Dirty Secret: A Bad Boy Romance (Bluefield Bad Boys Book 3)
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Authors: Tess Oliver
Dirty Secret
Bluefield Bad Boys #3
Tess Oliver
Dirty Secret
Copyright© 2016 by Tess Oliver
Cover Model:
Nick Bennett
Cover Photographer:
FuriousFotog
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All Rights are Reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Dawson
The chalky black coal dust came up like a tidal wave and swallowed me. Grit pelted my skin like thousands of pins. Every breath was a chore. Blinded by the dust, I groped around for Kellan. He had been there, smiling and talking about his girl, Rylan, and then he was gone. My finger found flesh. It was an arm, warm and wet with blood. “Kellan,” I called. “I’ve got you, buddy. I’ve got you.” I yanked the arm to clear him from the fallen rocks, but there was nothing. It was just an arm.
“Fuck!” I yelled and woke up.
It took me a few seconds to assure myself I wasn’t in the coal mine. The shadows of the room came into focus.
Long, white fingers wrapped around my arm. “Dawson? Are you all right?”
Sasha sat up, pressed her naked breasts against my back and rested her chin on my shoulder. “You must have been having a bad dream. What was it about?”
I scrubbed my fingers through my hair but didn’t answer. I’d been having the same damn dream for a month and it was really starting to fuck with my head. It had been a year since the continuous miner, the monstrous machine with the ability to chew coal out of a rock wall, veered off of its path and collapsed the section of mine where Kellan and I had been working. We’d both made it out, thanks to Kellan coming back for me. My foot had gotten caught on the coal car rail, and as I tried to free it, a second collapse pushed my body in the opposite direction of my leg. I’d felt the bone snap cleanly in two. I was sure I would be buried alive that day, but Kellan had risked his life to save me. I’d have done the same for him. We always watched each other’s backs down there. I had no idea why the dreams had started nearly a year after the accident, but they were starting to shake my confidence.
Sasha kissed my shoulder and moved her lips across my back.
“I sure am going to miss these tattoos.” She ran her fingers over my skin, outlining the ink as she moved along my arm.
I leaned back against the pillow and crossed my hands behind my head. “Is that all you’re going to miss? Cuz, I can name a lot more about you
I’m
going to miss. I think you should stay here in Bluefield. Who the fuck needs all that Hawaiian sunshine? And it’s expensive. Everything costs twice as much as it does here. Even a damn mug of beer is ten bucks. And for what? Constant summer temperatures?”
“Waking up without grit between my teeth and taking deep breaths without coughing. It’ll be tough, but I think I can manage.” She picked up my hand and kissed my knuckles. “You should come with me.”
A short laugh flew from my mouth, and she dropped the subject. Sasha understood coal mining. It was what I knew. There just wasn’t any other job out there where I could make a decent living doing what I’d been born to do. Coal mining was in my blood.
Sasha and I weren’t a couple. I hadn’t given my heart to anyone, ever, and I doubted I ever would. Sasha wasn’t really in the market for anyone’s heart either. She’d grown up in the same crummy half of Bluefield as me. We’d been friends for years. But now, like my sisters, Aubrey and Megan, she was breaking free of this place. Her grandfather, her only family, had died and she was free to move on. She’d landed a sweet office job at one of the big resorts. She was looking for the same thing as me, something that was hard to define and equally hard to get. Happiness. That feeling that there were more things right with the world than wrong. So far, that kind of happiness had eluded us both. But Sasha liked sex, and I was never opposed to a good, no-strings attached fuck. It had worked nicely for both of us.
Sasha smiled down at me. “I know just what will help you sleep.” She reached up and her beautiful, round nipples lifted as she reached behind her head and tied her hair in a loose knot at the back of her neck.
Sasha lifted up on her knees and leaned over me. Her small warm hand wrapped around my balls. She lowered her mouth and ran her tongue over them as her free hand took hold of my cock. It hardened in her fingers. She moved her lush, hot mouth to the tip of my cock and suckled me gently at first, just teasing slick moisture from me. She lifted her eyes to me.
“Fuck yeah, that works. Your mouth is fucking perfect,” I groaned.
She ran her lips up and down my shaft as she grasped me firmly and milked my cock.
She moved her mouth over me, and I pressed myself firmly against her. Her naked ass jutted up above the bed as she moved her mouth over me. I needed that ass.
“Enough,” I grunted. “I need to fuck you.”
She climbed off and obligingly took hold of the headboard. I shoved her hair away from her neck and kissed it, holding her firmly in my grasp. Sasha mewled softly with anticipation.
My bedroom door snapped open, ushering in a cool breeze and breaking us from our erotic trance. Sasha’s sensual mewl shifted to a sharp gasp. She spun around and sank down below the covers.
Joey, my idiot of a roommate, was standing in the hallway, holding onto the doorway with one hand and clutching a bag of marshmallows in the other. He was drunk, although since drunk was his usual state, it was hard to know what sober would have looked like on him. But, I thought, as my fist tightened into a ball, he was about to be sobered up fast.
“Wow, sorry bro, didn’t mean to interrupt. Just thought you might want a S’more. Bought some of these.” He lifted the bag of marshmallows and looked at it in confusion. “Oh yeah, marshmallows. And there’s some chocolate and some of those crackers that the mommies always give their babies to gnaw on. But I can see you’re busy, so maybe later. Carry on with the sex.” He flailed his arm around in a half circle, and the gesture nearly pitched him onto his face. He walked with big clumsy steps back to the kitchen.
I plodded across the room and swung shut the door, then returned to the bed and climbed in next to Sasha.
She pulled the sheets up higher, sighing in frustration. “Jeez, Dawson, how can you stand living with that guy?”
“He’s the only person I could find to live out here in this cabin. When Tommy and Andi found that crummy old farm outside of town, they had to jump on it before developers snatched it up. And I felt kind of sorry for Joey. His last roommates didn’t even tell him they were kicking him out. They just piled all his shit on the sidewalk and changed the locks.”
She lifted a brow at me. “Which, of course, should have been your first clue. You make enough to rent this place by yourself.”
“Yeah, but I’m trying to save to buy a place. That’s not going to happen if I’m throwing away good cash on rent.”
The distinct smell of burnt marshmallow seeped beneath the door. It was followed by Joey’s loud footsteps as he half-stumbled down the hallway to his room. The door to his room shut.
“There. He’s taken his marshmallow to bed with him.” I turned and curled my arm over Sasha’s waist. “Now, it seems to me we were just about to have one rocking good fuck.” I pressed my mouth over hers, and with little effort, got myself back in the mood.
My partner wasn’t feeling it as much. Sasha pulled her face to the side and away from my kiss.
“Guess my roommate shattered the mood too much,” I said as I made one more attempt by lowering my mouth over her nipple.
“No.” She pushed at my shoulder. “Smoke. I smell smoke.”
My mind was quickly off of the beautiful naked body next to me as I sat up on the bed. One short whiff of the air in the bedroom assured me she was right. I flew off the mattress. “What the fuck did that idiot do this time?” I raced to the door and yanked it open. Black, choking smoke was billowing around the front room. I ran back into the room and grabbed my pants from the floor.
Sasha had already jumped out of bed. She was hastily pulling on her panties and jeans. I leaned my head into the hall. The smoke burned my eyes and throat.
I yelled down the hallway. “Joey, get the fuck out of bed! Joey!” There was no response, and I hadn’t expected one. The fool was already passed out drunk in his bed, completely oblivious. I grabbed the blanket off my bed and threw it over my shoulder. I took hold of Sasha’s hand next. “Keep low to avoid the smoke,” I told her as I leaned down and led her through the hallway to the front door.
“I think I can contain it in the kitchen, but, just in case, step out and away from the house.”
“Be careful. I’ll call for help.” Sasha pulled her shirt up to cover her face as she ran out into the cold night air.
I raced to the angry flames in the kitchen. The marshmallow bag and its fluffy white contents had melted into a mess on the counter. Joey had left the stove on, and the marshmallows had caught fire. I held my breath to avoid the acrid smoke, but it left a bitter taste in my throat. I threw the blanket over the flames. Pieces of hot curtains floated around me like glowing butterflies. My feet were bare, but I managed to stomp them all out before they drifted off to the main room. The entire kitchen was black with smoke, reminding me of a suffocating rock fall in the mine. The window was searing hot, but I managed to push it open. The smoke seemed in no hurry to leave. I was relieved the flames were out.
Sasha poked her head in through the front door. “Is it over?” she called through the haze.
“Yeah. Guess I should invest in a fire extinguisher.” I followed her out onto the front yard.
“Or maybe you should just get a new roommate.”
“Probably won’t need to. The landlord will be handing me my walking papers when he sees the mess.” Sirens sounded in the distance. “Shit, now I’ve got to hear about how important it is to keep my fire alarms charged. Think I’ll go in and wake Joey and let him deal with the firemen.”
“Well”—Sasha hopped up on her toes and kissed me—“I’m dressed, so I might as well head home. Looks like you’re ready for that trip to California you’ve been talking about. It’ll give you a chance to clear your head of smoke, lousy roommates and those dreams you’ve been having.”
I smiled at her. “How can one woman be so smart and so beautiful?”
“See what you’ll be missing when I’m gone?” She winked at me. “I’ll see you before I leave, Dawz. Try and stay away from burning marshmallows.”
She got into her car and drove away. The sirens were nearing. I stomped down the hallway to Joey’s room and shoved the door open. He was face down on the mattress with a toasted marshmallow glued to his hair.
I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him upright.
His breath stank like whiskey. “Dude, what’s going on? Why are you waking me?”
“You need to find yourself a new place to live.”
I released him. He flopped on the bed like a rubber doll and drifted right back to sleep.
Chapter 2
Lenix
I pushed open the door to Brick’s bedroom and walked inside. His disheveled man-bun popped up from the pillow. A small pair of feminine feet, complete with painted orange toenails, wriggled on the pillow next to him.
“Fuck, Lennie, what the hell are you doing?” he growled as I traipsed across the room.
“I’m looking for my phone.” I walked over to his dresser. It was covered with empty beer cans, guitar picks, ripped condom packages and some powdery remnants of cocaine.
“Why the hell would your phone be in here?”
“Because the last time I had it was when I came through this shithole of a room.” I glanced around, but with the blinds still shut, it was too dark to find a speck of a phone in a hurricane of discarded clothing. I tripped over one hot pink high heel on my way to the blinds. I reached up and yanked them open.
Brick covered his eyes with his forearm. Several disgruntled, feminine moans floated up from beneath the sheets. With more light in the room, I could see the other set of toes at the bottom of his bed sheets.
As I perused the floor, I saw at least three pairs of panties and two bras.
“Wait. I just remembered, I used your bathroom.” I ignored Brick’s yell to get the hell out of his room and headed into his bathroom. The bathroom had been designed by an interior decorator with Italian marble and a massive shower that could hold a party of people, and with the bubbles still clinging to the tile walls, it seemed it had been used for just that. It also had a gold plated toilet. Brick’s stupid idea. He said it would make him feel like ‘a king when he was on the throne’. The real truth was that we’d all been so darn poor before the band took off that none of us had a clue what to do with money now that we had it.
I shoved aside the wet towels on the sink, and my phone blinked up at me. “Found it.” My voice echoed in the cavernous bathroom.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of my room,” Brick growled from his bed.
I walked back into the room. “Graham says he booked us all a beach house for a week.” I stopped at his bed and surveyed the silhouettes of the bodies tucked in around him. “Jeez, just how many people do you have in there?”
“Lost count at three,” he muttered, but he was proud as hell about being an asshole. By the time our band Ice Cake had taken off, Brick, my now ex-boyfriend, and I had drifted apart sexually. He’d immediately launched into what I lovingly referred to as his ‘indiscriminate, anything on two legs phase’. He had an addiction to groupies, and fortunately for Brick, they were equally devoted to him.
Apparently Brick had grown used to the light in the room. He lowered his arm and sat up. The tattoos on his neck were swollen with red hickeys. I pointed to my own neck. “Nice look. Sure hope the toes in this bed are eighteen or older.”
A pile of blonde hair popped up from the sheet at the end of his bed. The girl had round blue eyes behind smeared mascara. She looked fresh out of high school . . . hopefully. “Hey, you’re Lenix Harlow.”
I placed my hand against my chest. “Am I? Holy shit.”
The huge slap of sarcasm floated over her pretty head, and she withdrew back under the covers.
I blinked down at Brick. “What the hell did we ever have in common?”
“Good sex?”
I shook my head. “Nah, it wasn’t that good. You should keep practicing.” I turned to leave.
“I guess Rushton is taking us to the beach to prove to the press that you had to cancel those last two shows because of exhaustion?” Brick said angrily to my back.
I stopped but didn’t turn back to face him.
“You’re going to have to get past it, Lennie. You need to face the stage fright head on or—”
I swung back around, and my eyes swept to the head sticking out from his sheets. I shot Brick a ‘shut the hell up’ look. He caught it and changed his words. “You need to get over this
exhaustion
problem soon. We can’t keep cancelling dates.”
“I’ll deal with my problem and you deal with yours.” I waved my hand over his crowded bed before turning and walking out of the room.
Graham Rushton, our manager and the man who, with the exception of telling me when to blink and breathe, basically ran my life, was in the kitchen talking on the phone. The only reason he wasn’t controlling involuntary functions like breathing and blinking was because he hadn’t figured out how yet.
Graham’s face was that shade of orange that I knew too well. It was an unnatural skin tone that came from his morning smoothies of carrot juice. The weekly spray tan, his gaudy taste in clothes and the unnatural brown color of his hair and moustache only added to the carnival of color. He was like that uncle that no one ever invited for Thanksgiving but who showed up anyhow to spend the whole evening after the feast with his pants unzipped and his hand in an awkward position beneath the waistband. Of course, the only thing I knew about family at Thanksgiving or weird uncles was from what I’d learned watching sitcoms on television.
Graham, or Rush as the guys and I sometimes called him because he was always in a rush, paced the mansion’s gourmet kitchen while talking on his phone. He didn’t look happy about his conversation. Something that became even more obvious when he returned to the refrigerator three times to pull out a beer. I had no doubt that the conversation was about me, his pain in the ass singing prodigy, who had earned him a fortune and earned him plenty of gray hair along with it. The reason behind the unusual brown hair color.
His bushy eyebrows bunched together as he tried without success to pop open the third beer. I walked into the kitchen. He stared at me with a harsh expression that confirmed my suspicion that the conversation was about me.
I gazed right back at him, popped open his beer and handed it to him hard enough to make foam splash out the top.
“We’re working on it, Frank. I just think this week away is all she needs.”
I walked out, not wanting to hear any more of it. I had no real interest in the conversation, mostly because I didn’t need to hear it to know exactly what was being said. Frank, the dickless record producer who we’d all sold our souls to three years earlier, was raging mad about the tour cancellations. And rather than just telling Frank the truth, Graham was trying to appease him with lies. But there was just no appeasing the devil, especially when he knew it was going to affect his bottom line. And two missed concerts were definitely going to cut out a chunk of cash.
I headed into the media room and turned on some music, any music that wasn’t our music. I picked up my book off the coffee table. The house had been too quiet. Duff, the keyboardist, and Rex, our drummer, had taken off for two nights just to get away from the tension in the house. When we were between concerts, we spent most of our time together under one roof, Hades Manor, as we lovingly called it, to compose and practice and record. Normally, we all got along fine, and aside from the parade of girls tripping through the house to Brick’s bedroom, we were cozy like a close family. Something I’d never had growing up. But like other real families, ours came with plenty of drama and emotion. And lately, I’d been the center of that drama. But it hadn’t been intentional. None of it had been intentional. And, for now, it all seemed out of my control.
Rush came out of the kitchen with the phone in his hand. He stared at it on his palm. “Do you think I could crush this thing in one hand? Or maybe I should just heave it through that flat screen television.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Don’t,” he snapped as he walked around to the couch and stood glowering over me. I continued to look at my book. “Don’t roll those eyes at me, Lenix Harlow. Don’t even fucking roll those eyes.”
“Too late,” I quipped. “Don’t know how to take back an eye roll. Although, I guess since I’m looking down at this book, it might count as undoing it. But the sentiment remains. You’re making too big of a deal about this.”
“Too big of a deal!” His baritone yell rattled the windows and my nerves, but I didn’t let him know that. I sucked in a long, silent breath and closed my book. Even as I reminded myself not to cry, the tears burned my eyes as I looked up at him. The ugly veins that always bubbled on the side of his neck when he was pissed looked as if they might just burst open this time.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Lennie? We just canceled two sold out concerts because the lead singer was having
anxiety
issues.” He made those grumpy, out of style air quotes that made me want to laugh and cry all at the same time.
I hopped up to remove myself from under his menacing shadow. Not that he would ever lift a hand to me but standing gave me back some confidence.
“During that last concert, it was all I could do to keep myself from running off the stage and hiding in the dressing room. I need this break. I told you, I’ll be fine. We just need to make some big changes to the set. No more of those horrid fireworks, and—”
“Medication.” He pointed his big finger in my face as he spit the word out.
“I told you I’m not taking any of that shit that your questionable doctor is handing out. Christ, Graham, you of all people should know that I can’t take that stuff. A week off, just like you said, and I’ll have this stage anxiety worked out. Just leave me the hell alone.”
He made good on his earlier threat and heaved the phone into the television. The crashing sound brought Brick running from his room. He’d at least taken the time to pull on his pants, even if he hadn’t bothered to button them.
Brick looked straight at me. “Are you all right, Lennie?” The guys, my bandmates and three best friends, were the main reason why Graham would never take a swing at me. I was pretty good at taking him to the brink, and I was sure the idea had run through his head more than once. But Graham knew there would be hell to pay if he so much as laid a finger on me.
“I’m fine, Brick.” I turned back to Rush. “If you don’t think I’m feeling the guilt, the pain, the fucking pressure of this down to my toes, then you don’t know me at all, Graham. Even after all these years together, you still don’t know me.” From that point on, I knew the tears would only keep flowing, like a river of humiliation, down my cheeks. I ran out of the room and headed for the solitude of my bedroom.
“Don’t forget the hell I pulled you from, Lenix,” Graham yelled unnecessarily at my back.
As if I could ever forget.