by Lily Cahill
Lacy pulled back and grinned, but she only had eyes for Chase. “Oh, Tiff. You know I’m mostly here to visit you.”
Chase extracted his limbs from Lacy and sat down at the table across from Emily. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. After a beat, he patted the seat next to him. Lacy chirped and bustled over to sit down, dragging her chair closer to Chase. He fought every single nerve in his body demanding that he scoot away.
It was going to be a long day.
Chapter Nine
Emily
EMILY WAS AFRAID SHE WAS going to be sick. She’d just sucked the cock of a man who was now flirting outrageously with another woman. God, she felt cheap. Cheap, and guilty. This was now twice in the last twenty-four hours that she’d slept with a man other than her boyfriend.
Across the table from her, Lacy giggled at something Chase had just said and batted at his arm. Emily stood up suddenly. She couldn’t take any more of this. Her eyes cut to Lacy, then to Chase.
“I’ve got to get some work done,” she announced, barely keeping the contempt out of her voice. “I’ll move to the living room.” Lacy barely looked at Emily, but Chase’s face twisted, his mouth drawn tight and his brow furrowed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can let you—”
“She said she would go to the living room, Chase,” Lacy said sharply.
“Right,” Emily said, still hovering at the table. She paused for one terrible second, her mind and body torn. She wanted to go. She only wanted to be near Chase. God, he was like a drug. He was terrible for her, but she couldn’t stop.
With stuttering movements, Emily gathered up her notepad, laptop, and phone and relocated to a couch at the far end of the living room, specifically choosing one that faced the view outside, not the kitchen table.
After a moment, Tiff joined her. Her voice was quiet, soft. “Do you want to talk?”
Emily kept her eyes on her laptop. “About what?”
She felt Tiff’s eyes on her. “I think you know.”
Emily stayed silent. But she wasn’t reading the screen or typing anything.
“When I first met Jax, I … I had a lot of doubts about why a rockstar could be interested in me. I mean, it’s crazy on paper. I don’t know how to properly explain it, but it’s like we’re made for each other. We fit together, you know?”
Emily finally looked away from the screen. “You should say that if I can get you and Jax that interview.”
Tiff sighed and raised her eyebrows at Emily. “I’m not telling you this for publicity reasons. I’m—”
Emily reached out and covered Tiff’s hand with her own. “Tiff, you’re amazing, and I’m so happy to have another woman around, but I think you have the wrong idea about … things.”
Tiff pressed her lips together. After a moment, she stood. “Okay, well, if you want to talk. About anything ….”
Emily turned her attention back to her laptop, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was working on the pitch to Nina Marten, but it sounded all wrong, too stuffy and formal. She was a pretty good writer; she’d taken journalism classes in college, but had gravitated toward the business side of writing and marketing. She spent an hour trying for the right opening sentence of her pitch, but nothing worked. She rolled her shoulders and leaned her head back against the couch.
This wasn’t working; she wasn’t working. God, she was sleeping with her client. What could be more wrong than that? Yet her body remembered the way Chase could make her feel, and it felt so, so right. Tiff’s words floated into her mind: It was like they just fit together, she and Chase.
Emily stood up suddenly, her laptop falling to the rug. She had to talk to Chase and keep her damned clothes on and figure this out. Maybe if they started over fresh, if she broke up with Asher first … maybe she and Chase weren’t so mismatched after all.
Emily padded into the kitchen, but the table was empty. She wandered up to the loft, but only Drew was up there with his ever-present headphones on and his face in a book. She walked back downstairs and down the hallway toward Chase’s bedroom. The door was ajar. Just as she reached up a hand to knock, the door swung open.
Lacy startled to see Emily standing in the hallway, then burst into giggles.
Emily stumbled back against the hallway wall, her heart in her chest. Sourness rose up her throat, boiled in her stomach. No.
No.
Her body took over. She spun away and bolted, barely keeping herself from sprinting out of the house. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.
Come on, Em. You knew what he was like. She berated herself, but that didn’t stop the deep cut of realization. And humiliation. So much humiliation.
Emily tumbled out the front door and clattered down the steps. The cool salt breeze stung her tender skin, bit at her wet eyes. God, she was such a fool. She’d let herself sleep with a man she knew slept around. She’d cheated on her boyfriend, her good, socially-approved boyfriend. She was very nearly ready to blow up her entire, carefully-made life for who? A drummer in a rock band.
Emily stumbled toward her car and had to press her hands against the door frame, a wave of nausea threatening to overcome her.
Distantly, she heard the front door slam. She peered up and saw Chase thundering down the steps toward her. She scrambled to get into her car, but she wasn’t fast enough.
“Just leave me the hell alone, Chase,” she hissed.
Chase’s hands were on her shoulders, and he spun her around. And oh God, there was bright red lipstick smeared across the edge of his lips and into his beard. Emily’s stomach clamped down painfully.
“Em, let me explain.”
Emily yanked her body out of Chase’s hands. “Explain what? That you were fucking another woman? News flash, Chase, I already have a pretty decent idea of what a bastard you are.”
Chase bristled and rubbed the back of his hand against his mouth. His skin came back red, and he grimaced. But his eyes when he looked up at Emily were granite, the muscles in his neck and shoulders tense.
“Yeah, you did know exactly what I am. I sleep around. Did you honestly think two rounds with you was going to change who I am?” Chase laughed, harshly, though he couldn’t meet Emily’s gaze.
Tears sprang to Emily’s eyes, but she held them back and doused them with anger. She could feel her skin flushing, her breath growing ragged, but it was so different from just a couple hours before with Chase.
“God, you’re impossible! You’re jeopardizing the band, and you don’t give a shit! You’re … you’re such a damn fuck-up, and it’s like you’re proud of it! I don’t know if you’re blind or just stupid.”
Chase’s mouth compressed to a hard line, and it was a moment before he spoke. “Yes,” he finally said, his voice deadly calm. “It couldn’t possibly be that I’m having fun, that I like who I am, whether you can agree with that or not. At least I own my shortcomings.”
“What does that mean?”
Chase’s eyes were lidded, his hands in fists at his side. “You haven’t for one damned second let me think that we’re equals. You spend every fucking second criticizing me until you get wet and need my dick inside of you. Your boyfriend not doing it for you? Or have you lived such a goddamned charmed life that you think it’s fun slumming it with the talent?”
Chase was breathing heavy, and he brooded over Emily like a storm. “You know what you are? You’re a tourist in your own fucking life. You’ve never had to work your ass off for anything. You want everything catered to you. It’s pathetic.”
Rage was a cleansing fire through Emily’s frayed soul. She stared up at Chase with every ounce of anger naked in her eyes.
“You don’t know a thing about how hard I’ve worked, Chase. You know I paid my own way through business school because I didn’t want my dad’s money to change the way I was treated. I spent a childhood taking care of my mom and keeping her upright when she was too strung out on pills or weak from not eating. Even when she criticized what I looked like or that I dared to eat food in
stead of starving myself like her. I worked damned hard for what I have, for who I am. You talk about working? The only thing you’ve worked toward is being a total failure. You’re an addict and a sleaze, and I hate you.”
Emily swung the car door open, shoving Chase out of the way as she did, and threw her bag into the passenger seat. She shoved the car into drive and roared away.
She spent as little time as she could packing up her bag at the hotel and was already driving to the airport when she called the airline to switch her flight.
She was going back to New York, back to Asher. And she was going to forget Chase Hart had ever spoken a word to her.
Chapter Ten
Chase
CHASE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE HE was.
He pressed fingers to his temples and tried to stand up, groaning as he did. He stumbled forward and barely caught his shoulder against a wooden beam to keep from falling over again.
All around him, bodies shifted and churned, like pieces of flotsam on a brooding sea. Chase shook his head, trying to shake some sense into his sodden brain, but it just made his temples throb.
“You okay, man?” A faceless arm accompanied the voice and hauled Chase to stand.
The room spun. He was in a bar, but it was a place he didn’t recognize. People shouted and screeched, and the sickly sweet scent of beer and liquor threatened to make Chase sick.
“Emily! Emily!”
Chase jerked his head up, looking for the sound. Across the crowded bar, a tall brunette held up a hand and smiled, then waded through the people toward her friend. Of course it wasn’t his Emily. Chase hadn’t spoken to her since she’d left two weeks ago.
No, Chase thought with another skull-splitting shake of his head. She wasn’t his Emily. And good riddance.
Chase growled and shoved his way to the bar. “Whiskey,” he shouted at the bartender.
The man took one look at him and shook his head.
Chase’s fingers bit into the sticky edge of the bar, his fury a flash flood. “Give me a whiskey, you fucker,” Chase demanded, throwing a hundred dollar bill onto the bar top.
The bartender paused, stared at the money, then he pushed it back toward Chase and shook his head again, firmer this time. “You’re done, buddy. You either get a water, or go somewhere else that’ll serve you.”
Chase snatched up the bill so quickly that it tore in half. He let it flutter to the ground and staggered toward the door. Screw him. Why was it that asshole’s job to tell him when he was done drinking?
Someone barred his way at the door, and he shoved against the solid body. A man turned around, his beady eyes narrowed.
“Move,” Chase spit.
“What’d you say to me?” the hulk of a man growled.
Chase drew himself up tall and squared his shoulders. “Oh, sorry. I said move, you piece of shit, before I knock you down.”
The fist came so fast, Chase barely had time to duck. Adrenaline and aggression jolted through him, and his fists were up in an instant. Three brutes surrounded him, dove for him. It was a wild flurry of punches, and Chase landed as many as he took.
God, it hurt so much. He reveled in it, in the shock of pain that cleared his alcohol-soaked head. Chase drove his fist into one guy’s gut, landed a hard, arced punch into the jaw of another.
Fists connected against his eye, his lip, his stomach. The last one doubled him over and nearly brought him to his knees. He was staggering to his feet when arms were on him, holding him back, stopping the fight. There was a confusion of shouts and threats, and then Chase was hauled outside and dumped on the sidewalk.
Chase groaned and rolled up to sit. His lip was warm, and he tasted coppery blood in his mouth. There was sick yellow-orange light from a blinking streetlight overhead, but the strip of stores and bars around him were mostly dark and silent. Where in the hell was he?
The air slapped Chase’s face when he finally pushed to his feet. It was black as pitch, and cold. Colder than it had been the last couple weeks. Chase stumbled across the street, following the smell of the ocean. He found it down an alley one street over. It was rocky along the shore, and his feet slipped on the boulders piled along the coastline.
“Fuck,” Chase swore. “Shitting, fucking fuck.”
He just had to take a second, clear his head. Maybe a bit of hair of the dog would help. There had to be another bar in this shit hole of a town. He stepped heavily onto a rock and felt his stomach leave him. The rock tipped unsteadily onto its side, and Chase went down with it. He smacked his head hard against the side of a boulder, then the world went black.
Chase was wet, his pelt crusted with dried sea salt. Chase groaned, and it came out like a low rumble through his heavy snout. He’d shifted; who knew when it’d happened. But as he became aware of his surroundings, he realized it’d been hours, maybe. The sky overhead was lightening to gray, the first fingers of orange reaching across the heavens.
Chase shifted back to his human form and stood. He was wedged between rocks, the frigid ocean lapping around his feet. His body must have shifted as a survival mechanism. He would have been in a bad way if he’d stayed in his human form overnight in ice-cold water.
The last night came back to him fuzzy and indistinct, like the old ham radios Mac liked to play around with. He’d been drinking with some longshoremen in town and he’d left with them. But he had no idea where they’d gone. Chase groaned and rubbed his hands over his face—blood was thick in his beard from his split lip. Tenderly, he prodded his face, finding sore spots around his left eye and the right side of his mouth.
He remembered trying to sleep with a woman, but he’d called her the wrong name and she’d slapped him. He groaned again when he remembered what name he called her. Jesus, he’d really fucked things up.
Chase picked his way over the rocks and stumbled into the town. Finally, he saw it: a town sign. He pulled out his phone—thankfully still dry—and called Drew.
Drew answered on the first ring. “Jesus Christ, Chase. Is that you?”
Chase grimaced and nodded, then croaked out a yes.
“We were about to call the cops, Chase. You’ve been gone for nearly two days.”
Two days? He’d been gone two days?
“Can you come get me?” Chase told Drew the name of the town and wandered into a coffee shop to wait. But even the strongest, blackest coffee couldn’t wash away the stain of the last couple days.
Chase laughed loudly at just how fucked up his life had become and saw a few people nearby stare at him. He dipped his head and went to the bathroom.
He reeled backward when he saw his face in the mirror. God, he was a disaster. He felt like he’d been to a hell dimension and come through the other side. His beard was ragged, his shorn hair growing out. His eyes were rimmed in red, one eye bruised yellow-green, and his face looked gray and drawn. Dark blood crusted the cut on his lip, and his black T-shirt was ripped along the collar.
Emily’s words beat against his skull. He was a failure; he was an addict; he was a sleaze. Jesus, how right she was.
Chase cleaned himself up as best he could and burrowed into a deep chair by the coffee shop window to wait for Drew. It was nearly two hours before his brother’s old truck pulled up.
Embarrassment wriggled through Chase and starting gnawing at his gut, but he pushed himself up and walked to the truck as steadily as he could. Drew didn’t say a word, just nodded at his brother and started driving south out of town.
Chase leaned his head back against the seat and shut his eyes, though sleep wouldn’t come.
This wasn’t who he wanted to be.
He didn’t want to be a liability, the brother they had to deal with. And he’d known damn well he was lying when he told Emily he liked who he was. He hated who he was … or at least this version of himself.
It wasn’t just how he’d hurt Emily, it was how he hurt his family too. They had once again postponed leaving for Brooklyn, still working out the kinks of the new album in t
he Maine studio. Chase just hadn’t been able to concentrate, and he had spent more time drunk or hungover than concentrating on the new beats of the album.
And his failures were affecting the others, not just in dragging out the completion of the album, but the relationships too. Bret and Jax were fighting more over lyrics and music, and Drew had withdrawn even more than usual. He’d spent nearly every night holed up in his room or on the phone with Mac. Out of all of them, Chase was most worried Drew would quit and head back to Montana.
They were nearing the cabin when Drew cleared his throat and finally spoke. “You need to find a reason to keep going, Chase.”
Chase rolled his neck to look at his older brother. They were only two years apart in age, but Drew had always felt like the eldest, like he was born a responsible thirty-year-old.
A large part of Chase wanted to laugh this off, to make light of it to hide his own disappointment in himself. But it was time he faced his problems head-on, instead of running from them. He was so sick of hiding from the man he wanted to be.
“How’d you do it? After Kirsten left, how’d you keep going?”
Drew sighed, and Chase saw his brother’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Honestly, I don’t know if I have. But … leaving Montana was part of it. Just putting physical distance between me and the life I could’ve had there.”
Chase sat up. “You’ve been on the phone with Mac a lot. Are you … are you thinking of going back?”
Another heavy sigh escaped Drew. “I don’t know.” Drew’s sharp eyes cut Chase’s way. “But I do know I’m not letting you change the subject. I know Jax tried talking to you, but you can’t laugh this one off, Chase.”
Chase’s shoulders slumped and he groaned. “I don’t know how to apologize to you, to the others,” Chase said. His heavy eyes staring at his feet. “I … I’ve been ….”
They pulled up, and Jax, Tiff, and Bret rushed to the truck. Drew paused for a moment before turning off the truck. He looked at Chase.
“You start by saying you’re sorry and meaning it.”
