Come Undone

by Madelynne Ellis

  What surprised him most was that another forty bulbs hadn’t flashed after the first. No one jabbered any questions at him either, which was good. It gave him time to tidy up: tie off the condom and, with no other place to put it, cast it into the sea, along with a prayer that it wouldn’t end up as part of some kid’s sandcastle tomorrow morning.

  OK, the silence started getting to him. No press pack had ever been this stealthy. He zipped his fly and turned his head. Cue flash number two, right into his eyes, but not courtesy of a bug-eyed man in a flasher mac. The girl wore torn fishnet tights with platform Mary Janes, and a cute little dress made of black tartan. Her three compatriots, although less overt in their costuming, nevertheless revealed themselves as his fans with the pitch of their screams.

  ‘Bad timing, ladies,’ he muttered to himself. Nevertheless, he erased the wrath from his face and, with a shrug, spun to face them.

  ‘It is you. It’s so, wow. It’s so, wow!’ The girl with the camera explained. ‘I can’t fucking believe it! Brigitte said she’d seen Mr Matlock at the airport, but we didn’t believe her. Are you all here, the whole band?’

  ‘It’s just me. Downtime,’ he explained. Obviously, news of Black Halo’s split hadn’t reached them yet.

  ‘What are you doing? Is that your sister?’ The latter was directed at Dani, who’d moved a step or three behind him, well out of frame of any more snapshots.

  ‘No,’ he laughed. ‘My sister’s not that cute.’ That, and the thought of making out with her turned his guts.

  ‘You know, we can be cute for you too.’ This from the girl dressed in skintight PVC with an obvious Catwoman fetish. Cute in that context didn’t much turn him on. Being clawed wasn’t his thing.

  ‘How about an autograph?’ asked one.

  ‘Or your shirt,’ said another.

  ‘I want his shirt.’

  ‘I want his trousers,’ Catwoman insisted.

  In a sudden escalation of lust, things turned from being relatively calm into a frenzy. Several sets of hands pinched at his clothing. Touches strayed over several inappropriate places. Xane twisted, losing his shirt in a bid to be free of them. He was doing quite well until Tartan Girl performed a flying leap. He caught her but stumbled under the impact, spun wildly and smashed his knee against the sea wall. His leg buckled, dropping him. His chin hit the railing, which set off dynamite in his ear.

  Balance bulldozed into submission, he failed to break his fall, and scraped his head against the wall in the process of colliding with the pavement.

  Fuck, that hurt!

  ‘Nooo! Get off him. Off.’ Dani slapped them out of the way. She leaned over him.

  ‘Xane, are you all right? Xane, talk to me.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s only a graze.’ He’d suffered worse injuries while netting balls with Jan and Paul between laying down tracks at the recording studios. Still, he put his fingers to the wound on his temple, to make sure it was only a graze and nothing more disfiguring. Luckily he’d fallen to the right and not the left, which might have torn out his eyebrow piercings.

  Dani, meanwhile, bared her teeth at the girls. She looked so ferocious, so unlike her normal sweet self, he immediately became more besotted with her. ‘You idiots! Were you trying to kill him?’

  Now that was cute.

  Xane always fought his own battles. Nobody had ever stuck up for him, let alone a woman. Yet this little dot of a girl was apparently prepared to tear off limbs on his behalf. That made him want to squeeze her so tight, he was sure to cause an injury.

  For good measure, he let out a groan.

  His attackers all paled.

  ‘We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to hurt him.’

  ‘Is he all right? You know we didn’t mean any harm. We love him.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll still sign my boob?’ asked Catwoman, which rather implied he’d already agreed, and told him that she, at least, wasn’t remotely concerned about whether he was genuinely injured.

  ‘No, he frigging well can’t,’ Dani yelled.

  Xane found the scene unexpectedly hilarious. Laughter spluttered up his throat. Immediately Dani’s attention returned to him. She swept his hair back from his face and forced him to look at her. ‘You’re bleeding. You’ve had a bang on the head, are you feeling OK?’

  ‘Never better.’ He hugged her tight, and pressed a smacker of a kiss on her lips, which provoked howls of outrage from his four admirers. Having stunned Dani into silence, he then perfected an upright pose.

  Yep, he was fine. No wooziness, no headache, and no obvious damage beyond the scrape. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Someone wanted a signature.’

  As if by magic, a marker pen appeared, thrust into his face alongside Catwoman’s boobs. He scrawled his spiky signature across the swell of her right breast, underlining it and finishing with a stylised skull doodle.

  Dani stared at him the whole time, jealousy raging within those soft brown eyes. But she didn’t make a remark or any sort of fuss. This was part of who he was; entertaining fans was expected. Xane sincerely hoped her silence was a sign that she could handle that facet of his life. It’d proved a sticking point for most of his past dates, with the obvious exception of Elspeth, who had just as many guys and girls crushing over her as there were babes desperate to snatch a piece of him.

  Catwoman appeased, Xane found the other women lined up with various parts of their anatomy bared for him to scrawl his name on. Only Little Miss Tartan girl offered him something less visceral to decorate. He signed her purse.

  ‘Can I have a kiss too?’ she enquired cheekily.

  ‘Sorry, no can do. Sore throat. Can’t risk spreading it. It might be glandular fever.’

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed, her cute button face downcast. ‘Well, what about if I kissed you, you know, somewhere else, other than your mouth.’ Her gaze dropped none too subtly to his groin.

  Xane took an urgent pace backwards. He’d had scenes like this escalate quite suddenly before. ‘That wouldn’t be very appropriate, would it? Though I’m sure you’d be profoundly good at it.’

  A raspberry blush spread across her cheeks. ‘I have been told I make a fab submissive.’

  Now that he didn’t believe. Her image might be all girlish sugar-coated innocence, but he very much doubted she let any man have his way in the bedroom. He’d lay money on her being the type to top from below.

  ‘I prefer my women dominant,’ he said, in order to watch her reaction, since it wasn’t strictly true. That admission earned him another ‘aw’ and a purr of delight from Catwoman. Shame he wasn’t interested in pursuing her glittering offer either. The only woman he wanted near his cock at the moment was the same woman he intended to take to bed for the next three days, the woman he’d spent a gazillion years looking for. Daniella Fosbrook definitely had something about her that made her worth holding on to.

  ‘Well, if we can’t kiss you goodnight, can we at least walk you back to your hotel?’

  These four didn’t let up. He really didn’t think that was such a bright plan. For starters, he didn’t want them to know where he was staying, and secondly, he didn’t think they’d disperse without hefty persuasion once they got there.

  ‘How about I have a quick drink with you ladies instead?’ he suggested, to coos of delight. ‘Where were you headed?’

  Chapter 20

  Xane knew a thing or two about fans, the primary one being not to upset them, and, given his recent track record involving a stadium full of disappointment, he figured he couldn’t risk alienating anyone else. Not if he didn’t want his career to nosedive completely. As it was, the next few months were going to be tough. Whether he restyled Black Halo or built a new band out of the ashes of the old, many of his longtime fans would desert him. People didn’t like change. They liked their favourites to keep on rocking in the same way they always had. Even Dani got twitchy when he suggested the band was dead. He wished he could promise her that Black Halo had a future, but he just didn’t kn
ow.

  Elspeth had to go, but Steve – he couldn’t think straight about the guy. His nose stung and his head started swimming whenever his thoughts strayed in that direction. He appreciated that things had been tense between them of late, but he’d genuinely believed their friendship had remained solid. He wished he could talk to him, ask him why he’d gone behind his back like that, yet at the same time he didn’t want to talk to him at all.

  They headed into the first bar they happened upon, Xane having got his shirt back on the promise that he’d hand it over again before he left. The place also served snacks, and so consisted of cosy circular booths suitable for private dining. Naturally, he ended up in the centre with two ladies apiece either side of him, and Dani tacked on the end of the curved seat like an afterthought – a situation she bore with admirable stoicism.

  Xane promised himself he’d make it up to her at the first opportunity. He prayed she understood that she had nothing to fear from these women. He’d much rather be alone with her than any number of fawning fangirls. Still, one drink had somehow become two, and then three. He didn’t plan to make it four.

  ‘I saw your set at the Salle des Etoiles when you did the Gala Evening last summer,’ Tartan Girl explained to him, her voice breathless with excitement. The whole of her seemed to thrum as though she were in a state of constant arousal.

  Xane wasn’t sure if that was down to his presence or if it was simply her normal state of being. Her name, he’d determined, was Tori. With her were Brigitte, Clara and Catwoman, who was Annalise. Tori wasn’t native Monégasque but she had spent most of her life there, hence her propensity to switch between French and English without warning, though for the last few minutes she’d seemed to be preferring French. Xane suspected the choice was down to Dani’s inability to understand what was being said.

  Never mind that he was striving to keep the conversation clean and Tori’s hands out of his pants. It probably sounded like a whole lot of dirty to Dani, especially given the way the woman liked to lean towards him conspiratorially as she spoke, and use all these breathless pauses.

  His poor ladybug was sitting so straight she looked as if she had iron rods welded to her spine. She was going to take some unwinding once he got her back to the suite.

  Not that he minded helping her to relax.

  Xane’s cock stirred as he imagined how he might do that. He had a few tricks in his repertoire, and he wasn’t afraid to experiment in order to work out her kinks. Whatever it took, he promised both her and himself.

  The memory of her soft, tight pussy clasping him in a fluttering embrace momentarily caused an unfortunate lapse in his focus, during which Tori’s hand found its way onto his knee, then up the inside seam of his trousers. She’d almost reached her goal and copped a feel of his package when he thwarted her by standing up.

  ‘Excuse me. Excuse me.’ He shuffled his way around the table and made like he was heading to the bar for more drinks. He even went to the effort of ordering another round, while he slipped the waiter a hefty tip to call him a taxi. It was past time he and Dani split. Though he could have jogged to the hotel in less than five minutes, the taxi would take them door to door without the risk of them being followed. All he had to do was alert Dani to his plan.

  Dani pre-emptively joined him by the bar as he swallowed the shot of whisky he’d ordered. ‘What did she offer to do for you – blow you, perhaps? Give you the use of her tits?’

  Xane turned his back to the bar. ‘Actually, she was telling me about the last Halo gig she attended, and how she has a set of Paul’s drumsticks and one of Spook’s baseball boots.’

  ‘Seriously, you expect me to believe all that … breathless … ness … was … over … Jan … Mortensen’s smelly old shoe?’ Dani asked, imitating the other woman’s pattern of speech. ‘You … must … be … fucking … nuts! I saw where she had her hand.’

  Xane shook his head. ‘Not anywhere I wanted it. There’s only one woman’s hands I want on me.’

  ‘Then why rush to the bar after your conspiratorial whisper? No one needed another drink.’

  He did.

  ‘Was I not supposed to notice her slipping off to the toilets at the same time, and you following a moment later?’

  ‘You really think I’m going to do that?’

  Dani folded her arms defensively across her chest. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Have I given you reason to think that I would? Of course, if you’d like me to follow you in there …’

  Her mouth opened and closed again without her making a sound.

  ‘Your taxi’s outside, monsieur,’ the waiter leaned over the bar to inform him.

  Dani blinked and searched his face for an explanation.

  ‘Don’t pout, and I’ll pretend you didn’t accuse me of trying to sidle off with someone else. I’m only interested in you, Dani. That’s why I invited you. If I’d just wanted to scratch an itch, I’d have flown here alone, and probably taken all four of them somewhere and had them one after the other. Is that honest enough for you?’

  Dani stared at him, a thoughtful, slightly sorrowful expression on her face.

  ‘The point is, I haven’t chosen to do that. I don’t enjoy soulless partying. It eats away at me. I’d much rather make love to someone I have a connection with.’

  ‘So we have a connection, do we?’

  ‘Don’t we? You at least try to understand me. And you look out for me in a way none of these ladies will ever do.’

  ‘Well, I suppose …’

  ‘Like you’re my girlfriend.’

  ‘Like,’ she parroted, as though she couldn’t quite comprehend his meaning. She shook her head vehemently, while her knuckles whitened where she gripped the edge of the bar. ‘Like, but not actually.’

  Xane snatched another drink off the tray and gulped it down, feeling rather put on the spot. Considering the wasteland ruins of his most recent relationship were only a day old, he wasn’t committing himself to anything, even if he did really like her.

  She certainly made a welcome change from Elspeth, whose flighty, floaty image was all show. Dani simply didn’t demand the same level of expectations, nor did she create complications, or seek out controversy for the sake of it.

  The only thing he couldn’t figure out about her was why she was so neurotic over her body. As far as he was concerned, she was absolutely gorgeous, soft and curvy in all the right places.

  He hoped some idiot ex hadn’t suggested she was fat, or something equally odious. If that were the case, he’d happily rip off the guy’s dick for knocking her confidence, should they ever happen to meet.

  Drink drained, Xane returned the glass to the tray. ‘Let’s go.’ Hand between her shoulder blades, he nudged Dani towards the exit.

  Thank God, the car sat right outside. He guided her straight onto the back seat.

  Halfway into the taxi himself, he stopped. ‘Ah, shit!’ he muttered, backing out again. While he thought nothing of running out on the four rock babes, having already reached his tolerance limit over their wandering hands, he refused to rescind a promise.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dani called, shock evident in her voice as he backtracked to the bar door.

  ‘Two seconds. I’m coming.’ He peeled off his shirt in front of the doorman and handed the bewildered man his shirt along with an apology. ‘Could you give this to the four ladies in the corner booth? It belongs to them.’

  ‘Monsieur?’

  Xane bounded back to the car. He ducked, hurled himself onto the backseat and slammed the door. ‘Hotel de Paris,’ he snapped, before sliding close to Dani. He felt sure the doorman would fulfil his request. What else was he supposed to do with a random stranger’s shirt?

  The taxi pulled away with a roar, but barely got into third gear before their destination sprang into view. The driver let them out beside the canopied stone steps at the front of their hotel.

  Xane stuffed a twenty-euro note into his hand and then, holding Dani’s hand tight
ly, sped up the steps, past hotel security and into the nearest elevator.

  ‘What the devil was that about?’ she asked pointedly as the metal doors closed. ‘Are you determined to reveal your whereabouts to the whole planet? Another twenty minutes and I’ll bet that everybody and their gran knows you’re in Monte Carlo.’

  ‘Four people can hardly be considered the whole world.’

  ‘Ain’t you heard of Facebook and Flickr?’

  ‘I did it quickly.’ And with good reason. Nudity, even semi-nudity, wasn’t tolerated on the streets of Monaco. ‘Did you know you can get done around here for wearing your swimming costume on the streets? Being seen with my shirt off is more likely to earn me a night in the cells than raucously serenading the locals with my rendition of “The Final Countdown”.’

  Seemingly perplexed, Dani squinted at him. ‘I wasn’t specifically talking about your shirt, more the whole drinks thing. And you didn’t actually have to hand over your shirt.’

  ‘A promise is a promise.’

  She pursed her lips, and then added, ‘You know the words to that?’

  Xane grinned wide and hard. ‘Course. Everyone knows the words to that. Dur nr nr ner, dur nr n n ner,’ he belted out. ‘It’s the final –’

  ‘Stop it,’ Dani begged, her frown morphing into an enormous grin. ‘Please don’t. I don’t want my image of you wrecked.’

  ‘You don’t like my singing?’ He continued his exaggerated performance, adding a few hair flicks.

  ‘Please.’ Her fingers trailed against his abs. ‘I love your singing, but not when you’re singing this. Oh, God, stop it.’ She laughed. ‘Xane, please.’

  He leaned around her to hit the appropriate floor button, and used their nearness as an excuse to snuggle even closer. Dani turned her face away from him to stop him kissing her, but more, he sensed, because she was still laughing too hard, rather than out of any desire to avoid him. He aimed for a spot by the base of her ear instead. Oh, man, she smelled incredible, a tantalising mix of fragrance and arousal, and she felt so good in his arms, her curves fitting against him so well.