Hung Out: A Needles and Pins Rock Romance (8 page)

“Scar, I’m barely holding on… Not a good idea—” His protest melted into a string of euphoric curses when my lips fit around him.

With him now at my mercy, I fully intended to pay him back for each tortuous minute he’d subjected me to. That was the plan. But Gage was a man. His physical strength outmatched mine. And it was just as erotic when he silently called the shots by yanking me up after I’d barely had a taste, pivoting me to face the wall, copping a quick grab of my breasts before locking his hands to my waist, kicking my feet apart, and growling sex talk into my ear while slamming into me.

T
hey said nothing for the longest time. He wondered if she also was too wrung out to speak. Or if taking her like an animal instead of worshiping every inch of the gorgeous body he’d been deprived of for months had traumatized her into silence.

“You okay?” Finally, he managed two words and cradled her closer in his lap.

“Um hmm.” She barely stirred against his chest.

Tipping his head back to rest in the corner, he closed his eyes while brushing his fingers up and down the smooth silkiness of her toned calves.

“Are they going to write you up or something if we miss the welcome meeting?”

“Write me up?” He grinned at her juvenile suggestion, wishing they could sit like this until… Until they didn’t want to. “Nah.” She relaxed onto him, and until then he hadn’t realized she had stiffened while waiting for his answer. “Just detention.” She slapped at him, and he let her, but caught her wrist when she began to button up. “Leave it, so I can play a little longer…” Using his knuckles, he skimmed the velvet softness swelling from her bra. “Speaking of school…”

“Were we?”

“You probably didn’t, but I definitely had detention a time or two.” His thumb dipped beneath the lace.

“No!” Her whispered comeback was suitably appalled.

Her antics had him grinning like a fool. Everything right now had him smiling. He was firmly entrenched in his happy place. “How are classes?”

“Great. I’m liking them a lot. One professor seems like she’s going to be impossible, but the rest are cool.”

The conversation took off and he soaked up the sound of her voice and relished hushing her laugh with his lips to hers when it got too loud.

“What’s new with your music? Still finding time?”

Nodding proudly, she reached behind him, and he raised his brows when her finger splayed on the back pocket area of his jeans. “My phone, nympho,” she clarified what she was after. And he remembered he had pocketed it when he’d noticed her carrying it without her purse. After thumbing through the icons, she passed it to him.

“Don’t tell me. ‘Gage and Scarlette Wallbanging in a Barn’ has been already uploaded by some spying pervy fuck with their camera always ready.”

He loved watching her brows shoot up when he rattled her cage of decency and decorum. Somehow, Henni Smythe had raised a lady. Despite all she had seen during her upbringing, Scar could be shocked. But that didn’t mean she was a prude. She always laughed at his audacity or told him off, and this time was no different.

“I love how you think you’re so funny.”

“Tell me I’m not.”

“You’re not.”

“I love how you think I believe everything you say.”

“Tell me you don’t.”

They’d reached an impasse, and they both fell quiet.

He had just joked about the sex video for the first time. It had a life of just over a month before the attorneys had managed to get it pulled. Copies continued to crop up, and now it was a task of someone his publicist had hired to routinely scan the internet for it.

Coming out of the past, he spent a moment taking in her mussed hair, swollen lips, disheveled clothing, and eyes alight from their teasing exchange.

With an anticipatory smile of whatever he was about to see, he hit play on the video and hastily bumped the volume down. Onscreen, Scar was on the studio couch with Claudine in her lap. Holding the speaker directly to one of his ears, he nodded his encouragement at what he was hearing. She was advancing on the guitar fast. Obviously, she’d inherited every last artistic gene from her father. When it ended, he replayed, but the second time around, he admired her fingers as they danced on the strings.

She was waiting expectantly, and he voiced his praise aloud. “No way. No way you’re going to school and still finding the time it takes to get that good that fast.” She rolled her eyes, matching his playful tone, but her face lit up, and he always felt lucky when he was the one to put the sparkle in her eyes. Something onscreen caught his eye, and his fingers clamped the phone when another look confirmed what he was seeing. “Son of a bitch. No fucking wonder!”

When she raised her face, no doubt alerted by the flip side of his tone, he looked away, hating the innocent confusion in her gaze. Because, if she truly didn’t know what piqued him about the video, then she didn’t share his same depth of feeling in this relationship.

“No wonder what?”

Easy to see why you’re playing like a rock star
. “We need to get back.” He shoved the phone back into her hand.

She rolled to her knees, and with a hand on each of his shoulders, tried to use her weight to keep him from standing. “What’s wrong?”

He blew out an enraged breath and dropped a concentrated glare to her face. “That’s Colt’s studio.”

“So?”

He honest to God hated her right now.
So?
No. He wished he hated her. It would be easier than loving her. Easier than the stabbing shards of hurt and jealousy.

“You’re being a pissy-ass bitch about me being at Colt’s?”

“I’m
always
a dick about you at Colt’s. And I always will be. I thought you’re with me now, and suddenly I’m feeling like I need to be there to fuckin’ drag you from his car.”

He’d hurt her. He saw it. A shimmer in her baby blues. A shift of her bottom lip told him she was biting it from the inside. She reeled from his words, but she came up fighting.

“You asshole! Seriously? You don’t get to say shit like that when you’re here hanging with junkie whores by the pool!”

“Hanging? I’m not hanging with anyone! Jesus. This isn’t a vacation. I’ve never felt so fuckin’ alone in my life.” Squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his teeth closed, he stopped the pitiful tirade. He felt her shift, but she didn’t storm off as he expected her to. Her hands still rested on his shoulders, but instead of clenching in anger, they’d relaxed, and now he swore he felt the slightest flex of her fingers—almost a gentle squeeze. His eyes drifted open, and his gaze landed smack into her concerned one. Panic seized him. Fear of being an object of her pity. Fear of how much he had opened up to her over the months, and fear of what she now saw when she looked at him. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you come.”

Their relationship was so lopsided right now. Her having it all together and him in the middle of mayhem. He’d been afraid her seeing him in this element would tip the precarious balance and so he’d refused visits at first. Then, after a couple of months of missing her crazy, he’d given in. There had been none of the awkwardness he’d worried about until now.

Now, in the span of something he’d seen during a second in time, his doubts and insecurities returned with a vengeance. He shouldn’t have let her come.

“You’re right. It was stupid.” She pushed away with her hands, but remained staring angrily into his face. “I knew it too.”

Her reply ripped him from his contemplation. “Knew what, exactly?”

“Knew you couldn’t man up and handle doing what you have to do.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“It’s here, or doing time in county. You’d walk out if that weren’t the case.”

“I would. Because I’m fine. And there’s no sense sitting around here until some overpaid shrink decides I can leave.”

“They’ll let you leave when you’re ready! Goddammit, Gage. They don’t have some war against you. Let ’em do what they do! Let ’em help you.”

“Do what they do? You know how the world works. Someone like me walks in who has no choice except to stay as long as they say he has to stay. Someone who has deep pockets. Who, every week they can extort another fifteen grand from. Is it any wonder I’m not
well
enough to walk out of here yet? Fuck it all!” It suddenly seemed as if she was staring into his soul a little too sympathetically, and he closed himself off again, this time, looking away. Grasping her hips, he pushed at her, gaining some distance between them. “You should go.” She’d made it clear what she thought of him. He was a loser until a piece of paper said he wasn’t anymore.

“J
ust go. Please…”

“Go where?” I studied his face, seeing the barest twitch of an eyelid. Still as a statue, he sat, waiting for what came next. What? For me to go ahead to the main complex, and he would catch up?

I had noticed the time on my phone screen. There was a half hour before the short meeting held before dinner. And then after dinner, guests had an hour left before visitation was over until the next afternoon.

Or go? As in leave for today? Each weekend, I visited on both Saturday and Sunday. I kept standing reservations in the same hotel we’d shared prior to his check in almost two months ago.

At last, his dark eyes roamed my face, before stopping dead on my gaze. “Go back to life. Back to what you do.”

One of the horses in the pastures might as well have been sitting on my chest. It became impossible to breathe, but I croaked out a confused, “What?”

“I’m not capable of a relationship right now.”

“What are you saying? Did that come out in therapy?”

“No!” His eyes widened a fraction, visibly shocked at the question and then a resigned look glazed them. “Look.” For a second he seemed on the verge of pulling me to him, and his next words were gentle. “Can we just end this for now, without a lot of talking? Just put everything on hold, and then do our talking when we’re not hiding out in a barn?”

Holding his gaze, I stood as if in a trance. “Fine. My flight tomorrow is not until six. Call me and―”

“I won’t. I won’t call. Change it for an earlier one. Go ahead back to the house and go about your life like there’s no me rotting away back here.”

I’d been on the verge of slapping him or breaking down in tears. Which, I wasn’t sure. Now, I worried and sank to his level again. “Do they have you on some meds?”

His eyes had strayed, but they snapped to mine. “No. This is me. All me. Telling you we’re done for now.”

“Fine.” I wanted to scream every hateful curse in my vocabulary at him. More so, I wanted to scream them at myself. He was a fucking rock star. They were all nuts, and I’d known that going in. What an idiot I’d been to convince myself the boy, who’d once been my ally against the world and against my mother, was still inside the man who had just fucked me both physically and emotionally. “I don’t want to talk about it either. So don’t worry.” I hated messy split ups.
God. Is that what we’re doing? Breaking up?
“I’ll talk to you when I talk to you, I guess.” I stood as I talked and clenched my phone as if it were a lifeline. “I’m going to see if I can get a red-eye out. Maybe I can get back before Colt goes to bed.” I moved toward the stairs. And suddenly he was there, in my face.

“Fuck you, Scarlette.”

“No. Fuck you!”

His lips curved, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah, you did. And I’m the best you’ll ever have. You know it.”

“Asshole. Let me go!”

He looked down and seemed startled to see his hands curled around my upper arms. Immediately, he released and I shot down the stairs so fast, I hit my head on the wall as I rounded the corner.