Dare (The Dare Trilogy)

by Sara Frost

  Chapter Thirteen

  For the next few hours, the two of them endured Darius’s monologues as they drove towards Berlin. Fortunately, the lead singer of Optima seemed more concerned to have an audience for his long-winded speeches for all that he had claimed to want to get to know them. For most of the journey, Dianne attempted not to glower at Elizabeth who curled her red lips in a sardonic smile whenever she saw the younger woman looking at her. For his part, Cam seemed to wish he was a million miles away.

  With typical lack of forethought, Darius gave no instructions as to where his two guests were to be dropped in Berlin: indeed, for an hour or so he seemed to have lost all interest in Dianne and Cam when they had failed to react with suitable enthusiasm to his suggestion for an impromptu orgy. As such, after the rest of Optima and their hangers on—including Johnny looking considerably worse for wear, half-supported by the two German women he had spent most of the time with—had cleared the coach, Dianne and Cam found themselves lost somewhere in the heart of the city.

  “Wait a minute,” Cam said with a sigh. “I’ll phone Tony and find out where we’re meant to be going. Hopefully they’ll have made it there already.”

  The phone rang out a couple of times but as soon as Cam spoke into it he held it away from his ear. Even at this distance Dianne could hear the Irishman shouting angrily.

  “Okay, okay,” Cam said, attempting to be as reassuring as possible. “I’ll sort it out when I get there -” He interrupted himself as Tony launched into another diatribe. “Jesus, Tony! I’ll do it as soon as I get there. Just tell me where you are!”

  Eventually he managed to extricate himself from the call and looked towards the bright blue sky above the tall buildings that surrounded them. “Give me strength,” he muttered.

  “A problem?” Dianne asked. She was torn: in recent days, there had been no repeat of the disasters from their first night in Paris, but she was unsure how much she wanted to stay on the tour if such problems were going to recur. At the same time, she felt deeply for Cam: seeing Elizabeth again had roused her anger, but after several hours on a coach with Darius and his malevolent companion she realised that Cam was simply embarrassed by the other woman’s presence.

  He shrugged. “Nothing too bad, I hope. I think Tony was just venting off after listening to Dan whinge on for hours. It seems the hotel doesn’t have air-conditioning, and our bass-player’s sensibilities are unable to endure such privations.”

  As they walked down the Kurfürstendamm, the long street of shops, hotels, bars and clubs that radiated away from the heart of Berlin, Cam was somewhat grumpy but Dianne put aside for a moment any sense of anxiety. The wide road was flanked by a mixture of elegant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings interspersed with cooler, modern shop fronts, with people walking along the busy thoroughfare and occasionally gathered at eateries that lined the pavements. Everyone—and everything—seemed relaxed, with the inhabitants of the city enjoying the summer air.

  Not that Dianne’s mind was entirely on this pleasurable experience, soaking up the atmosphere of Berlin as they continued on their way. “You said you went to school with him,” she said after a while, putting into words a thought that had been with her for several days now.

  “Who?” asked Cam, looking at her with a slightly goofy look as he tried to focus on what she had said.

  “Johnny. You said you’d been at school with him.”

  He smiled at this, though Dianne couldn’t help but notice there was a slight sadness to his expression. “Yeah, little Johnny McIntyre.”

  “Little?” she scoffed. “If he’s your idea of little, I’d hate to meet a giant in the world of Cam Fraser.”

  This made him laugh. “He was a late developer, was John. I knew him pretty much from when he started school—not that it was difficult. We both lived in pretty small towns and villages, and there was only one school for miles around. He used to be bullied mercilessly at one time, but when he hit—oh, I don’t know, ten, eleven?—he started to shoot up and people left him alone after that. And then his good looks started to shine through and he was very popular with all the girls.”

  “So you had to stand at the sidelines jealously?” Dianne teased, sliding her hand through the crook of his arm.

  Smiling, Cam shook his head. “We were both terrors together,” he said, then, remembering who he was talking to, he shook his head. “But you don’t want to hear about that.”

  For a second, Dianne felt her heart clench inside her chest and agreed with him. But only for a second. Her curiosity had the better of her.

  “What was he like, when you and he went round together?”

  Cam thought about it for a second. “Actually, he was pretty damn shy. Lived for his music. We were inseparable at one point, but that was a decade ago—even longer now.” His eyes looked towards the horizon as he became lost in old thoughts. Reviving himself from these, he shook his head again. “I went away to university, but Johnny was just nuts about his guitar. He always told me—anyone who’d listen—that he was going to be the best. None of us believed him at the time.”

  “And he proved you all wrong.”

  “I guess he did.” Cam’s smile was fixed, a little rueful.

  “He doesn’t look the shy type,” Dianne added after a while, thinking of his behaviour on the bus with the two German women.

  “Oh, he’s grown very good at putting on a front. You have to do that with Darius, I guess. It’s do what Darius says or find your own way in the world.” Cam did not try to disguise the bitterness in his voice.

  Dianne held back the rest of her questions as they turned off the main thoroughfare into a side road. To one side was a six-storey high building, the front white with wide doors and windows, a sign announcing that it was the hotel they were looking for.

  “Well, it doesn’t look so bad,” Dianne said as they stood before the steps. Certainly had she been booking a place for herself, her own budget would have stretched this far: it was just a shame not to be treated a little more extravagantly. She thought of Darius’s comment that she should join him and travel in style before squashing the idea guiltily.

  “Not so bad,” Cam agreed hesitantly. He looked down at Dianne and pressed her hand, a slightly shameful look on his place. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Not for the first time I think I’ve dragged you out here on false pretences. This was hardly what you had in mind when you joined us, I’m sure. Hell, it’s not really what I had in mind.”

  “Don’t be an arse,” she told him affectionately, pressing her face to his arm. “I would never have dared to go on a trip across London. Anyway,” she added, smiling shyly, “I’m enjoying being with you.”

  He said nothing in response to this, but she saw his bright blue eyes glisten slightly. Then he looked back at the entrance and took a deep breath. “Come on,” he said at last. “Let’s see what the damage is.”

  The hotel was not as bad as Tony had led them to believe, being a family-run affair that may have lacked the mod cons but was clean and neat. Going to the reception, Cam quickly established that the rest of Black Ark had already checked in.

  Taking the lift to the second floor and checking that their bags had been dropped off there, Cam suggested that Dianne remain in the room while he went and found the other band members. Agreeing readily enough, Dianne took off her jacket and looked out of the window as she heard the door close behind her. At the far end of the street she could just make out the Kurfürstendamm, still busy as the afternoon rolled into the evening, though few people made their way down the side street where the hotel was located.

  The room itself was as neat and clean as the rest of the hotel, but somewhat bare, lacking even a TV. It was also a little muggy but Dianne did not mind an open window in place of air-con, letting the noises of the city drift in alongside the cooler air.

  There was, at least, an en suite, though it was somewhat small containing a shower rathe
r than a bath. She wasn’t so fussed about that, though she wondered if Dan’s irritation was not so much that the hotel itself was basic as the notion that he wasn’t being treated in the fashion he expected as a rising rock star. Not for the first time she was grateful she had fallen in with Cam and not the bass player, though she had a hard time conceiving any woman being interested in the miserable Mancunian.

  Turning on the water in the shower, she stripped from her clothes, glad to remove the grime of travelling before she stepped beneath the hot spray. Within moments her hair was plastered against her neck and shoulders as she reached out for the soap and began to rub along her arms, across her chest, massaging the suds into her heavy breasts. The water made her skin alive, reviving its freshness, and soon she had forgotten all her cares, singing aloud as she cleaned herself.

  So lost was she in her toilette that she did not hear Cam enter the bathroom and jumped when he pulled aside the curtain that sealed off the shower from the rest of the room.

  “Now that is a sight for sore eyes,” he said, grinning.

  Instinctively, she had crossed her arms across her breasts, but the sight of his handsome face made her naughty and she opened them again, stretching out wet fingers towards him.

  “Why don’t you come and join me?” she asked. Her eyes glanced downwards, towards a familiar lump in his jeans. He sighed.

  “I’d love to,” he told her. “But there’s dissension in the ranks. I’ve got to go with the others and check out the venue. They won’t be happy until they see that we’ve not been dumped in a similar dive as that place in Paris.”

  She frowned at this, her lips pouting outwards. “Surely you don’t have to go now,” she said.

  Instead of moving, Cam was staring at her, his eyes clear and piercing, that lump in his trousers becoming larger every second. “I should find more time for you,” he said, quietly.

  She leaned forward, placing one hand around his neck, suds running down the fabric of his shirt and his skin. Pulling herself closer to him, her wet breasts squashing against his broad chest, she rubbed her hips against his thigh and lifted her face so that her mouth was millimetres against his.

  “You’re all wet,” she told him, “and you can’t go out like that. You need to clean up before you do anything else, Mister Fraser—and before you get clean, you have to get really dirty first.”

  His grin was irrepressible as he allowed her to lead him gently into the shower, hot water splashing over his hair and clothes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dianne felt slightly apprehensive as she waited near the front of the stage for Black Ark to come on. The nightclub—Feuerwerk—was by no means the largest in Berlin but nor was it as dingy as its alternative exterior had led her to believe. Outside, various smaller bars and clubs promised cabaret acts and other, more esoteric, delights, and certainly the clientele filling the room seemed to be dressed overwhelmingly in black, some of them affecting the powdery white makeup that Darius wore on stage. If nothing else, the lead singer of Optima would be at home.

  As she usually did, she had no desire to hang around backstage with Darius’s other camp followers. Even after ten days on tour, the experience of seeing Optimus play (and Black Ark, of course) was still enough of a thrill for her to want to get among the crowd, to see the performance as it was meant to be seen and to throw herself into a frenzied dance. In any case, the conversation with Darius on his coach had unsettled her, and she had no desire to be alone with him while Black Ark played their set.

  In any case, although she had to admit that the strange glamour of Optima did cast its spell over her during their performances—even if Darius Optimus himself failed to live up to the illusion—she also wanted to be there, to be visible, for Cam and the rest of his crew. Black Ark had spent the afternoon scrupulously checking and double checking their sound system. Cam’s face was set in grim determination, and though he did not speak about it to the others Dianne knew that he was intent on showing Optima that his band was a force to be reckoned with.

  She was standing among a few people, idly curious as to what the support band would be like, before the stage, her arms wrapped around her chest. The air was warm and a little humid in the club, and her posture was more due to nerves than anything else—and also to cover her breasts from the stunted local, in his fifties if he was a day, who was ogling her with a leer that made her skin crawl.

  For the most part, the crowd was not a million miles away from the others she had seen since that first night in London, though there was a harder edge to them she felt. This also made her nervous: clearly many of them would greet Optima adoringly, but Black Ark would have their work cut out to impress this lot.

  Not for the first time, however, she pondered the size of this venue. From the way Darius spoke, he intended to be playing stadiums across Europe, but in the end she had found herself in nightclubs similar in size to Feuerwerk. That would not have surprised her—one of the things she had always appreciated about Optima was that although they were undoubtedly popular, they were also something of an acquired taste for most listeners. Darius’s ambition and hubris, however, clearly wanted much more.

  She was disturbed from these and other musings by Cam leading out the rest of the crew onto the stage. There was a murmur among the crowd, and one isolated cheer. Before Dianne could add her voice to it, however, a plastic glass half-filled with beer sailed through the air before tipping its contents over Cam, soaking his shirt.

  Dianne’s heart stopped in her chest and she wanted to scream in anger at the member of the audience who had thrown the missile. Cam, however, surprised her by not displaying any temper. Instead, he calmly strode to the microphone at the front and called out: “Danke, Berlin! Sie haben mein Durst gestillt!”

  This raised a laugh from some members of the audience, but then Cam followed it with a flourish that changed the atmosphere completely. Tugging the front of his shirt, he sucked some of the beer with a comic look that made more people laugh, but when he lifted the fabric and pulled it over his shoulders, revealing a broad chest and muscular arms decorated with black tattoos, his abs a rippling washboard above the waistband of his jeans, more people began to cheer—mainly women, Dianne noted with a mixture of jealousy and satisfaction. There were a few catcalls and whistles, and she was sure that plenty of those females around her could not help but see the large, solid bulge in his jeans. Dianne suddenly felt herself becoming wet between the legs, her heart beating more rapidly in her chest.

  Cam gave a huge grin at this, his eyes glittering and his teeth shining white, his face carved in its beauty. His eyes scanned the audience until they came to rest on Dianne at last, and now his grin transformed into a warm smile, his whole face shining when he saw her.

  The look between them could only have lasted a few seconds, but to Dianne it felt as though hours had passed. She was giddy, and as she watched him turn to Tony, James and Dan, nodding to them with complete self-composure as he strapped his guitar across his bare shoulders, she realised that something had subtly changed. Darius had goaded him, and now Cam refused to hide his talents. This was where he belonged.

  The drums kicked in with a steady, powerful beat, joined shortly after by Cam and Dan on guitar and bass. For someone who had not even heard of Black Ark two weeks before, Dianne was quickly becoming an aficionado of the groups (admittedly limited) back catalogue: Fire, one of those songs that Cam thought was his best. When he moved to the microphone, however, glaring into the space before him with a determined intensity, as he began to sing Dianne was shocked.

  “Du bist mein Feuer, meine ewige Flamme—immer, wenn ich dein Gesicht sehen, Ich durch die Nacht brennen.” The whistles and calls from the audience suddenly turned into a mighty cheer from those people who were nearest the stage, and the rest of the club, intrigued at the very least by what they had supposed to be a British band, now started to surge forward.

  The music was fast, powerful, impulsive. Sensing that at last she
was no longer surrounded by potentially antagonistic people, Dianne gave herself up to the music, letting it surge through her as she threw her head back, her long, black hair whipping her face, her muscles twitching in her limbs as she lost herself in her dance.

  “Du bist alles was ich will, meine Lust für dich wird niemals sterben.” Dianne understood little of what Cam sang, but his voice, growling and deep, echoed deep within her chest, her belly, her loins, and she felt a wetness and desire for him that astonished her as it surged. His voice raged in her ears, her mind, her heart, her groin, passionate and powerful.

  “Du alles tun, aber ich brauche mehr. Ich war schon immer dein, jetzt gib mir dich.”

  At that moment, Dianne opened her eyes and looked up—straight into Cam’s handsome, dominant face, his blue eyes glittering with an icy fire, staring directly at her.

  It had been a while, but in that instant she experienced an orgasm, gasping and shrieking with pleasure simply by looking at him, hearing him.

  For the rest of the set, Dianne was a mess, her body throbbing, desperate, flinging itself to the front of the stage, ignoring the other bodies that pummelled into her as Black Ark played with a fury that she had never heard before. The sound was loud, clear, perfect, and her thighs were shaking, her nipples stiff and hurting inside her bra, her own voice hoarse as she screamed more loudly than anyone around her. She had no care how she appeared to anyone else: she was lost, willingly abandoning herself to the emotions she felt at that moment.

  By the time Black Ark finished, the crowd let out an enormous cheer that filled Feuerwerk. Cam was grinning wildly, waving a tightly-muscled arm, glistening with sweat, above his head. His expression was shared by the rest of the band—even Dan was smiling—and Dianne jumped up and down, whooping with glee.