He looked at her then, his eyes going even darker. “Does anyone else think this is a big fucking mistake?”
Chapter Two
Lita looked like she wanted to kill him.
Tough shit. He wasn’t joining the crazy train that allowed a journalist into their midst as a trusted agent. Trust and reporters, hell, trust and Lita, were words that did not belong together. She’d proven that much to him four years ago when she’d betrayed him when he was lower than low.
He was here to watch one of his best friends in the world, a brother, marry the woman he loved. He wanted them to be happy, to have their fairy-tale moment, and that is what had kept his mouth shut during this whole scene, but now it was time to speak up. Now was the time for him to get them all to see how crazy this idea really was.
“Why don’t you tell them what kind of story you’re really going to shoot for the millions in TV-land? What clever variation of ‘the other woman’ are you going to go with? You’re going to have to get creative to beat the crap your fellow journalists have been spewing.”
“I’m going to report the truth.”
“And what is your version of the truth going to be?”
“That these two crazy kids love each other, and nothing could get in the way of that.”
“And what about the other stuff? The ugly side to this fairy tale? The story that every other reporter is falling over themselves to tell? You can’t be the only one in your mob who realizes that rucking up a bunch of drama and lies gets better ratings.”
He stood almost nose-to-nose with her, Lita’s five feet nine inches augmented by her three-inch heels. The women he usually dated were sweet, tiny, blond, and blue-eyed, and rarely inclined to get in his face about something. Not Lita. With her dark hair, golden bronze skin, and dark eyes, inherited from her Brazilian supermodel mother, she was anything but sweet.
A spitfire was what his mother would have called her, and she’d have been right. Lita would bust his balls every chance she got. And truth be told, it was the part he liked the best. Liked? Hell, let’s just call it what it was and get it over with: Lita was the one woman who’d gotten to him, and she’d never let him go. But she was the one woman who viewed the world so differently from him that he knew it could never work between them.
She loved living in the public eye, glowing like a thousand suns whenever a camera was around. He sought out the shadows like a vampire. When you were that different, no one could be happy living in the ill-fitting half-life of twilight.
He ignored the way his temperature spiked around her, the way her scent of spice enticed him, tamped down the arousal that was inevitable when he thought too long about her. He might still want her, might be crazy about her, but as close as they were right now was as far as that was ever going to happen again.
“You’re right. I can’t ignore the facts of how they got together, as that would reduce the credibility of the whole piece,” she answered, taking two steps closer to him. She was near enough for him to feel her breath on his lips, the moist heat bringing the memory of what she tasted like racing to the forefront of his mind. She’d been so damn sweet, so sexy, so open, or so he’d thought until he’d figured out what was really going on those three days in Mexico.
He wouldn’t be fooled again. He guessed he had her to thank for a valuable lesson learned. He didn’t mind doing occasional publicity stuff for The Rift, because Jake and Laz usually jockeyed for the spotlight while he was content to blend in with his drum kit.
“Rocky, I trust Lita to do right by me. By Jake,” Callie said as she walked over to the two of them, her presence causing them to back down from the standoff. He looked down at her and eased off the glare. Callie was good people, and once Jake had decided that she was his world, she became family to Rocky. And where he was raised, you protected your family. That was what he was trying to do.
He made an effort to soften his delivery and try to explain this better. “I’m sorry if I’m coming off as a jerk, but I really don’t understand why you think letting the press inside is such a good idea. No matter how much Lita cares about you, she’s serving two masters, you and her employer. Who do you think will win when it comes down to a hard choice?”
“My employer has given me the leeway to do this story the way I see fit. If I didn’t think I could portray the situation honestly, I wouldn’t have taken the assignment.”
“Uh huh.” Okay, now he sounded childish, but he had no response to that. He just didn’t believe her.
“I don’t know how I need to apologize to get you to drop this. It was a stupid thing, ”
“Save it. We don’t need to rehash anything from before.”
“Wait. Before? What the hell are you talking about?” Dash’s voice brought him back to the present. Oh shit. He’d forgotten that they had an audience, an audience that didn’t know about their past, and he wanted to keep it that way.
“What happened?” Lori added her inquiry to a situation that was quickly getting out of control, and knowing her, she’d never let it drop. She was, tenacious. Dash had his work cut out for him with her. Rocky had only intended to be the last voice of reason, and now he’d given Lori a puzzle to solve, a problem to fix. He was so screwed.
“Nothing.” He locked eyes with Lita, daring her to disagree with him. He was not going to engage in a group Dr. Phil moment with these people. They were so slaphappy with love they’d hear wedding bells when really it was just the gong signaling the beginning of the next fight round between the two of them. “Nothing you need to know about.”
“Wait. You just said more in five minutes than I hear you utter in a month, and you expect us to drop it when you let that nugget slip past the Fort Knox, also known as Rocky Cardano?” Laz asked, his nodding increasing as the others joined in.
“That sounds great,” Rocky answered. “Do that. Forget it.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Lita reached out and grabbed his arm, the warm touch of her skin on his making him jump. An electrical shock would be a gentle massage compared to what she did to him—still. How many times had he taken a woman to bed just to get rid of her memory? Booze didn’t do it, and pills weren’t his thing. Brutal workouts and long sessions behind his drum kit helped a little. In the end, Lita was still under his skin, which added a stubborn wrinkle to the current situation.
Lita wasn’t immune to him, either. He’d witnessed her aroused, responding to him and his touch for three solid days, and it was something he’d never forget and recognized when he saw it again, like now. Her hand trembled, breathing faster than what was normal, pupils enlarged. She was still attracted to him, wanted him just like he wanted her, but an unspoken understanding between them knew that even enemies with benefits was a place they could never go.
Thrown by the impact of her touch, he let himself be led away to the other side of the space. The others stared, but he blocked them out; it wasn’t hard with Lita so close, her perfume invading his senses, her touch lighting him up. Jesus. What was the shelf life on this kind of connection? At this rate, he believed it would survive the apocalypse.
Lita got to the point. “We need to call a truce. Let go of the personal stuff for one week.”
“I can’t.” She rolled her eyes, and he cut her off before she could lecture him. “I’m not doing it to be a dick. I don’t think this is a good idea. This is not going to end well.”
“I just don’t understand you.” Her grip on his arm tightened, and she tugged him closer, the movement bringing their bodies into whisper-light contact at breast and thighs. Rocky found his own hand reaching out to grasp her waist and pull her in, but he curled his fingers inward, fist so tight his skin strained and paled at the knuckles. “This is a great opportunity for Callie and Jake to turn the tide of public opinion, to win over a huge group of people. They have the power of the press, all dying for a chance to share their story. This way, they get to write it, give it the spin they want.”
Spin. Public opinion
. Sharing their story. Those words made him shudder a little.
“You believe that they have some power to control the beast once they unleash it, but that’s all a lie. The press is going to print whatever they want, whatever will sell magazines or rack up website hits.”
“Exactly. So why not use that to your advantage? Everybody has to play the game in this business, and you’ve got one chance to make sure you’re the player and not the played.”
“But they don’t have to play at all,” he countered.
“They live in the public eye, ”
“They have high-profile jobs.” H stepped closer, his proximity creating a low current between them. “It doesn’t mean they have to let everyone know their personal business.”
“You give up some of that choice when you become a celebrity.”
“It’s a job. Not an abandonment of any privacy.”
“True. But they would be crazy if they didn’t use the system to their advantage.”
“It’s not worth it.”
“You’re being short-sighted and stubborn.”
“Right back at ya.”
And that was it. The same old argument. The same old chasm between them. There was no bridge to cross this divide, and they both knew it.
Rocky grew up protecting himself and his family. He knew first-hand that if you didn’t let people in, they couldn’t hurt you. Lita was raised in the Hollywood glare, and she believed that parsing out the nuggets of yourself to strangers with press badges was the way to protect yourself and what you didn’t want to share. They only agreed on one thing: secrets and knowledge—whether taken or given—was power.
He withdrew his arm from her grasp, ignoring the way he immediately missed her touch. He stalked back over to the others, ready to exit this little scene.
“I’ve said my piece.” He looked specifically at Jake and Callie. “I hope I didn’t make you mad, but I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I kept my mouth shut.”
“Rocky, we all know your aversion to the press, the limelight, and that’s cool. We respect that, but Lita is one of us,” Jake said.
Callie looked between the two of them, her consideration of his comment playing like a movie on her face. In the end, she reached a hand out to Lita and then turned back to him as she wrapped her tiny fingers around his. “Lita is a friend. She’s a journalist, and I know it will be a challenge for you to have her around, but I need you to try. For me.”
Oh shit. Her smile said that she knew he wouldn’t refuse. Callie was a good kid, good people, and she made Jake happier than Rocky had ever seen him. If she wanted him to play nice with Lita while she was here, then he could do it. It wasn’t like he was going to be with her that much anyway. They’d avoided each other very well for two people who called L.A. their home, and they could certainly do it here, too.
“Sure, Callie. Whatever you want.”
She was nodding happily, and Rocky turned to split and be anywhere but within the same room with Lita, when Callie tightened her grip on him, snuggling in close and stopping him in his tracks. He gazed down, and one look at her “I’m the little sister you never had, and I can get you to do whatever I want” expression didn’t bode well for his plan to stay clear of Lita Matthews.
“Since you and Lita are going to the wedding, ”
“What? No one from your stable of tiny blondes could come to the wedding?” Lita interrupted, her raised eyebrow and smug expression matching the snarky tone in her voice.
He ignored her.
“Anyway,” Callie continued, “I’ve paired the two of you up for all of the remaining events for the wedding, the houseboat cruise, the rehearsal dinner, so it won’t be any trouble at all for you to help her with her filming. Right?”
Fuck no. He met Lita’s shocked gaze across the space, and she’d gone pale under her golden skin, her head shaking an emphatic no. At least they agreed on this.
“Callie, I don’t need his help. I’ve got Eddie. I’m fine,” she said.
“An extra pair of hands won’t hurt, especially with all the additional paparazzi around. You might need some muscle, and Rocky scares off even the most persistent of them.”
“Man, they give you a wide berth whenever they see you. And since you have reservations about the whole video thing, you can see first-hand what a professional Lita is.” Jake’s eyes lit up like he’d just discovered fire. Rocky knew when he’d been boxed in; there was no way he was going to talk them down from this. “It’s perfect.”
A perfect nightmare. The seventh layer of hell.
“It’s really not necessary,” Lita said, refusing to see that they had no choice in the matter.
“I insist. Maybe you guys can work it out and be friends, now that we’re all practically family.” Callie reached out and grabbed one of Lita’s hands as well as one of his own. Rocky took a step back. All of this sounded suspiciously like bridal matchmaking. “You can only guess how hard all this press stuff is on me. I know I shouldn’t care, but I do. This way, I know that the two people who care as much as I do about it will be looking out for me.”
She started blinking rapidly, her big eyes growing shiny. Oh shit, were those tears? Yep. He was fucked now. No way could he say no to a crying bride, even if she did have the worst idea in the universe. He might be an asshole, but a heartless asshole he was not.
“Of course we’ll do it,” Lita said, dragging her into a hug.
They both started sniffling, and he inched away, preparing to make his escape, to hit the gym and figure out how to get out of this mess.
“So, are you going to give me a clue about what your real deal is with Lita?”
He turned to find Dash right next to him, his expression filled more with concern than prurient curiosity. The urge to spill it all was strong in his gut. He and Dash had been tighter than brothers, but when Dash had walked away from The Rift and shut Rocky out of his life, he’d learned to keep his own counsel.
Sure, Jake and Laz were trusted, but he’d never felt the close connection he’d had with Dash. He was the one guy who knew almost the whole story about Rocky and his dad, and he’d never told anyone else. But those days were long gone. He’d work this out by himself.
“There’s nothing to tell. I just don’t like reporters.”
Dash observed him closely, and Rocky felt him trying to peel back the layers of his shield. All those years of living like a hermit had fine-tuned Dash’s observation skills, but he was in no mood to have his demons let loose.
“Stop giving me the eyeball, Dash. It’s nothing more than what I said. I think its crazy to have a reporter here.”
“Especially Lita.”
“Yes, especially Lita.”
“And that’s what— ”
“Man, you’ve got to let it go.”
“Fine, but news flash. I don’t believe that nothing happened between the two of you. Not for a minute.” Dash moved in closer, his mouth turning up in a slight grin. “And whatever it was, it isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”
“Uh huh.” Rocky turned to head to the bar. He needed a drink. A big drink. “Give it up Dash, there’s no story here.”
Chapter Three
She was getting scooped on her own story.
Lita stood on the front row of the throng of reporters screaming and shouting for Callie and Jake to look their way, and she had nothing. No cameraman. No camera. Nothing except the pathetic little camera on her iPhone she was currently using to find out where the hell Eddie was.
Callie stood in between Jake and the Superintendent of Public Schools for Fairbanks Montana as he announced the endowment they had set up to fund special visual and musical arts programs in the school. She looked beautiful and bridal, and the adoring looks that Jake leveled at her would make amazing front-page copy. At least it would for everyone else.
“Eddie,” she hissed into the phone once his voicemail picked up for the sixth time, “Where the hell are you? I. Am. Missing. It.”
She
pressed the end button on the screen so hard she was surprised it didn’t crack from the strain. Lita looked around the crowd, taking note of a few people she could beg for footage later, colleagues who owed her a favor for contacts made with the friends of her famous parents and access to places that the press was normally never allowed to enter. She hated the thought of blowing some of these carefully cultivated prospects on something so stupid as missing the photo op that she had arranged.
Since she could do nothing about Eddie and his no-show act at the moment, she returned her attention to the scene before her. Callie looked good, nothing like the poster child for anxiety she’d been at the mansion yesterday. Lita knew about her past with this town, the poor girl from the trailer park, shielded from the mean girls and their mothers by big sister Lori, but not untouched by the derision of townspeople who despised where she came from.
It didn’t make Fairbanks a terrible town. Look at any main street in America, and you will find those who secured their place in their narrow-minded hierarchy by keeping down those who just wanted to be left alone to live their lives. Minerva, Callie’s mother, had fallen apart when her husband took off, and Lori had kept the family going by working two or three jobs, and with the support of their friend Sydney. But not many people here had stepped up to help the family in desperate need of a break.
But look at them now, clapping for her, risking injury to get a photograph with her, and generally sucking up. Lita had appointments to interview some of the gushier ones tomorrow.
The press conference wrapped up, and Lita made her way over to Callie and Jake, who were waiting patiently as they posed for pictures with some of the more prominent locals. The police and the private security hired for the week kept the rest of the press at a safe distance, while several of them glared at Lita for her advantage with the couple of the hour. She tried not to look smug.
“Hey, Lita, did you get what you needed?” Jake asked.
“That would be a no,” she answered, her anger at Eddie surging back with a vengeance. “My cameraman didn’t show.”
Playing With the Drummer Page 2