This time, no one glowered. We were giving Gerry a chance, and slowly but surely, what he was saying was starting to make sense.
“What kind of cancer is it?” Dom asked finally. We were all waiting for Gerry to get there, but since he hadn’t said anything, it was time to ask.
“Prostate.” His face was expressionless.
“What’d the doc say about your prognosis?” Nick asked.
“He’s fairly positive. They caught it early during a routine checkup.”
Caleb put his elbows on his knees, resting his chin on his steepled fingers. “What can we do?”
Gerry looked around the room and made eye contact with each of us in turn. “You can go on your tour, listen to what Alicia tells you, and come back safe. That’s what I really need from you guys.”
One by one, we nodded. If that was what he needed, that was what we were doing.
“Okay,” Dom said, voicing what we were all thinking. “If that’s what we need, we’ll do it. Good luck, Gerry.”
Our meeting ended shortly after that. The guys and Gerry left, walking out together. I waited for Alicia to grab her stuff. When she was done, she slung her purse across her shoulder and took my hand. “How are you doing with the news?”
I contemplated her question before answering. Threading our fingers together, I gave her hand a squeeze and pulled her to my side. “I’ll be fine.”
As long as I had her hand in mine, I really felt like I would be.
CHAPTER 66
ALICIA
I was going to kill whoever it was on the other end of that line. My phone was ringing incessantly, and I tried to ignore it, but this was the third time without any break in-between that it was ringing, and ignoring it was becoming impossible.
Groaning, I rolled over, and without opening my eyes, reached for the phone. After fumbling around for a second, my fingers closed around the offending object, and I blindly slid my thumb across the screen and held it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Alicia,” Gerry’s voice barked, and I flinched at the loud noise. “Thank god. I’ve been trying to reach you for ten minutes. Where are you?”
My eyes burned as I cracked them open. “Where do you think I am? It’s four-thirty in the morning. I’m in bed.”
Gerry’s impatient voice came barking through the speaker. “When was the last time you checked Insider Scoop?”
His reference to the popular celebrity gossip site confused me. Then, I was scrambling out of bed, wide awake as I realized the implications of why he would be calling to ask me that at this hour. Someone in the band must have gotten up to something last night.
“What is it? I checked it before I fell asleep, and Destitute was clean.” Part of my nightly ritual before bed was checking notifications and alerts of where and if the band’s name had popped up.
“Well, they’re not clean anymore. Just check the site, and get to my office in an hour.”
With that ominous summoning, the call dropped, and I flicked on lights as I hurried to my living room where my laptop was charging. I hit the button to fire it up, and while I waited, I made a very quick cup of coffee and then carried it with me to my couch.
As I might have expected from something big enough for Gerry to pull me out of bed at this time of the morning, the dull, electronic beeps of incoming notifications and emails rang out as soon as I logged on.
Hastily opening a few tabs on my browser, I thought at first, I was still dreaming, but as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I knew I wasn’t. My initial thought that one of the band members had gotten up to something last night was dead wrong.
It wasn’t one of the others, but it was my very own Jared Larsen who was blowing up the internet this morning. A quick scan of the headline and article that had been posted on the most widely-read gossip blog in town gave me the basic details.
A woman, a Madison Green to be precise, was claiming she was pregnant with Jared’s child. The article had been posted just under four hours ago, and it quoted Miss Green as saying, “I’ve tried to contact him to tell him I’m having his baby, but he’s refusing to have anything to do with me. Or with his child.”
Tears stung the backs of my eyes, and a wave of nausea rolled through me. I couldn’t believe this. Making quick mental calculations, I tried to determine whether he could have knocked her up while we were already together. Since the article didn’t say how far along she was, it was entirely possible that he had and also absolutely impossible for me to actually calculate.
As I fought to remain calm, I remembered the promise I’d once made to myself to stop assuming the worst about him was always true. I allowed myself to focus on that and felt the anger and disappointment leaving my body as I gulped in a few deep breaths.
It’s going to be okay. I had to believe that. Jared had changed in the last few months. His own brother had said so, and I’d seen it with my own eyes.
Even if the woman was pregnant and on the off chance the baby was, in fact, Jared’s, I had to believe in him and that it hadn’t been conceived after we’d started seeing each other. More than that, though, I knew all the way to my bones that he wasn’t the kind of man who would simply blow off a woman he’d impregnated.
Sure, there was no way he was going to make an honest woman out of her by marrying her or anything, but he wouldn’t refuse all contact, and he definitely wouldn’t refuse to provide for his child.
My shoulders squared as I absorbed all these things I knew to be true. I had to be there for him. Everything else I could figure out later.
Red hot annoyance spread through me at the lies the woman was spreading, one way or the other. I wasn’t going to allow her to paint him as the next poster child for the “worthless fathers who didn’t support their kids” list. Not on my watch. Slamming down the lid on my laptop and leaving my cooling coffee behind, I headed to my bedroom to throw on some clothes.
It was time to get to work.
An hour after my rude awakening, the early light of dawn was playing softly on the ocean beyond the windows of Gerry’s office where Jared sat next to me listening to Gerry rant and rave.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, Jared was freshly showered, and the clean, masculine smell coming off him where he sat so close to me was distracting me from Gerry’s lecture about how many times he’d warned them about the pitfalls of their lifestyle.
Looking as unshakable and impenetrable as ever, Jared was almost bored as he listened. Clad in another of his old, iconic rock shirts, sunglasses hanging from his neckline, and a worn pair of jeans, I knew Gerry was seeing the old Jared. The arrogant, entitled rock star.
“Be honest with me, Jared. Do you know this woman?”
“Now you ask me that? After making me sit through all of that?” Jared folded his arms and cocked a dark eyebrow. “Yeah, I know her. Before you ask, yes. I did sleep with her. Once.”
My stomach sank. However, his genuine exasperation and annoyance when he continued were like a soothing balm to the stinging brought on by his admission.
His eyes touched mine as he said. “She told me she was on birth control, but I used a condom anyway. I swear.”
Gerry ran his hands through his hair, as he suggested. “Maybe this one time, you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget,” Jared scoffed, dismissing the possibility outright. Having personal knowledge of how dedicated Jared was to wearing condoms, regardless of the heat of the moment or the place, I tended to agree with him.
“How do you know? Maybe you were drunk or—”
Jared held up a hand to stop him and shook his head. “No. I wasn’t. I remember this chick. We were at my place after a party at Nick’s. I wasn’t that drunk, and I specifically remember her begging me to leave the condom off. It was a bit of a fucking turn-off, and it was definitely her.”
“If that’s true, then why is she coming after you?”
“I don’t know.” Jared shrugged. “She showed up at my house a couple of days later and tried to se
duce me and then got all pissed when I refused her. I think this whole thing might be a shakedown by a slightly obsessed fan who may or may not still be holding a grudge. It all happened months ago.”
“Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked him, but there was no distrust or judgment in my voice.
His eyes cut to mine. It didn’t look like he was hiding anything when he answered me. “It all happened before I even met you. I think it was maybe a week or so before you came onboard. By the time I met you, I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. There was never any reason to bring her up.”
“Okay,” I said.
His brow furrowed a little, but he nodded. “I’m telling you, if this woman is pregnant, the kid’s not mine,” Jared concluded, dropping his chin as if waiting for Gerry to contradict him.
I didn’t know which one of the two of us was more surprised when the contradiction didn’t come, nor did any more questions. Gerry shifted in his seat and focused his attention on me. “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to spin it as a full-frontal assault by an obsessed stalker, and I’m going to round up Ted and his team. We’ll demand blood tests and take it from there.”
I nodded and started to rise from my seat. This was a nightmare. Just when I thought we were in the clear for the tour, the guys finally at peace with Gerry’s decision to stay behind, this had to happen. The entire tour could be derailed by this.
My mind raced a thousand miles an hour.
I could carry out Gerry’s plan with the press. Stalkers and obsessed fans were known to pull this kind of stuff. It wouldn’t be hard for people to believe Destitute, and Jared as their front man, were being targeted.
The band was at an all-time high, and it was no secret. The tour was selling out faster than we could release tickets. The guys were everywhere, in the news, in magazines, on billboards. If you switched on the radio, chances were Jared’s voice would be serenading you on your way to work. Their old stuff was being revived, and the new stuff was a sensation.
If they were ever in the prime spot to gather this kind of attention, it was now. Spinning it and doing my job wasn’t what was bothering me. I could do that in my sleep with my hands tied behind my back. The question gnawing at the back of my mind, the one I couldn’t shake and didn’t have an answer to was way more troubling.
What if it turned out she was pregnant, and it was Jared’s baby she was carrying?
CHAPTER 67
JARED
A week.
A fucking week. That was how long it had been since I’d woken up to a severely pissed-off Gerry telling me I was being accused, of all things, of being a father. It was ridiculous.
And yet, it had taken the whole week for us to get this far.
Alicia sat on my left around a conference table in one of the big conference rooms on the top floor of Gerry’s office building. The sun was so bright, I had to shield my eyes as I looked out the window, but Gerry, sitting to my right, noticed and hit a button that automatically lowered the blinds.
True to his word, Gerry had demanded a blood test from Madison, and we were waiting on a courier to deliver the results. Frustrated rage was rolling off me in waves, and Alicia put her hand quickly to the side of my thigh, squeezing me lightly. Telling me to calm down.
Glancing at her, I tried to accept the small amount of comfort she was offering me by that light touch.
Then I realized that more than being appreciative and grateful for her being by my side and trying to comfort me, she was one of the big reasons I was so wound up about these lies. I was worried about what she thought of me, about what would happen with us because of them.
I couldn’t remember the last time I gave a flying fuck about what anyone thought of me, but I was genuinely worried now. What did all of this look like to her?
Madison couldn’t be … pregnant. I swallowed past a bitter taste in my mouth just from thinking the word. Condoms failed all the time. I knew that. But I was careful, so she couldn’t be … that word.
If she was, though, what would Alicia say, think? Would she put my sorry ass behind her or stick by me? Fuck. This was all so new to me. And it was getting to me—all of it. My leg started bouncing against Alicia’s, and again her small hand was there, her palm pushing down on my thigh.
She’s here. She’s not leaving. Yet.
Fuck.
Either way, I would find out today. And tomorrow, I was going on tour. By tomorrow night, I would be standing onstage in front of thousands of fans for the first full concert on the Imperial Inspection Tour and know whether I was becoming a father or not.
If I was, it could throw a motherfucking wrench the size of a continent into the plan. I had no idea what Madison would want from me other than a shit ton of money, I was assuming.
My leg started bouncing again. Where the fuck was this courier?
Gerry’s phone buzzed at that exact moment, and he excused himself, doing up the button on his jacket as he rose. “Excuse me. The courier is here. I’ll be right back.”
He strode from the room with a confident gait, and the tension between Alicia and me was palpable as we waited for him to come back, which happened not a minute later. Holding up the sealed envelope once he got back to the table, he tore it open and read the results.
My heart was pounding, but his expression was unreadable as he handed the results to me. I ripped the paper containing my fate from his hands, but then my eyes refused to drop. I gulped air into my lungs, desperate for oxygen that didn’t feel like it was reaching my brain. My vision blurred. This was it.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I took a breath and manned the fuck up. I didn’t bother to read half the crap printed on the paper, zeroing in on the two most important words that jumped out at me like flashing beacons of salvation.
NOT PREGNANT.
I blinked hard. Once. Twice. Again. The words didn’t change.
I was on my feet before I knew it, throwing my fist up and then bringing my elbow back to my side in a swift punch. “Fuck, yeah. I told you it wasn’t true.”
Gerry chuckled, and Alicia looked stunned for a second before her lips pulled up into the most relieved smile. “I take it the baby’s not yours?”
Shaking my head, I pulled her to her feet and lifted her right off them in a hug I had to force myself to loosen so I wouldn’t hurt her. “She’s not even pregnant.”
“Thank god,” Alicia breathed against my hair, her entire body relaxing. Gerry cleared his throat, reminding me of his presence.
Quickly replaying my reaction in my mind, I decided that my hugging Alicia probably didn’t look too suspicious. If I let her go now.
Reluctantly, I set her down on her feet again as Gerry rose to his and stuck out his hand to shake mine. “You were right. Congratulations, Jared. I didn’t doubt you for a second, but let’s never talk about this again. My heart won’t be able to take it.”
“Never another word.” I grasped his hand. “Thanks, Gerry.”
His pale blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled a relieved smile. “Now get your ass home and your bags packed. It’s time to shine, Larsen. Go make me proud. Get out of here.”
Lifting my fingers to my forehead in a salute, I snapped them back down and matched his grin, relief lifting the weight that’d been on my shoulders all week. “We’re gonna do our best. Good luck with the treatment, man. Keep us in the loop.”
Gerry made a circular motion with his index finger. “You’ll be the first to know.”
“Good.” Preparing for tour while knowing Gerry wasn’t coming with us had been weird, to say the least. At least he’d been around all week dealing with the Madison shit storm with me, but it still felt wrong he wasn’t involved in any of the tour arrangements. “We’re gonna miss you out there.”
He clutched my shoulder, moving his head from side to side. “Nah. You won’t even notice I’m not there. Have fun. Just not, you know, not too much fun.”
Alicia laughed at my side, moving in to
give Gerry a quick hug. “I’ll keep them out of trouble. You just focus on getting better. We’re going to need you here when you get back.”
“Then, here is where I’ll be,” Gerry assured her. He was putting up a good front, but I could see this sucked as much for him as it did for us.
But we all had to do what had to be done. With that in mind, I placed my palm on the small of Alicia’s back and walked her to the door. We both turned to wave at Gerry, standing behind the seat he’d vacated with both hands on its backrest. “See you around.”
“See you around,” I called out as Alicia preceded me out the door. Gerry had asked us to meet him at the office while we waited for the results, but now we both had to get the final packing done before we left home for the next few months.
I was pretty much packed, and Alicia, being the organized person she was, had been packed and ready to leave for days so she could pay attention to finalizing the last details instead of worrying about what she was going to wear when we got there—her words.
Walking into the humid parking garage with Alicia, I slung my arm over her shoulders. “You still coming over later?”
“If I don’t get arrested for murdering an assistant first,” she joked. Maybe. She’d been having some trouble getting a response out of one of the venue coordinators, and I knew she was frustrated as hell. Along with all the added work caused by the rumors of Madison’s pregnancy, my poor girl’d had a hell of a week.
Sighing, she shrugged out of my hold. “But yeah, I’ll probably be at your place around six. Hopefully.”
“If you’re not, I’ll swing by the police station and bail you out.” Hooking my arm around her waist, I jerked her closer to me and kissed the top of her head. “See you at six.”
Alicia smiled and took off in her little red Audi, loud music blaring from her radio as she raced out of the garage. I spent the rest of the afternoon going through my pre-tour motions, which meant I made sure everything was set at home and then lay out in the sun at the pool listening to my old favorite get-psyched songs and thinking about the one other thing I still had to do.
My One and Only: A Bad Boy Secret Baby Second Chance Romance Page 97
