Ice Steam (Loving All Wrong #3) (11 page)

“How about I spend the night?” We were out of the movie room now, drifting aimlessly down the hall, his strong, protective arm still around me. “Remember I have Saturdays off now, so I can even stay the weekend if you’d like.”

Steel-gray eyes penetrated me. “I’d like.”

“I have a change of clothes in my bag.” Rule number one from Danni was that I
always
have a change of clothes, a makeup case, and a pair of heels in my handbag. “And I could borrow stuff from Xena.”

“Ah, sis doesn’t like people touching her shit,” he said in an apologetic tone. “I’ll buy—”

“Sluts,” Xena said from somewhere in the house, then all of a sudden she was in front of us. “I don’t like
sluts
touching my stuff. Alina’s not a slut. She’s class. Look at her, she’s buffed shine from head to toe. Right up my alley. Girl can have whatever she wants from my closet.” Taking my arm, she pulled me right out of Xavier’s cocoon. “Come take what you want. So excited there’ll be a
real
girl staying over tonight and not some penis-crunching, cum-gurgling groupie. It gets tiresome living with a bunch of growly, egotistical rock stars constantly arguing over whose cock is the biggest or who ate the last slice of overnight pizza. I hang out at Eye Spy and try to make do with Jess sometimes, but that girl gives me cavity. She’s
way
too sweet. Chick could be Joel Osteen’s daughter. I need a girlfriend with a few bad bones. And you, Alina, I can see it in those impish black eyes, you’ve got
dirty
little secrets.”

As she hauled me off, I glanced over my shoulder back at Xavier and mouthed, “Who talks this much?”

Smiling, Xavier raised a finger to his temple and made a few quick circular motions to convey his sister was loco.

I lost sight of my big, strong, beautiful guitarist as Xena hauled me around the corner.

“You’re gonna fall in love with him,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Xavi.” We were now mounting a spiraling set of white stairs. “When he wants something he goes all out, goes hard. And he
so
wants you. The way he looks at and holds you says it all. Brother’s undone.”

She was wrong. I wouldn’t fall in love with Xavier because I was already in love with another man. There was no place in my heart to accommodate Xavier. Davian owned all of it.

Leaping fast off that topic, I asked her, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

A whole four years older than me yet she acted like a high school junior. “I’m twenty-one.”

“Guessed it.”

Might sound impossible but upstairs was bigger than downstairs, possibly due to layered architectural design. We passed through a massive chill area that had a foosball table, a pool table, a small stage with microphones, drums and guitars, recliners, big luxury sofas, and an alcove bar with ‘Ninety Miles’ flashing in neon blue on a mosaic backsplash.

Xena paused at an intersection where two gaping hallways faced each other, and it felt like I was standing at a crossroads.

Jutting her right thumb to the right hallway, she informed me, “Leo and Markie’s this way.”—Left thumb to the left hallway—“Tex and Xavi’s this way.”

Then she continued straight ahead to yet another spiraling staircase that disappeared through a hole in the ceiling. “The Queen of Beach Rock gets a floor all to herself,” she boasted as we climbed up to her floor. “This is me!”

Xena’s floor was a super-luxury studio apartment with a killer beach view. Popping with colors, it housed a sleek, all-red kitchenette, a living area, a California King, and even a fireplace.

“Nice,” I commented.

“I know, right? While the boys were busy fighting over who should get this house, I just moved in first and claimed the best room.” Skipping south of the studio, she opened a set of double doors. “Annnd, here’s the best part.”

I followed her in. A sizable walk-in closet. I had seen and had better, I was living in a penthouse for Pete’s sake, but I wouldn’t kill her buzz. The woman was giddy about her space, and there was no crime in that. In fact, I envied her contentment. Lord knows I forgot what that tasted like. Haven’t had even a whiff of it in a long, long time.

Xena waved her hand like a fairy godmother. “Go ahead, pick something. By the way, it’s Jake’s birthday tomorrow and the boys are throwing him at party at SiTo Night Club, so you might wanna pick a club dress, too.”

To get it over with, I began picking through her stuff. Her style was chic, lots of silk and sheer and blazers and scarfs. “Jake the guitarist from Ice Steam?”

“Yep, same fine ass boy,” she said. “I walked in on him getting head the other day and, girl, lemme tell you, that boy is hung like a horse
god
!”

This chick was something else. I liked her, though.

“Uh, I don’t think—”

“It’s appropriate to talk about other men’s dicks with your man’s sister?” She flipped her hair back and rolled her eyes. “You think because he has a ‘girlfriend’ now he’s gonna walk out of the room when the boys switch on porn? Pfft. Please. I’ll slit your throat and let you bleed to death if you break his heart, of course, but I won’t tattle if you drool over a fine piece of ass. And Jake
is
a fine piece of ass. You’re red-blooded, you have a vagina and good eyesight, you’re allowed to lust after hot guys.”

Straightening, my free hand automatically went to my throat, and I felt all the blood drain from my head to pool in my ankles, weighing me down like an anchor, sucking me into the ground like quicksand, my vision going from colored to shades of gray.

No, I didn’t blame her for the onslaught of horrific memories her threat triggered, because she didn’t know. She didn’t know what happened to my parents. So, to restrain myself from throttling and strangling her till her body went still and lifeless, I closed my eyes and steadily inhaled and exhaled on ten counts.

“Whoa, Alina, are you alright? Did I—”

“I think these will do,” I said, clutching the armful of clothes to my chest like a lifeline and quickly turning out of the closet.

Of course, in-your-face Xena pressed a hand to my chest and stopped me. After studying me a minute, she must have misread what was there, because when she spoke next, the bubbly blonde was gone and replaced by a woman with austerity and discernment. “Here, we’re a family. We look out for each other and our love for each other is boundless. Many come and go, because their hearts weren’t right. If your heart’s not right, you can’t sit at our table. You seem legit, and I actually do like your spirit so far. But you’re hiding something, Alina. And I hope to God it’s nothing that’ll screw Xavi in the end. Because I seriously
will
hurt whoever
hurts my brother.”

Mute, I counted backwards in my head to keep the unbidden memories at bay. To shut out the blood, the gaping mouths and wide, lifeless eyes.

…76, 75, 74, 73, 72, 71, 70, 69, 68, 67…

Xena went on, “We can be good friends as long as you’re straight and you don’t try to play me. I might talk a lot, but that’s because it buys me enough time to read you. Don’t ever think I’m stupid.”

“Xena,” I said in a calm, quiet voice. “Please remove your hand, stop talking, and step aside.”

Biting her bottom lip, she narrowed her gaze and searched my face, then slowly backed out of my space.

Still counting backwards, struggling to breathe, I hurried out, barley hearing as she called after me, “It’s my job to cover their secrets, Alina. And as good as I am at burying secrets, I’m twice as good at unearthing them.”

I sought refuge in the nearest bathroom after leaving Xena’s floor, turned the lock on the doorknob and let the apparels fall from my arm as I rushed to the toilet, dropped to my knees and regurgitated everything I’d eaten that day.

After a couple of long minutes hurling so hard my throat felt sore, I flushed the toilet, lowered the lid, sat down, buried my face between my knees and remained in that positioned until the nausea subsided.

Luckily, no one came searching for me, and by the time I rinsed my mouth with some Listerine I found in the cabinet and walked out of the bathroom, I felt like myself again. The strong, cool, unfazed me.

Navigating down the hall where Xena informed me Xavier’s room was, I tapped on the ajar door on the left, because the door on the right had a poster of Saskia Day on it with a little black knife jammed into where her heart would be. Couldn’t be more obvious whose room that was.

No one answered from inside Xavier’s room so I pushed the door and went in. Like most of the house, his room was all-white, but one could tell it was a man who slept there. Above his headboard was an old, battered Stratocaster that could do well with a refurbish.

On one corner of the headboard hung a Rastafarian beanie. Dumping the armful of borrowed clothes on the enormous bed, I took the beanie and smoothed my palm over the top of it, then sniffed it. Sea breeze. Exact same scent his hair carried.

I fixed the beanie as neat as I could over the big, high-fashion curls I’d gotten during the photoshoot, and carried on browsing his room.

A few personal photos were on his dresser. One of him and Xena in what looked like a desert, her sitting on a camel, grinning at the camera, and him standing on the sand in jeans, T-shirt and a red bandanna tied around his head, eyes squinting at the camera.

Another with him and the band. Another with what seemed to his parents. And an old, weathered, black and white photo of a tall man on a stage in what looked like a bar with the words
Ole Boy Xander
behind him, his mouth forming an O over the mike, and his fingers crooked on the strings of the same guitar above Xavier’s headboard. Judging from the stark resemblance, build and height, he was definitely an old relative of Xavier.

I espied some printed images peeking out from beneath a stack of comics on the right end of the dresser. Shifting the comics, I peeked at the images. Me. The photos the paparazzi had snapped of me and Saskia and plastered on the internet. On one image that showed more of me than Saskia, my face was circled with red marker, with a fine scrawl that said:
is it her
? Another was zoomed in to my left wrist showing a partial view of my tattoo. It, too, was circled with scrawling I couldn’t read because it was in French.

The others were scrawl-free but I hated all of them, because that day I’d been so Jacob-stressed and exhausted, bedraggled. Baggy sweats, plain white tee and Uggs, hair a rioted knot atop my head, no makeup, freckles dusted on my nose. I couldn’t fathom how Xavier found me attractive in these, and the “
is it her?
” scrawling was kinda
strange. Was I who?

“Used to look at them while I talked to you on the phone,” a deep voice said from behind me. “Putting face to voice.”

I glanced up in the dresser mirror and found Xavier watching me with a secretive little gleam I couldn’t pin down. Shifting the comics back onto the photos, I turned to face him. “I look like crap in those.”

“You got your opinion, I got mine.”

My hands gripped the edges of the dresser, restraining my sudden sexual urges. Whenever Xavier was near me it felt as though I was standing near open flames, the air between us warped and wavy like actual heat was emanating from him. He was big and crowding and unmistakable and unforgettable and undeniable and unsustainable. His presence was ambushing and arresting, and all you could think about while he was
right there
in front of you was sex.

Raw. Primal. Sex.

Like now, I knew I should be asking him something about something, something relevant to something, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember that something, and instead I was flirting with, “And what’s your opinion?”

Closing the gap between us, he tugged at the Rastafarian beanie on my head. “I think you’re jammin’.”

I did a little bounce from side to side as I sang in a terrible Jamaican accent, “I wanna jam it with you…me jammin’… me jammin’…an’ I hope you like jammin’, too.”

He laughed, soft, mellow, and I almost came. “’Course I wanna jam it with you.”

“Then what you waitin’ on, man? Let’s jam—”

My Caribbean act ended abruptly because, faster than I could think, Xavier had me jacked up on top of the dresser with his hips between my thighs, his tongue slaughtering mine, his erection like bent metal at my pelvis.

This kiss was different. This one spelled hunger and starvation, reservation broken, a bomb exploding.

I returned it as he gave it, equally starved and eager for this “getting to know me more” farce to be over. I just needed his dick already.

His hands had just cruised up under my blouse and cupped my aching breasts in his big palms when I heard Xena’s voice in the room.

“Well, this makes me feel like a lonely old bat.”

Xavier emitted an exasperated sigh, breaking away and turning to his sister.

As I straightened my top, I peeked around Xavier’s broad back to dagger Xena a “WTF” glower.

She was unrepentant. “I don’t knock. Ever. The boys know this. Don’t want me to barge in, turn the damn lock.” She held out a tray of takeout food. “Dinner just arrived.”

Xavier relieved her of the tray, and she winked at me then went on her merry way. Well that explained how she knew what Tex and Jake’s dick looked like. She didn’t knock. Ever.