Scandalous Beat (The Tempest Rock Star series Book 6)

by Michelle Mankin

  * * *

  “No! No! Stop! Please, stop!” I bolted upright in my bed. Two strong arms immediately banded me. I tried to escape them.

  “Miriam. Reina. It’s me. It’s ok.” As his bear hug loosened, I opened my eyes, focused on him and slowed my breathing.

  “I came in when I heard you cry out. You were thrashing around so much,” he explained, “you nearly cracked your skull on the headboard.” He pointed at it with his chin. The nightlight in my room cast mysterious shadows on his face. In the low light with his rakishly handsome features and soul patch he looked like a pirate. A very hot one. “You ok?” He stroked my hair softly.

  I nodded.

  “It’s a dumb question. You’re not ok. Are you? But we’ll get you there.” He didn’t know I had heard him talking earlier with Mike.

  “You ok?” Mike skidded to a stop in front of my room. His hair stuck up all over his head. He had white tape on his nose, and he was wearing only long white tube socks and boxer briefs. I might have laughed out loud if my heart didn’t hurt so much for him and the injuries he had endured for my sake. “Ah,” he declared, assessing the situation quickly. “A nightmare. That’s to be expected.”

  “Not fun though,” I admitted. “Scary. I’m so tired, but I’m afraid to sleep. I don’t trust my subconscious mind.” I shrugged. “Sorry to wake you.”

  “S’ok.” Mike yawned. “Looks like you two have it under control.” He gave me a firm look that said don’t hassle King.

  “We do,” I agreed, and it was impossible not to notice the pleasure my words gave the man on the bed beside me. “Thanks.”

  “Night.” Mike knocked on the door frame three times. A private signal that meant he loved me.

  “I better let you rest.” Juaquin stood. My mouth went dry at the full-frontal view of his ripped physique. Nothing cute about his maroon boxer briefs and the royal sized appendage they barely contained. Maybe I should have gotten a glass of water before bed.

  “Could you stay?” I whispered.

  “Absolutely.” He lowered himself back down. I tensed suddenly, thoughts of other less benevolent men filled my mind. I clinched my fingers into fists to keep from panicking.

  “I mean.” I pulled in a breath. “I want you here. Only can you…would you mind sleeping on the floor next to me?”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all.” He grabbed the extra blanket from on top of my foot locker and threw it on the floor.

  “Thank you.” I handed him one of my pillows.

  “Smells like you.” He was smiling when he withdrew it from his nose. My stomach fluttered in a good way as he punched it into shape and placed his head on it.

  “Can I ask one more favor?”

  “Anything.” He turned his head to face me.

  “Can you scoot a little closer?”

  “Sure.” He moved so his hip was touching my side of my bed.

  So close that when I breathed in and out, the lime and salty scent of him was all that I smelled. I closed my eyes, no longer seeing a ring of men looming over me on the back of my lids. I drifted into a deep dreamless slumber.

  * * *

  King

  A light touch awakened me. I tensed involuntarily until I realized it was only Miriam. Lying on her stomach in the bed beside me, her arm dangled off the bed, her fingers wrapped gently around my wrist.

  Smiling softly, I closed my eyes and settled back to sleep.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Miriam

  My feet pounded hot frustration on the baking pavement. Not only was the sexy Latino messing with my workout mojo by running directly in front of me with no shirt and that tight ass of his just out of reach every single day for an entire week, but he was not letting up about me talking to a counselor.

  I had put Bryan off so many times he had given up and returned to Seattle with Sager. Avoiding my mother and sister was as simple as not taking their calls. Not so with Juaquin. He was nearly ever present and maddening in his persistence.

  Slap-slap went my irritated soles against the ground. I didn’t need to talk to anyone. Slap-slap they went again. No, I wasn’t in denial. I had been held hostage against my will. I had been beaten and almost raped. Acknowledged. End of story. Slap-slap. Slap-slap. I picked up my pace. Catching him unaware, I shot past him on the hill at a good clip. I needed to move on. I wanted to forget it ever happened. I sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Everyone else seemed to understand that.

  Why couldn’t he?

  Bending over at the waist, sweat dripping into my eyes, I put my hands on my thighs and tried to recapture my breath. Somehow I had managed to beat him back to the house. He had the physique of a fighter, and he used all that muscle to propel his legs into powerful ranging strides. I was so lost in the mental image that I didn’t hear him coming until he was already there.

  “Don’t run away from me like that. Not ever again.” He grabbed me in a firm insistent grip, lifting me easily, and pressed me into the side of the house. I flailed and squirmed uselessly in his arms realizing why he had let me beat him back. He had been trying to rein in his temper. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say he hadn’t wrestled it down quite yet. He had caught me instead.

  “Don’t tell me what to do. Stop following me everywhere. Like I’m going to be attacked by hitmen on my way to the bathroom or something. Give me some breathing space. Let me get on with my life.”

  “You want to get on with your life?” His hot angry bursts of breath bathed my face.

  “Yes,” I spat. “I do.”

  “Great. Sounds awesome. But first you’re going to see that counselor. Maybe then you can stop having those nightmares every night. Maybe you’ll stop flinching from me when I try to hold you and start looking at me with desire in your eyes again.”

  I looked at him plenty with desire, but he refused to see it because of this ridiculous notion that I wasn’t ready. That I needed to address underlying, unresolved issues first.

  “I’m sick of Mike feeding you all that phases of recovery bullshit. I’ll get better my own way. I’m making my own damn decisions and not going to a counselor is one of them. Another is getting back to work.”

  “You mean stripping?”

  “Yeah. I still have my dreams. Dreams don’t pay for themselves, you know. And just because you’re a big rock star doesn’t mean you have the right to pick people up and shove them into walls until they do what you want them to?”

  “Reina. Fucking shit. You know it’s not like that.” He dropped his forehead to mine. Twin headlights of alluring gold blazed with concern. “Settle down. I can see the panic in your eyes. You know avoiding the issues isn’t going to make them go away. Stop resisting and get some help.”

  But I resisted. Oh how I resisted. If I gave in, if I let some shrink dig around inside my brain they would surely find out how fucked up I really was. And then I would lose him. I had almost lost him, my life, everything. I was hanging on to what I had left. For as long as I could. To the part of him I had now. Even if he was only staying for pity. Even if it was only just a small part of him and so much less than the entirety of him that I truly desired.

  * * *

  King

  “She drives me to the absolute brink of sanity.” I flopped into one of the kitchen chairs while Miriam took her shower. I was giving her some breathing space, but I kept an ear open and my eye on the control pad of the new alarm system. My stomach grumbled. The eggs and bacon Mike was frying revved up my appetite and threatened my waistline. Running every day with her was not nearly enough exercise to counter the calories of stuff like this each morning and takeout every evening. I needed to get to the gym to burn that off as much as I needed it as an outlet for the stress.

  “You have any luck with her yet?” I asked him.

  “Hell-to-the-fucking-no.” He made it a joke, but I could tell he was as exasperated with her as I was. We were both worried. She had retreated into herself like he had predicted, but e
ven working together we hadn’t been able to draw her out again.

  “You know she just told me she wants to go back to work stripping?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh yeah. Would I joke about something like that?”

  “Shit. I can’t see that going well. All those men. She’s not in the right frame of mind. What did you say to her?”

  “Nothing. What can I say? She’ll just give me the line about her needing to make her own choices.”

  “Hard to argue against that one.”

  I nodded.

  “So what are you planning to do?” He dropped down into the chair opposite me after sliding four eggs, several strips of bacon and two slices of toast onto my plate equaling what was on his.

  “I don’t know.” I raked a hand through my hair. “But we both know she can’t keep going on like this. She jumps at shadows. She cringes when we raise our voices.”

  “She almost lost it after we went in to record our statements.”

  “Yeah, she did not want to talk in detail about that shit.” Not in front of the transcriptionist. Not even with Jasmine afterward. Rehashing events for the prosecutors had rattled both of them, but the government needed every piece of evidence if they were going to make the trafficking and child pornography charges stick. Hopefully Miriam’s statement would be the last thing they would need from her going forward. Likely much more would be required of her young former charge.

  “The Sexxy Club would love to have their queen back on stage,” Mike said, seeming to be thinking aloud as he liberally smothered butter on his toast. “We can’t count on them being a roadblock. But given the shape she’s in, she’ll have to demonstrate to them that she can do her full routine before they’ll let her in front of a real audience. So we have a little time to convince her to change her mind. “

  “Ok, so I’ll go with her to her practices, and we both keep pressing on the counselor front.”

  “She’s strong but too stubborn for her own good.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “She has all that inner strength at her disposal, but she’s spending it on resisting us instead of using it to get herself better. It sucks.” I didn’t want to change her. But I knew. I fucking knew if she didn’t stop running from what had happened she and I would never get to the place I wanted. Her in my arms with no room for anything to ever come between us again.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Miriam

  I avoided searching for him in the darkness as I danced, but I knew he was out there watching and disapproving. I couldn’t shake him. For two weeks running now. Two weeks of him strutting around my house dressed in little but those decadent maroon boxer briefs of his. He had some in every color, but the maroon ones were my favorite. I could barely think coherently around him, let alone breathe without feeling light headed as I drew in his lime and salty scent and remembered how hot it had been being in the same bed with him.

  Or inside a plane lavatory.

  Or on that pallet in his backyard.

  Hell. Tied up or fucked against a shower wall. I would take him any way I could get him. But I was beginning to suspect that I was never going to get him again at all.

  I had a new alarm system. They had taken the tape off of Mike’s nose and the bindings from his ribs. The bruises on each of us had mostly faded. I wasn’t hideous anymore. Nor was I in any direct danger, yet Juaquin remained, though he had commitments elsewhere. I knew it was mostly because he felt sorry for me. Responsible maybe because of the sacrifice I had made to Campanella for his sake. A serious lapse in judgment on my part, but whatever, it led to the same result. Things were on the skids between us. I just needed to woman up. Cut him loose. Say goodbye. For real this one last time.

  Arms on either side of the rim, I dipped my body into the basin of the tub imagining his body was beneath me, and his cock was inside of me. My breathing grew labored. My pussy wet. One of life’s sad little ironies to go so long without sex when both the source of my sexual frustration and the cure was so near. I continued with my routine, telling myself the male groan I heard was only wishful thinking.

  * * *

  “Goodbye, Queen, and good luck. I’ll see you later tonight.” I looked into the dressing room mirror and met her eyes, ignoring the concern I saw inside them.

  “Thanks, Trinity.”

  All the other girls were gone. Mike had gone back to the house hours ago. But I had been slow in shedding my workout clothes. Dancing didn’t energize me like it used to. I seemed to always be tired lately, like I was weighted down by the memories of what had happened inside that locked hotel room. Every move I made dancing or otherwise felt like I did it with lead shackles around my ankles.

  I could see King. The door to the hallway stood propped open. He waited, leaning casually against the wall, one ankle crossed over the other, both thumbs tucked into the front pockets of his jeans. So sexy. Too much temptation to contemplate going home with him just yet. Watching him each night, his routine had rarely varied. First, he unbuckled his jeans. Then he reached back to peel off whatever tight tee he had worn, revealing all the chiseled strength he possessed. He removed everything in its turn but the boxers. He had a striptease that could earn him a fortune if he ever went public with it.

  My cell rang. Well, it buzzed. I had the ringer off so it really only walked across the counter. The same counter King had once fucked me on. Oh my. I had been planning to ignore the call. I kept my phone mostly on airplane mode these days and used that as an excuse to avoid almost everyone. Occasionally I spoke with Jasmine. My mom. My brother. But I shut them down if they pushed at all. Even Ann. Even knowing they were well intentioned. But with my thoughts running the way they presently did, the very tactile memory of his strong fingers gripping my thighs and separating them before he… I swallowed and looked away from the counter, but only to catch Juaquin stretching his arms over his head, his shirt lifting revealing ripped abs. Defined v. That arrow of dark hair. My phone danced again. This time I didn’t ignore it.

  “Hello.” I licked my lips, still staring at Juaquin. He stared right back.

  “Hey, MJ. Guess what?”

  “What?” It must be good. Mike sounded like he was bouncing on the tips of his toes.

  “Alex is here.”

  “That’s fantastic. I didn’t know he was coming.” Had Mike told me, and I had forgotten? Admittedly, I had been knocking around in my own head a lot lately.

  “He surprised me. His film finished early. Come home and get dressed up. He wants to meet Juaquin. He’s taking us all out to celebrate.”

  * * *

  King

  I watched her practice each evening. Still so seductive. So mesmerizing on that stage. So sexy that I had to finish in the shower what she had started. An unsatisfying substitution, I wanted her for real, but I wouldn’t push her until she was ready. Not that she applied the same parameters to herself.

  It was too soon for her to take the stage. She wasn’t the same up there, not even in practice. It certainly didn’t seem to me like she was taking charge of her life by going back to stripping. It felt like she was giving up on it.

  So why was she so dead set on doing it?

  The club wasn’t the only place I watched her. I watched her all the time. Every morning, she got out of bed. She went through the motions, but she never greeted the dawn with her former sense of anticipation.

  Why not?

  Was it yet another part of herself that she had lost because of my failure to protect her?

  For two weeks, I had been waiting and watching for the old Miriam to step from behind the curtain but all I kept seeing was a silhouette.

  “Oh there you are,” she called, and I moved out of the dark hallway where I had been standing watch over her while she dressed. From the outside it might seem obsessive, but I refused to be more than a breath away. Should she need me again, I would not fail her.

  I stepped into the light.

  “Whoa,” she said after a long h
ead to toe check of me. “I’ve gotten used to seeing you around the house in jeans and a t-shirt, sometimes a lot less. But wow.” She pulled in and let out a long breath. “You look like you stepped out of a men’s fragrance spot. You know, the ones where they’re on location somewhere exotic like Monte Carlo and the guy’s all dressed up and he stalks toward the girl and the camera fades out as they embrace to show a bottle of cologne?”

  “Really?” My lips lifted slowly as I stepped closer. “I like the scene you’re describing. Maybe we can act it out.”

  “I’m almost ready.” She ignored my suggestion. “But I’m having trouble with the clasp on this necklace. Can you help me put it on?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks.” Her fingertips lightly skimmed my palm as she dropped the delicate silver chain onto it. She pivoted on her rhinestone heels, the long slit in her strapless gown splitting to reveal the shapely length of her leg from her ankle to her creamy upper thigh. My cock always ready and willing in her presence became more eager. Lifting the weight of her hair, she gave me another intoxicating view, this time of her backside and the regal column of her neck.

  “It’s a pretty piece.” My voice was thick as I reached around her, wanting so badly to pull her sexy body back into me, to lock my arms around her and hold her tight, but I knew I couldn’t. Unless she was in the throes of one of her nightmares she panicked whenever I tried to embrace her.

  Small steps, I reminded myself. They would lead to bigger ones. I just had to be patient.

  I fastened the necklace and gently turned her back around. “Caramba.” I slid my gaze slowly over her. “I might look like a model, but you look like you stepped out of a painting, like one worthy of the Louvre, one people come from around the world to see.”