by Jess Bentley
I glance up at him and shrug apologetically. I'm not sure why some little painting would make me feel like crying but…
Wait.
August writes down the number and takes my hand, pulling me gently toward the bidding table. He puts a note down on the corresponding sheet for the painting and smiles at me graciously. I'm distracted, counting backward mentally. Then I count again.
“Oh, they gave us a nice table,” he remarks. “Cabernet?”
“No… maybe a soda water,” I answer, shaking my head.
“Everything okay?” he asks me, his eyes full of concern. I lean forward in my chair, pressing my fingers lightly on his knee.
“August… I think I might be pregnant.”
His mouth is open. “Pregnant? Are you sure?”
I shake my head. “No… Of course I can’t be sure. I'll have to take a test. But… gotta be three weeks late. We have just been so busy, I wasn't even paying attention. But it's got to be at least three weeks.”
I am so distracted, mentally calculating over and over again, I barely notice it when he takes my hands in his, draws me closer to him. He strokes my cheeks with his hands, kissing my upper lip, then my lower lip, sighing deeply.
“Dahlia! That's so amazing!”
“But we have to go to Malta!” I object. It sounds silly when I say it, but still. “I mean… Greece is right there? Italy?”
“We can go anywhere you want,” he says quickly. His voice is urgent and sincere.
“But, Malta… it's a cruise?” My voice trails off.
“There's time for that, Dahlia. All the time in the world,” he smiles. As I watch him, he smiles broader, his cheeks creasing, his eyes dancing.
“But school? Your new app… I mean we are so busy. What if we get into the —”
“Marry me.”
My breath chokes my throat.
“What?”
“Oh, what am I thinking,” he blurts out, distracted. He looks around at the other people in the room, though I'm not sure what he's looking for.
Then he stands up abruptly and dashes to the other side of the room. He moves quickly from table to table, quickly investigating each of the auction items. Other guests have started to watch him as he darts toward the bidding table and scribbles on the paper. He talks to the official, bending his head forward and then shaking his hand.
Just as suddenly, he strides back across the room to where I sit. He pushes his chair to the side to make room and drops to his knees in front of me. Taking both my hands in his, he looks up into my face.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Dahlia Cox, I'm asking you to marry me.”
“But —”
He squeezes my hands, and I stop talking immediately.
“Dahlia, I don't know where I was before you. I can't remember a time before there was you. You changed my life, and I didn't even know it. I didn't even understand. You brought me back to life, Dahlia.”
“Oh," I say.
He smiles, the most beautiful smile I've ever seen.
“And so I want you — I need you — to be my wife. Let me care for you forever. Let me raise this baby with you, and all the babies we will have after.”
“Oh, August…” I breathe, suddenly dizzy.
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s so... I mean…”
“Tell me,” he growls. My body shivers in response. That voice. That low, sexy, commanding voice. “Tell me, Dahlia.”
“I will,” I say in a small voice.
“Tell me again.”
I make him wait. His hands grip mine, caging my small fists inside his larger palms. I let the sound of his voice echo through me, hearing it over and over and over again.
Finally, when I can't stand it anymore, I give my answer.
“I will. I will marry you, August Berner.”
I hadn't even noticed people are watching us. All I could see was him. Now as he stands up, everyone breaks into applause, circling us and smiling, congratulating him. Men reach out and shake his hand, but he will not let me go. His hand is covering mine, holding me gently, keeping me close to him.
I never realized exactly how lost I was until he found me. And now everything will be different. I feel utterly complete.
Copyright © 2017 by Jess Bentley and Mona Cox
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Rory vs. Rockstar was adapted from an existing work for which Jess Bentley owns rights.
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Prologue
"You think we have time for one more, girls?" Ashley asked, but her hand was already signaling the waiter who was heading over. "Besides, this waiter is fucking hot."
"I mean, it's not like we have a plane to catch or anything," Lisa said, a smile on her lips. "We just got off the plane. All we're doing is sitting here drinking with no real place to go."
“Please," Rory said nodding her head as the waiter put another Cosmopolitan in front of her. He was awfully quick bringing those Cosmo's out as soon as Ashley had ordered another round. Rory began to wonder whether they were in a pitcher in the back, already pre-made for the girls after the first round, just waiting till they were ordered.
Awfully sneaky.
"Please what, babe?" Alicia asked turning to her.
Rory rolled her eyes. "Please, not everyone has nowhere to be," Rory said. "I mean, I still have a flight to catch in an hour."
"Oh right," Alicia said, as if realizing for the first time that Rory had to go. "Why, again?" she asked.
"Oh my God, because I live in Southern California?" Rory asked, with a faint touch of exasperation. "You know, like you did while we were growing up. And when we went to school at USC. You know, before you moved out here."
Rory didn't realize if maybe she had come across a little bit too intensely and immediately felt bad for how she had sounded.
"I mean, I just miss you so much sometimes," she quickly added before Alicia began to think she was being berated. "Why don't you ever think of coming back to California?"
"Um, because New York City is totally the center of the freakin' world," Alicia said, as if explaining a matter-of-fact statement to child. "You need to come to the capital of the world, babe."
"Ugh, I hate big cities," Rory said before taking a sip of her drink. "Give me an island next to the ocean any day of the week and I'm happy with whatever else."
"Really?" Natalie asked her. "What about Manhattan? That's an island."
“An island without three million people living on it," Rory replied with a smile.
"What about if two million of them were hot guys?" Kim asked.
Rory chuckled. She might not always get along with her friend Alicia, who she had grown up with and known all her life, but she couldn't deny that Alicia had some friends that definitely made life a blast.
The girls had just returned from a Spring Break visit to Myrtle Beach. And while they had fun, Rory was beginning to miss the quiet environs of Montcove—the island community that she had spent summers for as long as she could remember, and where she now lived.
Rory had grown up with her best friend Alicia Sullivan in LA, and Alicia had even visited Montcove a few times. The two had been practically inseparable as they had matured from little girls to young women. They’d shared everything with each other—their first crushes, the first time they kissed a boy. When Alicia had lost her virginity the two had stayed up all night talking about it. And when Rory had finally lost hers a week later, Alicia persuaded her to go to Tijuana together to celebrate.
Now, Alicia was getting married to Derek Lowell, a client of hers from Carter Jeffries. She was living the fast paced New York City lifestyle and had wanted as part of her engagement celebrations to spend a week during Spring Break
with her girlfriends. Rory didn't mind it. For a while at least it was even a pleasure to get distracted by all that Myrtle Beach had to offer.
The hot guys walking along the beach were more than enough to eye candy to enjoy each morning as the girls nursed their hangovers on the beach, working on their tans.
But now that week was over. Those days were gone and all she had left to prove they even went, was new bikini shaped tan lines.
But that’s okay. Rory was looking forward to taking over the world with her T-shirt business. And she knew she’d see her friend at Alicia's wedding in 6 months.
That's right. The wedding!
"I'll be in New York City for your wedding," Rory said to Alicia, dreading the thought of actually leaving her island paradise and heading into Manhattan.
"Yeah, but that's in the Hamptons so you won't actually be in New York City," Alicia replied back. "It's not the same thing."
Well, thank God for small favors.
"Attention passengers of United Airlines Flight 43 to Los Angeles," the overhead speaker called out. "Boarding will begin in twenty minutes."
Right. They were going to call out the Elite Super Diamond Prestige Award Members first and then all the other variations of passenger, so Rory was pretty sure she'd be the last person to board the plane.
"I gotta go, ladies," she said, however. "Gotta get that seat. If I board late, they may just throw me off the plane if they're overbooked."
Natalie, Kim, Lisa, Carla, Brittney, Becca, Ashley, Christine, and Alicia all gave a variation of the eye roll. To go through all the reactions took at least a minute.
The hugs took another ten minutes.
Detaching herself from Alicia took another five.
"Promise to come visit, okay?" Alicia said with glossy eyes as she hugged her best friend for the eighth time. "And I promise to come by soon too!"
Promises made, Rory headed towards her gate. Her head spinning from the booze, she had no doubt she'd sit down and fall asleep once she boarded.
And then...Southern California.
Different from what Alicia lived in.
But...there was something about how it felt.
Something was going to happen.
Her life felt as if it was about to change.
She didn't know how.
But Rory definitely felt excited.
One moment it was sunny like an Indian summer on the island of Montcove, and the next moment it would turn into a monsoon. Thankfully bad weather didn’t linger for long and things were mostly peaceful. At least they were, till a few years ago when the peace was disturbed when Montcove suddenly became a celebrity vacation destination.
It took just one celebrity marriage to kick Montcove’s status as an obscure vacation island into oblivion. Where the residents were used to a few thousand tourists a year, now they saw hordes of Hollywood celebrities renting villas and hotels and driving around in their fancy cars. With Hollywood stars came business opportunities, and much to the dismay of local residents, plenty of outsiders had bought up properties and set up shop to cash in on the buzz.
The old German bakery was now a luxury rent-a-car, while the shabby Windwood Hotel had been turned into a luxury rehab. In the three years since the boom started, the residents had seen everything—A-list celebrities, the fanatic tourists who came for celeb spotting, and of course, the dreaded paparazzi.
As good as that was for the economy of the island, many of the residents still found it a nuisance they could do nothing about. It was on one such summer night that the rain gods decided to come down over the island. The residents ran in to take cover, the celebrities rolled up the windows on their expensive sports cars, and the paparazzi rushed to save their expensive camera lenses.
Chapter 47
The wind hit Arsen in the face, determined to do some harm. Beads of sweat mixed with rainwater trickled down from his longish hair as he walked past the main door of the villa. Loud voices, clinking glasses, and smoke fumes trailed him, but he couldn’t care less.
Enough’s enough.
His vision was blurred, thanks to a healthy combination of too much vodka and sleepless nights. For a moment he thought about the cops, only to realize that he wasn’t in LA anymore.
“Podunk town,” he muttered as he opened the door to his red Ferrari and thumped himself down on the driver’s seat. A barrage of swear words left his mouth, and Arsen cursed the day he had agreed to this arrangement.
After a year full of scandals, freak incidents, and decadent overindulgence, he thought that this time away from LA would allow him to do what he did best—make music. Instead, he spent his time getting high, getting drunk, and dwelling in the misery of a songwriter’s block. The ideas had stopped coming, the words all but disappeared, and in the ten days that he and the band had been in Montcove, he had barely written a single verse.
To everyone else, Arsen was in a temporary slump. For them, a triple Grammy-winner shouldn’t take long to churn out a whole bunch of new hit songs. Deep inside, however, he knew that this was no random writer’s block. Everything that had happened to him since his band, Insurrection, took off three years ago had been surreal, and it all led up to this point. Everything was at stake in this game, and only he held the dice.
The arrogant wind grew fiercer as his red Ferrari sped down the hill to the town center, swaying harshly to the songs of Frank Sinatra, one of Arsen’s idols. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was going there for; he just wanted to be away from that Villa, from everyone inside it, and most of all, from himself. Or at least the rock star persona that he’d built up over time.
Arsen grabbed a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels that sat on the passenger seat and tried to keep his eyes on the road. The rain blurred his already diminished vision. His mind was sending him warning signals. He should’ve pulled off, parked by the side of the road, and asked Don to come pick him up instead. In the back of his mind, he was aware that he shouldn’t be driving at all. But he was desperate to get away from it all: the drugs, the booze, and the scantily-clad sexpots who routinely threw themselves at him.
In all the extravagance, the band had forgotten why they got together in the first place—to make music. All that mattered to his bandmates now was partying, spending money, and utter decadence. Arsen pulled off the bottle cap with his teeth and took a big swig. He flinched as the liquor hit the back of his throat. A few days’ worth of booze rumbled inside his body, and he amused himself by wondering what his DUI reading would be if he were pulled over.
He instinctively took a sharp right turn and barely missed a slow-driving SUV. Fuck. I hope that’s not the paparazzi, he thought. I gotta get away from this shit. A laugh escaped his lips as he thought about wrecking a paparazzi truck. Especially the truck that belonged to this one paparazzo that he was sick of.
Agitation coupled with frustration was driving him to a point where he felt claustrophobic every time he was in the room with his bandmates. They refused to work hard—or work at all—and as always, he knew that as the lead guitarist and the main songwriter, the onus was once again upon him to come up with a full album’s worth of hit songs.
The record label was pressuring him for new material, and their agent was burning up his ear with his own demands, but Arsen had struggled to come up with anything. His fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel as he thought of the countless deadlines.
Neon lights from the billboards flashed by the corners of his eyes as he took another swig from the bottle. Fuck. His throat burned and he realized that he hadn’t eaten anything all day or maybe for the last couple of days. Who could remember? Time and hunger ceased to matter when you were high all the time.
“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” Singing along with Sinatra, his voice automatically found the harmony after years of handling backup vocal duties.
I should find a hotel. Sign in under an anonymous name and spend a few days by myself. The plan seemed soun
d to him. Maybe that will finally help me get my groove back. Or maybe I should just check myself into a rehab.
Arsen had thought about that a few times, but then rejected the idea as it would’ve simply created a huge stir in the media and spread panic among the record company executives. As it was, the members of Insurrection had enough public scandals going on at any given time.
Lights flashed into his eyes from a car across the road and he squinted, barely able to see where he was heading. One last sip remained in the bottle and Arsen grabbed it tightly with an intention to finish it in one go.
As he lifted the bottle to his mouth, he saw something zip across the street, maybe a dog or a cat, about twenty yards away from where he was. Arsen brought down his foot heavily on the brakes, and the whiskey bottle went flying from his hand as he hurriedly turned the steering wheel.
The wheels of the car lost traction and Arsen felt was if he were driving on ice. The car veered sharply, there was a big bang, and Arsen felt a sudden impact on his face. Then it all went blank as Arsen Ford, the greatest guitar player of his generation, passed into blackness.
“I’ve lived a life that's full. I've traveled each and every highway,” Sinatra sang to the empty, dark street.
Chapter 48
A little over fifteen hours before…
Half her mind was still lost in last night’s hazy dream. The other half was struggling to make sense of the rapidly spoken words that was the voice on the other end of the phone. The dream had been fantastic, though she struggled to remember the details. But she knew how it felt. Happy. The voice yapping away on the phone, her mother’s in this case, was anything but.
As she always did when talking to her mother, Rory went on autopilot. Give her enough yeses, and she’ll be content. Not happy, of course, because her mother was rarely happy. And almost never when it involved matters concerning her elder daughter. Elder by a whole nine minutes.
“Yes, Mother. I got the dress in one piece.” Rory opened a single eye in response to the sharp sunlight that had invaded through a forgotten gap between two curtains. She hated bright light in the morning.
