ROCK F*CK CLUB (Girls Ranking the Rock Stars Book 5)

by Michelle Mankin

  “I love you, Gale.” My eyes held the truth of it. I couldn’t have held it back, though I wanted to. He would doubt it later when he doubted everything. But for now, in this moment, it was real.

  “I love you, Josephine.” Wonder filled his eyes as he gazed back at me.

  When he pressed his lips firmly to mine, it was like I imagined a groom would kiss a bride in church in front of all their family and friends. Only I was wearing a cropped top and panties, and he was totally nude.

  Gale lifted his head and changed the angle. His whiskers feathered my lips before his mouth did. He skimmed the surface before he dove in deep. His tongue in my mouth and his hands in my hair, he urged me to match his passion, and I did. Heated strokes. His groans. My moans. We were building a fire together with only our mouths, and it was glorious.

  “Jo.” He broke the kiss, his eyes dark, and swept his gaze over me. “Let me see you again.”

  My lips were swollen and bruised. My breaths were ragged. My hair was tangled around my face.

  His mouth curving, he reached for the hem of my cropped shirt. I pulled in a breath and held it as he whipped my tee over my head. My tightened nipples tingled beneath his appreciative regard.

  “Fucking beautiful.”

  “You are too,” I said, feeling like I should praise him too. The perfection of his chiseled body. His incredible cock.

  Noting how close it was to where I wanted it to be made my nipples draw tighter. How hard he was, how thick, how extended, it all made my pulse pound and my pussy throb.

  “You’re so sexy.” Reaching for me, he framed my breasts, sweeping across the tightened tips with his talented thumbs.

  “That feels so good,” I said as he did it again, and then moaned when he rolled my nipples between his fingers.

  “You’re so good,” he murmured, noting my pleasurable shudder.

  Then he did something unexpected, tracing the links of the chain around my neck before veering from it to the left side of my chest. Circling my breast, he drew an arrow through it toward my heart.

  “My target. Don’t you ever forget it.” His voice was deep, and the deeper meaning of what he’d done rumbled through me as he lifted me, shifted, and returned me to the center of the blanket.

  Sweet and sexy, Gale Lafleur was both. Succumbing to him felt more than inevitable. It felt preordained.

  On my back, I registered the creases in the blanket beneath me. Then I noticed nothing but him. His whiskers soft against my skin, he ran his cheek over one nipple before capturing it with his mouth. He sucked it hard enough to make me gasp.

  “Yes, Gale.” I arched my spine. “More.” His hands went underneath me, holding me up to his mouth so he could capture and suck on the other nipple. This time he sucked harder, firmer and wetter than the other one.

  “Kiss me, again, babe.”

  He held me, freeing my hands to cradle his head, to lift it, to bring his mouth to mine. But as soon as our lips were together, he controlled the kiss. His hands insistently roaming my spine, he gave me a long, drugging kiss. He only changed the angle to deepen the next one, making me more and more crazy, making me more and more his.

  “Gale.” I panted when he lifted his head and I caught a breath. “I can’t take any more.”

  “You’ll take it.” He spread my hair out around my shoulders, his gentleness seemingly at odd with his words. “You’ll take all I have to give. Because you want it. And I want you to have no less than all of me.”

  Snagging one side of my panties, he ripped them apart and then tore the other side while I gaped at him. My pussy no longer merely throbbed, it pounded and ached, much like I ached for him.

  “I need you,” I said.

  “I know you do. I need you too. Lie back again so I can come inside you.”

  I lay down and watched him as he grabbed another condom and rolled it on. Then he separated my legs and moved between them.

  “So pretty,” he said, his voice thick. His expression was as taut as the tension within me as he swept his thumb through the gloss of slickness that coated my lower lips and inner thighs.

  “Because of you.” I whispered because the night was hushed. It seemed as if the world that surrounded us had stopped, and only he and I existed within it. “For you.”

  I lifted my hips as he aligned himself, and wrapped my arms around him as he dropped his weight onto his palms on either side of me. Caging me in, protecting me, he claimed me, gliding the entire length of his cock inside me.

  “Me for you, Jo.” He stroked out and in, again and again. He filled me with his passion, filled all the empty spaces.

  “Gale. I’m close.” I trembled with need, trying to hold his cock inside me each time he withdrew. The hard back-and-forth glide ratcheted my tension, tightening it impossibly.

  “Hold out.” He thrust inside me deep. “I’m almost there too.”

  “I’ll try.” I curled my fingers into fists that I pressed into his back as he withdrew.

  “You feel so good when you tighten around me.”

  “Faster, please.” His praise and his cock unraveling me, I arched into his next thrust. “Harder.”

  “Yes, Jo. Come for me.” He picked up the pace. “Come with me, babe.” His hips moving like pistons, each thrust was faster and harder than the one before.

  I moaned. “Yes, Gale. So good.”

  It was there. Not the edge of the world this time, but the new world I’d seen before. It was spread out before me, a wide-open place full of possibilities. The place he said was a feeling.

  It was beautiful. It was us.

  I didn’t fight it coming this time. Rather, I embraced it like I embraced him. Spiraling, I surrendered to it, having all of him and being his. And he surrendered to all of it with me.

  I KNEW ABOUT DREAMS and wishes.

  They came with a price, and that price was usually paid after the magic wore off at midnight. But I was extending my deadline until the morning.

  Lucky for me, the prince of the realm carried a small travel tent inside one of his luggage compartments. Calls had been made. Mine to Dolly. His to Noah. And I was where I most wanted to be—with my head lying on Gale’s chest, listening to the metronome of his heart.

  At first, his hand had been on my hair. Stroking it gently, he’d soothed himself to sleep. As he breathed deeply, I’d remained awake, watching the world change from pitch black to barely gray. The dawn of a new day was almost here.

  As I propped myself up, my hair slid down across my face and over my shoulder. I swept it aside and gazed down at him, allowing myself one last look while he slept.

  His brow was smooth. Sooty lashes fringed closed lids that shielded the rare clarity of the diamond-dusted eyes behind them. His brown hair surrounded his handsome face. The beard and mustache framed his sexy lips. His chest was bare, sculpted, but more gently at rest than when he’d made love to me. I noted the sheen of dewy perspiration on his skin. It had gotten warm inside the tent with two of us breathing each other’s air.

  Slowly, I eased away from him. I’d thought long and hard while he’d slept how this would go. My plan was to put distance between us incrementally.

  Stretching one inch into two, I crawled away from him backward, watching his chest moving rhythmically before I turned away. Carefully, I tugged the zipper up, then slid the flap aside and ducked through the gap. Outside, I drew the zipper down again and stood, turning to face the horizon. I slipped on my jeans, shook my socks out of my boots, then finished dressing.

  I was going to watch the sunrise alone. Hopefully, it would give me inspiration for the words I needed.

  Heading down the slope from the rise we’d camped on that night, I spotted a small sliver of a stream below with an old downed trunk of a tree beside it. I moved toward it, weaving my way through bluish-green clumps of sage. The rust-colored sand was firmer for walking on than I expected.

  I made it to my destination quickly, stopping only once to reach out a hand to sk
im the ripple pattern the wind had drawn in a dune. The texture of the grain was smooth like powder, the temperature cool. An effect from the night air and the morning dew, I guessed.

  When I reached the log, I found a wide spot and sat down. Closing my eyes, I tipped my face toward the rising sun.

  So many words tumbling through my head. I gathered and sorted them as the stream gurgled over its worn path only a few feet away from me, and while the man I hoped to sway with them slept silently in the tent behind me.

  Finally, a pattern emerged, one with rhythm and rhyme. I hoped it would explain how I felt and why I’d withheld such critical information. But everything but panic fled when I heard his voice.

  “Josephine. What are you doing?”

  I turned to look at Gale over my shoulder. Luckily, I didn’t stand. My legs went weak at the sight of him.

  Asleep, I’d been able to drag my gaze away from him. But when he was awake with those silver eyes on me, I couldn’t look away.

  It took me a moment to even speak. I followed him with my gaze as he took a moment to circumvent the log. He stopped in front of me, blocking the weak sunlight and plunging me into cool shadows.

  “I needed some time to think,” I said.

  “Think about what?”

  “How to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “About how my brother died.” Tears flooded my eyes, and I blinked through them.

  “It was a car accident,” he said, sounding puzzled.

  “Yes.”

  I grabbed the locket by the chain Gale had traced the night before. Usually, I wore the necklace inside my shirt, but I’d taken it off before all my RFC hookups. Today, though, I wore it on the outside of my tee. I didn’t want it near my heart.

  “I was driving the car, Gale. I was drunk. It was dark, and I hit a guardrail. I was flung from the vehicle and hit my head, and some of the metal tore a gash in my leg. But my brother was crushed inside. They say he died instantly, but I don’t know if I believe them.”

  Gale didn’t say anything. I shielded my eyes, but I couldn’t make out his expression.

  “You were too young to drive alone at night.” His voice sounded far away, even though he was standing right in front of me.

  “I had a provisional license to drive with a licensed parent or a guardian in the vehicle. My brother was my guardian.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself. The memory chilled me.

  “I picked up my brother that night from the bar where his band had been playing. He’d been drinking steadily all night. I’d only had the one glass of wine my boyfriend had given me. Between the two of us, I thought I was the better choice to get us home, but I was wrong. It was a terrible choice. The worst one I ever made.”

  “Yet, you continue to make them.”

  “What?” I wrapped my arms around myself. I was shaking.

  “You seem to have learned nothing since you continue to make bad choices. Doing the Rock Fuck Club. Lying to me about your brother. Sleeping with me last night. Lying about what it meant.”

  “I never actually lied to you,” I said, but it was a hollow excuse. I hated that I’d voiced it. All my planned pretty words failed me.

  Gale scoffed. “You didn’t correct my misunderstanding. I call that a lie, but you can call it whatever you want.”

  The rising sun silhouetted him, leaving him in shadow. Not seeing his face was disconcerting. I imagined vacant holes where his eyes were. Vacant like that cavity in my chest where love had no right to be. Vacant because I was unlovable.

  My heart pounding like a triphammer, I stood. “I didn’t lie about loving you.”

  I needed him to know that, to see the truth of it in my eyes. But when I moved closer, he stepped back.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  Hurt sliced through the center of my chest, and then I saw his face. The silent fury and cold disdain in his expression froze me, killing any desire to be closer.

  No, his eyes weren’t vacant. That might have been better. Instead, they were solid sheets of dark ice. He had no emotion for me. He’d never looked at me like that.

  “O-okay,” I stammered. “Maybe we should talk later after you have some time to think about it.”

  Gale raked his hand through his hair. “Time won’t change the facts.”

  I looked away and stared at my feet. Anywhere but at him. “No, it doesn’t.”

  I thought about all the hours upon hours I’d lain in my cell at the women’s correctional facility, trying to spin a different outcome for the choice that I’d made.

  “Can I tell you the rest?” I asked. “Or will that not change anything either?”

  “What do you mean? What more can there possibly be?”

  “I was arrested. Convicted of intoxication manslaughter. Served two years.”

  “You were a juvenile.”

  “On the verge of adulthood. They made an example of me, and I didn’t fight it. Why would I fight it? I’d lost everything that night. Everything that meant anything.” I looked Gale straight in the eyes. “Until now. Until you.”

  He studied me for a long moment, his eyes cold, analyzing me the way a jury would examine a legal exhibit. Suddenly, I was that wide-eyed young girl on trial in that courtroom all over again.

  “It’s time to get you back to your bandmates.”

  “At the hotel?”

  “We missed bus call. They left early this morning. I was planning to ask you to ride with me on the motorcycle all the way to Napa. I thought . . . I thought a lot of things, but that’s over now.”

  “Are we over?” I whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Numb, I bobbed my head. “Okay.”

  My voice was gone. Hopes, dreams, and wishes, all of it was crushed beneath the weight of all that I’d nearly had with Gale and then lost. Away it went, back into the place where I buried all good things, deep down like there was a locket inside me.

  I HELD ON TIGHT to Gale on the motorcycle, but not too tightly. He wasn’t mine anymore, and I wasn’t his.

  We rode on the small two-lane highway we’d come in on, heading in the opposite direction from the night before. We were a long way from the main thoroughfare the tour buses were using to get to Bakersfield, California. Gale wanted to get rid of me when we caught up to them, but even with things completely wrong between us, I was in no hurry to go.

  I knew that there would be no more opportunities to hold him, to feel his warmth, to inhale his scent. Right now, I could rewind the past, could pretend he was still mine. But when we returned, I had to accept that it was over.

  “What are you humming?” Gale’s voice boomed inside the suffocating silence that had hung between us since I’d confessed my darkest secret to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly, luxuriating in the rich velvety tones of his voice. “I didn’t realize I was doing anything.”

  “It’s a pretty melody.” He paused as if reluctant to converse with me anymore. “Sounds familiar.”

  “It was a song my father used to sing to me. He said he wrote it for me. It was a popular song his band ended their concerts with back in the day.”

  Later, when I’d found out that he’d had another family and another daughter, I’d doubted he’d really meant it only for me. When had anyone done anything just for me?

  “My brother covered the song with his band. It’s his voice I hear when I hum it,” I said, noting the sudden tension in Gale’s frame. It was impossible to miss anything with my body plastered to his. “You didn’t want to know all that. You don’t want to know anything about me anymore. I won’t hum. I’ll be quiet.”

  I could do that. I could exist inside my head from intro to chorus, note to note, separating the instruments and the individual parts that somehow wove together to make a beautiful something out of nothing. When all else failed, like it had after losing Joey, I retreated to that reliable haven.

  “Who is your father, Josephine?”

  “Pe
ter Belle.”

  “Peter Belle,” he repeated softly. “As in Peter Belle, the lead guitarist of Reverb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poet isn’t your last name. You changed it.”

  “Yes. But it’s not Belle either. My father never claimed me as his.”

  Me or my brother. There was no clear trail to lead anyone to the truth of my past. That was why the RFC research department probably hadn’t picked up on who I was or what I’d done.

  Suddenly, I longed for the people who knew my worst and always supported me. That meant Dolly, mainly, plus the twins, who had all changed their last names to show their solidarity with me. Mistakes and all, known and hidden, they loved and accepted me.

  Friends surpassed wishes and dreams. They embodied them.

  Gale’s deep voice rumbled again in my ear. “That’s a secret that won’t stay secret long.”

  “Maybe not.”

  I didn’t ask him not to tell anyone this secret, or the uglier ones I’d revealed. I had no rights, no leverage, and no bargaining chips remaining to ask him to be silent.

  It didn’t matter. Even if he didn’t tell, it probably would come out eventually. I’d wanted a chance to escape my mistakes, to fulfill my brother’s dream, free of the taint of me and our father. But I didn’t believe that was possible anymore. It was just a wishful dream, like the idea of Gale and me.

  “You don’t have to take me all the way to the buses,” I said. “You can leave me somewhere once I have cell service.”

  My provider wasn’t picking up where we were. Otherwise, I would have called Dolly. While Gale had packed up the tent and rolled up the blanket where he’d shown me the difference between fucking and lovemaking, I’d tried to call her, needing the comfort of her voice.

  “I’m not going to do that. I can’t believe you would even think it. I’m not that type of man, Josephine. I take responsibility for those in my charge. I took you out, and I’ll return you. For now, we’re on a shared path going in the same direction.”

  “The good guy tangled with the bad girl,” I said, my throat so tight I could barely speak. “It was nice for a while. But now that you know how dirty I am, you can’t wait to get rid of me.”