Taking the Lead (Secrets of a Rock Star #1)

by Cecilia Tan

  I guess he really did know me, since a part of my brain was already preparing to run at the earliest opportunity. I tried to put off having a heavy conversation, at least. “We’re going to talk on the weekend.”

  “We can talk then, also. But I mean tonight. No running away.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I don’t come, I keep fucking you, and we talk anyway, with my cock buried to the hilt in you, like it is right now. I’m not tired yet. And I’m ready to start talking anytime.”

  He was serious. I was starting to worry about Gwen, who probably wondered where I’d run off to, and who might have found my car … “Hopefully my sister didn’t put out an APB on me,” I tried. Why was it such a strong reflex to run away?

  “Disappearing into a seedy motel was your idea, not mine,” he reminded me. “You can call or text her in a few. After you promise you’re not rushing off. I came here because you asked me to, Ricki. You owe me at least that.”

  “All right.” He was right. “I promise I won’t rush off.”

  “I’ve half a mind to keep slow-fucking you for a while to keep talking, now that we’ve started—”

  “Don’t you dare—!”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he scolded. “I’m in charge, remember?”

  My face flushed scarlet—in fact, I think my whole body did—as I realized my error. It was like speaking out of turn in class by accident and getting scolded by the teacher, only worse. I was ashamed because I felt I was better than that. I forced myself to say, “Yes, Mr. Hawke.”

  “Mmm. Very good, Ms. Hamilton. I do believe you’re getting the hang of it. And oh God your pussy gets tight when you’re embarrassed. Squeeze me now, darling. Squeeze hard and I’ll come.”

  I clamped down as hard as I could and he went at it with great gusto, very nearly making me come again just from that, but it wasn’t quite enough. Especially since at the last second he pulled out and came while rubbing himself against my belly, groaning and half-crushing me with a hug as he did. It felt intensely good to be held so tightly, to feel him shuddering as he lost control, to feel him clinging to me in his moment of weakness, though I was surprised by his last-second pull-out. His come was hot and slick and as it hit my skin it sent a last wave of sympathetic aftershocks through me, too.

  He held his breath as the last few spurts issued between us, and then when he started breathing again he loosened his grip.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, and I wasn’t sure which thing he was apologizing for, not making me come one more time or covering my belly with goop. He lifted himself on his arms, snagged the small towel I’d been using as a blindfold, and cleaned the spunk off my stomach with it.

  Then he collapsed on his side next to me. “Sorry, Ricki,” he said. “I just … couldn’t risk it.”

  Because I was acting like a crazy person, I thought. How could you trust the word of a crazy woman who blindfolded herself and acted like she wanted to be taken like that?

  Then he nuzzled my hair and said, “I want to trust you completely.”

  I know that was my moment to say “me, too,” but the words got stuck as I flashed to a thought of my mother, and of my grandfather tearing up ten years after her death just thinking about her. I was too exhausted at that moment to explain, so instead I just said, “I know.” He grunted in agreement and then tucked me against him to snuggle. For some reason I hadn’t expected that. No one tells you dominants snuggle their submissives. There’s nothing in the high-tech catalogs or the porn movies about that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  EVERYBODY WANTS, EVERYBODY NEEDS

  RICKI

  The truth was I didn’t want to run away. I didn’t want to rush off. I wanted to lie there in Axel Hawke’s arms and forget the whole rest of the world. But I couldn’t. As the glorious sensual heat in my body cooled, my mind began to spin again.

  So much to think about. So much I didn’t want to think about. It was much easier to wish for a retreat into the fantasy world where Axel Hawke took care of everything and all I had to do was lie there.

  The words “Is Axel even your real name?” came out of my mouth.

  “You think I’d name myself after a part of a truck?” he said.

  I sat up suddenly. “Be serious.”

  He tucked an arm behind his head and I could see the dragon tattoo went all the way around his upper arm. It was hard not to admire the lean, muscular line of his chest. “I am being serious. My mother named me Axel and I’ve stuck with it.”

  I hugged my knees. My curiosity about him was suddenly burning. He wanted to talk? Let’s talk. “Are you close to your mother?”

  “Pretty close. She raised me on her own after she split from my father.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.” He stretched and cocked his head to look at me, but he didn’t protest all the questions. “Didn’t I tell you this? My dad was military. We moved a lot. I first met Mal in England when I was ten. After they split, my mom was tired of moving around, so we ended up in Massachusetts near my grandparents.”

  Right. I remembered him saying he’d lived in Germany and Japan, too. He looked so relaxed right now, no attitude, no act. If anything he was even more devastatingly handsome. “How’d you get into music?”

  “Same way most guys do. To meet girls.”

  I poked him in the ribs. “That’s why. I asked how.”

  “I dunno. I always played instruments and sang. I know it’s a cliché but, when you move to different countries all the time …” He shrugged. “Music is a universal language. It was a quick way to be liked.”

  I tried to imagine a young boy, making new friends with his music in all different countries, all different schools. Everything he had said just made my heart softer and sweeter on him by the minute. I wondered if he was eventually going to say something that would burst my bubble. Surely he can’t be that perfect, thought the little voice of denial in my head. I’ll stop being so into him once I find out what a shallow jerk he is. Right? “When did you start the band, though? When you were ten?”

  “Ha, no. I got back in touch with Mal when I was about sixteen and had run away from home.”

  “You ran away from home?”

  “Yeah. Teen rebellion. My mother didn’t like the crowd I was hanging with. I was fronting a band of guys who were all in college, so they were sneaking me into bars to play shows by saying I was eighteen—”

  “But even at eighteen you’re still underage.” When he said “bad boy” he really meant it.

  “I know. But if you’re working or performing, you can be in bars if you’re eighteen. Just like you can be a waiter in a place that serves alcohol if you’re eighteen. But you can’t be sixteen.”

  “And you never got caught?”

  “No.” His smile was nostalgic rather than sly. “No one really worries about the band. Besides, we didn’t drink. We were too busy getting high in the van.” Now his grin turned to a smirk and I wondered if he was kidding. “Mom wasn’t too keen on me staying out late for gigs all different nights of the week and failing out of school.”

  “You failed out of school?”

  “No. That’s the thing. I was doing fine in school. And I tried to explain if she would be supportive and help me out, you know, then I could do it all, keep my grades up, sing in the band, no problem. I always thought that was our contract, you know? My job was to get good grades and if I did that I could do whatever else I wanted. But all of a sudden she wanted me to dress a different way, act a different way. It was like, when I was twelve and we were out of the military, she was fine with me being a rebel and growing my hair. But she felt by the time I was sixteen I should’ve grown out of it. It was time for me to straighten up and fly right.” He shook his head slowly.

  “What does she think now?”

  “She’s fine with it now. Turns out a lot of that attitude was coming from the guy she was dating at the time.” He shrugged and as his muscles flexed, the dragon around his upper a
rm moved. I settled close, putting my hand on his chest as he kept talking. “I mean, I knew that, but I really didn’t give a shit about him. He knew better than to waltz in and try to be a father figure to a sixteen-year-old with hair halfway down his back and a nose ring.”

  “You had a nose ring?”

  “I did. It was a pain in the ass, though, so I took it out.”

  “And hair halfway down your back?” I tried to picture teen rebel Axel with hair like that.

  “Yeah. That was a pain, too, though. I mean, girls absolutely loved it, but when it’s that long it’s always in the way during sex.” He propped himself up on one elbow, folding my hand under his. “The good part about it was it was like a signal to musicians that I wasn’t just some poser. Growing hair that long takes some commitment.”

  “So what happened to that band?”

  “Well, I ran away from home, remember? And not one of those bastards would take me in, so that pretty much would’ve ended the band right there even if I didn’t take off for England.”

  “England?” I lay back and he traced the curves of my sternum with the tip of one finger as if he were painting a picture between my breasts.

  “Yeah, because after I’d been on the street for a little while Mal offered to take me in. I spent the summer in Wales. By the end of the summer my mother had come around. She had dumped the strait-laced dude and I think she was afraid maybe I wasn’t coming back. But I went back and finished high school, got into college … and the rest is history.” He shifted then, piling some pillows against the headboard, and urged me to lean back with him. “And now it’s your turn.”

  I let out a long sigh. It would’ve been completely unfair of me to try to put off telling him about myself any longer, after he’d just answered all of my questions with no hesitation. “How about we start with what you know already?”

  “What do you mean? I confess I Googled you a little after Grammy night but I was so anxious to see you again I could barely absorb what I was reading so I mostly just looked at recent society photos.”

  I felt a little bad for having put him through that, but he went on before I could apologize.

  “I know you and your sister inherited a fortune and that your grandfather was some kind of media mogul in the old days. Oh, and that you’ve got a dungeon in your basement. That’s it.”

  “That’s it?” I frowned. I was skeptical that he hadn’t come across the stuff about my mother and wondered if he was playing dumb.

  “Am I supposed to know more? Remember, half my life I didn’t even live in the United States and after we split from my father we didn’t have a television.”

  Apparently he really didn’t know. “You didn’t?”

  “Nope. We had the Internet and video rental. Who needs actual television? That was my mother’s attitude, anyway. Anyway. Fill me in. What am I supposed to know?”

  I let myself lean against him slightly. “I don’t know, I guess. I always assume most people know a lot more than I feel like they should. And that makes me want to tell them even less.”

  He cleared his throat in an exaggerated manner. “Ahem. Can we agree I am not ‘most people’?”

  “You certainly are not,” I said, thinking both of him stalking down the runway and making women scream, and of his voice making me shiver when he’d said It’s me. I’d never had a lover so attentive. Well, maybe I’d never really had a lover at all. Boyfriends, guys I “dated,” for whom sex was assumed to be part of the package. The same guys I was always saying no to. If any of them had been half the sex god that Axel was, I probably would have said yes more often.

  “Just tell me what you want to,” Axel said gently, brushing his hand over my hair. “Don’t feel like there’s anything you have to.”

  “Okay, but there are a couple of things that are … kind of known already. My grandfather tried to keep our family life sheltered from the attention of the media. But that got harder and harder to do when my father kept doing things like getting drunk and wrecking cars.”

  “He did that a lot?”

  “Well, twice, and then they took his license away.”

  “Your mother must have loved that.”

  He really didn’t know. While that was kind of refreshing, it meant that now I had to be the one to tell him. “Well, the big thing that most people know about me, but that I guess you don’t, is that my mother died when I was four.”

  “Oh. Oh, Ricki—”

  I bristled reflexively. “Don’t pretend to be sympathetic. It’s not like you knew her.”

  “Well, no, but I know you, and I sympathize with your pain.”

  “I’m not feeling any pain,” I snapped. “It was twenty years ago. Stop patronizing me!”

  That was the point where I burst into tears. Axel held me and I didn’t try to stop him. He rocked me slightly. He was very nice to me. So nice he didn’t even say anything snarky like “not feeling any pain, eh?”

  So nice he didn’t even press me to tell him more.

  AXEL

  It’s sort of a truism that when someone you love is in pain, you want to do anything you can to make them feel better, right? The flip side of that, though, is that when people are in pain, they’re easy to fall in love with. How exactly that fits into the whole sadism-masochism thing I’m not sure, but I’m sure it’s related. Let’s replace the word pain with passion, or with ecstasy. When someone you love is in ecstasy, they’re easy to fall in love with. See? It works.

  I was already crazy about Ricki Hamilton before she broke down in tears. I didn’t carry her off from that awards ceremony simply to make trouble, you know. Yes, I wanted her. But since that night I’d wanted to touch her, to spend time with her, to hear her voice, all of those things that aren’t just about sex. And the more I found out about her, and the more time I spent with her, the more I wanted.

  Especially when she was having an all-out ugly cry in my arms. When someone’s heart is breaking, your heart breaks a little, too, doesn’t it? And maybe when it heals up, some of the pieces get a little mixed up and cemented together … I should put all that in a song because it sounds so corny but it’s true. Isn’t it?

  I’d do anything to make her feel better.

  It’s true that I am familiar with one surefire way to make a woman feel good, Ricki in particular, but I wasn’t intending for comfort to turn into sex. I really wasn’t. But somehow rocking and stroking her hair turned into caressing her and murmuring about how beautiful she was, which turned into kissing her, which turned into kissing her all over …

  Which turned into her sliding her leg over my hip and pulling me on top of her. I’m not the type to ignore an invitation, even a non-verbal one, but this was almost subconscious, like I barely even realized we’d transitioned all the way to making love. We were rocking back and forth together, her fingers buried in my hair, my mouth on her skin, and the only thing lacking was I wasn’t actually buried inside her.

  And then she whined urgently, and her whine changed instantly to a happy moan when I pushed inside her. My beautiful Ricki. That was the moment I was lost, I think, if I had to point to one moment from which there was no going back. But our whole relationship up to that point had been a series of those moments, hadn’t it? If it hadn’t been love at first sight, maybe it had been love at first kiss—or more likely at first penetration. That first time I’d joined our bodies had changed me. And since then each time I’d touched her, held her, or breathed her name I had gone deeper into it. Into loving her, into being in love with her.

  My cock inside her had now transformed her sobs to sounds of joyous pleasure. So much better. So much better than crying or feeling pain or sadness. Maybe I couldn’t fill the empty space in Ricki Hamilton’s heart over her lost mother, but at least I could do this.

  I made love to her gently, with no hurry until she neared a peak, and then I pushed her forward until she came apart with pleasure, losing herself in it. I watched her eyes close—not clenched in frustration
but merely closed in pleasure as the sensation took away her troubles and her pain. My Ricki. I pulled free then and massaged her with my hand, intending to jerk myself off quickly and be done with it, but her hand found my shaft and took over. Her eyes opened as she worked me experimentally at first, getting the feel of me. I gave her a nod of encouragement, leaning on my hip to make it easier for her to please me. Her fingers wrapping around me felt like a new intimacy. I stared into those warm brown eyes, then groaned deeply as she struck upon a rhythm and motion that pulled me suddenly closer to my own peak.

  “Mm, Ricki, you—” I threw my head back as she looped her thumb over the slippery tip.

  “Is it okay?” she asked, as if worried she was hurting me.

  I was too close to orgasm to speak at that point. Too close to explain. Instead I closed my hand around hers and held it in mine while we both pumped my cock to the inevitable result. Having come once already not even an hour before, I didn’t make much of a mess this time. Only a dribble.

  Her hand was still around my cock—now mostly soft—when she said, “You don’t trust me.”

  “Just being careful,” I murmured, as I found a dry corner on the towel. “An accidental child isn’t something I could deal with right now.” Whether I could even deal with a full-time relationship was another story, but I didn’t really want to bring up that question.

  “Sensible.”

  “I can be when I really try.” I took her hand in mine. “You feeling better?”

  She let out a breath, looking at the ceiling. “I think so. Sorry about that.”

  “Ricki, you don’t ever have to apologize for crying.”

  “I don’t know. This week is the twentieth anniversary of her death. You’d think I’d be over it by now. I mean, I certainly thought I was over it.”

  “You seem pretty wound up, though.”

  She nodded unhappily. “That’s true. Because of the anniversary The Tinseltown Tab has an article coming out tomorrow about it and I’m dreading what it might say.”