Shane
Making friends, I see.” Travis appeared at my side, both of us watching Delaney’s tight ass wriggling in her dress as she stalked off.
The list of things I wanted to do to Delaney was a mile long, but being parked in the friend zone? Not on it. “I don’t need any more friends, Travis.”
“Of course not. You have me.” He lightly clinked his glass against mine in a mock cheers. “Speaking of which…I did good, right?”
Ignoring his question, I asked one of my own. “How did you find her anyway?” The girl was a unicorn in a field of mules.
“I have my ways.”
I arched an eyebrow, looking pointedly at my longtime agent. “That’s your answer?”
“What? I can’t leave anything to the imagination?”
Frustration spiraled inside my stomach, dead-ending into a tight knot. “I want to know. Seriously, Trav. I wouldn’t put it past you to send out a casting call for this.”
Travis raised his hands, palms facing outward. “I swear. I just met her this afternoon and knew she was perfect.” He gestured at the crowded patio. “But hey, there’s got to be twenty, thirty chicks here who are just your type. You’re not into Delaney, go find someone else.”
“You didn’t coach her? Tell her what to say, how to act?”
Travis snorted. “I’ve yet to meet a female that knows how to take direction well, Oscar-winning actresses included. Believe me, meeting Delaney today was just a coincidence.”
“You don’t believe in coincidences, and neither do I.” I didn’t know what I believed in anymore.
He huffed out an exasperated sigh. “I might have to reevaluate my opinion. Turns out that Delaney’s an old friend of Piper, a girl who works for me. Listen, if you two didn’t hit it off—” Travis slapped his hands together “—no harm, no foul.”
I stared him down, trying to gauge the extent of his honesty. With Travis Taggert, it was a sliding scale.
“So, are we good?” he prodded, always looking to close a deal.
I shook my head, crossing my arms as adrenaline spiked inside my blood. Yes, so fucking good. “No. Let her go. I’ll make do with someone else.”
“What?” Travis reared back as if my words were bullets. So much for “no harm, no foul.” “What are you talking about? Delaney’s perfect.”
He was right. She was. Perfect.
Too fucking perfect.
Because, offstage at least, I was completely, abysmally imperfect. I knew it. Travis knew it. There were cracks in my soul that couldn’t be filled no matter how hard I tried. And I had tried, over and over. In bed. Beds, actually. And on buses and planes and in countless bars. I’d tried everything, although I had my favorites. Whiskey, women, and a white powder that made me believe, for a just few hours, that I was whole. One was good. All three were better. Overindulging in the dangerous trifecta was so tempting, it had nearly killed me. More than once.
It was Travis who had come up with a solution to my problem. My addiction. Not Alcoholics Anonymous, or Narcotics Anonymous, or Sex Addicts Anonymous.
I was Shane Hawthorne—I wasn’t Anonymous.
At first I’d laughed him off. Hire a girlfriend? They had a name for that, and it was illegal. But in Hollywood, nothing was off-limits. Closeted sex symbols hired boyfriends and girlfriends all the time, sometimes even married them. Addicts hired sober coaches and passed them off as romantic relationships. There wasn’t much that was real in this town, and as Travis bluntly pointed out, the relationships I entered into on my own had been nothing but disasters.
Women were my gateway drug. Left to my own devices, I gravitated toward party girls, chicks with invisible wounds as deep as mine. They alone saw the blackness in my soul, would hang around as long as the party raged. Meanwhile, I just raged.
So, I’d agreed to let Travis trim my options, weed out the bad choices. He looked at L.A.’s pool of stunning starlets and found the ones with half a brain, who viewed the experience as an opportunity, not a romance. By now, launching a new girlfriend was almost like rolling out a PR campaign, garnering as much press as a new album. And for the most part, it had been a successful solution for me. Aside from the occasional setback, I hadn’t touched cocaine or whiskey in years. I stuck to wine or beer, not too much, and the high I got from performing in front of a live audience. My short-term, faux relationships might be superficial, but they were monogamous, and most importantly—disease- and drama-free.
I’d had more than enough drama in my life already, the kind that belonged on the Jerry Springer Show. My rock-star veneer might be thin, but it was my only protection against getting dragged back into…I stopped myself. There were places my mind didn’t need to go. Dark, desperate memories I’d been hiding from for well over a decade now. If the truth ever caught up with me, the fact that Shane Hawthorne was rock ’n’ roll royalty might be the only thing to save me. I needed to maintain my place at the top of the food chain. Predator, not prey.
And if I needed a goddamn “girlfriend” to keep my ruse going, so be it.
With the newest Nothing but Trouble tour just days away, Travis was nervous. I was, too. So far, the only thing that kept me from getting sucked in by the excesses so abundant behind the velvet ropes of rock and roll was to be preoccupied by a woman who was just as tempting. A woman who wasn’t an addict. A woman who softened my image, just enough, so that when I fucked up, the millions of women who bought my music, believed in my brand, didn’t write me off. Sometimes it was a starlet looking for the career boost being Shane Hawthorne’s girlfriend would give them. Sometimes it was a model looking for more exposure. Travis insisted that the woman in question be hampered by an ironclad confidentiality agreement and locked into a contract that ran the length of the tour. After that, she could leave, and usually did.
My girlfriends were temporary companions. Interesting enough to be worth my time, attractive enough to get my attention. They were good while they lasted, and when they were over we parted amicably and moved on.
There were a whole bunch of words I could use to describe Delaney Fraser. Beautiful, sexy, lean with curves in all the right places. But what I’d discovered during our all too brief conversation couldn’t be captured in words. She called herself a fan, and maybe she was. But not the crazy kind who would attach herself to me and declare that we were “meant to be,” or the saccharine-sweet kind with no backbone, giving me everything I wanted without batting an eye.
I should insist that Travis find a sweet little thing to bring on tour, like he’d done in the past. Someone happy to smile pretty for the paparazzi and eager to spread her legs whenever I wanted.
But damn, I was so sick of sweet. I wanted someone to make me work for it.
Delaney was no easy lay, I could tell. She had mounds of smooth, dark hair I wanted to plunge my hands into, framing a round face with delicate features that gave her a dreamy, angelic look. But her aquamarine eyes had blazed with caution, as if one glance at me and she’d known immediately I was toxic.
Delaney made me feel off-balance, like the control I’d worked so hard for was tenuous at best. And if that happened, no one was safe. Especially her.
A flicker of lust had fought its way into her gaze, teaming up with the sensual curve of her lips to tempt me. Intrigue me. And yet—she’d stood up to me without a second thought. Shrugged off my touch as if it was unwanted, stalked off without a backward glance. Delaney had a temper inside her centerfold-worthy package. And I liked it. I liked that she hadn’t fawned all over me while I made one obscene suggestion after the other, responding with incessant giggles that made me want to shove something in her mouth just to shut her up.
I’d done just that with other girls before, and there were more than a few selfies floating around cyberspace, a grinning girl with my dick stuffed in her mouth. Easily found if you typed “Shane Hawthorn, dick pic” into Google.
Welcome to my life.
Travis was having none of my reluctance, listing Delaney’s attributes as if she were a prize hog at the town fair. I cut him off. “There has to be someone else. Someone not like all the others, but not like—” I raked a hand through my hair and then gestured at the women preening like pink flamingos all over his patio, before finishing lamely “—them.”
“Who? If you don’t want Delaney, fine. Go mingle, find someone else. But I’ve introduced you to a dozen girls in the past month. You’ve turned them all down. Too dumb. Too tall. Too short. Too quiet. Too loud. The last one was too bat-shit crazy, if I remember right. You want Delaney, I can tell. So, what’s the problem?”
Nothing. Except that she made me feel things. Want things I didn’t have a right to want. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.
Travis pounced on my non-answer. “See. You can’t come up with a reason to reject her.” He had that look in his eyes, the one I’d seen in meetings with studio executives and moneymen. The look of a hunter who’d spotted weakness in his quarry. “Okay, Shane. This is what I’m going to do. Since you’ve shown more interest in Delaney than you have anyone else I’ve introduced you to lately, or anyone here tonight, I’m going to ask her if she wants the job. Who knows? Maybe she’ll be one of the one percent to turn down a tour with Nothing but Trouble. Maybe she has commitments here.”
He rocked back on his heels, hoisting his shoulders up and then dropping them. “Maybe she has a boyfriend.”
That last comment hit my eardrum like a sonic boom. Boyfriend? Some other guy running his fingers through her hair, kissing her perfectly pouty lips, sliding his hand between her thighs. Oh, hell no.
I stalked off, heading back the way I came in. “Get me her address. Don’t do anything until you hear from me.”
My phone vibrated with a text before I’d even started the engine. Travis was nothing if not efficient. I sat inside the locked doors for a moment, blood rushing through my veins so loudly I may as well have been clinging to a damn raft. No oar in sight, just an inky black night and no fucking clue where the current was taking me.
A frown was doing its damnedest to dig a ditch across my forehead, and I let go of the steering wheel in an attempt to rub it away. What the fuck just happened?
Delaney. Delaney Fraser.
Even her name sounded like a lyric. Soft and hard. Sweetly sinful. That whispered shhh toward the end, as if she were a secret I wasn’t meant to discover.
The girl who walked away from me without a second glance.
Delaney Fucking Fraser.
Beautiful name. Beautiful face. Beautiful body.
Beautiful packages were a dime a dozen, though. Especially in Tinseltown. And backstage, too. Everywhere I looked, really. Gorgeous girls were within reach wherever I went. Inviting me to take what I wanted, when I wanted, wherever I wanted.
But they were easily discarded, easily forgotten.
I’d reached for Delaney, and the damn girl had slapped my hand away. My frown eased as a begrudging grin pulled at the corners of my lips. With a low chuckle, I started the Italian engine and shifted into gear, the quilted leather seat throbbing beneath my ass. Delaney Fraser, I’m coming for you.
Delaney
I couldn’t wrestle the too-tight, too-tiny dress off fast enough. What the hell was I thinking—trying to run with Piper Hastings’s crowd? I hadn’t been able to pull it off in high school, and despite leaving my baby fat and bad hair back in Bronxville, I wasn’t cut out for it now.
Breathing a sigh of relief once the dress was just a black puddle at my feet, I swept my hair into a ponytail and pulled on Lycra capris and a T-shirt. So. Much. Better.
The buzzer sounded just as I was taking out my lingering aggression on my teeth. Thinking Piper had turned around and decided to retrieve her dress tonight, I hastily spit peppermint foam into the sink and grabbed the dress from the floor. “Be right down,” I called into an intercom system that had a fifty-fifty chance of dispensing only static, before quickly sliding into a pair of flip-flops and grabbing my keys. I lived on the fourth floor of a four-floor walk-up that was more than I could afford but the cheapest place I could find. Jogging down the stairs, I pushed open my front door, eager to shed any connection to Piper and a night I’d rather forget. “I would have dry-cleaned it—” My head jerked back, lungs rattling inside my chest as I shuddered to a stop.
Shane Hawthorne was at my front door, looking every inch the sex symbol that had captivated me from the moment I saw him, his presence no less overwhelming now than it had been an hour ago. Maybe more. My breath caught in the back of my throat, my heart tripping over itself in an effort to run away. Telling me to run away. But I couldn’t run. Couldn’t even breathe.
“Hey, Delaney.” He spoke my name like he’d said it a million times before. Like we were old friends.
Without my heels, Shane seemed taller, his chest wider. And his shirt did absolutely nothing to hide the well-defined muscles beneath. Heat broke over my skin. “H-hi.” The word was a hiccup, at best.
His eyes swept over me, from the top of my messy ponytail to my bright pink toes, lingering slightly over the bubble letters stretching across my braless breasts. “A Hello Kitty fan, huh?”
My nipples puckered beneath his gaze, a flush traveling from my exposed collarbone to settle on my cheeks and the tips of my ears. I swallowed. “Isn’t everyone?”
The air between us crackled with sexual tension, electric energy rushing straight to my head. “Absolutely.” Shane’s husky answer raised the voltage another notch.
Fighting the temptation to swoon like the awkward teenage fan that still lived inside me, I crossed my arms over my chest, straightened my spine, and dragged my muddled mind back to reality. “What are you doing here?”
The cockiest smirk I’d ever seen blazed from Shane’s gorgeous face, streetlights shining on the deep dimple in his left cheek that hinted at easy smiles and quick comebacks. “I was in the neighborhood.”
Ignoring the lurch of my stomach, I jerked my chin at his gleaming sports car blocking the fire hydrant at the curb. “Bad call. Too much time down here and you might need a new ride.”
His full lips twitched, telling me that’s exactly what he’d come for.
Indignation pricked at my temples, and I stepped back inside the small vestibule of my apartment building. “I’m not your next ride.”
Shane grabbed the door, his booted foot blocking it from closing. “Did I say you were?”
“You didn’t have to.”
He sighed. “Look, can we start over? I drove here because I didn’t like the way we left things, okay? I didn’t mean to offend you, to send you running off in the other direction.”
I eyed him skeptically, not buying that the hottest heartthrob on the planet had followed me home solely to issue some sort of mea culpa. But regardless of his reasons, I just wanted to go back upstairs. This night was way more than I could handle, and it needed to end. “Fine. All is forgiven. You can go home with a clear conscience.”
The bitter laugh gurgling from Shane’s throat scraped at my nerves, tapping a well of empathy I didn’t realize I still had.
“Don’t know that I have one of those anymore, and even if I did, clear is about the last way I’d describe it.” There was a rawness to his voice that had nothing to do with Shane’s singing abilities, a serrated edge that hinted of past hurts to rival even my own, that touched me somewhere deep. Somewhere familiar. I let go of the door, trying to get a read on the man beneath the grit and gloss that was Shane Hawthorne, rock star.
His burning eyes locked onto mine, flaring briefly. For a second I caught a glimpse of vulnerability in him, an openness. But then they went dark, his chiseled bone structure settling into an impenetrable wall once more.
Shane raked a hand through the famously rugged hair that framed his face like a lion’s mane. Paired with his luminous topaz eyes, he bore a vague resemblance to Mufasa, surveying his domain with a wary kind of confidence. When Rolling Stone proclaimed Shane Hawthorne the new King of Rock, they had definitely gotten it right.
He crossed his arms over his chest, shirtsleeves riding up his forearms to offer another glimpse of the ink marking his skin. “Maybe I just wanted to see if you taste as good as you look.” This time Shane’s voice wasn’t raw, and the words coming from his mouth felt practiced, like he’d used them before. Often.
Shane hadn’t asked a question, but I answered it anyway. By slamming the door in his face.
Except that his foot was still in the way, so it bounced off his boot and I had to stagger back to avoid being clipped by the rebound.
Flustered, my gaze landed on the man planted in front of me.
The grin started at the corners of Shane’s lips, pulling them into a crooked smile before his full-bellied laugh wrapped itself around me. I covered my own mouth, not wanting to laugh with him. But it was no use. His mirth was contagious.
As quick as it came, the lighthearted moment disappeared, leaving us silently staring at each other. The invisible current between our bodies sparked, electricity burning off the oxygen and leaving me light-headed. I had the strange sense that he was just as surprised to be here as I had been to find him at my door.
Finally I found my voice. “Why are you really here, Shane?”
He gave a long blink, then shrugged. “No place else I wanted to be.”
The blunt sincerity of Shane’s answer was enough to make me swoon, but the way he was looking at me, like I held the key to a mystery he’d been trying to solve his whole life, was the knockout punch. “That’s…sweet.”
His soft chuckle floated on the charged air between us. “Never been called that before.”
“Maybe you should try deserving it now and then.”
“Nah. Not good for my image.” He glanced up and down the block, then turned back to me. “Can I come in?”
Fighting the urge to nod, I gave a slow shake of my head. “No. I don’t think that would be smart.”
“No?”
“Yes. I mean—no. Definitely no.”
“A hard no?”
Very hard. This time I didn’t trust myself to speak, instead drawing my lips inward and biting them as I blinked at Shane. “Mmm-hmm.” I was already shattered. I didn’t need anyone—especially not the man in front of me—shaking up the pieces I was barely holding together.
“How about a walk? Would you at least go for a walk with me?”
“A walk?”
“Yeah.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
In my Intro to Psych class I’d learned that one of the surest ways to get a yes from someone was to simply keep asking questions. Everyone relented eventually—more often than not, after only two tries. Apparently I was no different, caving like a cheap tent at the second gust of wind. “Um, okay.” Stuffing Piper’s dress into the wall-mounted mailbox assigned to my apartment, I eased out from behind the door. “Just a walk, right?”
Shane pulled a baseball cap from the back pocket of his jeans and pulled it over his head, lowering the brim so I could barely see his eyes. “Scout’s honor.”
I rebuffed the pledge. “Don’t even pretend to be a Boy Scout.” It came out more harshly than I intended.
For a moment, his smile dropped, lips turning down at the corners. “We’re all just pretending, Delaney.”