by Pam Godwin
He leaned down and captured her lips with a shower-wet smack. “Because I set your ringtone. Like?”
“Love.” She grinned, and her lips curved down just as quick. “It has to be Nathan. Maybe he has news about the letter.” She slipped out of the stall before he could catch her.
Damn Nathan, the hater. Interrupting his shower time.
He followed the trail of wet footprints out of the bathroom and found her bent over the desk, dripping water on the phone in her hand and tapping on the screen. She held it up, wide-eyed and gorgeous. “How do you work this thing?” Then she returned to her frantic swiping. “I haven’t owned a phone in years.”
Probably not since Noah. Who was she going to call? A twinge pulled his chest. He closed the distance and held out his hand. “Give it here.”
When she stretched it toward him, he grabbed her elbow. “Go dry off properly. Water on marble inspired Bon Jovi to compile Slippery When Wet.”
Her eyebrows climbed then dropped over narrowed eyes. “You’re so full of shit.”
He pinched her ass. “Walk back to the bathroom like I’m not.”
The pound on the door sent him lurching into the closet. He dropped the phone and fought a t-shirt from its hanger. Yeah, so he still didn’t want anyone looking at his back. Motherfucking knee-jerk reaction. He yanked on a pair of workout shorts and didn’t belittle himself too much for it until he skidded out and found her answering the door stark fucking naked. “Charlee!”
She startled and dropped her jaw as if she had no clue why his face was on fire.
Nathan strode around her, and the fucker was lucky he didn’t lower his eyes below her chin.
“Charlee, go put on some clothes.” His voice rattled the glass doors. Fuck it. He spun into the closet and wrestled another t-shirt off the rack.
Back in the bedroom, neither of them had moved. Both stared at him with identical sets to their jaws, likely for different reasons. He tossed her the shirt.
She turned it over in her hands, locating the head hole not near fast enough. “Calm down, Jay. He’s seen—”
“He doesn’t need to see it again.”
The shirt hit him in the face and fell to the floor. Okay, maybe his tone was a little too coarse.
She propped her fists on her hips. “You might remember that next time you fuck me onstage.”
His balls curled up as if they’d been punched, but the real pain throbbed behind his ribs. He scooped up the shirt and pulled it over her head, stretching it over her little fists and down to her thighs.
His memory of the show was muddy, but he realized she’d enjoyed the exhibitionism before the groupies showed up. That realization set his nerves on fire. Jesus. Clear-headed, he never would’ve put her on display. Was that what she wanted? Would this be another sticky point in her closet of kinks? “We’ll talk about this later.”
She pushed her arms through the holes and turned toward Nathan, who was watching their interaction with a blatant scowl. “Nathan? Is this about the letter?”
He nodded, facing her, and shoved a hand through his hair. Not good.
“Dennis, the spotter’s alias, isn’t answering his phone. Munt tracked down his family.” He dropped his hand. “He has a nineteen-year-old niece who went missing two nights ago.”
The night they flew back from New York. The odds sucked.
Her hand shot behind her, reaching for a bed that was too far away. Jay wrapped an arm around her waist and walked her backward until she sat on the edge. He perched beside her, heart racing.
“The message about the girl killed in Roy’s stockroom came from Dennis’ phone. Text. Not voice.”
A chill swept through him. They were being played. “You don’t think Dennis sent that message?”
Nathan shook his head. “Two bodies were found early this morning in an abandoned warehouse on the Wharf. Middle-aged man. Teenage girl. Suspected murder-suicide. An anonymous caller reported them.”
A tear streaked down her cheek. “Roy discovered Dennis. Probably knew about him for some time and waited for the right moment.” Her voice cracked. “He killed the niece. Killed Dennis. Staged the murder-suicide. An easy trick with the assistance of San Fran’s law enforcement. The letter makes more sense now.”
Jay jumped to his feet, shaking out his fists when he so badly wanted to swing them. “Why would he do that? What was the point of threatening you with it?”
She stared out of shadowed eyes at the wall behind him. “It wasn’t a threat.” Her voice sounded dusty…dead. “It was my punishment.”
71
The next three days drudged by. The bodies in the warehouse were identified, confirming their suspicions about the spotter and his niece, and Jay watched Charlee slip further inside herself. If helplessness had a taste, it would’ve been the rancid decay curdling in the back of his throat. He fed her, protected her, and loved her. But he couldn’t heal the hurt dulling her eyes.
Since Roy had proven himself unpredictable, Jay kept Charlee within the guarded walls of the estate, always in his eyeshot.
During daily band practices, she perched on the basement stairs, watching and sketching. Sometimes a smile bent her lips when the guys teased one another, but it never lingered. He doubted anyone noticed her silent grief, but he glimpsed it in the languor of her gestures and felt it when her gaze flitted from his.
Each morning, Tony brought in a martial arts practitioner to teach him basics of self-defense. Charlee watched and often participated in the drills. His flashbacks surfaced once during a weapon disarming technique under the strike of her hand. She’d coaxed him back to the present by singing a Pixies song. Her endearing, off-key rendition of Where Is My Mind shooed away the nightmare, but it cast a lasting pall over her eyes.
He knew she carried a hefty load of guilt regarding Roy’s potential threat to the band, but their lack of offensive strategy seemed to plague her most. Hell, restlessness vented from the pores of every member of the household. The estate bristled with it. The band and the staff argued over canceling the tour, how many guards to hire if they went, and how best to protect Charlee. During one of the debates in the basement studio, Faye jumped from her laptop and announced that the seventy-show tour was officially sold out.
“Maybe the Oxford prick won’t fuck with the tour now.” Laz adjusted a tuning peg on his guitar and plucked the string. “Think of the millions his new acquisition would lose if he did.”
Impatience bunched Jay’s shoulders. The tour babble had grown old an hour earlier. He had what Roy wanted, and she was right freaking there, stretched on the couch and studying the ceiling tiles. Jay wanted nothing more than to protect her, tour be damned. Trouble was, the decision affected his best friends and hundreds of thousands of fans. “Roy can’t cancel the tour. Technically, he owns our record company not our production company. He can pull our CDs from the stores and prevent radio stations from playing our songs. He can’t tamper with our performances.”
“Windsor Records owns our production company,” Laz said around the pick between his teeth, angling his head near the fingerboard of his guitar. “All of the subsidiary labels and corporations report to the same damn head.”
“And that head got away with murder.” Her voice floated from the couch, hushed and distant. She rolled to her side, pillowing her face with the bend of her arm, and looked at Jay. “He has a weakness. Use it against him.”
The challenge in her eyes boiled his blood. What the fuck was she suggesting? Use her as bait? He would never use her for anything related to Roy. The set jaws and hard faces around him indicated his friends wouldn’t have either.
That night, another band meeting sprung from an impromptu argument in the kitchen. The fifth one in three days. When it fizzled to a close with no resolution, Charlee rose to her feet and slammed her hands on the island. “Keep the tour dates, and double the protective team. Because you know what? Roy can’t do much while you’re standing in the limelight. If you cancel, you mig
ht as well break up the band and sell your home. Gonna let him win that easy?”
Silence. The kind of silence in which ideas were formed and fashioned together. His girl had her fire back, and it burned in a fierce glow on her face. He wasn’t sure if her decision was a sound one, but his stance had been clear. No matter the consensus, she would not leave his sight.
A collective breath released through the room and disintegrated the animosity from moments earlier. Rio kissed her first. A peck on the check. Wil and Laz followed in turn, and Jay surprised himself by smiling as he watched the reciprocal effect. They didn’t want to cancel the tour, but each man’s kiss confirmed they would’ve given it up to keep her safe.
Grins radiated from them as they reminisced about their debauchery on their last tour together.
Nathan stormed from the kitchen, his ears blood red. His job had just become impossibly more challenging. For the first time since Jay met him, a feeling of sympathy swelled for the poor guy.
Since the news of the murders, Nathan had pulled in every law enforcement and private security connection he had to pin the crime on Roy. Three days into the effort, Jay didn’t have to see the defeat in Nathan’s eyes to know the case wasn’t reopening.
The next day, Colson lumbered through the front door, balancing five boxes.
Expecting the delivery, Jay bounded from the kitchen island and abandoned the repairs he’d been making to his guitar’s bridge pickup. “Thanks, Colson.” He accepted the packages and strode to the couch, his nerves alight with anticipation.
Charlee sat cross-legged at one end, angled over a sketchbook. Multicolored arcs leapt off the page she was shading with art pencils.
Rainbows? What, was she twelve? He bit back the impulse to tease her, unsure if the illustrations had emotional meaning. “Charlee?”
She looked up and blew a rampant lock away from her eye. It drifted back and clung to her long lashes.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” Wil pounded the buttons of a controller, ass hovering over the other couch, eyes fastened on the zombies shuffling across the TV screen. “Come on!” More pounding. “Aw yeah. You got owned, beyotch.”
She shook her head, a smile gracing her beautiful face.
Privacy would’ve been preferred for this, but Wil’s energy seemed to return some vividness to her face. Jay stacked the boxes on the coffee table and perched on the edge, facing her.
She reached up and skimmed a tentative finger over his lips. He held still, lost in the blues animating her eyes.
She poked his dimple, rose from the couch, and stretched over his shoulder to look at the packages. “Whatcha got there?”
The press of her tits against his chest and the sweet scent of her hair tickling his nose were hell on his focus. He was there to give her something, and it wasn’t the pest jerking in his jeans.
Despite her somberness, their bed hadn’t grown cold. Whenever she’d led him there, he followed, feeling his way through her mood. Since the morning he’d feinted choking her, she refused pain or any semblance of it. Knowing how that impacted her, he wanted to refuse her. But she’d pull him close and he’d sink into her, his intentions scuttling.
So for four days, he’d had orgasms and she had no-gasms. She claimed the comfort he gave her was all she wanted, but it rubbed at the back of his mind, a persistent and consuming thing.
“These are for you.” He reached behind him and offered her the largest box. “But I’ll reap the benefits, so I’m pretty fucking excited about them.”
Her eyes blurred as she sat back. She blinked at the package, once, twice, and tore it open. Bubble wrap and box discarded, she balanced three tattoo machines on her thighs. One hand pressed against her mouth. Fingers of the other fluttered over every detail.
Flames engraved the steel frames. In his e-mail to the artist, he’d tried to convey the design Charlee had outlined on his back. Given her shining smile as she stared at him in amazement, he figured he’d succeeded.
“The black steel is the liner machine.” He picked it up and tested the one-pound weight. “The red one is the shader. Blue is the cut-back shader. Each has been tuned, tweaked, and set-up to do what it’s supposed to.”
She turned the cut-back shader over. “I’ve always used one machine. Had to jack with the tension in the rear spring to adjust the gaping from front coil to arm bar. You know, to switch between outlining and shading? Could never get the precision right. It was a poor man’s way to do it, but three irons? This is…How’d you even know what I’d need? And custom crafted so quickly?”
Money and fame had its benefits. “The artist was very accommodating.”
She lifted the liner machine from his hand. “All hand crafted and the engravings match your tat. My God, Jay, they must have cost…I don’t even want to know.” She glanced up, eyes clear and bright. “I don’t know what to say.”
The wonder in her voice filled him with pride. He stole a kiss from her curved lips. “Say ‘thank you’.”
She set the machines on the cushion beside her and stared at them, lashes fluttering rapidly. In the next thump of his heart, she tackled him, hands in his hair, mouth crushing his. She smothered kisses over his face, sparking every happy receptor in his body, and rested her forehead against his. “Thank you.”
“It’s full on double rainbow time.” Wil reached into one of the boxes behind Jay and pulled out several bottles of ink.
The boxes should’ve held every color available, along with needles, tubes, stencil stuff, and anything else the supplier thought she might or might not want.
Wil dropped the bottles in the box and scooped up her sketchbook. “Hell yeah. We’re so doing this tattoodle.”
His bassist might’ve been hippie, but a rainbow tattoo? “Seriously?”
She grabbed the book. “It’s not for Wil. Since inking Laz’s dick is a sensitive subject—”
“It’s not a subject, because it’s not happening.”
“—Wil settled on an alternative tat.” She tapped the cartoon rainbow.
Jay cocked one eyebrow and glared at Wil. “The issue isn’t the design. It’s the placement.”
“Lose the bitchbrow, man.” Wil returned one of his own. “Laz is getting a tramp stamp.”
Nice. Jay could live with that, though he wasn’t sure Laz could.
Wil cupped his hands around his mouth and angled toward the patio. “Laz! Get in here!”
Two hours later, Jay forced himself to recline in the chair across the room in a guise of cool collection. His jealousy would’ve shattered the morale Charlee had so effectively lifted.
Laz lay face down on the couch, arms bent above his head, expression a picture of tranquility. She knelt beside him, hands low on his bare back, tattoo machine vibrating the air.
His bandmates and some of the security staff had gathered to watch, and a heady buzz bounced around them. Even Nathan hovered, a smile floating on his face.
As Laz’s rainbow-shaped embarrassment arced from the rise of one ass cheek to the other, the tiny movements of her machine held the room captivated. Humming her out-of-tune melodies, she brushed the needle over the cartoon of colors with a vivacity that put everyone in a lively mood.
His shoulder blades tingled. He wished it was him on the stabbing end, but when she’d snagged his gaze before she began, the silent question arching her brow, he shook his head. He hadn’t wanted to quash the excitement whirring between his friends. And when the time came to complete his tattoo, it would be an intimate session. Momentous. Just like the night he met her.
A groan drifted from the couch.
Jay’s graciousness slipped, his face heating. “Laz, if you’re trapping a hard-on under there, so help me God, I will break it off. With a sledgehammer.”
He groaned again. Louder. “Cool story, bro.”
“Wow. I missed this. I haven’t inked in a week.” She winked at Jay. “It’s been a very long week.”
Her wink spiraled through his chest and stole
his breath. There she was. His girl was back with light flickering in her eyes. As relief settled over him, he relaxed in the chair and watched her work. Her scrunched nose, brow pinched in concentration, and the tune drifting from her throat hurtled him back to Kilroy Tattoo. He’d changed his life that night to earn a future with her. It was time to confront the past so he could hold onto that future.
A shiver passed through him. It had been his lot to suffer an abusive childhood, but he would make damn sure her lot didn’t include another second in chains. He’d accept a death penalty if that was what it took to eliminate Roy.
He wanted her safe and happy. More than he wanted freedom, or music, or breath.
72
Charlee focused on the tattoo equipment in her hands, scrubbing the shiny steel until it shone and tucking it into a box. If she glanced up, she knew she’d be ensnared once again by the heat of Jay’s gaze. She was also certain that one more shared look and her devotion to equipment care would be deserted for sex.
Hard, rough, painful sex. The promise radiated from his stiff posture. Oh, he had one leg draped over the arm of the chair, the other stretched out in front of him to accommodate a full-body slouch.
He wasn’t fooling her. Aggressive arousal emanated from him in the unmoving way he watched her, the slack of his parted lips, the minute press of his fingertips in the armrest, and the tell-tale stretch of his fly. Her fingers itched to slip out that top button and free him.
Boisterous laughter stumbled in from the patio. Everyone had congregated outside with beer and chips, their spirited mood wafting into the night sky.
“You have a magical way of bringing people back to life, Charlee.” His timbre was husky, his gaze burning her skin.
Too bad she couldn’t bring nineteen-year-old girls back to life. She gave herself a mental slap. Hadn’t she beaten herself up enough? “Nothing’s more magical than a six-inch double rainbow over your ass.” She packed up the last machine and bent to close up the box. “All done.”