Just me.
And I’ve chosen him.
Forever.
“So you like what you see?” I murmur, still playing coy.
“Like,” he grumbles, stalking closer, his fingers twitching. “That’s a weak word if I ever heard one.”
He smooths his hand over my ass slowly, and then gives it a little spank, his jaws getting tight as he stares at my ass cheeks. It doesn’t hurt at all, he does it so softly, so playfully, just teases me with a stinging kiss and then drags his swim shorts down so they slide down his thighs.
His cock springs free, harder than I can almost believe, stroking against my clit and then my ass and then coming to rest, heavily, on my ass cheek, painting it with a spot of hot precome.
“I want you like this,” he groans, smoothing the precome over my ass, leaving a shivering trail of warmth as he does. “Bent over for me, with that beautiful ass. Jesus Christ, Myla, do you have any idea how perfect your ass is?”
“Take me like this,” I moan, feisty and sassy and free.
That’s what it feels like. I’m finally free to enjoy the things other women seem to take for granted.
He smirks and then grabs his cock, guiding it to my hole and then pushing in with one quick movement, no subtle easing this time. He arches his back and pumps his hips like a man possessed.
I collapse forward, gripping the sheets in big handfuls and letting out a cry that seems to linger in the air, and then I slide into motion with him, feeling my ass cheeks crushing against the stony hardness of his abs.
“Fuck, fuck,” he growls, his voice already catching. “That ass, that fucking ass. I’m going to …”
He makes a groaning noise and his cock begins to beat like a heart as he shoots hot come inside of me, and I scream louder, begging him to come, begging for it all.
I don’t even care that I didn’t finish.
I’m happy to do this for him.
But after he’s come, his cock stays rock hard and he keeps pumping, a crazed look in his eyes as he moves even quicker, pounding me into the bed.
He leans over and collapses atop me, sending me flat onto my belly with my legs together, his whole body aimed down at my pussy now, pounding with so much intensity I can’t take it anymore.
A sun shatters inside of me and fragments of blistering light are sent scorching to every single part of me, the tips of my fingers and my toes, my clit buzzing, my lips rough and crazy with friction, everything wet and gushing.
My juices flow down his cock as my pussy flutters, tightening and then loosening around his pumping length.
And then he groans again – again – and leans down to bite my shoulder softly, his teeth grazing my skin as he makes wolf like grunting noises, emptying another sultry helping of his seed inside of me.
I buck back into him, riding the quivering euphoria of my orgasm, and then realize in a sudden jolt that it’s another orgasm, that the two have joined and now a whole new one is starting.
It goes on and on, time seeming to stop as I float atop the hard massaging pleasure of the moment.
His cock pounds deep, deep, deeper inside of me, finding a spot so secret I never even knew it existed, kissing it hard and intimately with the engorged head of his coming cock.
I turn and reach back, finding his hand in the twisted pleasure.
He grips hard and we interlace fingers as our shared orgasm – our shared second helping – comes to a panting stop at the same precise moment, as though we choreographed it, as though this was how it was meant to be all along.
Because it was.
Because we were made for each other.
“Jeez, Maddox,” I whisper, rolling onto my side and finding his lips in a brief moment. “That was crazy. I can’t believe we both did it twice. I mean, I think you did, right?”
“Myla,” he smirks. “Don’t pretend you’ll ever have any problems reading me. Yeah, you just looked so good, your perfect ass bouncing like that. I couldn’t stop.”
I giggle, giving him a sassy eye roll. “So I guess we’re having twins, huh?”
“Triplets,” he chuckles. “Don’t forget about last night.”
But then his face grows serious, any semblance of a smile, if Maddox can smile and not smirk, replaced by an intense, flat line.
“What is it?” I ask, my heart suddenly frenetic in its beating.
“It’s time, Myla,” he says. “We’ve both been trying to ignore it. But we can’t anymore. Not now. It’s time we told your father about us.”
Oh.
That.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Maddox
“What is this about?” Lenard murmurs, glancing at me and then Myla, his eyes narrowing as he runs a hand through his dyed hair.
We’re sitting in his backyard, the air thick with insects and music playing from the radio inside the house. Tina sits next to him, her hands folded, her eyes flitting between Myla and me in a different way to Lenard’s.
The idea that she can tell what we share at a glance occurs to me, and then solidifies into certainty.
It’s in the tilt of her head, the no-shit glint in her eyes.
She knows, and I’m daring to hope she approves.
Or perhaps that’s just my need for an ally in this shit storm of a situation erasing my reason.
Beside me, still in her summer dress and still smelling of her womb and our lovemaking, intermingled with her perfume, Myla sits with her hands clamped on her knees to keep them from shaking.
“You’re my oldest friend, Lennie,” I say. “We came from nothing together. We made our fortunes together. So I won’t bullshit you. Myla and I are together.”
“I can see you’re together,” Lenard mutters, as though I’ve taken a knock to the head and he needs to explain to me that the sky is blue. “You’re sitting side by …”
He trails off and his expression goes through a series of strange contortions I can only read because I’ve spent so many countless hours and days and weeks – and years – with him.
First he smiles at the stupidity of his misunderstanding, and then the smile turns savage when the realization of what I’ve said smacks him in the chest, but then it twists into disbelief and he begins shaking his head, determined that I’ve got it wrong somehow, or that it’s a joke, or that something – anything – will happen to make this not true.
“No,” he says. “No, no, no. Don’t fuck with me, Maddox. This is some joke, right, one of those bullshit pranks we used to pull on each other back in our touring days?”
“No, Dad, it’s real,” Myla says, her voice far firmer than I would’ve guessed it’d be.
“Real?” Lenard snaps. “What’s real? A few days ago you came to my show, and now … and now this. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do you know how I used to talk about how I’d know the woman of my dreams the second I saw her?”
Lenard just about represses an eye roll, his hand tightening into a fist as he stares at me, his jaws trembling as though he’s fighting the urge to leap across the table and throw a punch at me.
“I remember,” he growls. “I thought it was some rock star lead singer poetry shit, Maddox. I didn’t think it was true.”
“Well, it was,” I tell him. “And the second I saw Myla in the crowd, I just knew it was her. I didn’t know who she was until I spotted you, Tina. But by then it was too late. I just knew I had to claim her.”
“Claim her,” Lenard mutters. “That’s a weird way to put it. What you mean is you put your moves on her and fucked her, took advantage of her. Is that it? She’s eighteen, Maddox. And you’re – what? – forty-one.”
“Forty-two,” I say.
“And that doesn’t even matter,” Myla hisses, a note of fire sparking in her voice. “Whatever you think about this, Dad, don’t make this about age. Because that isn’t it at all. This is about the way we feel about each other.”
“And how the fuck do you feel about each other?” Lenard says, grindin
g his teeth from side to side.
“I feel like, heck, like I finally belong—”
“What is this, some Hallmark movie?”
“Let her talk,” Tina says, shooting Lenard a sharp look.
Lenard throws his hands up but says nothing, leaning back and staring at the two of us alternately.
“It’s true,” Myla goes on. “With Maddox, everything just makes sense. We understand each other, Dad. There’s a connection between us I never could’ve dreamed of before. It’s like nothing I can even explain, really, except to say that I want to be with him. I want to have his children. I want to build a future together.”
“And I want that too,” I cut in, when Myla breaks off. “This isn’t some fling, Lenard. This isn’t me coming in here and telling you that I want to take advantage of your daughter. Jesus, we’ve known each other since we were kids. Do you really think that’s who I am? Have you ever known me, in all the long years we’ve toured and played together, to treat women like that?”
“You don’t go near women, Maddox,” Lenard sighs. “Me and the boys, oh, we had some wild times. Sorry, sweetheart.” Lenard touches Tina’s hand, sighing again, shaking his head wearily. “But you were always somewhere else, working out, reading, writing our next hit. For a rock star, Maddox, you were pretty goddamn abstinent. Except when it came to the fights in the early days.” A smile of reminiscent touches his lips. “Then you were a godsend.”
“That’s his point, honey,” Tina says. “Can’t you see that? He’s never gone near a woman in all his life. You told me that. And now he and Myla have this chemistry, chemistry it would take a fool, no offense sweetheart, not to see.”
Lenard grins and leans across to give Tina a quick kiss on the cheek, and then slumps back in his chair, looking the same way he did in our old flat after our latest unsuccessful gig.
The memory slams into me and the idea that my best friend might not be okay with this whirls around my mind, twisting painfully.
“We’ve been through too much to let our friendship end just because Shadow’s Crow has, Lenard,” I growl. “But there’s nothing in this world that will stop me from claiming Myla.”
“And you?” Lenard says, glancing at his daughter. “Do you want to be claimed?”
“Yes,” Myla snaps, sitting up straighter.
I flinch slightly when she reaches across and takes my hand, the gesture so surprising with her father present, but I nod at her and give her a supportive squeeze.
“I know it seems crazy, Dad,” she says. “I know it’s only been a few days. But don’t you get it? All those things in songs, those things about wanting somebody at first sight, about just knowing when you’re with somebody that this is it … I used to think they were all just stupid Hallmark crap, like you said. But then I saw Maddox and it all changed. Everything changed.”
I love her.
The thought thunders into me with clarity as I watch her talk, the passion infusing her words, the way she waves her hand as though orchestrating the ebbs and flows of our love.
I almost blurt it out right there, but somehow rein it in, not wanting to muddle this moment more than it already is.
“I feel exactly the same,” I say. “I felt like my life was hurtling down one set of tracks. And in an instant, I switched tracks. And when I was on these new track I could never imagine being where, or who, I was before. Myla is it for me, Lenard, Tina. She’s all I’ll ever want.”
Tina wrings her hands together, looking at Lenard with a smile forming on her lips but a wariness about it, as though she doesn’t want to let her positive emotions fly just in case Lenard is still caught up in his own bad mood.
But then Lenard looks me straight in the eye, the same way he used to do in his darker and drunker moments when Shadow’s Crow was still a small band with a funny name, a band not many people believed in.
“Do you really think we’re gonna make it, mate?” he’d ask on those nights.
And I’d tell him the truth, “I don’t know. But I’m going to kill myself trying if that’s what it takes.”
That look means he wants the truth, all of it, and that he’ll accept nothing less.
“Is this for real, mate?” he says. “This is for the long haul? It’s not some … trick.”
Myla and I exchange a look, Myla letting out a little involuntarily giggle at the mention of the word trick, since it’s what has consumed us so much these past few days.
“No, Dad,” Myla says. “It’s not a trick.”
“It’s not, old friend,” I tell Lenard as the insects buzz loudly in the air and, just then, one of Shadow’s Crow’s songs comes on the radio, my voice filling the air.
“Jesus, talk about timing,” Lenard grumbles, with a chuckle. “You know what, Maddox? You’re lucky I know you. You’re lucky I know what a good man you are. If Myla came around here with some other forty-two year old … and I know, I know. Age doesn’t matter. But all I’m saying is, if it was anybody else, this place’d be trashed worse than a hotel room after a bender. But you both look so bloody happy. And I’m happy for you.”
“Really?” Myla gasps, her words light and airy.
Lenard leans forward, taking us both in with his gaze. “I can tell just by looking at you that you’re crazy about each other. All I want is for that to last. Because this is too big a thing to be short term.”
“Never, Lenard,” I say. “Myla is mine for the rest of our lives.”
And I love her. I love her more than life itself.
But something holds me back, maybe the fact that I don’t want to let that declaration fly in front of her parents.
“I’m going to go and change the radio,” I mutter. “Listening to myself seems a bit egomaniacal.”
“No,” Myla giggles, touching my hand. “I like watching you squirm.”
“She’s right,” Lenard grins. “It is pretty amusing, mate.”
“You two are animals,” I chuckle deeply, knowing that soon I’ll make an excuse to speak to Lenard alone.
I’ve got something to ask him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Myla
When Maddox asked me what one of my biggest bucket list dreams was, and I told him that it was to go on an African Safari, I didn’t expect him to go and organize one for the next freaking day.
I was still reeling from the conversation with Dad, his blessing like the cherry on top of the already tastiest cake in the universe.
When Dad said he was happy for us, I felt my chest glow so warmly and I thought, in a spur-of-the-moment rush of emotion, I love Maddox. I love him more than life itself.
I almost blurted it out right there, but something held me back, maybe the fact that Mom and Dad were there.
Or maybe it was the sickening idea that if I just blurted it out, he’d stare at me and his mouth would fall open and then he’d tell me that he loved being with me or something like that, and that idea just twisted me up inside.
But then, the morning after the conversation with Dad, when I awoke in his bedroom, my body sore from our lovemaking the night before and the sun shining through the window, Maddox was looking down at me, a sly smirk on his face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We’re going on a trip,” he said. “That is, if you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you,” I smiled. “More than anybody. But where are we going?
An almost boyish look glinted in his hunter’s eyes. “It’s a surprise.”
The flight was long, but in the comfortable confines of the private jet, with the plush seats and the personally cooked meals and all the legroom I could dream of, it didn’t seem that bad.
And now here we are, the Kenyan sky blazing down on us as we sit in the back of the privately rented jeep and bob over the landscape, my heart still thudding at the back of my throat from seeing all the exotic creatures I’d only ever laid eyes on in zoos before.
“It’s so different seeing them in the wild,” I gasp, looking a
cross at Maddox.
He’s wearing a khaki colored T-shirt that hugs tightly to his bulging sleeved arms, his hair flecked with sweat from the intense heat, swept aside like liquid iron.
He reaches across and brushes his hand along my lips.
“So you enjoyed it?” he murmurs.
“Enjoyed?” I laugh. “Um, I guess that’s one way to put it. It was freaking magical. I still can’t believe we’re here. Maybe I’ll wake up and it will be the day of the concert, and none of this will have happened. It all seems so crazy.”
“Crazily perfect,” he growls, sounding for a moment like one of the beasts we spied earlier today.
“Yeah,” I agree, taking his hand and feeling it tremble slightly.
Or is that just the movement of the jeep over the dusty road?
Why would Maddox be trembling?
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, giving my hand a squeeze. “I’m just thinking.”
“About what? And remember, rock star, we promised never to lie to each other.”
“I’m thinking about us,” he says. “About the meal I’ve got prepared for us back at the camp. And about our future.”
“Okay, mystery man,” I giggle. “You know you sound pretty weird right now, don’t you?”
He grins jackal-like and slides into the seat next to me, crossing the back of the jeep and putting his arm around me. He waves a hand over the landscape, sun lavished and seemingly endless, wildlife surging all around us even as we inch closer to partial civilization, the netting around the open back humming with insects as we fly ever faster.
“Look where we are, Myla,” he says. “Not so long ago we were in the States and worrying that your dad wouldn’t approve of us. Now we’re on the other side of the world and nobody can touch us. If that’s not weird – in a good way, a great way – then I don’t know what is.”
I settle into his arms, feeling the solidness of them.
The feeling is like being wrapped in a protective blanket as the sun glows warmer and closer around us, pressing in like a wave of just-right heat.
Claimed By The British Rockstar Page 7
