“Amazing,” she says with a smile. “Stretched out in the middle of the bed. It was glorious.”
“Really?” I shake my head, smiling. “Bullshit,” I grumble into my cup of coffee.
“How did you sleep?” Kellie asks, and I decide to play her game.
“Best night’s sleep I’ve had in a month.” Her mouth opens. “No one hogging the covers.”
“You two are full of shit,” Cori says. “Neither of you looks like you slept a wink.” She points at me. “You look like you are from the walking dead.” She then points at Kellie. “And you look like all those bags I sent back to LA are under your eyes.” Kellie shrieks and touches under her eyes. “So cut the bullshit.”
“No bullshit,” Kellie says. “I want to have sex with him. Lots of sex.” She throws her hands up in the air. “Sex for days.” She looks at me. “So I’m taking away the foreplay until he snaps and finally has sex with me.”
“Baby,” I say, and she slaps the table.
“No,” she shouts, “no baby! I can’t believe that I have to beg my boyfriend to have sex with me.” It’s the first time she’s called me her boyfriend to other people. I don’t have a chance to respond because Cori does it for me.
“I didn’t know he was your boyfriend.” She then looks at me. “Did you know she was your girlfriend?”
I look at Kellie. “I didn’t know what she was, but I knew one thing, and that was that she was mine.” I watch Kellie’s eyes go soft. “So you can label it whatever you want.”
“Oh my God,” Cori says, “that was …”
Kellie just shakes her head. Leaving her coffee, she goes to walk out of the room, but then turns around. “I’m going to shower. Or maybe take a bath. A long, wet bath.” She turns and walks out, swinging her hips. Her ass is coming out of the shorts she is wearing. I make a mental note to bite the shit out of it the next time I have her in bed.
“Are you not going after her?” Cori asks me, and I just shake my head.
“I know you have boundaries and all that.” She shuts down the computer in front of her. “And I don’t even know how you are going to take this, but I’ve seen her with men before.”
“Not interested,” I say, looking straight ahead, trying not to smash the coffee cup in my hand.
She laughs and doesn’t shut up. “I have seen her with men before, but I have never seen her like she is with you.” She gets up and walks around the table, grabbing the two coffee cups. “I’ve seen her cranky, and I’ve seen her bitchy, but I’ve never seen her sex deprived, and the last time she was with someone was over a year ago.” I grit my teeth. “Oh, don’t pretend you were a virgin before her.”
“Cori, I can’t do it. If I do it, it will go against everything I stand for,” I say softly.
“Sometimes, the risk is worth it,” she says and walks out, leaving me alone. I finish the coffee and then walk up the stairs, seeing that her door is closed as is Cori’s. I walk back into my room and close my own door. Getting into the shower, I wonder the whole time how far I can take this. How much more before I snap. I close my eyes and focus on the finish line. But I wonder if, when we get to the finish line, she’ll still be there waiting for me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kellie
“Atlanta, you were wonderful,” I say into the mic after my second encore. Walking to the middle of the stage, I take a final bow before I turn around and run off the stage. After handing off my mic and my earpieces, I jog down the stairs and find Cori and Brian waiting. I look over at him and want to jump into his arms. It’s been a week since he last kissed or hugged me. And if I’m honest, I’m dying inside, but I’m standing my ground. I want him to take it to the next level, and I want to do it with him. Climbing into bed at night without him is hell, tossing and turning all night is horrible, and I haven’t slept through the night since he last held me in his arms. It’s ridiculous. I’ve been without him my whole life and after only one month with him, I already yearn for him.
We are almost to the bus when I see a man walk from the side. I think it’s the driver, but his stance is different, and he isn’t wearing the jacket that he usually wears. I look over at him and see him scurrying off. “Brian, that guy over there,” I say, pointing at the guy who is now running away. “I think he came from the bus.”
He ushers me into the bus, and we see the inside is trashed. The pillows are sliced in half, and it looks like red paint is all over the walls.
Why are you hiding from me? is painted on the white curtains.
Brian grabs me around my waist, and my feet don’t even touch the ground when he gets off the bus. We are walking around the bus to, I don’t know where, and I see two guys coming toward us. I start to shake in his arms. He has enough time to look up but not enough time to stop the two guys from running up to me and asking me for my autograph. I look at them and see that they are maybe twenty, and they are both wearing my tour merchandise. One guy is screeching my name while the other one goes on and on about how much he loves me. My heart pounds in my chest as I try to overcome the fear that if I stay here long enough, the man might come back and get me. I look around almost violently while I scan the back of the venue.
“Not now, guys,” Brian says, pushing them away, and they plead with him to just get a picture. I can’t say anything. Nothing comes out of my mouth.
Cori goes to them and tells them that she will send them huge fan bags if they just let me go, so I can leave.
Brian reaches into his pocket and presses a button, and we are running to the car. He puts me in and looks over at Cori, who just nods and runs off. He gets in the car and takes off to where the guy came from. “Son of a bitch.” He punches the steering wheel and then takes out his phone, the ringing coming from the Bluetooth.
“Hello,” Hunter mumbles.
“I want all the video surveillance from tonight’s venue watched,” he says, his voice tight. “Someone trashed her bus.”
“Where are you?” he asks, and I hear rustling in the background. “I’m putting you on speaker.”
“I’m going to take her to the plane I had on standby,” he says, and I don’t know what to say. My hands are shaking. “He’s getting desperate.”
“He’s bound to fuck up sooner or later,” Hunter says. “I’m going to get the team up and have that surveillance checked.”
“I’ll be in the air in the next twenty minutes. I need you to call the pilot on standby and tell him we are on our way.”
“Copy that,” he says, and then the phone disconnects.
“Brian,” I whisper, and he just shakes his head, “he’s not going to stop until he gets me.” Putting my hand on my stomach, I say, “I think I’m going to be sick.” He pulls the car over, and I open my door and step out into the dark night. “I don’t think I can breathe,” I say to him, holding my chest. “He is going to get me.” I start to shake now; my body shakes as if I’m standing in the middle of Antarctica with no clothes on and I’m freezing. The lump in my throat is becoming so big I’m having trouble swallowing. The writing on the wall is all I can see.
He grabs my shoulders. “I swear on my life he will never, ever get you.” He takes me in his arms, and I let go of the sob I was holding back. My legs give out, but he has me in his arms. “Baby, we have to go,” he says softly. “We have to get on that plane.” I nod. “You are not going to let him win. You hear me?” he says, and all I can do is just nod my head. I try to make the tears stop, but they don’t. He puts me in the car, and we take off, arriving at the airplane, and I see that Cori is there waiting.
I step out of the car, and Brian is already walking around to grab my hand, and we walk up the stairs. “Is everything taken care of?” he asks Cori, and she just nods her head.
“I found the driver inside, and he said that someone went to him and told him to meet us inside,” she says. The stairs of the plane come in, and just like that, we are taking off. “The bus is on lockdown.”
I don’t
listen to anything they say. I just look out the window, and I wonder why this is happening. We land about an hour later, and when we get off, I don’t even ask where we are. We get to the house, and he takes me in. Cori stays with me that night while he gets on the phone with the guys and they go over the footage. When I walk down in the morning, he’s still sitting at the computer. Cups of coffee scatter the table, and he looks like he hasn’t slept at all. “You need to sleep,” I tell him, and he just shakes his head.
“This guy is a fucking ghost. We can’t find shit on him,” he tells me. “Then the camera cuts out, so he must know someone who works there.”
“Brian,” I tell him, “you need to sleep, baby.” He looks up at me. “If you don’t sleep, you can’t take care of me.” I try to turn it around on him, knowing if it’s about keeping me safe, he’ll do it. “We aren’t leaving this house for the next four days. You can go sleep.”
He gets up and kisses my neck and then goes to the bedroom and lies down. When I walk upstairs, I find him sleeping on top of the bed with his clothes on.
For the next four days, all he does is go over the footage. The concert that night isn’t my best, and I end up scanning the crowd for the man, but he isn’t there.
Two concerts later and still nothing, but now my bus is clean. I’m afraid to get on it, if I’m honest, but I don’t let the fear win. Not this time.
I walk onto the bus, and Cori comes on, unzips me, and then walks off the bus. “Where is she going?” he asks me and slips off his black suit jacket and then unbuttons his cuffs. All I can do is picture him naked—fully naked—over me, on top of me, under me, behind me. Jesus, I can’t keep up with all my fantasies at this point.
I want him to snap, and I have to say I haven’t been playing by the rules either. This morning, I knew Cori had left to go to the venue and it was just the two of us, so I put on my sheerest thong, basically consisting of string. The little piece of see-through material covers my landing patch. I grabbed my white tank top and cut it, making it hang on my tits just enough to cover my nipples. I walked down into the kitchen where I knew he was sitting. He looked up from his computer and then I saw the vein in his forehead start to pop. I walked to the fridge, the cool air making my nipples get hard and poke out of the shirt. I grabbed a water bottle, trying to keep my cool, but he was sitting in his shorts at the table with no shirt, and I wanted to get on my knees and deep-throat him. But I didn’t. My hair was loose and long and in long curls the way I knew he loved it. I walked away from him and then dropped the cap of the water bottle in front of me. I bent over, spreading my legs a bit and showed him everything that I had to offer. “Oops,” I said, getting up and then looking over my shoulder. His fingers gripped the table, his knuckles were white. “Slippery little suckers.” The sound of his groan was heard while I walked up the stairs with a huge smile on my face.
“She’s meeting us there,” I tell him, walking to the back where the bedroom is. I close the door and get in the shower. I wrap a towel around me and then walk out of the bathroom, sitting on the bed and grabbing my phone. My best friend, Jessica, is going to be FaceTiming me soon, and I’m so excited to catch up with her.
We met two years ago when she went with me for a weeklong interview. We had so many things in common that the friendship stuck. She’s Hollywood’s best entertainment journalist, and she is usually five steps ahead of everyone else. Right now, she is on the biggest press tour of her life with the cockiest of movie stars, Tyler Beckett.
I get up, putting on my sweats and a T-shirt, and go out to see that Brian is sitting on the couch. Leaning back, he has one arm outstretched, and his face is down, reading a paper or something. He looks up at me when he hears the creak in the floorboard. The smile on his lips soft. I walk to the other side of the couch, and he hands me a water bottle. “You need to hydrate.”
I want to say no, but he’s right. I text Jessica that I’m available, and then the phone comes to life in my hands.
“Hello, gorgeous.” Her beautiful face lights up the screen. If she wasn’t a reporter, she could have been a model. I’m so excited to be talking to her, so I grab a couple of pillows and then lie down with my feet on the floor. “Where are you?”
“On the tour bus of hell,” I tell her, rubbing my face. “Can you do me a favor?” she asks. I see her jump into her bed, getting under the covers. “Next time I bring up how much fun touring is, can you remind me of this conversation?”
She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she just bursts out laughing because I tell her this every single time I’m on this bus for more than two days. I can’t answer her because Brian’s husky voice says, “I’ll remind you, babe.” I watch Jessica on the screen, seeing her eyes widen, and then I turn my glare at Brian.
“I told you not to call me that,” I hiss, then come back to Jessica. “Um …”
“Um? I’d say that’s a good word, all right,” She turns on her side, her head sinking into the pillow.
“I’m going in my room.” I get up from the couch and then hear him grumble as I walk into my room, close the door, and then collapse on the bed. “I’m in hell.”
“I think you have a lot to explain,” she tells me, and I just nod. What can I say? I don’t even know what to say. We had massive amounts of foreplay, and he refuses to do me, so I’ve stopped till he gives it up. So instead, I give her the little pieces of the truth.
“I had to amp up my security, then guess who walks in as my bodyguard? Christ on a cracker, it was Brian,” I tell her, and her eyes go wide yet again. Yeah, everyone in my inner circle and the ones I trust with my life have all heard about Brian and my schoolgirl crush on him. “Yeah, so he swaggers in here, and I’m not kidding with the swagger.” My eyes roll, and she laughs at me. “I just . . . it’s so irritating . . . I’m supposed to be ignoring him and all this shit, and he’s basically my shadow.”
“Well, at least he’s not an asshole who pretends to be your friend and then tries to kiss you and then ignores you.” She goes into the whole story about her and Tyler, and I want to tell her to run the other way. It’s no secret they don’t like each other.
“He already fucked Roxanne a while back,” I inform her, and she just closes her eyes softly. “It was a one-night thing.”
“How do you know?” she asks me. Her tone is pissed, and I just wonder just how much she hates him now.
“We share the same stylist.” I tell her the only bit of information I have. I’m not going to go into detail about how hot it was and that he rocked her world so hard she is dying for a repeat. “So what are you going to do?”
“Fuck if I know. What are you going to do?” She turns the question around on me. “I think I’m going to ignore him to give him a little taste of his own medicine.”
I laugh at this idea. “I think the only thing that men can’t handle is when you ignore them.” I hear footsteps, and I don’t know if my door is going to open or not, so I wait a second before continuing, “I did that to Brian, and he snapped after four hours.” I try to hide the smile on my face, but I can’t. It was a good day.
“What did he do?” She asks the same question with a twinkle in her eye.
“He told me that he would put me over his knee and turn my ass red.” I think back on the day he said that, and knowing that my knees got weak the minute he said it, Jessica’s only reaction is her mouth hanging open. “Yeah, but not yet. Because he doesn’t eat where he shits, or shits where he eats, or however the hell that saying goes.”
“I get that.” She tries to be rational, but I’m past that point, so I just glare at her. “What? It’d be really awkward if you guys hooked up and then you dumped him, and he had to watch you flirt with other people.”
“I don’t flirt,” I hiss. “It’s called Southern charm.” She laughs at me, and we talk about nothing and everything. About my tour, about her tour, about the journalists on her tour.
“I have someone trying to FaceTime me,” she tells me. “Can I call y
ou back?”
“Yeah, go and be good and safe and please try not to kill him.” I laugh at her, and she points her finger at the screen.
“Go see your babe.” She smiles at me, and I glare at her while she disconnects.
I toss the phone on my bed and then get up, going to the door. I come out and see that he’s still on his phone. “Have a good chat?” he asks me, not looking up.
“Yeah,” I mumble and then open the drawer, grabbing a granola snack. Going to the couch, I sit on the other side of him. “How long until we are there?”
“We should be getting to the car in about thirty minutes, and then I changed the plans for tonight.” He looks at me, and then I just stare at him. “Since it’s just the two of us, I went for a smaller place, but it’s right on the beach.”
“What?” I whisper. This whole time, I kept saying I wanted to be on a beach. I want to sit my ass down on the sand and watch the waves. Feel the sand between my toes.
“Well, we have four days off, which is the most I think that we’ve had, so I was thinking.” I drop the granola and crawl over to him. As I straddle his lap, one of his hands automatically goes around my waist, and he squeezes my hip.
“You.” My hands go to his face, cupping his cheeks, then my finger traces his lips. Lips I’ve missed. “Are taking me to the beach?” His hands start to go up my back and then in my hair. He pushes it over my shoulder, nodding his head. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything when it comes to you, baby,” he says softly as he waits for me to make the next move, and I lean in a touch more. “Give me your mouth.”
Hollywood Princess Page 16
