details of the buzzards’ talons, feathers, and eyes or on the elaborate wing pattern, spindly legs, and slim abdomen of the butterfly. He also didn’t skimp on the details of Nikki’s breasts, because breasts deserved attention. Breasts always deserved his attention.
He was almost sad to move his work down to a slender belly and the flair of hips, with a leg bent to angle conveniently over feminine folds. It was invasive enough for him to imagine what her breasts looked like—and end up drawing them like Madison’s. Adam had no business or interest in imagining what the woman’s pussy looked like. He felt she had to be naked in the drawing, though. Clothes would have taken away from the feeling of exposure. But all of her secrets didn’t need to be completely revealed. He was still futzing over the exact shape of her big toe when he realized she’d fallen silent.
He glanced up to her face, expecting to find her asleep, but she was simply watching him. Perhaps she was tired of talking about Melanie.
“Almost done?” she asked.
“Almost.”
“I can’t wait to see it. I had my portrait drawn by a caricaturist once,” she said, “but I didn’t care much for the results. It only managed to make me very self-conscious about my horse teeth and my chipmunk-fat cheeks and my wide-spaced eyes that are practically on the sides of my head.”
Adam shook his head. He had hated the drawing that hack down by Jackson Square had done of Madison. “There should be a law about taking something beautiful and making a mockery of it.”
“Can I see the drawing now?” She was like a child who couldn’t wait to open a gift.
“Not yet.”
She scowled at him. “You gave me horse teeth, didn’t you?”
He laughed. “No, your teeth are very lifelike. Especially where half your face is missing.”
“I can’t sit still anymore,” she whined.
“You can move. I never said you couldn’t move. Besides, you didn’t have any problem jacking your jaws earlier. Plenty of movement going on there.”
She slapped his leg. “Shut up.”
He laughed, adding a shadow here and there to the nearly finished drawing.
She sat up beside him and opened her beer, which was sweating a huge puddle onto the wooden table near her hip. Her fingers toyed with the water as she took a swallow from the brown bottle.
“It’s hot out here,” she said.
It was rather warm. Adam had been so wrapped up in his work, he hadn’t noticed until she’d mentioned it.
“We should go inside,” he said.
“Not until I see the drawing.”
Poker face in place, he said, “I think I’m going to shred this one and start over.”
Her jaw dropped, and she wrenched the sketch pad from his loose grip. He’d been done for several minutes, but was a bit nervous for her to see the completed drawing. With the exception of the tattoos he’d designed for his bandmates and the sexy image he’d crafted of Madison, he usually kept his artwork to himself. His music was for the world, but his drawings were for him alone.
“I’m naked!” she squeaked, her gaze shifting as she examined every detail of the sketch. “Oh, Adam, it’s beautiful. I’m beautiful.”
“I told you that you are.”
Her eyes widened, and she lifted a hand to hover over the living butterfly he’d drawn in her hair.
“Why did you draw this?” she asked, her tone accusatory. “I never told you about Melanie putting butterflies in my hair. Were you eavesdropping on us earlier? When I told her that I love her?”
Adam shrugged. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. There was just a lot of white space there, and I thought a butterfly would look better than a scorpion, but if you want me to change it . . .”
He reached for the sketch pad, and she clutched it to her chest. “No, don’t change it,” she said. “It’s perfect. Better than perfect.”
“How can it be better than perfect?”
“It just is!” she said, her eyes a bit watery. She watched him warily and when she seemed convinced that he wasn’t going to take the drawing away from her, she tilted it away from her chest to take another look. “Okay, so it isn’t perfect.”
He leaned closer so he could examine his work more critically. “Should have made the teeth bigger.”
She smacked him half-heartedly. “It isn’t that. My boobs don’t look like that.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how I imagined them. So that’s how I drew them.”
“Mine are bigger than that, and this part isn’t that wide,” she said, matter-of-factly, pointing at the areolas. “And my nipples are larger.”
She shoved the pad into his hands and reached for the hem of her tank top. “I’ll show you.”
Adam probably shouldn’t have been shocked that Nikki was taking off her clothes outside in broad daylight—plenty of women had shown him their racks in public arenas—but they’d been bonding on a friendly level, so when her pink tank top went flying in one direction and her lacy bra in another, he could do nothing but gawk.
Apparently, he wasn’t the only one gawking. Several low wolf whistles came from the area of the semi-truck parked near the bus. The road crew was taking a break from setting up the stage. Adam hadn’t even noticed them until they’d directed their appreciative attention to the suddenly half-naked woman at his side.
“See,” Nikki said, cupping her breasts in both hands and offering them up for his artistic examination. “My boobs look way different than those.”
Well, he wouldn’t say they were way different. The general structure of breasts was similar in all cases. But the devil was in the details. And she was right. He hadn’t drawn hers properly.
He erased the nipples and the under curves of her breasts and took up his pencil to do a more realistic job.
“Take it all off, baby!” one of the road crew yelled.
Nikki gave them the finger. “Get lost, baby.”
The crowd of men staring at them had gotten uncomfortably large.
“Let’s take this inside,” Adam suggested. “I can’t concentrate with all the noise they’re making.”
“Okay.” Nikki hopped down from the table and retrieved her tank top. She held it over her breasts with one hand, located her bra, and tossed it over one shoulder before picking up her beer and heading for the bus.
“Go get her, Adam,” one of the road crew shouted. “Plow her good and hard for me.”
Adam rolled his eyes and shook his head. Just because he was following a gorgeous, topless woman up the tour bus steps did not mean he was going to plow her. He was just going to draw her breasts properly. He had no interest in sex with anyone except Madison. And maybe once the love of his life figured out what she really wanted, he’d go back to plowing her, but it wasn’t happening with Nikki. Nope.
“Where do you want me?” Nikki asked as she glanced around the interior of the bus.
“The bed.”
Nikki laughed. “So you are trying to seduce me.”
“If I was trying, you wouldn’t have to ask,” he said.
She shivered. “Mmm, I really do think I went after the wrong member of the band last weekend.”
“If you don’t knock it off, I’m going to draw a fifty-year age progression of your boobs.”
Her jaw dropped, and she cupped a breast in either hand, rubbing her thumbs over her nipples to make them stand erect. “You wouldn’t.” She pouted at him. “You said there should be a law about mocking something beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t be mocking them. Just giving you a glimpse of the future.”
He started when her tank top and bra slapped him in the face.
“You are so mean,” she said.
He brushed the clothes away, and they landed at his feet. “If you’re trying to insult me, you’re going to have to try harder than that.”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you. I just want you to make me look beautiful in your drawing.” She fluttered her eyelashes at him.
“Then go lie on the bed and stop playing coy. You know damned well I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“Jeez, I was just joking around,” she said and stomped into the bedroom.
She stretched out on the bed and tucked one arm under her head, shoving the pillows up against the headboard. Adam kicked off his boots and climbed up on the bed beside her to sit cross-legged. He examined her breasts closely. She trailed the fingers of her free hand over one pink tip.
“Do you want them hard for the drawing?” she asked, her voice low and seductive. “I think they look better hard, don’t you?”
If she didn’t knock it off, his dick was going to change his mind about not having interest in sex.
“Just lie still,” he said.
“They’d get really hard if you licked them.” The tip of her tongue traced her lip and then disappeared into her mouth.
“Do you even know how to have a nonsexual relationship?” he asked.
“I know how,” she said defensively.
“Then prove it.”
“It’s kind of hard not to get turned on when you’re staring at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?” He took the pencil to paper and restructured the under curves of her breasts so they no longer looked like Madison’s.
“Like I’m worth looking at.”
“We already established that you are. Now stop talking so I can concentrate.”
She smiled and went still, watching him draw and no longer doing her best to put his dick in charge.
He turned his attention to her nipples, careful to draw every detail in perfect likeness. The soft pink buds really would look better hard, he decided, but he was not going to lick them even for the sake of art. He was tempted to draw a second image of her with her chest intact and not marred by the gaping hole of her heart ripped out by the battling crows.
Maybe she’d allow him to draw her again sometime.
Adam yawned unexpectedly.
“I’m sorry you find my boobs so boring,” Nikki said, her lips twisted into a wry grin.
“Your boobs are perfectly tantalizing,” he assured her. “I just didn’t get much sleep last night.” And his brain had recognized that there was a bed handy for napping.
He returned to his drawing, moving faster now, because he suddenly wanted to finish as quickly as possible so he could catch a few Zs before the show.
“Once Melanie took me to bed with her last night, I slept great,” Nikki said.
Adam paused and glanced at her face. She was smiling dreamily and her nipples grew hard without her even touching them. Yep, Gabe definitely needed to be warned about the puzzling relationship between the two women.
“I thought she didn’t want you that way.”
Nikki sighed. “She doesn’t. And now that she knows I do want her that way, she probably won’t let me cuddle up with her when I sleep. I can’t sleep alone unless I take a couple of these.”
She shoved her hand in the pocket of her jeans and tugged out a small baggie full of bar-shaped white pills. Adam’s belly tightened. Yeah, he could use a few of those himself.
“What are those?” he asked, but he already knew.
“Bars. You want some?”
God, yes, he wanted some. He wanted the entire baggie full.
“I’m drawing,” he said. His hands were shaking as he pulled the tip of his pencil over the seductive texture of the sketch paper.
She popped several Xanax into her mouth and swallowed them with a chug from her beer. She set the bottle on the night stand and then returned to resting on her back. “Adam?”
He looked over the drawing, checking for anything he missed, and added a small mole to the under curve of one full breast. Hell, he might as well make the drawing as realistic as possible since he had a living model at his disposal.
“Hmm?”
“Will you hold me? Just until I fall asleep. And then I’ll be okay. I won’t dream on this stuff, so I’ll be okay.”
His first instinct was to refuse, but she was staring at him so hopefully that his resolve crumbled. “Yeah, okay. But just until you fall asleep.”
He set the completed drawing aside, and she smiled at it. “Now those are my boobs,” she said.
He chuckled and lay down beside her. “Glad you approve.”
Nikki shifted, resting her head on his shoulder, and snuggled into his side.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He didn’t mind. He kind of liked feeling that someone needed him. Even if it was as a pillow.
“For you,” she said and pressed one of her pills into his hand. “It will help you forget her.”
He stroked her silky hair with his free hand, and she relaxed against him. Soon her breathing became deep and regular. Even though he was exhausted, Adam didn’t have such an easy time falling asleep. He held the pill she’d given him pinched between his thumb and forefinger and stared at it. What could it hurt? It was just one pill. It wasn’t as if it would even make him all that high. It would just take the edge off, let him relax. Allow his mind to clear. Maybe even make sleep possible. A lot of power to do good in this little pill, he thought.
What could possibly be so bad about swallowing one little pill?
He should call Madison and talk to her about his thoughts, these undeniable urges to self-medicate. But she’d left him, and he had no one to turn to.
The drugs had always been there for him; they had never failed him. Fucked him up and fucked him over, oh yeah, but they had always given him exactly what he’d needed. Or so he’d thought. Through all the rehab and treatment, had anything really changed inside him?
He still wanted to live outside of reality. Reality hurt. It sucked.
So what harm could it do?
Just one little pill.
What harm?
Chapter Sixteen
Something hit Adam hard in the belly. He sucked a startled breath into his lungs and blinked open his eyes, trying to focus on whatever was hovering above him. Turned out to be Gabe’s chick glaring down at him looking entirely pissed off. Weird.
“How could you?” Melanie bellowed at Adam and slugged him in the stomach again. “How could you take advantage of her after everything she’s been through this weekend, you fricking asshole?”
Adam managed to catch her fist before she pummeled him again.
“What the hell?” he growled, not close enough to awake to put up with this sort of bullshit.
“Do you even have a conscience?”
Well, that was debatable, but in this case he didn’t have a clue what had the woman so riled up.
The warm body resting against his side groaned in protest as Melanie shifted her attention elsewhere.
“Nikki,” Melanie said, shaking Nikki’s shoulder vigorously. “Nikki, can you hear me?”
Nikki was out cold and considering the number of Xanax she’d swallowed, Adam wasn’t the least bit surprised.
“What did you give her?” Melanie said, her voice taking on an edge of desperation.
“Give her?” Adam said, his confusion quickly turning to annoyance. “I didn’t give her shit. Why don’t you ask her what she gave me?”
“Nikki, what did you take? Wake up. Talk to me!”
“Let her sleep, for fuck’s sake,” Adam grumbled. “She’s
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