Merry Ever After

by Vi Keeland, Penelope Ward, Lucy Score, Marie Force, Tijan, Kennedy Ryan

  Betty obviously agreed because she was sprawled at his feet, staring at him lovingly.

  He chose that moment to look up. I felt his gaze travel from my purple snowflake socks, up my legs, over my torso and chest before stopping on my face. We locked eyes for a long beat before his eyes moved to my forehead.

  “Thank you for the fire,” I said.

  “Bleeding again,” he stated.

  “Yeah. I was wondering if you could…” Lamely, I held up the box of butterfly bandages and a bottle of liquid bandage.

  He crooked his finger at me, and my feet shuffled forward of their own will. When he turned to wash his hands I tried unsuccessfully to pry my eyeballs off his very nice ass. The man was the perfect physical specimen. Hands washed and dried, he approached. I held my breath as he stepped into my space.

  At five feet, eight inches, I was tall with long legs. But Vonn cleared six feet with room to spare. Standing this close to him I was looking at the tattoo that peeked out of the neckline of his shirt. In a trance, I watched as he reached toward me. His fingers made contact under my chin, nudging it up.

  There was something desperately intimate about the touch. My eyes met his, and I saw no evidence of a smile or the dimple he’d shown earlier.

  His hand dropped from my chin only to splay on my stomach, the strip of exposed skin between the hem of my tank and the waistband of my pants catching fire at his touch. I wanted more. I wanted him to slide that hand under my shirt so his palm was hot and hard against my stomach.

  I didn’t realize he was guiding me backward until my back met the counter.

  He stepped in closer, his feet between mine as I leaned back ever so slightly. I couldn’t stop staring at his mouth. Surrounded by that salt-and-pepper beard, his lips looked so kissable.

  We weren’t touching, but every cell in my body was aware that all it would take was one tiny inch. My nipples puckered under my shirt, and I immediately regretted not putting on a bra.

  I could feel his breath on my face. The heat pumping off his body. The intensity of his gaze. I didn’t understand how a man could be so infuriating and infatuating at the same time.

  “Still breathing?” he asked, his mouth twisting in a gentle smirk.

  I nodded, then sucked in a breath.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got here,” he said quietly.

  For a second I thought he was going to kiss the hell out of me or at least whip my shirt off. But instead, he went for the gauze on my forehead. Disappointing.

  Carefully he peeled back the tape and went to work.

  “I shouldn’t be the one doing this,” he murmured as he dabbed at the wound.

  “I can probably handle it from here,” I decided. Being this close to him was a mistake. I tried to shift away from him, but he caged me between his arms, hands on the counter on either side of my hips.

  “Not what I meant, babe.”

  My eyes met his, and I stopped breathing again. “What did you mean?”

  “Why are you with that asshole?”

  “Who? Mark?”

  “My woman brings me to a concert, I’m sure as fuck not deserting her in the middle of it. She gets hurt? I’m not letting another man take care of her. Get rid of the dead weight, Brooke.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, feeling snarky, “but Mark has a lot on his mind.”

  He pressed a butterfly bandage into place, then dipped down until I met his eyes. “From where I’m standing, he’s got the wrong things on his mind.”

  Okay. That was flirting. Right? Or was it the head wound confusing things?

  “He…had an important call.”

  “On Christmas Eve, when he hasn’t seen his woman in two weeks,” he prompted. “What the fuck are you doing wasting time with him?”

  I didn’t know why his opinion mattered. But for some reason it did. “I’m trying to break up with him. Okay?”

  “Trying?”

  I dropped my hands and crossed my arms. “We met through a dating app. I thought it would be fun to date a younger guy. I thought he’d be interesting, energetic. My ex-husband married a woman eleven years younger than I. They made it look exciting. But Mark is…”

  “A narcissistic prick,” Vonn supplied.

  “You met him for a minute,” I said. I’d taken Mark backstage to meet the band before the concert. He hadn’t been particularly impressed or gracious.

  “Already knew I wasn’t gonna like him,” he continued, pressing a second bandage into place. “Just didn’t realize there’d be good cause.”

  His hand slid down to my neck, thumb at my throat. It felt amazing. “Why were you going to hate him?”

  All amusement disappeared from those blue eyes. “Because he’s yours.”

  “Seriously? What does that even mean? You’ve spent the last two weeks ignoring me! You refused to sit down with me. You refused to answer every single question I asked. The rest of the guys had no problems talking to me, but you acted like I was chasing you with a machete.”

  “What do you wanna know, babe? Ask me anything.”

  His flippant reply made me mad. “Don’t play games with me, Vonn. You made sure that I didn’t get the story. And now I don’t get the job that went with it.”

  His hand tightened at my neck. “Explain.”

  “I’m hungry,” I said petulantly. And bizarrely turned on.

  “I’ll feed you after you explain.”

  My sigh was half groan. “The magazine told me if I got you to actually open up and talk about saying goodbye to the band, the fans, that I’d make staff writer.”

  “Is that something you wanted?”

  “Well, yeah. I’ve always wanted to be a music journalist. I thought this was my shot to get out of a mom job and into something I wanted to do.”

  It was Vonn’s turn to blow out a breath. “You know and they know I don’t do one-on-ones. I don’t talk about anything but the music,” he insisted.

  He had me there. The man was a vault. He was infamous for avoiding questions and getting downright pissy when journalists didn’t take the hint. And part of me couldn’t blame him. He’d been hounded mercilessly by the press ever since the death of his best friend and the band’s original lead singer.

  “This your farewell tour. You’ve been doing this for thirty years. Why don’t you want to talk about that?” I asked in exasperation.

  He was angry now. His hand dropped from my neck and landed on the counter next to my hip. “Because it’s never fucking enough. It’s not enough that I write and play music people like. That I get up on stage and perform for them. They still want more. They want pieces of you. Pieces they can hold up under a magnifying glass to judge their worth. Be raw. Be real. Be fuckin’ vulnerable. Let me judge you, dissect you, digest you to decide if you’re good enough.”

  It was more words than I’d heard him say in an entire day. And I wished I’d had my voice recorder on.

  “Wow,” I breathed.

  “You want this story? This job?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you gotta earn every answer.”

  I wet my lips and wondered if it was wrong to hope that he wanted me to earn answers with really awesome punk-rock sex.

  “H-how?”

  “Quid pro quo, sweetheart. You get an answer; I get an answer.”

  I accepted the plate Vonn handed me. I was trying to figure out his angle. I was a divorced mother of two adult children. I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. I didn’t have secrets like a man who had been on a dozen world tours did.

  “Do you want some wine?” I offered.

  He shook his head. “No thanks.”

  I remembered then that he didn’t drink. An interesting quirk in his line of work.

  “We got a deal?” Vonn asked, strolling into the living room.

  Betty barked, and I looked down to see her sitting in front of me, tail swishing across the kitchen floor.

  “Dinner. Right,” I said. I put her
kibble dinner in the bowl before following Vonn.

  He was sprawled on the couch. Feet propped up on the coffee table.

  Gray sweatpants had been invented for Vonn Barlowe.

  Not only did they put the perfect globes of his butt on display, they also paid quite the flattering homage to his crotchal region.

  I snapped out of it and took the opposite end of the couch, pulling my feet up and resting my plate on a throw pillow. It was roasted chicken legs with sprigs of rosemary, fat wedges of red onion, and… “Are these grapes?” I asked, poking one of the purple globes. It smelled divine.

  “They are.”

  I took a bite of grape and onion and chicken. My eyes rolled back in my head. “Yum. This is really, really good.”

  “I’m a man of many talents.”

  It was safer not to respond to that.

  My phone rang on the coffee table, and I realized he’d brought it into the living room for me.

  Addison.

  “It’s my daughter,” I said, putting my plate down and swiping to accept the call.

  Shane and Addy’s faces popped up on my screen. “Merry Christmas Eve, Mom,” they sang.

  I grinned. Once again surprised and delighted by the combination of traits both kids got from me and their dad. Hair. Eyes. Jaw. Nose. Yet all four of us were completely different people. Addy was a bubbly perfectionist hell-bent on growing up as fast as possible. Shane was a laid-back athlete who didn’t waste time on things like planning for the future.

  “Merry Christmas Eve, guys. How about this snow?”

  “I know, right?” The camera shifted as Addy panned through the large wall of windows in her dad’s living room. Beyond the tornado of baby toys and piles of wrapped presents, the snow fell.

  “Beautiful,” I said. Betty nosed her way into the frame, always happy to hear the kids’ voices.

  “How was the concert? Did you feed Whinnie?”

  “The concert was great. Whinnie is fine. She had her supper and she’s bedded down for the night,” I assured her.

  “What are you having for dinner?” Shane asked.

  “Chicken,” I said, holding up my plate so they could see.

  “Is Mark there?” Addy asked. I wasn’t imagining the tone. Both kids had met Mark once or twice. Neither of them liked him.

  Vonn snickered, and I shot him a disapproving look.

  “No. Mark’s not here,” I hedged. “Something came up.”

  “Told you she’d end up alone on Christmas Eve,” Shane said, shoving his sister.

  “Oh my God, Mom!” Addy screeched. “What happened to your head?” Somewhere in the background, their half sister added her voice to my daughter’s distress.

  I winced. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

  “You have a head injury and you’re alone on Christmas Eve,” Addy said in a half shout.

  “This blows,” Shane said.

  “I’m fine. Betty and I are relaxing. It was just a minor bump on the head at the concert. I didn’t even need stitches.”

  Vonn rolled his eyes at my little white lie.

  “I’m coming to get you. You shouldn’t be alone,” my son said firmly.

  The last thing I needed was to be treated like an invalid old lady at my ex-husband’s house on Christmas.

  “You’re not going out on these roads. It’s not supposed to stop snowing until morning. Stay at your dad’s, and I’ll see you guys tomorrow night.”

  My kids gave each other a look. “Fine. But text us when you go to bed and then call as soon as you wake up,” Addy said. Shane nodded.

  “Fine, weirdos. Now go play with your sister before she eats her way through that gift box.”

  “Bye, Mom! We love you!”

  “Bye, guys. Love you too.” I blew them a kiss and ended the call.

  I tossed the phone onto the cushion and went back to my plate. I could feel Vonn’s attention on me.

  “How bad of a guy am I when it’s better to let your kids think you’re spending Christmas Eve alone instead of with me?” he wondered.

  I nudged him with my foot. “Funny. If I told my kids I was shacked up for the night with Vonn Barlowe, they’d strap on snowshoes just to get back here.”

  “Fans?” he asked, capturing my foot with his hand.

  Even through the thick layer of sock, I liked the contact. A lot. “They grew up with me as their mother. They didn’t have a choice,” I said, trying to sound normal.

  “So we got a deal or what, babe?” Vonn asked, his thumb pressing into the arch of my foot. It felt like heaven, and I almost forgot what he was talking about.

  “Are you serious about this?” I asked him.

  “You want the story, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but why would you be willing to—”

  His thumb dug in a little deeper, and my question turned into a low moan.

  Wicked. That’s what his smile looked like in the firelight.

  “Before I say yes,” I began, trying to control myself, “I think it’s only fair to remind you that you wouldn’t be getting wild celebrity secrets out of me. I’m a forty-six-year-old divorced mom. The last two decades of my life have been dedicated to raising a family, not shooting tequila on a yacht with supermodels.”

  “It’s interesting to me that you don’t see just how interesting you are.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Right. You’ll answer all my questions with actual words, not just grunts?”

  His thumb shifted higher on my arch, and I wondered if it was possible to orgasm from just a foot rub.

  “Anything you want, babe.”

  “I want the first answer,” Vonn announced.

  Our plates had been cleared. The leftovers stored. He’d forced more Tylenol on me before adding another log to the fire. Betty was snoring on the loveseat. Bing Crosby was softly crooning about white Christmases. We were facing each other on the couch, my phone on the cushion between us recording our conversation.

  I had a bad feeling about this. “Fine,” I said.

  “Why the hell are you with that asshole? The truth this time.”

  The truth. I winced, and Vonn’s smile turned lethal. “Not so easy being on the receiving end, is it sweetheart?”

  “The truth is I meant what I said about thinking it would be fun to date a younger man. But I picked the wrong one. We’re not compatible. At all.” I thought about the sex, or lack thereof, and winced. “I’ve been meaning to break up with him for almost two months. But every time I figure out what I’m going to say, he’s so stressed out about work or his parents or life in general. I don’t want to add to his stress when it’s already manifesting in physical ways.”

  “He can’t get it up,” Vonn stated.

  I blinked. “How in the hell—” I shook my head, cheeks flaming. “Never mind. I don’t want to know how you know.”

  “You gotta stop wasting your time, babe. It’s not your job to fix him or his life or his dick. That asshole abandoned you, left you without a ride, scrapped your dinner plans, and still hasn’t texted to see if you made it home okay. You’re dumping his ass.”

  “Vonn!”

  He shook his head. “Don’t waste your time with someone too dumb or too blind to see how special you are. End it.”

  The man was right. He was also blunt and rude and cocky. But he was right.

  “Right now?” I asked.

  His lips quirked. “You can tell him tomorrow. Or whenever he pulls his head out of his ass. But just so we’re clear, it’s over now.”

  There was a warm feeling in my belly that pretended he’ meant something important by that.

  “Okay. It’s over,” I agreed.

  “Good. Your turn.”

  “Uh. Why don’t you drink?” It was the first question that came to mind. It was also one that he’d never publicly addressed.

  He gestured at my foot. Still feeling that warmth in my core, I extended my leg and he took my unrubbed foot between those delicious hands. “Because the
last time I drank, I had sex with a stranger, she filmed it, and I got her pregnant.”

  I let out a noise somewhere between a moan and a yelp because as he’d delivered that news, he’d found a tender spot under my big toe and pressed into it.

  “Wait,” I said, my entire body tensing. I hit the Pause button on the recording. “Are you telling me Shayla West recorded your sex tape?” The sex tape that was still mentioned occasionally on late night television. The sex tape that had landed Vonn’s ex a starring role in a reality TV show.

  The woman had made a career out of being a rock star’s girlfriend. She and Vonn had gotten together for a few years over two decades ago. They’d never married, but they had a daughter together. Laney was twenty-nine and a model/actress/activist.

  “Why’d you stop the recording?” he asked looking amused.

  “Because that’s deeply personal,” I said, exasperated.

  His blue eyes glinted in the firelight. “Yeah. It is.”

  I got his point. My job was to drag deeply personal stories out of him and show them off to the general public. Because he was there to entertain.

  “Turn it back on, Brooke.”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  He squeezed my foot. “Turn it back on, babe.”

  Reluctantly, I did as I was told. I rubbed at my forehead and tried to focus. “That tape came out years after Laney was born. After you and Shayla broke up.”

  His fingers worked my foot, but his eyes were on me. “I got wasted. I fucked a girl I didn’t know. I was so far gone I didn’t notice the camera or the fact that she kept angling us toward it. When she came at me through my manager two months later it was with a pregnancy test and that tape. If I didn’t do right by her, she’d leak the tape.”

  I wanted to punch Shayla West in her lousy face.

  “Not that she needed the blackmail. I would have stood up for my kid no matter what. We made it work. At least for a while. It was a business arrangement. She raised Laney while I was on the road, and I made sure she had all the money she needed. She surprised us both and ended up being a good mom. Lucky for me because I was gone. Either in the studio or out on tour. I was the guy who would come home every few weeks with presents before disappearing again. I was living my dream, and family just got in the way of that. Eventually, Shayla got tired of being ignored. She got pissed. We split. She sold the tape.”