Rock Hard: A Bad Boy Rock Star Romance (29 page)

Yeah, that was as much my fault as it was his, but that didn’t stop the urge to punch from rising every time I thought about walking onto his bus and seeing him smiling at me.

I was going to have to get control of that before I reached the buses, but first I needed to make sure I could reach the bus in the first place. Because the crowd of girls gathered around the outside of the chain link fence were starting to notice the walking commotion that was me walking with a crowd of paparazzi looking for a good story.

I’d learned over the years that there were gradations to how dedicated and crazy a fangirl could be. There were the girls who liked our music and thought the guys were hot. Maybe they bought the posters and tore them down when they moved onto the next big thing. Maybe they gave our new music a download which I appreciated, but they weren’t die hard fans.

Then there were the moderately crazy fans who joined the fan club for early access to concerts. They downloaded all of our albums and maybe they still had that poster from when they were younger rolled up somewhere that their husband couldn’t see it because they couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw it away. They were our bread and butter. They came to the concerts and bought the merch and God bless them, every one. Especially since the crazy was never very strong with them.

Finally there were the true crazies. The ones who wrote fanfiction about the group on our fan club forum. At least that was my understanding from the horror stories we heard from our social media guy.

These were the ones who would get into fights if we flicked a pick or a drum stick into the audience. They were the ones who charged the stage. They were the ones who posted pictures of the hair doll they created from putting together locks of leftover hair collected by venue workers who cased the green room when we were done and sold their findings on eBay.

I really wish I was joking about that last one. It took a cease and desist order to get that crazy to stop selling her wares on various craft sites.

And that was the level of crazy I was facing down now as these women turned and saw me approaching. I saw the hunger in their eyes. They were regarding me the same way a shark might regard a nice wounded fish that was limping along leaving a trail of blood, only in my case it was a trail of “news” organizations and photographers.

I had no doubt these women were the craziest of the crazy if they were still waiting outside so long after the concert was over and their chances of seeing anyone from the band were so vanishingly small. Well those chances were about to go back up.

I winced as more of them turned towards me. As they started dashing towards me in a mad stampede. This was it. This was how I was going to die. A broken heart from the one girl I’d ever had true feelings for running away from me. Humiliated on the Internet in the worst way possible. And finally trampled to death by a group of rowdy fangirls who had lust in their eyes that made it terrifyingly obvious they planned on enjoying themselves thoroughly before I went down.

At least that would provide some interesting pictures and copy for the vultures behind me who were looking for something juicy.

I turned back to see if there was any way to escape, but of course the crowd of vultures had closed in around me and they were sniffing blood in the water, though of a different variety than what the fangirls were after. No, they were looking forward to the impending blood bath and they weren’t going to let me get away.

Damn it. Paparazzi on one side and crazy fans closing in on the other. I squeezed my eyes shut. This is not how I imagined this day going when I started.

Squealing tires brought me back to reality. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see a black limo with tinted windows screeching to a halt in front of me. Right between me and the crazy fans. If the crazy son-of-a-bitch driving the thing had cut it any closer he would’ve risked running into some of the equally crazy fans dashing towards me.

As it was they crashed against the other side of the limo with a muted thud and screamed out in frustration as they realized their chance to get me and rip me to pieces, hopefully metaphorically but you never knew when there might be a love knife hidden away in a crowd of crazy like that, had disappeared.

The door on the side facing me flew open and Blake was there gesturing frantically for me to get inside. No words were spoken. They didn’t need to be. Both of us knew what it was like to get caught in a crowd like that, and neither one of us wanted to repeat it. I dove into the limo and stuck my hand out to give the news types a final one-fingered salute before slamming the door shut. I was pushed back against the leather seats inside as the driver hit the accelerator.

“Damn that was close,” I said.

“I’d say. Seems like you’ve been having quite an evening,” Blake said.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, and it’s all thanks to you, you asshole.”

Blake blinked and then he gave me a one fingered salute of his own, though he was grinning as he did it.

“That doesn’t sound like a grateful man who just had his ass saved by his lead guitarist,” Blake said.

“Hey, he’s not the only one,” a familiar voice said.

I turned and grinned at Jake. Of course he was the crazy bastard who was willing to nearly drive a limo into a crowd of crazed fans. He knew better than anyone else just how bad things could get in the middle of one of those crowds, which made me appreciate him jumping in like that all the more.

“So what happened anyways?” Blake asked.

So I explained everything. How the night had been going so well. How I was really starting to feel something for this girl which got a raised eyebrow from Blake who was always a heart breaker that even eclipsed my record of broken hearts, but he took it in stride. I told him about the text message coming at the single worst moment possible and how Mia found it and it set her off in the worst way. I ended with how that all turned into me being humiliated in the middle of a hotel lobby with people taking pictures of my unmentionables since I had no way of letting the hotel know I was locked out of my room short of going down to the front desk.

“Man, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“How you were feeling about that girl?”

I had a moment to think about that as the limo pulled around to the other side of the staging area and they let us in. I noticed a couple of the guys out there were looking nervously at the other side of the parking lot where the rescue had taken place. I had no doubt that some of the girls who’d gone for me were making a run around to the other side in the hopes that they could get in before the gates were closed, but those dudes moved so fast that the girls didn’t have a prayer.

It was always interesting to see the fear a crowd like that could inspire. It was like a zombie horde, and I was so used to it that I didn’t blink an eye unless I was out there completely exposed like I’d been a minute ago. I still had a bad case of the shakes.

We got out of the limo and stepped into my bus where I immediately pulled out my guitar. That always helped me think. The strains of the song I’d been working on earlier in the day picked up and I noticed Blake nodding right along with. I always appreciated it when he liked something I was putting out on guitar. I was good, but he was an acknowledge deity of the instrument after all.

“I guess I was afraid,” I said.

“Afraid? What are you talking about?”

“Well there was the whole Incident to think about. The last time I got serious with a girl she ended up pulling a Yoko and splitting the band up for a decade. I was afraid of something like that happening again.”

Sure that was part of the reason, but it wasn’t the main reason. And Blake wasn’t making it any easier.

“That’s crazy. Anyone could see this girl is different from she-who-shall-not-be-named,” Blake said. “Besides, if you feel like you’ve got a good thing going with a girl you don’t have to keep it from me.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I worried you’d think you were being abandoned or something. We were the two single guys in the band on this tour. I know I’ve felt left out watching the other guys with their perfect relationships and here I am with nothing because I thought it would be more fun to fuck around the last time around than find something real.”

Blake snorted. “If you think it’s all sunshine and rainbows with them then you’re crazy.”

“What are you talking about?”

Blake shrugged. “Relationships are about ups and downs. Good with the bad. It’s not like they’re all lovey dovey all the time just because they have their wives with them. You have to learn to roll with the punches if you’re going to be in something long term. Which, I might add, is a big part of the reason why you won’t see me in anything long term any time soon thank you very much. I get the highlights and then it’s how d’you do and see you the next time I’m in town, but we both know that’s a pleasant fiction.”

I blinked in surprise. Aside from the last bit about showing women the door when he was done with them that had been a surprisingly profound bit of wisdom. There was going to be good and bad. Well there’d certainly been plenty of that tonight with Mia.

The only problem was I didn’t know how I was going to track her down and prove to her that the good could outweigh the bad. That I wasn’t the guy she thought I was. At least not anymore.

I was still picking at my guitar, lost in thought, when Blake interrupted.

“So what’s that you’re working on? Doesn’t sound like any of the old standards.”

“It’s not,” I said. “I think I’ve finally got something worth writing about here.”

“Fair enough,” Blake said. “I’ll go get my guitar and we can work on it. What are we calling this one?”

I looked up at him and grinned. Things might’ve gone to shit with Mia, but at the very least she’d given me this gift. I was finally in a head space where I could start writing again.

“I’m calling it Mia’s song.”

30: Pre-concert PR Blitz

I heard the closing strains of a damn catchy song as I stepped into the elevator and breathed a sigh of relief. Another day over at the office. Another day of seeing Rachel give me disappointed looks out of the corner of her eye because she thought I should be out there with Grant and not here in a cubicle wasting my life away

Never mind that actually focusing on my career was probably far better than going off on tour chasing some asshole rock star who was just using me as a semi-permanent booty call anyways. Not that I’d ever been able to quite convey that to my boss.

I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by going into the details of why things never worked out with me and Grant. Details that I knew she desperately wanted to hear but was always too polite to ask.

I found myself wondering who that was but then I caught the announcer and suddenly I wasn’t curious anymore. Suddenly I couldn’t get away from the elevator fast enough.

“And that was the surprise new smash single from Twenty Promises who will be swinging back around to our city for a second…”

I didn’t hear the rest. I tuned it out. I did not need to know anything about Twenty Promises or what they were doing on the second leg of their tour. I had a pretty good idea of exactly what Grant was doing: any pretty girl who stood still long enough for him to work his bullshit seduction routine on her. The poor things, but that wasn’t my problem. The only thing I could do was make sure I wasn’t that girl again.

I’d finally stopped getting text messages a month ago. I still wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed or relieved that he’d stopped, because every time he messaged me, it came up as an anonymous number since Kayla had deleted him from my phone book but she hadn’t actually blocked him no matter what the poor tech-unsavvy dear had told me at the time, I was tempted to respond.

I was proud of myself that I never did. I could kick myself that I never did.

As I walked through the apartment doors I wanted to scream out in frustration. My ears were assaulted with the same strangely compelling sound I’d heard in the elevator.

“Kayla, we have a rule!” I shouted as I made my way back to my room where I could close the door and be free from that song. Mostly. The walls weren’t exactly all that thick in our cheap apartment.

She’d been surprisingly understanding of my “no Twenty Promises” rule since the incident, but maybe she thought I wouldn’t know that new song was theirs or something. Either way I needed to get away from it. I needed to get away from anything that would remind me of Grant and what he’d done to me. I needed to not think about him because that led down a path where I remembered all the wonderful things he’d done to me right along with all the terrible things.

Remembering those wonderful things made me want to dig out that number and send a message. It always sent me into a spiral of weakness where I had to put my phone in a drawer until I’d cooled down. I hated that he could still do that to me a couple of months after he’d broken my heart by revealing himself to be exactly what I’d thought he was all along.

This was one instance where I hated every day how right I’d been.

“Oh no you don’t,” Kayla said just before I reached my room. I turned and raised an eyebrow. What the heck was she going on about?