His Melody

by Nicole Green

  “And what do I want?” she asked, hoping her tone didn’t give away the fact that she wanted to crawl across the table and get it. She’d been feeling that way especially since the kiss they’d shared Friday.

  Austin slurred his words. “You want to know about Grayson. Well, let me tell you about fucking Grayson Meadows. You wanna know about him? Fine. He was a murderer and a cokehead. So I did what had to be done. I killed him.”

  “What do you mean a murderer?” Both were hard to wrap her head around, but murderer edged out coke addict. She didn’t remember hearing about either in the news and couldn’t imagine how either could be true. Granted, she didn’t follow celebrity gossip closely, but Grayson had been a pretty big deal and Jen did follow it pretty closely. It seemed she would have heard something about either or both of those things.

  The server brought over Melody’s water and Austin’s beer. He pushed what was left of the warm beer aside and grabbed the cold one.

  Austin’s face drooped with sadness. He clenched the glass the server had brought him, but didn’t lift it to his lips. “I watched her die. I could have saved her, and I watched her die. I killed him, too. It was my fault he had that stroke. Both the first one and the one that killed him.” The glass shook in his clenched, trembling fist. A little beer sloshed out of the top and dribbled over the side of the glass. The dark amber liquid ran over his fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Austin, I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  His eyes met hers dead on. “My girlfriend, Isadora Lampkin, died of an overdose. We were both hooked on coke at the time. God, she was beautiful. She didn’t deserve that. And my dad? I was such a knucklehead. I gave him that stroke. And he—he left me the shop anyway. Despite all I did to him? He still loved me.”

  She did have a vague memory of hearing about former supermodel Isadora Lampkin, who she remembered being connected to Grayson as a love interest, dying of a drug overdose. And he blamed himself for killing his dad, too. What an awful burden to carry. “Oh, Austin.”

  “Don’t ‘oh Austin’ me. I screwed up. I know it. And that’s why I had to leave that life behind. Don’t you see? Nothing good ever came out of me leaving Sweet Neck, and I don’t plan on doing it ever again. First off, I owe too much to the people who saved me. Second? What do I need with that kind of life? People always thinking you’re something you’re not. Always trying to push you farther from everything real—everything that matters. It’s all about money and one-upping and fighting to not be yesterday’s news. It’s a brutal, deadly popularity contest. All materialism. Nothing of substance. I don’t want it. None of it.” He downed half his beer.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. It isn’t always,” she said quietly even though she was becoming unsure of her words as she spoke them. If she was meant to be the one to save him, how was she supposed to do that? Blanche hadn’t shared that part with her.

  Melody leaned forward in her chair. “Tell me more about Grayson. Tell me everything.”

  To her surprise, he did.

  He leaned back in his chair and tapped his glass against the table as he spoke. “After high school, I wanted out of here. The last thing I wanted was to end up stuck in Sweet Neck, married, and taking over the family shop. So I hitchhiked to New York, looked into modeling, tried to find an agent. Finally, I lucked up on one.” He laughed. “We met in a strip club. She was there with some of her clients who wanted to go to the club. That and she’s discovered a few girls at strip clubs. She’s always working.” He shook his head. “She was my only one-night stand that turned into a relationship—my longest relationship. Bianca White.”

  “Isn’t she one of the top modeling agents?” she asked. “She founded Modeling Elite, right?” She had this knowledge courtesy of Jen.

  Austin downed some of his beer before nodding. “That she is. She’s ruthless but effective. She changed my name, changed everything about me so that I wasn’t even sure who I was. Helped me cover up a coke addiction. Introduced me to Isadora. We had a lot in common, Isadora and me. No. Jane. Jane was her real name.” He paused and a sad, little smile creased his face. When he looked up at her again, he said, “Jane was from a small town, too. Her parents were farmers in Iowa. We hit it off, but the only thing Bianca cared about was how good we looked together and that the match was good for both of our careers. She helped the two of us cover up more than she should have.” He finished off his beer. “Like the fact that we were killing ourselves.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “That’s terrible.”

  “I had a good run, but I was hollow. And high for most of it. I barely knew what was happening from day to day. I don’t even remember half of it. I remember Jane going in and out of rehab. Trying to convince me to go. I never did.” He gulped more beer.

  She tried to think of something to say, but she couldn’t. She rubbed his arm again instead.

  “That show about the male models?” He snorted. “I got kicked off it for going on a coke binge, beating the hell out of one of the models and leaving him in an alley behind a club.”

  “I don’t remember hearing about that.”

  “Bianca’s good. She kept it as contained as possible. Kept it out of all the major media circles anyway by feeding them more ‘exciting’ stories about ex-clients she decided to throw under the bus. She even ‘convinced’ some of her media contacts that a vagrant beat that guy up and robbed him. That helped confuse things so no one knew what to believe.”

  “Really?”

  “I told you she’s ruthless. And she can be very persuasive when she wants to be.” He looked down at his empty glass. “After that, she hired the image consultant. The image consultant wanted to go with a ‘darker’ image. He wanted to make me ‘edgier’ or something. That gave Bianca the bright idea that I should become some stereotypical gimmick white rapper. She found out I was into music, and she saw dollar signs.” He laughed bitterly.

  She nodded. So that was where his refusal to even consider a music career came from.

  “She came up with yet another name for me, Rhyme Doctor.” He sneered at his beer. “She decided she wanted to get into representing musicians, too, and I would be her first. She wanted to market me as some Paul Wall-Bubba Sparks knock-off. I went along with it for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it. It’s not what I wanted to do. She wanted to change my sound, my image, everything about me.”

  “And what happened to the Rhyme Doctor?” Melody asked.

  “I got Isadora out of rehab early.” He heaved a shuddering sigh. “One last time. We celebrated getting high and. And. She went to sleep and didn’t wake up. I was too high to realize what was happening until it was too late. After Isadora died…my dad got sick not too long after that. I came back here, and he was dead within a couple of weeks. I didn’t want to go back to that life in New York.” His face hardened. “I should’ve never left here. I asked my mom and Regan to help me. They put me in rehab, and that’s that.”

  “And the shop?” She folded her hands around one of his.

  He considered the remains of the warm beer for a moment then pushed it aside. “My dad left it to me in the will, to my surprise and everyone else’s.”

  “Austin, I think you’ve probably had enough,” she said when he tried to signal the server again.

  “No. You’ve had enough.”

  She moved her chair next to his.

  “Weren’t you listening?” he asked. “You should get on out of here. If you had sense, you’d get as far away from me as you could.” He grabbed the warm beer and finished it in a few desperate-seeming gulps.

  “We all make mistakes. Doesn’t mean we have to pay for them for the rest of our lives.”

  “Don’t you understand? I’m the one who sprung her out of rehab early. Me. She told me she wanted to come home. I’m the one who put the poison right back in her hands. That wasn’t the first time. I didn’t know it would be the last…” He ran a hand over his face. “I killed her.”
He choked out the words.

  “That’s an awful burden to carry,” she said, pulling his head onto her shoulder. “You didn’t kill her, Austin. You happened to be in a bad place like she was. Her path of self-destruction ended less fortunately than yours did. That’s all.” For a long moment, he sat there, unmoving. When he moved, she thought it would be to push her away, but instead, he put his arms around her waist.

  “I don’t want to be alone tonight. I have bad dreams when I drink like this. About her. And Dad,” he said.

  “Okay.” She moved the backs of her fingers from the back of his head to the nape of his neck over and over again.

  He sat up and put his fingers under her chin. Bringing her lips close to his, he traced his thumb over her lower lip. She closed her eyes and leaned forward. Taking her face between his hands, he nibbled at the corners of her mouth before kissing her lips fully and slowly. His tongue pushed over hers, demanding a response. She sank into the alcohol-soaked kiss. She hadn’t realized just how much she missed the feel of his lips against hers until that moment.

  She moved her fingers over bristles of his hair and then the skin of his neck. She pressed against the hard wall of his chest, feverish for more.

  His fingers pressed into her waist. His thumbs slipped just inside the waistband of her jeans. She started to climb into his lap, but then stopped herself, realizing she how carried away she was getting.

  He pulled back slightly. “We better get me home before I pass out. I’m kind of heavy to carry, you know,” he mumbled over her lips.

  She laughed. “I noticed.”

  “I didn’t scare you off. Hm,” he said in a musing tone. She didn’t know if he was talking to her or to himself. Before she could decide if he wanted an answer or not, he said, “I snore.”

  She grinned. “So do I. C’mon. Up we go. If you can still walk.”

  Somehow, he made it to his feet, and they made it out to his truck. He dropped the keys into her hands and managed to pull himself in on the passenger side.

  Once they were in his room and she’d helped him change into sweats, she went back to her own room to change and then came back to his. She thought he was already asleep when she leaned over to check on him and almost left, not sure if she should really stay based on a plea he’d made in a moment of drunkenness. Right as she was about to leave the side of the bed, he reached up and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her into bed with him. He said, “You came back.”

  “Yeah.” She snuggled against him. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. Something had changed between them that night. She’d finally gotten him to open up to her. Now that she knew his story, she was less sure she’d be able to convince him that her plan would be good for them both. She was also less sure that she was right about it being the right thing for him.

  With his eyes closed, he mumbled into her shoulder.

  “Hm?” she nudged him gently.

  He lifted his head from her shoulder, but his eyes remained closed. “I said, I lied to you earlier.”

  “About what?”

  “When I told you kissing you meant nothing to me. Every time I kiss you, touch you, I feel a whole hell of a lot. I need to stop.”

  “Why?” she barely whispered.

  “‘Cause every time just makes me want more of you than I have any right to take.”

  Her heart thudding, she sank back against the mattress and pillows. She didn’t know what to say or think. With her wrapped in his arms, he was fast asleep in minutes. It took her a lot longer to fall asleep because she couldn’t shut her mind off. All she wanted to do was replay his words in her head. She wanted so badly to call Jen and tell her all that happened that night, but there were two problems with that. The first was, she was afraid to move a muscle. He might wake up, regret asking her to sleep in his bed, and send her away. The second was, two in the morning was not a good time to call anyone.

  #

  The next morning, she woke before Austin and watched him sleep for a while until he blinked and squinted at her. He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “You stayed all night. That’s gotta be a good sign I wasn’t too awful last night.”

  “Yeah. You asked me to. So I did. Remember that?”

  “Unfortunately? I remember everything,” he said with a humorless laugh. “Mmph, my tongue feels like it’s made out of fur, and I could use about two bottles of aspirin.”

  She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him, eyes roaming over him, comparing what she saw with what she remembered of Grayson.

  “What?” he asked, stifling a yawn.

  “I had a dream about you last night,” Melody said. He was in too good of a mood that morning, especially amazing after a night of drinking, for her to bring up Grayson.

  “Oh yeah?” Austin stretched and gave her a sexy smile.

  She let her eyes move over the flexing of his muscles as he stretched, not shy about appreciating. After all, she might not get many more chances to appreciate them. She was going to enjoy looking at every inch of him that she could see while she could. “Mm hm. It was a dirty dream.” She didn’t mention that she’d been having a lot of those lately.

  “Oh yeah?” He slipped his fingers under the strap of her camisole.

  “Yeah.”

  He trailed his fingers just under her bottom lip, and she leaned in closer to him, desperate for more of his touches. “I would ask you to act it out for me, but I don’t guess that would be too appropriate,” he said.

  “What if I wanted to act it out for you?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said, but he sounded reluctant about it.

  She pressed her forehead to his and sighed. She was afraid sex with him would make her too attached, so she didn’t push it any further. After all, she was already starting to feel too much for him. He’d needed her the night before and being there for him had felt good. Just felt right. Too right. She needed to keep her head on straight.

  What kind of business relationship would they have if she was falling all over him? And they were going to have a business relationship. She was determined about that. She could show him that it didn’t have to be like in New York. She wasn’t his former agent. And he didn’t need to be afraid to follow his heart. Him coming to Atlanta could and would be good for both of them. She wouldn’t allow herself to lose sight of that. She could show him that not everyone outside of Sweet Neck was like Bianca. That she’d never do anything to hurt him, no matter how much money or prestige was at stake. She knew what it was like to put all your trust into someone and be betrayed. She wouldn’t do that to anyone, and she wouldn’t let anyone do that to Austin.

  “So…you should get out of my bed.” Austin pulled away from her. “Because I can only take so much temptation,” he said, drawing out the last word.

  She brushed against him in a very suggestive way as she got out of the bed.

  “That was just cruel,” he said.

  “No more cruel than you kicking me out of bed after what you did to me in my dreams,” she said.

  “And what exactly did I do? You never said,” he said, following her with his eyes.

  “I wouldn’t want to be any crueler.” She left the room, wondering how she was going to make it through the next few days without giving into what she wanted to do with him. And not really wanting to resist.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Tuesday after work, on the ride home, Austin looked over at Melody before looking back at the road.

  “What?” she said.

  “Your car will be all ready to go by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll probably finish up with it by lunchtime,” he said. The job had gone faster than expected, faster than he’d wanted it to. He’d thought about drawing it out, but why prolong the torture? The sooner she left, the better chance there was he wouldn’t fall completely for her. He’d already gone too far. He cringed inside, thinking of how he’d all but
fallen to pieces in front of her the night before. Had he really asked her to stay with him because he was scared to sleep alone? The answer to that question was a tragic yes, he had.

  “Okay,” she said with a heavy sigh. She sounded just as reluctant about her leaving as he felt.

  “There’s somewhere I want to take you tonight,” he said. He watched her turn toward him from the corner of his eye. Took in her curious stare.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Just this place. It’s a surprise,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  After all he’d put her through over the past couple of weeks, and especially after last night in the bar when he’d been at or near his lowest, he felt that he owed her this one last thing before she left town. He owed it to himself, too. He needed to stop shutting things out and refusing to deal with them in hopes that they would go away. Certain things were a part of him, whether he liked it or not, and trying to ignore them wasn’t helping him or anyone who had to deal with him.

  #

  Austin knew he was in trouble when she met him at the truck in a low-cut red number. It clung to her perfect shape, curved in all the right places, ended just high enough on the thigh to put his imagination in high gear. He tried not to stare, but she’d made that damned near impossible.

  “I’m ready,” she said in a low voice that connoted she meant more than she was ready to get in the truck and go with him. “Wherever you want to take me.”

  “Um, let’s go then,” he said, barely able to watch where he was going because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. His eyes trailed over those perfect shoulders, moved down the naked skin of her back exposed by the skimpy dress.

  “Am I overdressed?” she asked as they climbed into the truck.

  He looked down at his dark jeans and button-down and then smiled up at her. “You’re perfect.”

  She returned his smile.

  He drove them to Glennville, to a place called Myrtle’s Catfish and Beer. He hadn’t been there in almost a year, and he could only hope he wouldn’t make a fool of himself. He walked over to her side of the truck and opened the door.