She grimaced down at the red dress. “My sister has the same one, but it’s okay. She will probably take it off later and run around in only her diaper.”
“Nev!” Drake’s deep voice, slightly raspy from all his years of overindulgence of Jack Daniel’s, bellowed just as we reached the door.
“Here I am, Daddy!” she called as she wiggled out of Linc’s arms and ran to find her father.
“What did I say about opening the door?” Drake asked his eldest daughter, his face slightly tense. “You scared me.”
“Sorry, Daddy, I just wanted to hug Uncle Linc.” She jumped into his arms, and all the tension seemed to evaporate out of him before my eyes as she kissed his cheek. “I won’t do it again.”
He blew out a long sigh. “Yeah, okay. You better not.” Stepping forward, he shook Linc’s then my hand before smiling welcomingly at my mom. “You must be Ellen. Angel told me all about you.”
At his smile, Mom seemed to swoon. “A-Angel?”
“Lana,” Linc supplied for her.
“Oh, oh,” she said with a smile, her eyes still wide as she drank in the sight of the sexy-as-hell Demon before her. With his long, dark hair pulled back into a bun and his blue-gray eyes shining with amusement, I always had a little trouble looking away from him too. “I didn’t realize Lana had such a…handsome husband.”
I read everything she hadn’t said but wanted to. She hadn’t realized Lana Stevenson had a husband who was considerably older than her. Drake was over a decade older, and because of his years of alcoholism, he looked several years older than he really was. Lana, on the other hand, looked younger than ever, barely out of her teens, even though she had two daughters.
“Dray?” Lana came out of the crowd of family and friends, her youngest on her hip. “Did she run off again?” She frowned up at her daughter. “What did we talk about, Nevi?”
“Sorry, Mommy.”
Turning to us, she stepped forward to kiss Linc’s cheek and hug Mom. “Hi, Ellen. We’re so glad you could be with us this year.” She glanced at Drake. “I see you’ve met my husband. Is he behaving himself?”
“I always behave,” Drake admonished her teasingly, placing a hand on her hip. “Come in, guys. Emmie is making the rounds, but there is food in the dining room set up buffet-style and plenty to drink in the kitchen.”
The night was full of laughter and good food. The house was overrun with babies, it seemed, all of them wanting their moment with their “Uncle Linc.” Mom appeared to be having the time of her life, and I didn’t want to leave anytime soon, just because I was having so much fun watching her.
Very few people at the party were related by blood, but that didn’t seem to matter. They treated each other like family, and I realized Mom and I were lucky to be included this year.
It made me want this every year.
But as the night wore on, the house became overheated, and I needed a little breather from the happy chaos inside. Sneaking off for a little silence, I walked out onto the deck. The pool was uncovered, toys floating around in it, but I walked around it to the railing.
The moon was bright and unobstructed by a single cloud, making it easy to see the white-capped waves as they hit the beach in the near distance. The sound was soothing after the loudness from inside the house. All the voices had started to blend together, all the kids’ laughter echoing in my ears. It had just been Mom and me all my life. I wasn’t used to all this family love.
I was so focused on the waves, I didn’t hear his footsteps until he wrapped his arms around me from behind. “Were they too much for you?”
I leaned back into him. “Just needed a breather. It was getting too warm in there.”
“They take some getting used to,” he murmured, not letting me get away with the half-truth. “But they’re the best people to have in your corner if you need them. When I first got pulled into this family through Lana, I didn’t know how to take it. They accepted me without so much as a blink. Treated me like I belonged to them. It was so different from what I was used to, I didn’t trust it in the beginning. But over the years, they grew on me.”
If I were being honest, it wasn’t the crowd that was making me nervous. It was tomorrow. I didn’t know why I’d done it, but the present I got Linc was something I was unsure of how he would react to. I’d been out shopping with my mom a few weeks back and passed the jewelry store. While Mom went off to get a few extra little things, I’d gone in and picked out an engagement band on a whim.
Now the idea of actually proposing come tomorrow was making me anxious as fuck.
We’d only been back together since August. This was the longest we’d been together without breaking up along the way, but that didn’t mean we were ready for that next step. Maybe we never would be. I had no business buying him a ring when I didn’t even know how he was going to react to my asking him to marry me.
Linc touched his lips to my neck. “When I was a boy, I never thought any of this would be possible. My parents always told me I didn’t deserve to have someone love me forever. For the longest time, I believed them.”
“I fucking hate your parents,” I bit out, my nervousness pushed aside for the moment at the mention of those bastards.
“I just feel sorry for them these days,” he admitted. “They were never happy people. Too worried what the world thought of them to care about what really mattered. They are weak-minded, and I doubt they’ve ever really known happiness.” His breath brushed over my ear. “Not like I have.”
My heart clenched with love for him. “Linc…”
“Getting you back, that has been the best present I’ve ever been given. I told myself, if I never get another gift for the rest of my life, as long as I have you, it wouldn’t matter to me.” He blew out a small breath and laughed quietly. “But I lied to myself. There is one more gift I want, and then life will truly be perfect.”
I frowned out at the ocean. “What’s that?” Because whatever he wanted, I’d make it happen. No matter the cost, no matter what I had to do, I would give him whatever he needed.
“You as my husband.”
I turned around so fast, we bumped chests, but I needed to see his face to make sure he wasn’t just playing with me.
Taking my hand, Linc dropped to his knees in front of me, his green eyes bright with the same anxiety I was feeling only moments before. “I was going to wait until tomorrow, but I can’t wait another second. The waiting has been killing me. I love you, Rhett. I want to spend every day for the rest of my life by your side. You have become my best friend as well as my lover, but there’s this pressure beating down on top of me because I need to link you to me in every way imaginable. So I’m asking you—fuck, I’m begging you, babe—to marry me.”
“Did you snoop and see your present?” I demanded, glaring down at him.
His brows pinched together. “No. Of course not. Why—?”
“Because I was going to ask you the same thing tomorrow!” I exploded.
Linc surprised me for the second time in as many minutes by throwing his head back and laughing out loud. “Really?” he choked out around his continued laughter.
“Really,” I grumbled.
One brow lifted. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I groused, my lip pouting out at him.
“Will you marry me, Rhett?” he asked again, losing some of his confidence.
“Say yes!”
My head snapped up over his shoulder to see Mom and everyone else standing in the now-open French doors that led to the living room. Tears poured down Mom’s face as well as Dallas’s and Harper’s.
“Say yes,” the others echoed.
A weak laugh left my lips as Linc’s fingers tightened on my own. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I told him in a quiet voice.
“Rhett…” His voice turned pleading.
“Yes!” I yelled, filling the night with my acceptance. “Yes. I want to marry you more than anything. I love you.”
Relief flashed ove
r his face, darkening his eyes, while everyone behind him started cheering and celebrating. Linc jumped to his feet, kissing me hard in front of everyone. “I fucking love you,” he growled.
Mieke
Chapter 1
Mieke
I felt his eyes on me as I moved through the crowded frat house. Those same eyes that had been on me in chemistry earlier that day. The same eyes that had burned my skin everywhere they grazed in the campus cafeteria both at lunch and then again at dinner.
I knew who it was…or at least the guy they belonged to. We hadn’t spoken to each other, so I didn’t know his name. But I knew it was him. Dark eyes and hair. I pegged him as having some really amazing Greek ancestry, because holy hell, the guy was built like some mythical Greek god. And those damn lashes…
Just thinking about those lashes made my heart rate double, and I wondered if Michelle would have been just as attracted to my stalker as I was.
“Would we have fought over him?” I mused aloud to my twin, who was always watching over me.
“What did you say?” my roommate and best friend since middle school asked as she lifted up on her tiptoes to look over the crowd in search of her own eye candy.
Tara was about to turn nineteen and I still had a while to go, but that didn’t matter since I’d completely skipped seventh grade and jumped right into AP classes in the eighth grade with her. The only reason I was even at this stupid noisy party was because she’d begged me to come with her.
She’d caught some jock’s attention this week during freshman orientation, and he’d invited her earlier at dinner. Ever since, she’d been kind of spaced out, giddy even. Tara wasn’t a giddy kind of person. It was all about studying to get the grades to get her a full ride to college, and then getting the hell out from under her parents’ thumb. But a smile and a little flirting from some guy with more muscles than seemed humanly possible, and every brain cell seemed to shut down.
“Mieke,” she whined now. “I can’t see over all these people. Please, do you even see him?”
Sighing, I glanced over the heads of most of the people surrounding us. Tara was barely five three, but I was a little more than five inches taller than her, making it easier to see over the females and a few of the males’ heads in the room. My eyes darted around the room, scanning each face until I came to the one she was looking for.
“He’s by the door to the kitchen, chatting up some Barbie look-alike,” I told her, a little disgusted by her taste in men. Mr. Muscles played defense on the football team. His hair was buzzed almost to the skin, so I couldn’t tell what color it was, but his eyes were blank, both now and earlier when he’d approached Tara. There just wasn’t much going on upstairs, that much was evident, but there was something about him that set my nerves on edge.
Call me crazy, but I could sense the good and bad in people. Literally. Mom said it was because of all the crap I’d been through in my short life. I called it carrying around someone else’s heart and having a twin sister who was also my guardian angel. Whatever it was, I could spot an asshole a mile away. And this brainless jock was setting off all kinds of alarm bells for me.
But the few times I’d tried to tell Tara that today, she’d blown me off. Even if my sixth sense had never led me wrong before, she didn’t want to hear about it.
“Is he really chatting her up, or is he just talking to her?” Tara asked now, her face tight with emotion.
I lifted my hand in his direction. “Go see for yourself, Tara. I’m telling you though, this guy is bad news.”
She rolled her brown eyes at me. “You don’t even know him.”
“I didn’t know Ted Bundy either, but I took one look at his picture and knew he’d done very bad things. And that was before we watched that documentary on him,” I reminded her.
“That proves nothing. You probably heard about him from your mom or something. Annabelle likes those serial killer shows too much for you not to have known who Ted freaking Bundy is.”
That was true. Mom loved her crime documentaries. She was the reason we had watched the Ted Bundy series on Netflix to begin with. But I had honestly never even seen a picture of the guy until his face popped up in my social media feed, depicted in a meme. I’d gotten goose bumps just looking at his smiling face, and somehow, I’d known he was a very, very bad man. Two days later, Mom and Dad sat in the living room getting ready to watch the story on Netflix, and Tara and I’d decided to watch with them.
Now, Tara pushed through the crowd that seemed to have doubled since we’d arrived twenty minutes before, making a path for me to flow through behind her. A few people saw me and then did a double take, as if recognizing me.
Maybe they did. My uncle Noah had been in the spotlight in the past during his country music career, and I’d always been confused for his daughter. But not many of them would know I was really the daughter of rock legend Zander Brockman. Between Mom and her business partner, Emmie Armstrong, the story about Zander finding out he was the father of a teenage daughter never broke.
“Hi, Neil.” Tara’s voice sounded insecure to me, and I knew she’d found him leaning into the Barbie look-alike, beer in one hand while the other was cupping the chick’s ass.
As I reached my best friend, the jock turned to face her, a frown pinching his brow together for a second as he seemed to attempt to place the cute chick in front of him. When Tara dressed to impress, she was a knockout, but we hadn’t had time for her to do her magic tonight. We were both still wearing what we’d had on at dinner, with zero makeup and our hair pulled up into buns. She was still beautiful, but in a girl-next-door kind of way.
Sober, Neil had seemed interested in Tara just the way she was at dinner. Obviously drunk, he seemed to barely remember she existed.
Douchebag.
“Oh. Oh yeah!” He straightened, lifting his beer at her. “Glad you could make it, Taryn. Keg is in the kitchen. Make yourself at home.” With a nod, he turned back to the blonde, lowering his head to whisper something in her ear.
Tara squared her shoulders, but I could sense the defeat in her. I grasped her hand, leading her away from the jock and his chosen fuck buddy for the night. We walked into the kitchen that was, thankfully, less crowded, and I poured us each a red plastic cup full of stale beer. I didn’t tell her “I told you so” or give her so much as a lift of my brows. I felt no joy in proving to her I was right about that dickhead.
Instead, I stayed quiet, letting her digest the reality of what an idiot the guy she’d thought liked her really was. I sipped my beer while she just glared down into her own cup.
Around us, the kitchen was a blur of people coming and going. Some lingered after filling or refilling their beers, talking classes or sports. Some took their drinks and went back to the party or walked out into the backyard, where I could smell people smoking every time the door opened.
In here, I didn’t feel his eyes on me, and I missed the sensation of his gaze caressing over every inch of my exposed skin.
“I’m such a freak,” I muttered as I sipped my beer, trying not to grimace at the flat, bitter taste. I’d been to plenty of parties with kegs, so I was used to bad beer, but tonight, I was only drinking it to have something to do while my friend snapped out of it.
“Ladies!” I lifted my head just as some guy I didn’t know draped an arm over Tara’s and my shoulders. “You two beauties enjoying the party?”
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I refrained. Instead, I took the guy in. Tight polo over his massive chest, jeans that were just a little too tight for him, molding to his junk, thighs, and no doubt his ass too. His hair was gelled in a way that told me he spent more time in front of the mirror than I did. I barely noticed if he was cute or not, because the rest was just too much of a turnoff for me.
But when it came down to it, this guy wasn’t my stalker, so I wouldn’t have been interested regardless.
I shrugged his arm off my shoulders, but he put it right back. I narrowed my eyes on him, but he
only winked and stepped in closer, invading my personal space even more. “Do I know you?” he asked after a moment passed with neither Tara nor I speaking.
“Doubtful,” I bit out, shrugging his arm off for the second time and taking several steps away from him. “We’re both freshmen.”
His brow furrowed as he moved into my personal space again, and I could smell the tequila on his breath. “Nah, I mean you look really familiar to me. Where do I know you from?” I shook my head again, cringing because I knew he must have seen a picture of me with my uncle and cousins in the past.
Everyone in my family was blond, including my mom. I took completely after my father, in everything from height to hair color to the gold flecks in my green eyes. Everyone assumed I was Uncle Noah’s love child or something. At one point, some tabloid even made up crazy things, saying I was the reason my aunt and uncle were allegedly breaking up. That he cheated on her and I was the result—and wasn’t she brave for sticking by him even though I was the obvious proof that he’d had an affair?
What a load of crap. Uncle Noah and Aunt Chelsea might argue every day without fail, but I’d never seen two people love each other as much as they did. He worshiped her, made her feel like she was everything. Even when he’d had a sea of female fans trying to throw themselves at him back when he was still touring, he always made sure Aunt Chelsea knew she was his number one.
Mom and Dad were great together now, and anyone with eyes could see how much they loved each other. But…
I was the one who walked into Dad’s life. I was the one who let him into our world and, in turn, got Mom and Dad back together. I couldn’t be happier for them, and I loved that he was in my life now. Hell, I was a huge daddy’s girl, and he spoiled me rotten. There wasn’t a day that had gone by since he found out I was his daughter that he didn’t try to make up for all the lost time.
But my parents’ relationship history had made me nervous about falling in love. What if I fell for someone as deeply as Mom had Dad when she was little more than seventeen years old? And what if, even though that guy said he loved me, he walked away—just like Dad?
Needing Forever VOL 1: Part of The Rocker... Series Universe Page 8