“Of course.”
Neither of them seemed much in control of anything.
-29-
13th February, Vienna, Austria.
“Ginny. Ginny… Wake up. Your goddamned phone.” Dani pawed at the device as it vibrated against the bedside table between the beds in the twin standard the two women were sharing. “Deal with it, will you?” She batted at the phone until it flew toward Ginny and landed on her pillow. “For heaven’s sake. It’s 3 o’clock. Why is someone calling you?”
“Hello,” Ginny said, having wiggled the phone between her ear and the pillow, only to then realise that the blaring melody was alerting her to a text message, not an incoming call.
She squinted blearily at the back-lit screen.
A: Do you have fishnets on?
Nope. A pair of plain cotton boy shorts and a candy striped crop-top. She was sleeping, and sharing a room with someone who didn’t appreciate her flaunting her assets.
G: I could be.
A: Send me a picture.
G: Of my legs.
A: And other things.
He probably didn’t mean of the alarm clock, she was now squinting at.
G: You do know it’s 3AM.
A: It’s only 2AM for you.
She checked. It was definitely three, but of course Ash was assuming she was in England, not continental Europe.
G: If I send you a pic, what will you do with it?
Hopefully not leak it to some tabloid, or use it to shame her on the internet.
A: Depends on the quality of the pic.
Ginny crawled out of bed and dragged her carry-on case into the bathroom. She took two photographs of her reflection in the large mirror. One in her sleepwear blinking dazedly, and a second poised under the shower in her fishnet stockings and a microscopic scarlet thong.
A: You’re killing me.
A: Give me a close up?
G: Only in person, buster. If you want intimate, we’re gonna have to do this face to face.
Ash didn’t immediately reply, leaving Ginny blinking expectantly at the phone screen. As the minutes passed, she curled up in the bottom of the bathtub with a towel wrapped around her, and rested her head against her make-up bag. Presumably, the mention of meeting had been a step too far.
The chirping of her phone woke her again thirty minutes later.
RG: Did you have to? Some of us are trying to sleep.
Ginny yawned. Yes, her among them.
G: I’m not sure what I’ve done.
RG: Don’t play innocent with me. It’ll be your fault if we have to cancel the gig tomorrow due to wrist strain.
G: Are you sure he’s not just dreaming?
RG: Oh, he’s dreaming all right. LOUDLY.
RG: FFS, now he’s set Xane and Luthor off. I hate you, and I’m going to burn all your lingerie.
He claimed that, yet she could hear the humour in his words. Right now, on the tour bus, Rock Giant was probably bellowing at his travelling companions, telling them all to fucking well get off quietly or he’d come and sever appendages so that they couldn’t fuck at all.
The notion made her smile and gave her hope. If Ash’s best friends were prepared to reach out to her, and Ash himself was clearly showing interest, then perhaps he might actually come to forgive her. Perhaps the time had arrived to make that final push to win back her man.
-30-
14th February, Vienna Stadthalle, Austria.
“What in the hell is all the noise about?” Ash stumbled into the dressing room, clutching his head expecting the rest of the band to be present. They weren’t. There was only Rock Giant hunched over a laptop screen. “Hey, is there something going on out front?”
The big guy swore, and beat a few keys. “Dumb bloody wanking game.” He slammed the laptop lid closed and finally looked up at Ash. “Kinda sounds like there is. Shall we go look?”
“What?” Ash backed up, while spluttering cola over himself. “Go outside? For realz?” Every artist worth their salt knew crowds weren’t something you wandered out into. They could be dangerous. “Maybe we could just look out of a window.”
Paul made a show of turning so that he observed every part of the pokey dressing room. There weren’t any windows, although the modern concrete and glass concert hall had plenty of them at the front of the building. “I doubt we’d get a decent view of the commotion anyway, and whatever it is, sounds like something I might want to take a good gander at.”
How Paul could surmise that from what little information they had, confounded Ash. All he was hearing were an awful lot of screams.
Ash watched his friend slot his big feet into a pair of boots and lace them. “Why take such a pointless risk?” He probably ought to go and find the rest of the guys and alert them that Rock Giant was about to feed himself to the piranhas. “Think about this, man. What if it’s an attack?”
Scary shit had happened at more than a few gigs in recent times. Nothing at any of theirs, thankfully, but still… It paid to be cautious.
Rock Giant clapped a hand on top of Ash’s head and ruffled his hair. “Are you hearing that, dimwit? Those are very clearly happy screams, not blood curdling ones. There’s summat seriously wrong with your hearing if you can’t tell the difference.”
He could hear just fine, and yes, he could tell the difference.
“Tell you what, if you’re so concerned for my well-being, why don’t you come with me? Then you can keep an eye on me.”
“Only a dumb schmuck would fall for that. I’m not going out there.”
Liam barged into the room, looking all wild eyed. He was followed by a couple of the other roadies. “Ash, are you hearing this, man? They’re baying for you.”
What? Were they? All he could hear were screams, not any particular enunciations. Although, with the door into the corridor open, and if he listened really hard, it did kind of sound like they might be calling his name.
Rock Giant barged him out of the room and shoved him along the corridor. “You’re gonna have to find out what they want.”
“I’m not going out there.” Ash repeated to himself. No one else was listening, and even if they were, they wouldn’t have heard him.
“That’s one hell of a din.” Spook fell into step beside them having come from the direction of the stage. “Want to clue us in on why they’re all so desperate to see you?”
Ash raised his hands. “I haven’t a clue.” In some sense though, it was curiously satisfying listening to so many people yelling his name, and not the names of any of the rest of the band.
Xane arrived too, along with Luthor and Cave Troll. Dani followed a moment later. “Why are you all in here and not out there?” she asked.
“We don’t want to start a riot,” Ash replied. Leastways, he didn’t.
“Well, I think you should go out and see what they want. Don’t you agree, Xane?”
Xane neither agreed nor disagreed. Instead, his gaze fastened upon her and a smile lit up his face. Luthor too looked massively relieved. “You’re back… It’s been the ten longest days ever.”
Dani had been somewhere? Ash guessed he hadn’t seen her for a bit, but he’d just figured she was around somewhere. He’d been avoiding people in general.
“Is everything cool?” Luthor asked.
“I’ll let you know in a bit.” Dani kissed him and then Xane. “Get your dumb arse mate to go outside, eh?”
The two guys squared up on either side of Ash, and somehow managed to wrestle him into hold. “We live to obey the lady. Let’s go and see what all this fuss is about.”
***
Despite there still being another hour until the doors opened for the gig, the queue outside already filled the plaza. The baying audience grew wilder the moment the band stepped outside. Ash wriggled free of Xane and Luthor’s hold by shedding his leather jacket. He’d have been straight back inside the building—it wasn’t that he objected to meeting their fans, he just preferred not to meet quite so many at once without the men in
suits around—if not for the glimpse of the canary yellow dream machine he spied out of the corner of his eye, and most of their road crew lurking in the vicinity with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.
“Is this a Sally special?” he remarked. Their PR manager was notorious for booking ‘happenings’ that made the collective members of Black Halo want to smash their heads against some rocks. “I didn’t realise we were channelling Motley Cr—” His words petered out as his brain took stock of what he was actually seeing.
Now, he understood why the crowd had been yelling for him specifically. It wasn’t just any yellow sports car that had been parked outside of the concert hall in the middle of a pedestrian plaza, or just any girl draped across the hood. It was his girl, draped over the Danger Car, or at least a replica of it.
“Ginny,” he croaked, shock strangling his vocal chords. He looked to Rock Giant, and then Spook, but the guys seemed as nonplussed as he was. Ash didn’t know whether to run, cry or grab hold of her and shake her until she rattled. He was still furious, and butt hurt, but after last night, he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t every bit as enamoured of her as he’d ever been, or that there wasn’t a very significant part of him that was ready to let the past go.
It was the moment he glimpsed her legs that he knew he was done for. Aw Lordy, Ginny and her fishnet stocking covered pins was enough to blow a hole in any man’s defences. She must have heard him say her name, as she sat up, and then slid forward to the edge of the bonnet until her stiletto heeled boots hit the paving stones.
Ash’s mouth turned dry. Staring at her made him want to howl uncontrollably and beat his chest. She looked as if she’d stepped right out of his wildest, most wicked fantasy. Corset, check. Fishnets, check. Gloves, check. Lacy ruffled garters—he swallowed hard—check. Hair like a friggin’ wild mane… He didn’t want to see her, or do any of this now, but he couldn’t stop looking, and his feet had riveted themselves to the spot.
“Ash.”
His mouth dropped open, goldfish style. What the hell did he say? He was still processing everything. Last night, what they’d done, what he’d initiated, he guessed it could have been construed as a turning point, given her hope of a reconciliation, and he did sort of want that, but there were still grievances they needed to air. None of which he wanted to do before an audience. He about turned towards the building, only for his friends to squash up like a bunch of Rugby forwards and block his path.
“You need to talk to her, Ash,” Spook said.
“Not out here.”
“Nobody says you have to stay out here,” Xane remarked.
True. Good point. They didn’t have to stay out here, they could climb into that car she had her dainty arse pressed against and drive off into the sunset.
“Ash, please.” The sound of her voice seemed to finagle its way around his senses leaving him powerless to resist. The moment he turned, her knees hit the concrete.
The line of gig goers erupted into cheers. As they whooped and whistled, Ash did his best to block out their cries. Languages might not be his forte, but he knew enough German to figure out many of them were being exceedingly crude about what they thought might happen next.
Please! Really? Like he’d ever put out like that in public. He was Ash Gore, not Xane exhibitionist Geist.
Ginny was still wearing his ring.
He stumbled over to where she was kneeling. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
She peeped up at him from under her enormous, heavily embellished eyelashes. “I thought after last night… Was I wrong to think that? I wanted to see you, Ash. I wanted to look you in the eye and say sorry for the enormous mess I’ve made of everything and how I wish I could rewind it all and not screw everything up so badly. I should have been honest with you from the start, but the truth is, I was barely being honest with myself. I was still hiding and fooling myself, hoping that if I kept my head down long enough everything would blow over. Only, it was never going to.”
“Are you free of him yet?” he asked. And even that question tore a new gash across his heart. Nausea prickled inside his nose whenever he so much as contemplated her with another man. Picturing her with Miles bastard Winters, was like the worse of the worst. In his head at least, Winters was some lumbering ogre with excessive nostril hair and tree trunk calves, who wore Hulk pants and had slave girls shackled to his bed.
Ginny shook her head, and the bounce of her crimped hair lit up the pleasure centres in his brain.
“At least another ten days to go I’m afraid. But I’m sick of putting my life on hold for that man. Ash, I wanted to be yours from the first night we spent together. I wanted it so much it scared me half to death, so for a while I pretended it wasn’t real. By the time we reached Belgium, I knew I couldn’t keep fooling myself. I went home and started the process of fixing everything. It was absolutely my intention then to tell you everything when we met up again at Roskilde, but then the whole Iain Willows nightmare happened, and the barriers to having that conversation seemed to become insurmountable.”
“Ginny, you’ve told me this.”
“I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to upset you,” she continued, exactly as if he’d never interrupted. “I didn’t want to burden you with my troubles, when you had so many issues of your own. And then when you started to recover, it just…there was never a good time. I guess there never is a good time, but I deeply regret not finding a time to let you know who the woman you were sleeping with really was.”
“I know who she was.”
She shook her head.
“I understand that maybe this isn’t what you want to hear, but I want you to know that you meant everything to me. I never turned you down, Ash. I never wanted us to be apart. Maybe it’s too late, and I hurt you too much, but I hope that it isn’t, and if it isn’t, I want to be with you. My answer is yes, it was always yes.” She took something from down the front of her corset and held it out to him. “Please say yes too.”
Ash stared at her trying to digest all her words. Was she… No, she couldn’t be. She wasn’t down on her knees proposing to him? He looked back over his shoulder at the guys. They were all lined up behind him, Xane and Spook flanking Paul, Dani with Luthor and Liam dancing back and forth from one foot to the other, not sure if he was meant to be with the band, or with the huddle of roadies.
He turned back to Ginny. She was still there on the concrete on her knees before him. Still holding out something towards him.
She was. She was asking him to marry her. His centre of gravity shifted so suddenly, that he staggered like a punch-drunk boxer and almost fell on top of her. The only reason he didn’t face plant was because she caught him, exactly like she’d caught him every time he’d stumbled during the summer and autumn as he’d fought his way back to health. He wouldn’t be here tonight, about to perform for this crowd of absolute nutcases if it wasn’t for her.
His tunnel vision receded a little, enough for him to realise that it wasn’t only Ginny who was holding her breath waiting for him to make a response.
“It’s traditionally the day…” she prompted.
Ash waited. He needed to hear her say the words, the exact words.
“Ashley Gore, I know I’m tarnished goods, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be the woman you truly deserve, but I love you with every inch of my body and soul, and I want you above everything else.”
She did have a stellar bod.
“Will you be mine, through sickness and health, going forward. In short, please will you marry me?”
There was no living without her. He’d had no more than a half-life from the moment he’d sent her away. Yes, she’d hurt him, but life wasn’t all puppy dogs and parties. Sometimes it liked to sucker punch you and leave you gasping for breath. What mattered was what you did after that point. If living without her in his life wasn’t living at all, then why choose to prolong his own agony, unless as Xane liked to point out, he got off on being a maudlin bastard.
He refused to prove Xane right.
Only a teeny part of his conscience doubted the decision. Well, fuck doubt! The rest of him knew what it wanted.
She was on her knees before him, asking him for permission to love him absolutely and forever. She was offering him the one thing no one else had, the one thing he wanted more than anything, to be the most important part of someone else’s life, and to actually matter.
Well, he might be labelled a sucker for it, but he was sold.
“Can we have a Danger Mouse themed wedding?”
Her brow crumpled into a frown, and her lips pursed. Then she grinned at him. “Only if I can be Jeopardy Mouse instead of Penfold.”
Ash tilted his head to one side to consider. “But Danger Mouse without Penfold is like strawberries—”
“—without fish paste and broccoli,” she finished for him, causing him to beam from ear to ear. “I know… I know… Oh, okay,” she conceded. “Then, as long as I can be sexy Penfold.”
“Fishnets and curlers,” he said with a laugh.
Ginny laughed too as he helped her back onto her feet. “Maybe we should save that for the honeymoon.”
They gazed at one another, eyes on a level—well almost, even in her heels she was still tiny—and all the emotions Ash had been striving so hard to bury welled up and overflowed. “God, come here, I need to hold you.”
She smelled of flowers, and rain, and candy, and some dark and musky perfume that lanced his pleasure centres and got him all fired up. Ash backed her up against the car, and caged her against its vibrant paintwork. He no longer cared that there were hundreds of people watching. Memories of all the moments they’d shared over the last year assailed him: the first night in her hotel room, Paris, Roskilde, painting her toenails, and making out in Spook’s hot tub. Then her lips hit his and everything converged and animal instinct took over.
All Right Now Page 32
