Taut Strings: A Rock Star Romance (River Valley Rebels)

by Gabrielle Sands

  “It’s catchy,” I told her before playing a slightly altered version and immediately earning an excited smile.

  Warmth spread through my body. This was off to a good start.

  By Wednesday afternoon, we had three tracks in the works. Working with Adeline was a dream, and I was even more angry at myself for not fully appreciating the potential between us earlier. It was rare to find a partner who could push you to new heights as a musician, and she was making me climb Mount fucking Everest. The exhilaration I felt at the top was unreal.

  She didn’t tease me, not like Charlie did. She also didn’t tear me down until I was no more than a shred, and somehow, we still worked well together. I couldn’t help but pray to the universe that she would agree to join the band. There was so much potential here, the thought of leaving it unrealized physically hurt.

  Unencumbered by old secrets and doubts, I felt more in touch with myself than I had in years, and I knew the truth now. I wanted her badly.

  The night of the Mastery concert had taken a sharp turn for the worst, but I’d spent the past few days replaying how Adeline had molded to my body as we’d watched the show. Her hips beneath my hands, her ass grinding into me, the sweet taste of her skin… I couldn’t get those memories out of my head.

  We stopped for a quick lunch, and I followed her to the kitchen to fill a glass of water at the sink.

  “Are you okay with a turkey sandwich? I don’t have the ingredients for anything fancier.”

  “Yes, sounds great.” I turned to face her and caught her quickly shifting her gaze up. Was she checking me out? The blush on her face was a sign I might be right.

  She sucked in a breath and walked over to the fridge. Of course, I did what any red-blooded male would do in this situation, and let my eyes drift down to her ass. It was just one of the things about her that had been on my mind a lot lately. My balls tightened, and I quickly sat down at the kitchen island.

  She made the sandwich with precise efficiency and handed me my plate before sitting down on the stool beside me and digging right in.

  I knew I was a goner when I caught myself thinking how cute she looked munching on her food.

  Fuck.

  It’s like the very real prospect of losing her had finally made me realize what an idiot I’d been all these weeks. I gulped down my water before turning slightly toward her. She must have seen my movement out of the corner of her eye because she stopped chewing for a moment before resuming.

  “So how’s Molly doing?”

  For the past two and a half days, we’d been all work. I didn’t think she’d done anything besides writing with me and working at the bar. It was great to be so focused during our sessions, but I wanted to know more about her life.

  “Fine, I think. We haven’t had a good chat in a while, but we text frequently. She says she likes two out of her three roommates, and that so far, the classes are pretty straightforward.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  The second song we were writing was shaping up to be a ballad about loss. I could piece together what I knew about Adeline’s life with the hints in the lyrics, and I was pretty sure it was about her family leaving her. Her parents in a tragic death, and Molly in a natural progression to adulthood. Of course, the two weren’t the same, but the feelings they brought up in her might be similar.

  She put the last bit of her sandwich down on the plate. “Yeah. A lot. It’s just me now in this house, and every little part of it reminds me of her. Of my family. All the things are like echoes of them, but the sources are gone. It gives me chills sometimes,” she said with a shudder.

  “Sell it,” I suggested. “Environment matters a lot. If you don’t feel good in your space, it will suck the creativity right out of you.”

  “I think I will. I just haven’t had the time to figure it all out with what’s been going on.”

  I shifted on the stool. “Molly is lucky to have you. I wish there’d been someone willing to take care of me when my mom passed.”

  It hurt to talk about my past, but a part of me craved to open up to her. To make her see that I had reasons for how I behaved toward others. For how I behaved to her.

  “You didn’t have any family besides her?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  “None who wanted that kind of a responsibility. Some of them were more than twice your age when you decided to stay by Molly’s side. You had a hell of a lot more courage than them.”

  She paled and fell silent for a moment. Then she began to speak.

  “When our parents died, I was scared as hell. I was nineteen with an underage sister to take care of, and I’d never admit it to Molly, but there were nights early on when I considered running away. My aunt and her husband would have probably stepped in if I left. We aren’t close to them, but they seem like decent enough people. I loved my sister so goddamn much, but I felt like a kid left in charge of another kid, and in my worst moments, I dreamed about the freedom of being on my own. How awful was I for even having those kinds of thoughts?”

  Her hand was on the counter, and I covered it with mine. “You weren’t being awful. You were rightfully scared.”

  She nodded, and tears glistened in her eyes. “One afternoon, Molly came home from school all smiles. I remember it clearly, because she didn’t smile a lot in the aftermath. She told me she’d won Most Courageous in the yearbook, and that over one hundred students at the school had voted for her. I congratulated her, and while she was eating her dinner in her room, I went to sit in the car in the garage to cry. In the yearbook, it said the definition of courage is ‘the ability to do something that frightens one.’ If my fifteen-year-old sister could be courageous, then what kind of a shit stain was I if I let my fear win?”

  I squeezed her hand. “What did you do then?”

  She wiped at her eyes. “Once I was done crying, I put the keys in the ignition and drove straight to the tattoo parlor. I got that definition inked down the inside of my biceps, so that I’d never forget.”

  Her basic, small-town-girl tattoo. God, how I’d misjudged her.

  I rose from the chair and wrapped my arms around her. She hugged me back, her body trembling with silent sobs that told me she didn’t share this story often.

  “I’m so sorry, Adeline,” I murmured as her hair tickled at my chin. “I was so preoccupied with my own fear that I never took the time to appreciate how much there was for me to learn from you. You’re amazing, you know that? I wish I had your strength.”

  She sobbed louder this time, and we stood in her kitchen wrapped together for what may have been minutes or hours, the clock ticking in the background as I tried to swallow up her pain.

  The guys accosted me as soon as I got home on Wednesday. We had planned to have dinner together, and it looked like Ezra had taken the liberty of bringing takeout with him before I arrived home.

  I walked into my kitchen, and all three of them turned their heads to watch me shrug my hoodie off and approach the island.

  “Status report, please.”

  I reached for a takeout box only to have Cole swipe it away from me.

  “Talk first, eat second.”

  Fucking bossy bastard. “I think it’s going well.”

  “You think?” Ezra asked, his voice careful. “You have two more days left. I think we were all hoping for a bit more than that.”

  I rubbed my neck, ignoring the rumbling in my stomach. What had passed between Adeline and I earlier today felt too intimate to share. “We’ve been working most of the time, and it’s been freakishly productive. So that’s going well. When we write, everything is smooth sailing, but as soon as we take a break, the temperature is hard to read.”

  “Are we talking Antarctica or New York in the late winter?”

  “Both of those are pretty cold,” Silas noted, his expression glum.

  “You haven’t freaked out or said anything stupid, have you?” Cole asked, earning a glare from me.

  “No,” I told him firmly. “I
’ve been letting her drive the process and contributing when I think it will help. You guys have been texting her. Hasn’t she said anything?”

  Ezra shook his head. “Nothing about this. I haven’t pried, because I don’t want her to feel like we’re ganging up on her.”

  His logic made sense, despite the fact that none of us were happy about being so in the dark about Adeline’s thinking when it came to joining the band.

  Cole pushed my food toward me at last. “Two more days. Make them count.”

  25

  ADELINE

  Two more days.

  I wasn’t sure I could keep my resolve for that much longer. Every hour spent with Abel, doing what we both loved so much, chipped away at whatever defense I had managed to erect before I agreed to spend a week together.

  He picked up on the themes of my lyrics with ease and helped me write choruses that felt as if they were simultaneously being lifted from both of our minds. Despite his eager involvement, he wasn’t a domineering songwriter, and my doubts about him letting me take the lead on the composition were quickly alleviated. The last time we worked together, he’d been driving the process, but now that the roles were reversed, we were working together just as well.

  He was respecting my craft and my ability as a songwriter, even though he had many more years of experience and success. It was thrilling to have him sit in my little bedroom with me and offer suggestions on how to take my own music to the next level.

  The first thought I had when I woke up in the morning was that I couldn’t wait to work with the rest of the band on completing the songs Abel and I had composed.

  This plan of theirs was working.

  Abel showed up at nine am sharp, as he’d done the previous three days, and I knew he’d stay until I had to start getting ready for my shift at around four. In an attempt to distract myself and continue to build up my savings, I had picked up more shifts at the bar, with only Friday and Sunday nights off.

  He halted as soon as he stepped through the doorway, his eyes catching on my hoodie.

  His hoodie.

  Shit. I had gotten into the habit of wearing it around the house because of how warm and soft it was, and definitely not because of how it smelled deliciously like him.

  “Sorry, I forgot to give it back to you,” I said nervously as his gaze shot back up to my face.

  His lips curled up, deepening the dimples in his cheeks. “Keep it. It looks better on you than it does on me.” It wasn’t what he said, but rather how he said it, all husky and low, that made heat pool between my legs.

  Today, his hair was tied at the nape of his head in a bun, and my fingers itched to pull at the elastic as we began our work. To keep from doing that, I kept playing with my own messy curls, occasionally catching Abel watching. There were flashes of hunger in his eyes that I hadn’t noticed before, and my pulse quickened at the thought of what they could mean.

  His forearm flexed as he strummed the guitar, drawing my attention to the corded muscles running up his arm. He wore a cut-off band tee that did nothing to impede the progress of my eyes from his forearm to his shoulder. His skin was darker, like mine, glowing with a gold tan that made me think he’d been spending a good bit of time in his backyard.

  Those green eyes found my gray, and something tense passed between us. Had he noticed me checking him out? My cheeks heated, and I looked down at the paper at my feet.

  “I’m going to go grab some water,” he said, forcing me to look at him again.

  “Me, too.”

  We awkwardly tried to leave the room at the same time before he took a step back to let me pass first, accidentally bumping his elbow against mine in the process. Why did that small contact light my skin on fire? I chugged my water, feeling dehydrated as fuck. He sipped his carefully, his attention still focused on me.

  “Are you all right?” His glass clinked as he lowered it into the sink.

  “Sure,” I said, leaning against the door of the fridge in an attempt to look casual.

  He frowned and walked around the kitchen island until he was only a foot away. “You seem a bit flushed. Are you sure you’re not sick?” He lifted his hand to my forehead before moving down to my cheek, and I held my breath as he conducted his spontaneous physical examination.

  Out of everyone in the band, Abel had the slightest built, but somehow, he was still crowding me with his presence in the confines of my small kitchen. My eyes trailed down his chest, noting how it rose and fell a little too quickly.

  My hand landed above his heart. Two could play at this game. “I’m not sick. But your heart rate seems a little elevated.”

  His face took on that hungry look again, and he trailed his fingers along my jaw before gripping my chin. If my phone buzzed right now, I was pretty sure the house would explode from the release of built-up tension.

  Instead, his lips descended on mine, pressing me against the door of the fridge. It was like jumping into a cold pool on a hot summer day, the initial shock quickly replaced by pure exhilaration.

  I found the goddamn elastic and ripped it out of his hair. The scent of his coconut shampoo enveloped me, and I tangled my fingers through the silky blond locks to draw him closer.

  His kiss was confident, much like his hands. One slipped under my shirt and bra to cup my naked breast. His deep moan at feeling my hardened nipple was so unlike anything I’d ever heard come out of his mouth that I trembled in triumph. I felt like a conqueror.

  I drew my nails down the arms I’d been admiring earlier today, pausing to squeeze his biceps and forearms. There were so many parts of him I didn’t known yet, and I wanted to discover them all.

  The old fridge shuddered violently behind me, and Abel pulled away at the noise, his hand still cupping my breast.

  “That…escalated quickly,” I said, glancing down at where his arm disappeared under my shirt. He extracted himself with deliberate slowness, his fingers grazing down my abs before falling to rest on my hip.

  “Must be another symptom of whatever is behind my racing heart,” he said with a teasing grin.

  My own heart was ready to burst out of my ribcage. I knew there was a lot at stake here, but in that moment, all I could think about was Abel, the way his scent lingered around me, and the fact that we had just shared our first kiss.

  And what a fucking kiss.

  “If you keep doing that to your lip, I’m going to need to intervene,” he said, making me realize I was nibbling on it.

  “I think you’d better.” I took a deep breath and closed whatever distance remained between us.

  He carried me from the kitchen to the living room couch without breaking our hungry kiss. I was ravenous, and he pressed his body down on me, letting me feel the extent of his arousal. I scratched at his back, as if some part of me wanted to mark him to prove this was really happening. When he at last pulled away from my lips, I whimpered in distress, missing the contact immediately.

  “God, Adeline,” he muttered, pressing his forehead against mine. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”

  I sucked in a shaky breath. Everything seemed unreal. Was this really the same guy who wouldn’t spare me more than an irritated look when we first met?

  He must have sensed my shock. “I’m going to make you come so many times, you’ll forget what an insufferable asshole I’ve been.”

  Damn. I chuckled. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  He grinned, and I knew that if my panties hadn’t already been wet, they would be soaking now. My toes curled in the anticipation of what was going to happen next as Abel sat up and started to unbutton my jeans.

  “Hey! Surprise!”

  I panicked and jumped off the couch, pushing Abel to the ground in the process.

  “Molly?” I shouted as I rushed to do up my pants.

  My sister waltzed into the living room with an enormous smile on her face. It quickly morphed into a look of pure horror when she took in the tableau before her.

  “O
h my God.”

  “Hey, Molly,” Abel croaked while trying to discreetly rearrange himself in his jeans before getting up.

  “What are you doing here?” I breathed.

  Her initial embarrassment seemed to be quickly replaced with giddy glee. She shot me a conspiratorial look. “I wanted to come home for the long weekend and surprise you. I thought you might need some cheering up, but clearly Abel already has that covered. I’ll be in my room!”

  “No, no.” I stopped her. There was no way we’d be resuming our earlier activity with her in the house. “Abel was just leaving. We can hang out until I have to go to work.”

  Abel nodded, his face schooled into an unreadable mask, and crossed the living room to go into my bedroom for his things.

  “That’s the one you picked?” she hissed at me excitedly when he was out of sight. “I’m honestly surprised. I was sure you’d go for Cole. He’s such a sweetheart.”

  I dragged my hands over my face. “It’s complicated.”

  Abel emerged from my room moments later with his jacket and a folder of notes. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  I rubbed at my neck, looking between him and Molly. “Um. I think I want to cancel tomorrow so that I can hang out with Mol.”

  A part of me worried he would explode and yell at me for changing the rules of our deal, but he simply nodded. “Of course, you guys need time to catch up.”

  Then he turned his attention to Molly. “We’re actually playing a secret show tomorrow in the Barnyard. Just close friends and family and folks from the community that have supported us over the years. We all would really love it if you’d both come.”

  Whoa, what? I wasn’t expecting that. He hadn’t mentioned anything to me. Was this planned a while back? Why hadn’t the guys said anything?

  Molly smirked at him. “We’ll be there.”

  “Wait a second,” I interjected. “What if I have work?”

  “Do you?” my sister fired back.

  “Well…no.”

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll see you tomorrow, Abel.”

  He gave her a rare genuine smile, and my heart tremored at the sight. “Nine pm. Don’t be late.”