Heart Broke (Hard Rock Roots Book 8) (5 page)

My cock turns to stone in an instant, drawing Sydney's eyes straight down to the bulge in my jeans. I lean against the doorjamb unapologetically. The fuck do I care anymore? Let her look. I'm done saying sorry for this shit. Why not play a Turner Campbell and unzip the damn things? Flash my dick for the entire hallway?

Only I don't, you know, because I'm not Turner Campbell. I'm fucking Dax. Just … Dax.

“Hey,” Sydney says, sliding under my arm and into the room with a sweet smoky scent trailing behind her. She smells like incense, like an underground magic shop that sells tea and herbs and shit. I close my eyes and breathe her in, prepared to slam the door closed behind her when I spot Ronnie pushing a wheelchair in my direction. Huh. Must be Trey, I guess?

I try not to feel disappointed. Didn't I just declare that I don't give a crap about Sydney Charell?
It wasn't like she was there for you when you needed her most or anything, right Dax? Be a dick and kick her out why don't you.

I step aside, hating that my room is a frigging disaster. It smells like sweat and desperation and beer in here. Jesus Christ. I kick the door closed and take a deep breath, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the overpowering reek of body spray that follows the wheelchair. Treyjan and Turner and all those other assholes like them, they might be douche bags but I've never been poisoned by the rancid stench of Axe before. Goddamn it. Thought that crap was reserved for jocks and fanboys.

“What are you guys doing here?” I drawl, slumping against the wall and putting a cigarette between my lips. I try to look at Ronnie but as usual, I can't keep my eyes off of Sydney.
Good god.
Even with a heavy blanket of melancholia dampening my spirit, I can't
not
look at her. Or keep my dick from getting painfully hard.
Down boy.
I suck in a deep breath and wrinkle my nose.

Sydney steeples her hands in front of her face, her multicolored fingernails flashing bright against her pink mouth as she looks at me with those liquid candy eyes of hers and grimaces sheepishly.

“You okay, Dax?” she asks me, giving me a once-over that doesn't really end like I'd want it to. I want to see her eyes light up like that first time she saw me, swarmed with lust, wrapped in desire. Instead she just looks … sad. Because
I
am sad. Just sad. Sad, sad, sad.

“I'm alright,” I say which is complete bullshit, and Sydney knows it. We've been spending too much time together for her to miss my tumble down fuck-up hill. All I had was the music and my friends, and now … now I'm not even sure I have either of those anymore. “What's up?”

Ronnie and Sydney exchange a long, lingering look, one that tells me there's something going on here that I'm not going to like.

“I'm about as low as I can go, guys. Hit me with it. You can't take much from nothing.”

“Dax,” Sydney begins, but Ronnie's already a step ahead of her, flipping back Trey's hood with a flick of his fingers and sliding off his shades.

Only it's not Treyjan Charell.

There's a motherfucking corpse in my hotel room.

“Oh fuck.” I slap a hand to my face and take a nice long hot drag on my smoke. “Is that Cohen Rose?”

“Might be,” Ronnie quips with a loose shrug of his shoulders. This guy, he's a god of the kit. As far as drumming goes, it doesn't get any better than Ronnie McGuire. This man's a living legend and he's not quite thirty years old. But apparently he's also a murderer. Great. Just great. Wonderful role model.

“You killed him?” I ask, not like I'm surprised. Turner's a fucking asshole, but Cohen Rose, man … he's a
wannabe
asshole. Nothing worse than that. Not cool but desperate. Not confident but insecure. A total nightmare. I think I spoke to the guy a total of three times on the tour. Once, to buy blow off him. The second and third times I think he was calling me an emo faggot or some other unoriginal piece of dribble. I could've beaten the bitch up with my eyes closed. Why does everyone act like I'm a skinny goth boy with greasy hair and a satanic altar in my basement? I work out three times a week. Don't see Turner Campbell lifting weights with me.

“Not me,” Ronnie says with another shrug. “Although I was strongly considering it. No, we found him dead in our bathtub this morning. I think Brayden Ryker left him there.”

“Why would …” I start, but then pause, taking another deep breath that smells like sweat and body spray. “Later. You can tell me later. What I really want to know right now is why the fuck you brought a dead man into my hotel room?”

“He was staying here, wasn't he? Cohen Rose?” Sydney asks, pulling my attention back to her. That's not a difficult task, really.
She's so fucking beautiful.
I check her out from head to toe, tracing her curvy figure, my eyes trailing over her acid wash skinny jeans, her purple heels, and then going back to her beautiful blonde hair and big pink earrings. Tattoos tease me from fingertip to shoulder, brightly colored sea creatures swimming over her skin and across her chest. She's like some eighties pop star or something, all neon colors and angles and pretty perfection.

“To be honest, I have no fucking clue. Maybe. I guess?” I run my hand through my hair, glad that at least I had the chance to shower this morning. “Brayden Ryker booked us in here through next week. After that … I don't know what happens after that.” My forehead wrinkles up as I try to recall the night of our last concert. It's such a blur, dude. I remember guns and a kid and blood and … fuck. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“We need somewhere to dump the body,” Sydney says, all matter-of-fact and shit. I raise my eyebrows at her, my body tingling as I stand up straight and move around the table, dragging out a chair and flipping it around to sit in it. If either Ronnie or Sydney notices my cock straining against my pants, they're polite enough to pretend otherwise.

“Um,” I start, my head spinning and twisting, my dad's words echoing in the back of my brain like they always do, a demon I can never shed.
Is that what you wanted to hear? You like knowing that you were unwanted by everyone? Your mother wept the entire nine months she was pregnant with you.
“What does that have to do with me?”

“We were going to toss him in a dumpster or something, but the crowd is … well, it's frigging enormous.” Sydney moves over to my trash can and spits out her gum, switching it out for a cigarette. At least she has the decency to crack the window. I haven't bothered to do that once and I've been chain-smoking since we checked in. “So we need another plan, and we needed a plausible excuse for coming over here.”

“And another accomplice for the felony charge of abuse of a corpse?” I ask. I'm being an asshole. I know I am. But come on? I hardly know these people, right? We're all trapped in the same spider's web. That's it. No connection at all.

“I know what you're feeling right now,” Ronnie says, his voice surprisingly soft. I flick my eyes up at him and raise my brows. He comes over to sit next to me, pulling out the other chair and staring at me like he thinks I need some mentoring or something. “I lost my soul mate and then, three years later, I lost my brother. I get what you're going through, and I'm not saying you can't grieve, but don't dig another hole, Dax.”

“What—”

Ronnie reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. It's weird, this dude covered in snake and rose tattoos, looking at me like he gives a rat's ass about how I feel. I stare back at him, trapped in brown eyes that hold way too much wisdom for a guy in his late twenties. I know all about Ronnie, about his lost lover, his drug habits, his horde of kids. But something's changed in him recently. I mean, I can see he's not nearly as skinny as he was, not all drugged up and dragging, but holy shit.

Part of me wants to slap his hand off and part of me wants to … listen.

But then I remember he just wheeled a corpse into my hotel room and shrug him off.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask instead, looking up at Sydney. At the very least, I owe her this. If she hadn't been there those first few days after the incident with Hayden and Tara, I'm not sure if I'd even be sitting here right now. “I might have a cemetery tattooed on my arm, but I'm not exactly an expert on death. In fact, the more I see of it, the more I hate it.”

“Do you have any idea what room Cohen might've been staying in? Or what floor? I mean, Brayden's guys are every-fucking-where, but they don't seem to have any interest in bothering my poor, crippled brother.” Sydney grins and pokes at Cohen's shoulder with her fingernail. “We figure if we can at least get him somewhere close by, then it doesn't matter if they find the body. I have a feeling that Brayden Ryker won't be making any calls to the police either. He seems to exist outside the system.”

Sydney taps a finger against her lips and my body goes bat shit crazy. I can just imagine those lips enveloping my cock, her bubblegum pink tongue wrapping my dick.

I groan and ash my cigarette into the tray behind me, leaning over and pressing my head into my forearm. Sex is like, literally the last thing I should be thinking about right now. So why when I see this girl does it become the first thing on my mind?

“I think he was on this floor to be honest with you,” I say, raising my head and looking between the two of them with tired, sticky eyes. “But I've been so out of it lately that maybe I imagined him? Who knows?”

“Well, that's a start,” Sydney says, putting her cig back in her mouth and flipping up Cohen's hood. I can't look at the man, at his corpse white skin or the weird half-smile on his face. God.
There's a fucking dead body sitting not three feet away from me and here I am, smoking a cigarette and sporting a woody. Fan-fucking-tastic.
“But if Brayden was in your room last night, Ronnie, he knows Cohen's dead, whether he put him in the tub or not. That means he's just waiting for us to do something about it. The man's not a complete idiot.”

“He did it,” Ronnie says, still staring at me like some sort of fucking sage or something. What does he think? That he can save me or something? Screw him. I watch as he stands up and straightens his black Indecency tee. “Nobody else could've gotten into the house with our security detail. There's no fucking way.”

“Either way, we're not getting into Cohen's room,” Sydney continues, moving over to the window and flicking the curtains out of the way. California sunshine streams in, blinding me for a moment as I lift up an arm and squint. When she turns to look at me, Sydney's body gets bathed in gold, lighting her up from behind like an angel.
Wish there was more than just sunlight behind her.
Something like, you know,
me.

I look away and clear my throat. I have an idea. Maybe it's stupid, but whatever. Ronnie and Sydney came to me for a reason, right?

“Who says we need to get him back into his own room? Those assholes left a dead body in your manager's room. Let's leave one in theirs.”

And I used to think the strip club back in Detroit smelled bad.

Hah.

The Happy Bunny ain't got
nothin'
on this twisted funk. It's true what they say: rotten bodies reek to high fucking heaven.

“I feel like I'm about to hurl up some Chunky Monkey,” I say, clamping a hand over my mouth. If I could go back in time, I would've avoided the pint of ice cream in the fridge and stuck with celery. Or water. Or maybe nothing at all.

I swallow down the acidic taste of bile and dig into my pocket for another stick of gum, popping it into my mouth and trying to focus on the bright, light bite of mint between my teeth and not the sticky, sweet smell of death in the narrow hallway.

It's quiet up here, much quieter than I thought it would be. Much quieter than it
used
to be. Hell, I wasn't even around for the 'rowdy' portion of the tour and still, there were always roadies, assistants, managers, and musicians scurrying around like ants. Now …

“It feels like a ghost town,” I say and then get a little shiver down my spine.
One that actually has nothing to do with Dax's hard, muscular body striding down the hall next to mine.
I let my eyes swing over to him, to his freshly shaved face, his perfect mouth, and get another shiver.
And that had nothing to do with him either, right?
I sigh and blow a puff of hot air out and up to ruffle my blonde bangs. I have the right to
pretend
his presence isn't affecting me, don't I? My moist panties might argue otherwise, but either way, we're both painfully aware that we have the world's greatest cock blocker in play right now: a dead wannabe rock star. How gloriously perverse.