“I thought you needed a time-out,” she said.
He took a bottle of water from the mini-fridge. “You always were full of good ideas.” Be a better one if she wasn’t all the way over the other side of this room from him.
“I have this idea that it’s past time we should come clean,” she said.
He sat his arse on the arm of a sofa. “Right when all my best ideas are dirty.” She grinned but didn’t come any closer. He uncapped the water and took a big slug. “Did my ears deceive me or did you say you loved me an hour ago?”
“I threw you off with that.” She looked at her booted feet. “My timing was bad.”
He inclined his head. “Timing has not ever been our strong point.”
“I’m worried it’s still bad. I don’t want to throw you off again.”
He needed to hurry this along. He needed this to take all day and mean everything. “You didn’t throw me off. I can be shit all by myself. If you’re about to kiss me, there’s no way it can be anything but the second-best day of my life.”
She tipped her chin up, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “When was the first best?”
“Dark corner, the smell of beer in the air, your fingernails in my neck. I thought I was going to shed my skin from excitement when you kissed me that first time.”
Seeing the flush bloom on Evie’s face was like hearing a stadium crowd roar his name. A straight shot of adrenaline, transforming him from an ordinary mortal who sometimes had trouble managing his anxiety to a guy who’d trade everything he’d built to have his woman walk into his arms and put her lips on his.
“Have you been waiting for me to initiate a kiss this whole time?” she said.
It took a moment to realize he had. That what had stopped him last night, this morning was needing to know Evie wanted it to happen. What better way of being sure of that than waiting for her to act? He nodded. “It’s not every day I get a second chance like you.”
“I’d have let you take anything you wanted about five minutes after I saw you again.”
He blinked in surprise. “So all the rules? The attitude?”
Evie’s expression was puzzling. A bunch of emotions flowing over her features too quickly for him to grab hold of. “I needed to know you wanted us to be real,” she said. “I needed to forgive myself for letting you go. For all the things I’ve done since.”
He took another slug of water because watching her struggle tightened his throat.
“This, what we’ve been doing, is good. I don’t want to push our luck,” she said.
That emotion was doubt feeding fear in a scrum with hope and desire. He needed to win that battle. “I want us to be forever.”
She tried to hide a smile and failed. “Yeah, well, you know I’ve heard that before.”
“You’re stalling.”
“Stalling?”
He could read that expression. A softening, an ease. “You’re all the way over there, trying to imagine everything that could go wrong with us this time around and I’m over here dying.”
“That sounds serious. I should call someone.”
That flick of her brows, the corner of her mouth twitching, that was amusement. “There’s only one thing that can save me.”
“Which is?”
“Your mouth on mine. Your hand on my heart.” She didn’t exactly fly into his arms and if she didn’t make a move soon he might truly need resuscitating. Had he read her all wrong? Shit. “Evie?”
“You do look like you need a good kiss.”
“I do. I do need a good kiss. I am expiring from the need of a kiss from you. At this point, I’d take a dry, chaste peck and be sky-high.”
“Our deal is done then. No more rules. We come clean.”
“Except I’d give everything I have to do a lifetime deal with you.”
“Lifetime, huh. Forever royalties.”
He capped the water bottle and put in down. “That’s how I roll.”
“You get kisses.”
“I get everything. I never stopped loving you.”
She stepped closer. He planted his feet more firmly on the floor. They were near enough now she’d know his breath was short.
“Never stopped. I like the sound of that,” she said, standing in the vee between his legs. She put her hand to the back of his head; he banded his arms around her back. She said, “Suck in a lungful, you’re going to need it,” before she put her other hand on his face and bumped her nose on his as their faces came together.
He braced for the kiss to be impatient, hard, teeth clashing, a rush of lust and necessity. But for an eternity, the best either of them could do was breathe. It was sweet and maddening. His heart was a death metal band in his chest, his hands strummed over Evie’s body feeling the rich melody of her, the trembling restraint.
Together their lips met, achingly gently, both of them sighing into it. The briefest catch and release, a hint of the wildest greedy passion and bone-deep contentment to come.
Wherever she led this, he’d follow. She pressed her lips to his again, another soft serve, another, another, each fleet and tentative. Jay kissed the half-smile on Evie’s lips and ate up her groan. Another, another, until her trembling tripped over her caution and she yanked at his hair and opened her mouth to him.
The crowd roared his name, the stadium roof lifted off. This kiss was a lyric sung for the ages; graffiti scored on eternity. It stole time and place and ripped out hurt and loneliness from the roots. Its intensity made him frantic to have more and more, while it grounded him in heat and need and possession, as if they were as essential as air and water and shelter.
At some point in the glory of it, he tipped back into the cushions of the sofa, pulling Evie with him, and the kiss became a function of their whole bodies. Lip to toe he needed Evie’s touch and he chased after it, tangling tongue on tongue while he twined their bodies as close as possible.
Pounding on the door wasn’t the only thing stopping this going further. The sofa was too short and the floor too hard and neither of them had enough critical-thinking faculties working to figure out how to deal with buttons and zips and boots.
Jay’s phone rang. Evie’s chimed. Whoever was beating on the door eventually gave up, but they brought the world back. Kiss by kiss, Evie’s body relaxed into his. Kiss by kiss, his pulse settled. They finished as they’d begun, breathing each other in.
“You did need that,” she said, voice smoky and lazy.
He maneuvered upright, Evie now on his lap. “My whole life. I love you, Evelette Violet Tice.”
“I know,” she said. Cocky little shit, where she’d earlier been hesitant in a way that had put plaque around his heart. “I don’t think I want to be without you ever again, Jay Endicott.”
“You don’t think?” The insult of that. He kissed a good dose of indignance into her and the gymnastics required to graduate to sex no longer seemed impossible.
She pushed away just when he figured out how to get her out of those damn skinny pants without dropping her. “What’s the protocol here?” she said.
He’d have to peel her out of them. Slowly. Boots had to go first.
“Is sex right before an opening allowed? Or are you supposed to preserve all the sexual energy for the stage like the musical athlete you are?” she asked.
“Allowed? What?”
Evie laughed and tugged on his hair. “You’re all lust-fogged and I’m sad to say I can’t take advantage of that.”
The thought of missing out woke him up about the same time as his phone rang and the person who didn’t value his own life highly enough started pounding on the door again.
Nothing foggy about what he wanted. Evie naked, lips locked on his, thighs either side of his, body ready for his. He’d make her come in all the ways she loved and all the ways they’d denied themselves.
Encore after encore.
But it wasn’t going to happen now.
He shouted to whoever was outside to give him five. Stood a
nd lowered Evie’s feet to the floor keeping hold of her hips. “It’s not called abstinence, drugs and rock and roll.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. “So you always had sex before a big gig.”
He snorted. He’d always been too uptight to even consider it before a show opened. “Always thought about having sex with you before a big gig. Usually spend the night puking. I’m thinking it’s time for a new tradition.”
She kept a hand on his chest. “I’m going to need a little more guidance on what that might be.”
He was going to guide her all the way onto his cock, but since he couldn’t do that now, he made do with taking her mouth again and making sure she understood exactly what kind of pre-show tension-release tradition he was going to insist on once he got her alone tonight.
And every other night for as long as she loved him.
NINETEEN
After all the sparring, teasing, the mental angst and the torture of physical longing, Evie was worried old-fashioned, sticking-it-in sex might be a thunderous letdown. After all, it wasn’t like it was their first time.
And it wasn’t like they hadn’t been having each other in all the other lovely ways possible. She had no complaints and she doubted Jay did either. Sexual satisfaction rating, a million stars.
Feels like the first time. Judging by the way she was biting her nails. The light changed, red to green. Hand back on the clutch, she focused on driving, swerving through the traffic, determined to have some quiet time to get her head together at the hotel before Jay got back.
Trying to get a grip because there was every chance Jay would be late, exhausted, or simply too distracted to want to pick up where they’d left off.
Come to think of it, she’d never been so nervous about a kiss before either. But kissing Jay was a threshold crossed. A line of truth with arrow heads at each end that stretched all the way through her past into her future. Once she crossed that line she couldn’t lie to herself anymore. She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t let Jay go, put herself into situations with her family where she’d been taken advantage of, that she’d hadn’t hurt herself by insisting she didn’t want more from the men she picked to sleep with; well, some of them. By shutting down her own musical talents in a grand tantrum because things hadn’t worked out as expected.
She couldn’t pretend Jay wasn’t the only man she’d ever want to kiss, let inside her body and her heart to stay.
At the next set of lights, she stalled the bike. Disgusted with her lack of cool, she restarted it and gave the finger to the driver who beeped at her. “I’m going to have sex with my boyfriend and it’s a big deal and I’m nervous, you dickweed,” she shouted into her helmet, over the roar of his car as he pulled out from behind her, his mouth moving, and his middle finger raised.
By the time she made it to the hotel, she was full of vinegar and nervous tics.
It was just Jay; who she’d known most of her adult life. Whose hotel she was camped out in. Who she’d gone to bed with last night, whose body she knew how to please, whose mind was aligned with hers. Who’d been giving her daily orgasms.
She got in the elevator and swiped her room keycard over the panel that allowed her up to the private floor where his suite was. It was just Jay, and oh my God, if she didn’t see him again soon, she might need to kick something, or find a puppy and spend all her emotional energy cuddling it.
She got out of the lift and her phone chimed. A message she should check. Maybe the distraction she needed. Passing her helmet hand to hand to fish her phone out of her pocket, she dropped the room keycard, exclaiming in exasperation. A quick text exchange and the problem was solved. Not distraction enough. As she pocketed her phone and bent to pick up the keycard, the doors of the elevator behind her opened.
Jay was on her before she had time to straighten up. His big hand carving over her butt, his little finger sliding over her sex. The keycard slipped from her fingers and she dropped her helmet.
“Well, hello to you too,” she said, laughing, reluctantly straightening up.
He didn’t say a word. He pushed the strap of her bag off her shoulder, taking half of her leather jacket with it, and as she twisted towards him, he backed her into the wall with a thud, one of his hands behind her head, the other at her hip.
If desperation had a color, Jay’s was a roiling ocean. If haste had a smell, it was the lemongrass in the soap he’d used to shower. If destiny had a signature tune it was the way her heart trilled, skipped, and trilled again.
If you believed in immortality, that’s how you’d define the way he kissed her. Breaking with time and the natural order of the world, making a new place for them beyond human constraints.
Evie died and was reborn in the taste of Jay; peppermint and possession; in the passion of him; firm hands, an almost bruising hold, muscles straining, arching into her touch, edgy and deliberate and unstoppable.
Shirtless.
Unzipped.
She was just as intent and desperate, and tangled in the tank he’d pushed up her body to expose her breasts.
After all that time on third base, they were cleared for a home run, down to fuck in the corridor outside the suite and she could hardly stand for the need of it, climbing Jay’s body to hump against his cock.
“Always too many fucking clothes,” he muttered, teeth against her shoulder, his arms under her thighs helping her roll her hips.
If she’d been wearing a skirt, he’d be inside her now. Calendar reminder. Go shopping. She could come like this, but it would be better to wait till they were skin on skin and maybe not in the corridor. He took her daith hoop in his mouth and she forgot about the details, clutching him as an orgasm shook through her. She was still trembling when he walked them to the suite door and had her find his keycard in his back pocket.
She got naked, standing on the bed, while he went back for her helmet, jacket, satchel, his shirt and the other keycard, and she loved him for that as much as for everything he was making her feel. Impatient, sexy, horny, desired. And very, very wet.
“This time I want to be inside you when you come,” he said, stumbling on his jeans in his speed to get them off. He was so engorged and flushed her mouth watered, and all she could do was nod as she went to her knees.
“How, wild thing?” He played a hand over his length, eyes bright, blazing. “How do you want me?”
A decision? He wanted her to choose when she could barely put a coherent thought together. He laughed, a satisfied smile slipping over his face. “Okay then. Like that.”
Like what? Like everything. She opened her knees, heard her wetness click, smelled her want.
“Like you’ve needed this for as long as I have, and you trust me to make it good.”
He was staring at her vulva. She used her fingers to open herself further for him. He made a noise that was part bear in heat, part king of rock and jerked himself once, twice and he was on her, pushing her onto her back, hooking her knee up so he could fit his body between her thighs.
They were mirrored in each other’s eyes when he entered her. Smoothly. Hot and wide and making her ache a little in a needy way; groan when he was fully seated inside her.
“You wreck me, Evie. You feel so good.”
Jay’s voice was honey sizzling on volcanic stone. It made her breath stall. She brought her other knee up, pushing the ache over the barrier of fullness into pleasure and pressed her hips up to feel all of him, loving his grunt, the way the muscles across his chest popped as he pushed up on his arms and snapped his hips.
Worth the wait to see the awe in his expression. Worth more to note it wasn’t new. It was the way he always looked at her.
It became a blur then, the rocking motion Jay set up, the sounds they made; a common language without words. The responses in her own body; a softening before everything began to wind up inside her; the concentrated intensity of his body, until he couldn’t hold it all back.
She shook apart as he drove into her and when he lifted her,
and she straddled his thighs, she came again, riding a pleasure hit higher than she’d thought possible as he came, face buried in her neck, arms tight around her back, his chest seizing, holding her down to catch the aftershocks.
And to think she’d been worried old-fashioned intercourse might be boring. Nothing with Jay was boring.
And the next night, thousands of screaming fans in the half-full stadium were with her on that as he surprised them by stepping out on stage with Lost Property halfway through their very first set of the tour.
She nearly orgasmed again, leaping to her feet with the rest of the concert goers. Her first look at Jay on a stadium stage and it was to watch him shock the shit out of Abel, Isaac and Oscar, making Isaac stop playing and Oscar swear into his mic. Only Grip seemed to be in on it, grinning madly from his throne behind his drum kit.
They played together as if they’d never split and she couldn’t take her eyes off Jay. He was her man; a little intense, a little dorky, sweet and honorable, and yet he was someone completely different up there on that stage. His intensity dialed way up and manifested in a kind of god-like mastery of the performance, as if the audience transformed him from a more than competent musician and a striking man into a genuine rock king who exuded a dark sparkling energy; quixotic, exciting, unknowable, and whose every move she was mesmerized by.
Jay quit the stage like he’d entered it, without any warning, without any fanfare, in the middle of a song, with a wave to acknowledge the audience.
If she didn’t already love him with every atom of her being, she would have fallen irretrievably in the space of time he played three songs on stage supporting her brothers and Grip, when she knew his management were against it.
It might have been an anti-climax when he took the stage again with World’s End but now the stadium was full, and the fans were hyped-up and Jay was incandescent, lighting the air on fire with sound and sex appeal.
One Kiss from the King of Rock (The One Book 2) Page 15