was too private. But this was Thea, who could ask him anything she damn well wished. “Fox, Abe, Noah, they were all getting ready to hit the road and start gigging after we graduated.” Noah had been ready to say fuck it to school by the time he was sixteen, had stayed on only because the rest of them refused to quit for reasons of their own.
“I wanted to go with them to the point where I was dreaming of it,” David told Thea. “And the guys? They wouldn’t even discuss recruiting another drummer, despite the fact I made it clear I was carrying on to college.” Chest tight with the memories, he focused on carefully following a detour for the next couple of minutes. “Then my folks stepped in.”
Thea touched his arm. “You’re deeply loved.”
“I know.” It was a gift he never took for granted, not after having seen the loneliness and isolation of Fox’s and Noah’s lives when it came to family. “But I love them, too. I could never follow my dream if it meant watching my parents work their fingers to the bone till the day they died. It would’ve killed me.”
Thea’s hair slid silkily across her shoulders as she nodded. “There’s something your parents don’t know, isn’t there?”
“Yeah.” Coming to a stop at the light, he glanced at her. “I gave myself a one-year time limit to make it. Not fame, nothing like that. I just wanted Schoolboy Choir in a position where we were gigging steadily, earning an income. If that didn’t happen, I was going to go to college, get myself a career.”
“Did you tell the other guys?”
“Yeah.” He’d never lied to his friends. “And the fuckers shrugged and said they’d just move to whichever college town I chose and drag me out to gigs on the weekends.” Laughing, he continued on down the road. “You know that wedding story?”
“The one about how the four of you once played six weekend weddings in a row?”
“Yeah.” To the public, the fact Schoolboy Choir had once had to earn rent money by doing covers of romantic ballads was an amusing anecdote in their history.
To David, it was one of the defining times of his life.
“We didn’t need those gigs for rent money,” he said, driving into the parking garage under his building and into his spot. “We were scraping by on our other jobs, making enough so we could take whatever gigs might get us some exposure.”
Thea’s face was shadowed in the dim light inside the garage when he looked at her, but he could feel the intent concentration of her gaze. “Was the money for your folks?”
“My dad broke his arm,” he told her, undoing his seat belt so he could face her. “My brothers were still only young, and even with my mom taking extra shifts, it would’ve been impossible for them to make ends meet.” David had known what he had to do. “I was going to come back to New York, find work here so I could help out, but Noah went out one day, all clean and shiny and polished, and came back having secured us the first wedding.”
Thea had never guessed at any of this; neither had the world. “Noah?” She liked the guitarist, but he didn’t give off the vibe that he could be counted on in a crunch.
“Don’t let his I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude fool you, Thea. Noah would kill for the people he loves.” That was what made it so damn frustrating that none of them could seem to do anything to help the other man in turn.
“The thing was, he and Abe, they both had trust funds, but they knew I’d never take their money.” It was a pledge the four of them had made as teenagers—that money would never come between them, that they’d always be equal, no matter if Fox and David didn’t have a nickel to their own names. “But if we earned it together, then I could accept it as a loan from the group.”
It had been a fine distinction, but one that mattered—a man could accept a favor from a friend when they were both on the same playing field. Three months later, when David paid the money back after an extended club run that had seen Schoolboy Choir earning a livable income for the first time, most of it had gone to replace Abe’s damaged keyboard. It had been their money, earned as a group and shared as needed.
“Noah’s the prettiest,” Thea said slowly. “Put him in clean, pressed clothing, comb his hair, block his tendency to swear a blue streak and that sharp, biting wit of his, and you’d think he’d stepped right out of a film catalog for ‘handsome, charming, elegant male.’”
“Perfect wedding singer, right?” David’s shoulders shook. “He told us he sang a ballad for his audition with the wedding firm and they signed him and the band up on the spot. It probably helped that the manager of the company was female.” Noah could charm women from age zero to a hundred.
“Wait.” Thea’s eyes grew bright. “It was Noah who was the lead singer?”
“Can you imagine Fox’s voice at a wedding?”
“I see your point.” Schoolboy Choir’s lead singer had a growl of a tone that was perfect for rock but that would’ve likely seduced the bride right out of her panties, it was so roughly sexual.