My Rock (The Rock Star Romance Series - Book #1)

MY
ROCK

THE
ROCK STAR ROMANCE SERIES

By
Alycia Taylor

Copyright
2014. All rights reserved.

Get
Future New Releases
In
This Series For 99 Cents

Read My Rock #2
By
Clicking Here

Read My Rock #3
By
Clicking Here

Read
My Rock #4
By
Clicking Here

Click
Here to Like My Facebook Page

Get
An
Email When My Next Book Comes Out By Clicking Here

CHAPTER
ONE

ELLY

I had been telling myself all day that I was a
professional, twenty-two year old woman and silly, old crushes should be just
that…..but my infatuation with Tristan had gone a little bit deeper than just a
silly crush. Granted,
I
was only twelve when I first
discovered his boy band, called
Uptown
Boyz
, but from the ages of twelve to fifteen, Tristan,
the leader and oldest member of the band, was my everything. I went to sleep
every night and woke up every morning to his beautiful face. I had borrowed our
neighbor’s ladder one day when I was home alone and I’d tacked my poster of him
to the ceiling above my bed.
 
It was the
best birthday present I ever got—my best friend, Lucy, knew me well. It was
there for two years and I don’t think either of my parents ever even noticed
it.

I carried my lunch in an
Uptown
Boyz
lunchbox. I had to hide it in
my backpack all through middle and high school because I got a lot of flak
about it, but I still carried it to show my dedication. I spent every dime I
was able to save from my allowance and babysitting gigs on their new CD’s, and
every little girl fantasy I had about growing up and getting married casted
Tristan in the starring role as the groom.

I can’t even describe how devastated I was when I
heard they broke up. I can still recall exactly where I was and what I was
doing. I was at the mall with Lucy, just hanging out at the food court, when I
heard some girl say that
Uptown
Boyz
was no more.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I’d asked her. My
heart was pounding and my head felt light.

“
Uptown
Boyz
broke up.” She delivered the news with a shrug of
her shoulders.
As though this was no big deal.

“Are you sure?” I asked, convinced this had to be a
mistake or some stupid hoax.
 
They are
always saying celebrities have died when they are alive and well—I held out
hope that this was the same kind of thing.

She rolled her eyes and took on a condescending
tone. “Yeah, I’m positive. I just heard it on the radio before I came in here.
The DJ said that Tristan Rogers was going into rehab for, like, the third time,
or something ridiculous like that. The rest of the band just got tired of him
always screwing up.”

It was like a slap in the face. “But without him, they
wouldn’t have been anything. They’re glorified back-up singers,” I told her.
Lucy was pulling on my arm, trying to get me to get serious about shopping. I
spent the rest of the shopping trip in a haze, unable to focus on anything
besides the breakup. Then I went home and fixated on it the rest of evening. In
truth, it took me months to quietly recover, but I finally did, and I moved
on…or at least I had thought.

Until that night.
There I was, seven years later, sitting in a back corner of a seedy bar called
Huggys
that I’d otherwise never had gone inside of. Why was
I there? Because I’d read in a tiny, obscure ad in the L. A. Times that Tristan
Rogers was playing this bar with his new band. I had tried to resist. I tried
telling myself that I was much too old and mature to dwell on old boy-band
crushes. I obviously hadn’t listened, because there I sat. I had come alone for
fear of tarnishing the view people had of me.
My
friends were mostly young professionals in the music and television business
and I couldn’t think of one of them who would have approved of this place or
the people I was now surrounded by—not even if I tried to play it off as some
adventure into irony.

I sat with my back to the wall on a high stool,
sipping my Jack and Coke, hoping that Tristan would come out soon so I could
satisfy my age-old curiosity and go home.
 
I had looked him up off and on over the years, searching for any
information about him or his band. I didn’t obsess over him any longer, but
every now and then when I got bored, I just checked to see if I could find any
information about him. What I’d been able to find had been snippets here and
there about the band. This one got arrested and that one came out as being
gay—all of it pretty typical, but none of it helpful. But the information on
Tristan was few and far between. The first couple of years after the band broke
up, he’d gotten out of rehab, dated an heiress for a while, and then a B-list
actress. He’d gotten picked up on a DUI and had to serve community service and do
rehab again. Sadly, his music seemed to have all but died. The day I saw the ad
about his band in the bar, I wasn’t looking for him at all. I had actually
bought the paper to look at job openings, and, when I had opened the paper,
there it was. I let my over-active imagination think that maybe it was fate and
that was one more silly reason that I found myself sitting in a bar that was
the namesake of a brand of diapers.

The advertisement hadn’t mentioned Tristan’s
previous connection to
Uptown
Boyz
. It advertised his new band as “new age rock”—a
far cry from the kind of music he used to sing. I ran my finger around the rim
of my drink, waiting. The lights in the already dim bar went down and a
spotlight lit up the stage. A woman that looked to be about thirty-five with
long, obviously bleached platinum blonde hair and dressed in black from head to
toe came on the stage. She was so thin that it wouldn’t have even taken a
strong wind to blow her over, just a light breeze. She walked up to the
microphone.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, hello and
thanks for coming to
Huggys
tonight.
I’m Mandy Silva, the owner of
Huggys
, along with my
hunky husband, Ray, who is over there behind the bar.”

I glanced over at the bar. The only bartender that
I’d seen tonight was a young stud that looked like he should have been the star
of
Magic Mike
. He was still the only
one behind the bar. I looked from him to the skinny, slightly torn up woman and
I had to wonder what the attraction was.

“I hope you’re all having a great time and getting
your drink on. We have a real treat for you tonight, so I won’t stand here and
bore you any longer. Without further ado, I give you Tristan and the Mister
Rogers band.”

The lights started changing colors and smoke floated
up from beside the stage as a drummer, and a bass player took their positions
on stage. The audience clapped, some hooped and hollered, and I waited for
Tristan. The band fired up and it was a good two minutes into the song before
he came bursting through a curtain hung along the back of the stage. If I
hadn’t known it was him, I would have never recognized him.

First off, he came out screaming and banging on his
guitar. I’m assuming the noise he was making was supposed to be singing, but it
didn’t sound anything like the beautiful voice that I remembered. Secondly, the
four young men that made up the band the
Uptown
Boyz
were famous not only for their extraordinary
talent at such young ages, but for their sense of style. They were trendsetters
for tweens, and when they performed, they usually wore starch white or brightly
colored t-shirts and casually faded designer jeans. Tristan always wore a
silver cross that dangled from his neck and stood out against whatever color
shirt he happened to be wearing. He never took it off back then. Their hair
was always stylishly mussed or spiked up
and they had that
scrubbed, fresh-faced look that mother’s and little girls both loved.

Tonight, he wore jeans, but instead of a designer
brand, they looked like he’d borrowed them off of one of the homeless men I’d
seen on my way into the place. They had huge holes in them—not stylish ones—and
they hung low on his hips, like he’d dropped a pants size since he’d bought
them. He wore them tucked into his lace-up black leather motorcycle boots that
ended just below his knee. He was also wearing a plain black t-shirt and the
silver cross necklace was absent. His arms had tattoos from shoulder to wrist
and his hair was messy, long and greasy. His face was still familiar, and still
handsome, but a lot thinner than it used to be. His arms were still muscular,
but it was very lean muscle. If I had to put a label on his build, I’d have to
say where he used to be somewhat stocky he had become wiry.

Seeing him that night, there and in this state, was
somewhat….surreal.

He sang a few of his screaming, head-banging songs,
still slamming his hand up and down against his guitar and between each set
he’d slam down another drink or two that someone off stage would hand him. The
whole show was more slamming than singing, and every memory I had of him was
pretty much shattered. Dejected, I took money out of my wallet to pay my tab
and stood up. At that exact moment, he finally slowed things down and strummed
his guitar beautifully as he sang a ballad. His voice was raspier than I
remembered it, but I could finally hear the old Tristan—the one I fell in love
with as a girl. He proved that he could still really sing when he wanted to.

CHAPTER
TWO

TRISTAN

I always loved being on stage. I loved it since I
was a kid and did my first talent show—I was six. For me, the applause and, in
the old days, the
adoration,
is like a drug that gives
me instant energy. I can’t imagine that a time will ever come when I don’t want
to be up there. When I was younger, I used to imagine myself being like Paul
McCartney when I got old. I thought I’d be touring at seventy-fucking-five, and
maybe I would be….if I lived that long. That seemed doubtful though. I was
twenty-eight and I already felt like a fucking old man when I got up in the
morning or after a long set on stage. My agent was always on my back, telling
me I was wasting my life partying, but I tried it the “good-boy” way and the
second that fucking boy band broke
up,
nobody
remembered my name, so fuck that.

“Hey, Trist, I sat your case over by the back door.
I have to take off,” Brad, my drummer told me.

“Yeah, okay, thanks. Where are you off to?”

“The wife just called and said the kids are staying
out in Anaheim tonight with the grandparents. I haven’t had sex in two weeks.
I’m going home to fuck my wife.”

I laughed. Brad was a good guy who had changed his
evil
ways for the love of a good woman.
She still let him play with us, but I had to wonder for how long. She hated my
ass. She thought that I was evil personified.

“Yeah, I’m
gonna
get out
of here too. I’m
gonna
grab another drink first,” I
told him, scanning the audience. This place was a dump, and if it wasn’t
evident in the twenty year old fixtures, the stage that tipped to one side, or
the scuffed up Formica dance floor, it was definitely evident in the faces of
the lost souls desperate enough to come to a place like this to see a washed-up
piece of shit band like ours.

I picked up my guitar and headed towards the back. I
put it in its case and then stepped out back and put it in the van we carried
our equipment in. As I went back in the door, I saw Billy. He was the one who
stayed semi-sober and drove the rest of us shit-heads around.

“Hey, Bill. Everything’s good to go in the van,” I
told him.

“You’re not
gonna
need a
ride, man?”

“Nah, I’ll get a cab or something.”

“You got anything lined up for tonight?” he asked
me.

“Not yet, but you know me.”

“Fuck yeah,” he said, giving me a fist bump. Billy
was one of the few who still remembered when I was music royalty and still
treated me that way. It was cool, most of the time. Tonight, I wasn’t in the
mood for him. I planned on getting my drink and grabbing a cab just to escape
his endless chatter.

He took off at last and as I walked back across the
bar, I spotted a few skanky looking chicks that I was sure I could at least get
a blow-job out of before the night was over. I didn’t see any pussy I’d be
likely to touch, not even with a good buzz and a raincoat on my dick—not until
I was almost to the door. There wasn’t a sexy, young, actually clean looking
girl sitting in the back all alone. She had to be waiting for some big, buff
son of a bitch at the bar, I’m sure, but she was looking at me with a pair of
wide, blue eyes. My radar is usually pretty damn good, and she was looking at
this Uptown Boy like she wanted to fuck him. I figured I had just found my
entertainment for the evening.
 
I
strolled up to her table and, for a few seconds, I thought she was going to
rabbit.