by Cari Quinn
I’d fallen for a charming man before. I knew how easy it was to let the lies and the what-ifs sound like reality when it was all fiction.
Finding out later it was because Robbie had been bunking with a new babe hourly hadn’t really helped matters. Once he’d gotten in my bed, he’d lost interest.
How I ended up with another man just like that didn’t make sense. Then again, I’d backed into whatever this was with Ian. We were hot and addictive now, but soon enough, he’d forget my name. I’d just be an artsy California girl he’d spent a few nights with.
He lowered his mouth to mine. “Just today, Zoe. I know. I didn’t mean to make it weird.”
I lifted my hands to his shoulders. The pink shirt with the white kitten on the front was ridiculous—but at the same time, it was so Ian. Careless and soft over raw edges.
“I feel like you might need a really ugly Hawaiian shirt.”
“The kind with the gaudy flowers and eye-burning colors?”
“Yes. We’ll find one to match Snowball. Cute and pastel.”
He frowned down at me.
“The pussy on your shirt.” I climbed up on him again and he transferred his hold to my thighs.
“Okay, now I have a pussy on my shirt. Well, depends on if you decided to go sans pants today.”
“Hello, I’m wearing cutoffs.”
“Sorry. Knickers?”
“You’re so cute.” Little British things seemed to sneak into his conversation. But honestly, it was like he was American with a really posh accent. Maybe he was playing it up. Then again, his accent got thicker when he was drunk, tired, or really turned on. Probably wasn’t put on. “Bikini actually.”
He groaned. “Really?” He nosed open the gauzy shirt I was wearing. “Yellow polka dots?”
“I was feeling a little retro. Even if I can’t fill up the cups like a pinup.”
“Your tits are perfect. I didn’t get to play with them nearly enough.”
“They’re not toys.”
“You sure about that?”
I laughed and hopped down. “Food. Maybe you can sprinkle a little sugar on them later.”
“Evil.”
“You haven’t seen me at my evil-genius level yet, pal.”
He hiked up his jeans. “I’m going to die in these things today. Your sun is rather hideous.”
“You’re already browning up. You’ll be fine. Besides, if you fit in my pants, I’ll kill myself.” I internally winced at that stupid remark. I was a bright one, man. But it seemed more damaging to make it a thing. I shoved sunblock, my beach blanket, wallet, and keys into one of my drawstring sacks. I ran over to my shelf of cameras and took Lucy down.
“Am I ever getting Matilda back?”
“Nope.”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed a few cartridges of film. The fact that he was so unapologetic about it drove me crazy.
His smirk bloomed. “We’ll have to go with ugly swim trunks to go with my ugly shirt, yeah?”
“I can’t wait to take you shopping.” I grabbed his hand and dragged him to the door.
He pulled me back. “Wait. Need my guitar.”
“Impromptu concert I didn’t know about?”
“It’s got my notebook in it. Never know when inspiration strikes. I have to write five songs in the next few weeks.”
I tipped my head. “You don’t have songs already?”
He shrugged. “I have tons of sketches—half songs.”
“Right. I get that. I have a zillion half sketches that never amount to anything.”
“Like the one of me?”
I swung my bag over my shoulders. “Still not showing you.”
“Come on. I’d be interested to see how you see me.” He stared at his feet before finally arrowing his gaze on me.
“I’ll show you one of my paintings before you leave.”
“One? How many do you have of me?” His eyebrows waggled. “Are they dirty?”
“Perv.” And I wouldn’t be showing him the one that sexualized him more than I was comfortable with. That one was at the back of my deck of paintings.
“Guilty.” He followed me out the door and down the hall. I led him to the main part of the community dining area. “Wow. This is crazy.” His gaze roved over the huge atrium. The windows were stained glass. The artists who worked at J Town often left their imprint on the walls and windows, which left the building as eclectic as its inhabitants.
Bent had a metric ton of vegetables laid out on the counters. Ian filched a sliced pepper off the cutting board, narrowly missing a slap from Bent’s knife.
“That’s how you end up missing a finger, boy.”
Ian crunched around a red pepper. “Sorry, mate. They were too tempting.”
“You take without asking?”
His shoulders tightened. “Had to most of the time.” He peered up at Bent. No fear brightened Ian’s eyes. Very different than most people’s reaction to the man who towered over most of us.
Bent grunted and pushed over a small pile.
Ian’s chin lifted. “Nah, I’m good.”
Bent popped a cherry tomato into his mouth, then loaded a container full of veggies and slid it across to me. “Take this and your friend out of my kitchen, Z.”
“Thanks, Bent.” I tucked it into my bag and steered Ian out to the front doors. “Gotta antagonize everyone?”
“It was just a pepper.”
“Bent’s all about manners. You’re one of many who have gotten a scolding.”
“But not you?”
“My aunt Laverne wouldn’t have that.”
“You’ve mentioned her a lot, but not your parents.”
I shrugged. “My parents are good people too. They work at the family orchard. I just ended up working at the store with my aunt more than doing hard labor like my parents and brothers.”
“Ah, the family orchard I saw in your photos.” His gaze seemed a little distant.
I nodded and sailed through the door he held for me. He wasn’t completely void of manners. “Yeah, in upstate New York. Not sure how much you know about LeeLee—er, Lila. Sorry.”
“LeeLee?”
I shrugged. “What we call her back home. Doesn’t really fit the suit she’s become here, does it?”
“I’m trying to picture it and it doesn’t work.”
I laughed. “She was pretty young when she got married to Martin. Biggest douche on the planet, by the way. But she moved here and made a new life. Dumped the douche—”
“Married another from what I hear.” Ian immediately shoved my old aviators over his eyes the moment we got outside.
I elbowed him as we made our way down the sidewalk. “Nick’s all right. You’d actually probably like him if you got to know him.”
He snorted. “The chances of that happening are about even with me sitting with the Queen for high tea.”
I fussed with the strap of my bag. Talking about Nick wasn’t exactly a smooth maneuver into his brother, but I was going for it anyway. “Do you want to get to know your brother?”
He didn’t reply right away. It was actually long enough that I wondered if he was just not going to say anything at all. He cleared his throat, his voice a little hoarse. “I keep burning those bridges. Maybe someday though.”
“Do you really hate him that much?”
“So, the New York kind of boardwalk is that different?”
I glanced up at him. “I take it you don’t want to talk about it?”
He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, swooped down, and gave me a hot, hard kiss. “No, I don’t hate him. Can we make today about us and not my fucked up family?”
I sighed. “All right.”
He looped his arm around my shoulders. “Did you say you had brothers?”
“Yeah. Big ones.”
He brushed a kiss along my temple. “Warning me, Magic?”
I shrugged. “You’ll be gone tonight. I don’t need to scare you with the details of my three older b
rothers.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Three?”
“Yep.”
He let me go as we steered around a woman with a carriage filled with bottles and cans then snagged my hand, lacing our fingers. “Could you stop reminding me that I have to go?”
“Maybe I’m reminding myself.” But I didn’t let go of his hand.
I rushed us across the street to the heart of the marketplace. He was right—now wasn’t the time to think about the end of things.
I was just going to enjoy the moment and the man.
We laughed our way through three different stores. He traded his jeans for Day-Glo orange board shorts that were literally five dollars. When the sales girl recognized him outside the dressing rooms, he signed one of the legs of the jeans and handed them to her.
I was fairly sure the girl was going to swoon for days. She already had her phone out to take pictures. Three selfies and one hand off to me, and she was nearly shaking at the end of it all.
“You know those are nine hundred dollar jeans, right?” I whispered to him.
He curled his fingers into his palm for a moment before shrugging. “Good thing I didn’t cut the bottoms off to make them shorts, yeah?” He dragged me out the door with a wide, dimpled grin.
Two more stores and we had all the snacks we’d need for the day along with ridiculous shirts for me and him. By the time we left for Micky’s, a low hum seemed to follow us. Phone cameras came out wherever we were. Surreptitious snaps, blatant ones, and people tripped over themselves to get a look.
Was this what it felt like to be him for a day?
The constant attention didn’t seem to bother him—at least at first. He got quieter and quieter. Even food seemed to hold little appeal for him, and I knew for a fact that food was probably his favorite thing next to sex.
I straddled his legs on the bench of the picnic table outside Micky’s.
Startled, he gripped my hips. His eyes went hooded.
“Do you want to go back to my studio?”
He gave the gigglers behind us a side eye. “You trying to cause trouble for both of us?”
“I don’t care about them.”
“That’s probably a good thing.” His brows knitted together. “I think a few girls are ready to murder you.”
I draped my arms over his shoulders and toyed with his hair. “You mean those reports that will be on your fan board tonight? ‘Who’s that girl with the weird purple hair?’”
“I love your weird purple hair.” He tipped up his chin to smile at me.
“Handy.” I bit his lower lip. The little scar at the corner of his mouth made me crazy. I moved to his ear. “Do you care if someone sees us together? Do you think they’re wondering if you’re hard between my legs? Think they’re wondering if we’ve fucked?”
His jaw clenched. “Does that get you off?”
“That I fucked a rising star?” I said it against his mouth, not quite kissing him, but not shying away from the charged air between us. “That you’re a fantasy for half the women around us right now?”
“I’m a man—not just a fantasy.”
“Remember that. Because I do.” I swung my leg off of him and dropped on the seat next to him. “Now eat your burrito before it turns to mush.”
“You’re a menace.”
I smiled around a bite of my taco and looked around for a way out of our current situation. I knew the area well. I’d been hunting the artistry in the area since I’d moved there. But I’d never needed to map out a covert exit before.
A few people wandered away as we finished our food. Things were a little boring at the moment from a fan point of view. But the real stroke of luck was a bus of kids being dropped off.
In the chaos of them lining up for food, I gathered our bags and motioned for him to follow me. We took two alleyways and another side street, cut through a bodega, and landed on the edges of the skate park.
It was so natural for me to escape to the park, I didn’t think about the memories that had followed me around since my attack.
“Zoe? What’s wrong?” He came up behind me. “You just went white as—ahh.” He took my bag and the handle of his guitar. “Come on, we can head this way.”
I shook my head. “No. I have to get over this.”
He slid his fingers around mine. “I’m here.”
“The hero of the skate park.” I stepped away from him, but didn’t unlink our fingers.
“Fucking crap.”
“Quite the free press. Your team must have been ecstatic.” Our picture had been in a dozen different tabloids and news feeds. Thankfully, I’d only been tagged as a local artist. I wasn’t one of the bigger names at J Town. So many of the residents had shows before their first month was up. It was a haven for artists and there was a waiting list for applications.
The fact that I’d gotten in was a miracle. But I was fucking it up big time.
Add in that kind of press and the director hadn’t been overly happy with me. They only wanted to show how safe it was to work at the commune, not the criminal element that would forever be a part of beach and tourist areas.
“Is that what you think?”
I shrugged.
He dragged me closer and set our stuff down to link both of our hands together. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my people.”
I tried to focus over his shoulder. I didn’t want to ruin today by talking about this. As it was, my nerves were already jangling from being this close to the wall I’d worked on.
That I’d never finished.
“Zoe, I swear I didn’t. I was just as surprised as you were. And believe me, I caught hell for it all.”
“Right.”
He cupped my face, forcing me to look at him. “Nothing about that should have been about me. No matter what I said, they wanted to turn it around to me, so I just stopped talking.” His thumbs smoothed over my cheeks. “But it was too late.” He touched his forehead to mine. “I’m sure you thought I was a dick.”
“No.”
“You know you did.”
“Maybe.”
His lips twisted into a half grimace, half smile. “I figured. It was bad enough you were hurt. And afraid. But to make it about me… Fuck, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
“I get it.”
“Do you?”
He was so wrecked about it, I couldn’t believe anything else. He had an ego and he loved the limelight on the stage. I wasn’t convinced he liked it when he was off the stage. Not after people had been so invasive today. The only thing I could do was take him at face value. “I believe you. Especially after today. You’re not really excited about people talking about you all the time.”
“No. Not really. I mean, I’m not going to lie. It’s exciting to get people to listen to my music. But this stuff?” He sighed. “This isn’t what I want every day.”
I rested my cheek against his chest. We stood like that for a few minutes. Laughter and the roll of wheels on the sandblasted concrete was an odd soundtrack. But they were good, normal sounds. Not the blanket silence of fear I’d been living with every time I had to travel around there.
And of course, it was Ian who gave me some of that normalcy again. A man who didn’t even know what the word meant lately.
I went on my toes and kissed the scruff on his chin. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For giving a shit.”
He tucked my hair behind my ear. “No worries in that regard.”
“Now let’s get us down on that beach for a little relaxation.” I took my bag and one of his.
“I can definitely get behind that.”
“You know you can’t carry a guitar around and hope to go unnoticed. Just a FYI, pal.”
“And back to busting my arse.”
“One of my favorite things.” I grinned over my shoulder.
Ian had traded his boots for flip-flops with flamingos on them. So of course he bitched the entire way down the hot
sand. He was tanning up when it came to shoulders and arms, but his legs still looked like he was fresh off the plane from England.
“Have you ever gone without socks, there, English?”
“Shut up.”
I laughed. Antagonizing Ian was quickly becoming one of my favorite things. I spread out my blanket then convinced him to let me slather him in sunblock. It was a good beach day, but thankfully, the bulk of people were more interested in the boardwalk. Enough that Ian relaxed with me on the blanket. He even fell asleep with his phone in his hand.
I stroked a hand down his hair and he turned his face toward me with a sigh.
It made me wonder how often he’d had a sweet touch in his life. I tried to relax with a book on my phone, but him in repose was too hard to resist. I dug around in my bag and found a small notebook and ballpoint pen at the bottom. He really was ridiculously handsome. I’d even go so far as pretty from a few angles. I would cheerfully pay for his lashes too.
He woke to me drawing him again. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been at it, but enough for him to be groggy when he started moving.
He squinted at me and pulled on a pair of sunglasses. My sunglasses. “You gotta stop.”
“Haven’t gotten a pair of Hugo Boss?” I ignored his comment. I was used to people not loving how I studied them. Most of the time, I asked permission before I sketched, but I didn’t feel the same need with him for some reason.
“What?”
I tapped my temple where I was wearing another cheapie pair. “My pink shades.”
“Oh. I like them. I’m keeping them. That’s not the point.”
“It’s not?”
“Why do you keep drawing me?”
“Not to swell your head, but I find your body fascinating.” I finished a third study of his fingers.
“I’m no model.”
“Not what I heard.”
He rested his chin on his stacked arms. “Checking up on me?”
“You wish.”
“I do. You never reply to my posts online, either.”
“What posts?” I tried not to smile as I absently drew his eyes with the glasses on.
“Mmm-hmm.” He rolled to a seated position and pulled his guitar case over. He crossed his legs and absently tuned it. His utter focus had me flipping the page to draw him in his element.
The way his fingers spanned across the body of the guitar and gently wrapped around the frets made my mouth go dry. He lightly strummed and hummed before words slowly tumbled from his lips.
