“Your mother responded by…”
“Hustling me out of their care at the first opportunity. Then we rattled around the West Coast for a few years. Pretty soon having to bother with me was more burdensome than the blow to her ego that was losing me, and she dropped me off here in Laurel Canyon. Now there’s only the occasional drive-by visit.”
“I’m sorry for those tough years.”
She shrugged. “It worked out. I was glad to come back so I could care for Grandma.”
When his response once again was silence, she plowed on, determined to lay it all on the line.
“All of which is to say I know what it’s like to live with someone who doesn’t pay attention,” Jewel said. “And I’d never, ever neglect my—our—daughter.”
Beck frowned. “No one’s accusing you of that.”
It was just her own insecurity talking that was all mixed up with the notion that there might possibly be something unlovable about her. Her own mother hadn’t wanted to keep her. Beck had packed his bags and left her behind without any promise of a return.
“I know that,” she said, trying to sound positive. Businesslike. Unemotional. What else? Oh, yes. Composed and dispassionate.
“And your father?” Beck asked.
“My mother’s high school boyfriend.” Facts again. Just the facts. “They never married, and I have no idea where he is. As far as I know, he never laid eyes on me.”
“Well,” he rubbed his chin again with his knuckles. The scritch of his whiskers sounded loud in the tiny room, and she realized the dryer had turned off. “Soul sure didn’t win the grandparent lottery on my side, either.”
“I…” Cilla had told her a little about growing up at the compound, but Jewel wasn’t as close with the men who’d done the same. She didn’t really know about Beck’s relationship with his famous dad. “I’ve only glimpsed your father from afar.”
“But surely you’ve read the reporting about the band and their infamous compound parties? Or maybe watched that documentary about their second-to-the-last final tour?”
There was no avoiding the edge to his voice. She tried to lighten things a little. “Well, once I overheard your brothers and the other guys talking about naked models in the hot tub. That doesn’t sound all bad from a teenage boy’s point of view.”
A small, reluctant smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “When raised by wolves…”
“Where’s your mother?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Like yours, my parents never married. Story goes that Bean—Ren and Payne and Cami’s dad—brought her to the compound, but she ended up making babies with Hop.”
“Then…”
“She left with a sculptor who had visited for a few months, leaving us three pretty much to our own devices.”
“And you’ve never seen her again?” Jewel thought of Cami Colson’s signature song that she invariably played at her gigs.
Motherless children have a hard time
When their mother is gone
“I actually tracked her down a few years ago.”
“In Antwerp or Amsterdam?” Jewel asked, then instantly wished the question back because it told him she might have been listening too closely when anything regarding Beck Hopkins came up. “I heard Reed mention it one time,” she muttered, looking away.
“I found her in Bruges, actually.” His no-expression expression gave nothing away.
Still, she had to ask. “How was that?”
“She told me I’d turned out just like my dad.” He was quiet a moment, then shrugged. “But, huh, I’m more like her than she thought, what with me leaving a kid behind.”
“Beck…” She didn’t want to feel this. She didn’t want to be aware of his sense of disappointment in himself. It made her heart ache, and it made the damn organ vulnerable to him again. Hadn’t he already battered it enough when he walked away? “You didn’t know.”
“Yeah.” He shifted to lean against the wall, and dropped his head to run his hands over his hair. Then he glanced up at her. “Both of us with lousy family histories. We’re quite the pair, huh?”
“Quite the pair,” she echoed, though it was dangerous to think of them in couple terms.
“Did we talk like this before?” he asked now. “About our childhood shit, that kind of thing?”
“No,” she admitted. “Then…”
He nodded as if he saw the picture. “I told you I was halfway out the door. There was no point to it. And I probably wasn’t very forthcoming about myself, either.”
“Yes.” And she hadn’t hesitated to take what she could get of him anyway, with or without conversation. They’d been intimate in a physical sense, but not in a personal one.
Yet she’d still crushed on him pretty hard. Must have been thanks to all those stellar orgasms.
“God.” He shook his head like a dog emerging from a stream. “I wish I could remember.”
“Beck.” One step, and she put a soothing hand on his arm. “Give it time.”
“We don’t have time. Soon, I’ll be on the road again, and I’m afraid that hole in my past will never be filled.”
Which meant he’d never remember the two of them together. Her chest squeezed again, the ache spreading throughout her body.
“I wish I could think of a way to help,” she said, though she was supposed to be keeping her sympathies at bay.
“Maybe…” He covered her hand where it rested on his wrist with his much larger, rougher one. “Would you be up to a little experiment?”
She should be moving off, putting distance between them. Not letting him anywhere close to her heart.
But then he squeezed her fingers and stared into her eyes and she lost all sense of self-preservation and said, “Yes.”
Despite her agreement, Beck noted Jewel’s stiff posture and wary eyes. A flush of color brushed her cheekbones, matching the warm pink of her delectable mouth. How could he have forgotten those lips? The short, puffy upper, the full lower one that cried out to be bitten.
Under his hand, hers trembled.
He shifted his gaze upward to see more uneasiness in her eyes. So he gave her fingers a reassuring squeeze and then began tugging her from the laundry room. “Can we sit together somewhere?”
“Okay.” She slipped from his hold and brushed past him to lead the way down the hall and into the family room. “Can I…can I get you something to eat or drink?”
“Not right now.” He sat on the couch, patted the cushion beside his. “I have this idea.”
She perched next to him, looking ready to bolt. Her fingers smoothed down the hem of her soft, drawstring shorts, but they still revealed a long expanse of the smooth skin of her legs. Her T-shirt was soft-looking and slouchy too, a raspberry pink color that matched the painted color of the nails on her bare feet.
As he watched, she crossed one set of toes over the other. The nervous gesture made him hesitate. Should he go ahead with his plan? It might spook her more, he thought, moving his gaze up to study her face.
A wave of unfamiliar emotion rolled through him. God, she was so damn beautiful. Even more so now that she’d shared with him about her childhood and about her attitude toward motherhood. I’d never, ever neglect my—our—daughter.
Their daughter.
They had a child together, and it seemed more imperative by the minute that he recall what had led up to Soul’s conception. While Jewel said she hadn’t known about her pregnancy before he left for Africa, had he sensed it on some weird, primal level? Was that the cause of this dogged disquiet that made him so damn determined to fill that fucking blank in his memory banks?
“I need to remember,” he said to Jewel now. “I can’t explain exactly why. And of course I don’t know how to make it happen. But I thought…” He hesitated again.
She looked alert, understanding even, the nerves less in evidence now. “You thought…?”
“The doctors have said my memories are likely still there, intact, but my brain
needs to find a new route to them. I wondered…I wondered if using my senses might help.”
Her brows came together. “I’m not sure—”
“You know how a certain smell can bring you back to an event in your life? The texture of something? A food?”
Nodding, she smiled. “Strawberry ice cream. My grandmother brought a milkshake to the hospital for me on the day Soul was born, and now when I have that taste on my tongue I can instantly recall the brand new sensation of my baby in my arms.”
He’d missed seeing that moment. The stab of loss surprised him. Maybe it was just the notion that Jewel had gone through giving birth alone. No, her grandmother had been there. Still…he didn’t like this idea that he’d let Jewel down.
“Beck?”
“I want to touch you,” he said quickly.
She twitched, and color rose up her neck to her cheeks. He saw her press her knees tightly together. “You touched me before.” Her gaze fell to her lap where her fingers were entwined in a suddenly tense bundle. “At The Hideaway, just the other night.”
Oh, yeah, he hadn’t forgotten those moments. “But that was…instinct, I’d guess you could say. And too fast. This time I want to go slowly, be more deliberate, and give a chance for my head to find you wherever you are tucked away in there.”
She looked at him through her long black lashes. “Beck…”
“It’s making me crazy that I’ve lost those memories of you. Of you and me.”
Her shoulders lifted and fell as she drew in and let out a long breath. “Maybe it’s something else. Or someone else from that time that you’re wanting to recollect. Other memories that you’re being driven to recall.”
“Maybe.” He couldn’t rule it out, of course. “But I have a child, and I think I need to know how she came to be. Can you understand that?”
Her gaze came to his and her face softened. “I can. Yes.”
“Okay.” He took in his own breath, let it release. “I’m not going to grope you or anything like that. I just want to…touch. Feel you.”
A wash of goose bumps broke out over her exposed skin. It gave Beck pause, and he felt another weird surge move through his chest, but she met his gaze calmly enough.
“All right,” she said, and seemed to brace herself. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks.” He rubbed his palms together briskly, making sure they were warm. Christ, his pulse was jumping like that of the innocent teen he’d never been.
Then he cupped her beautiful face in his hands, like Ren had done with Cilla’s the day before. But Jewel didn’t lift her mouth for his kiss. Instead, she remained statue-still. He didn’t think she was breathing as he traced his thumbs along her elegant jawline.
Willing his memory to return, he stared at her face, counting each of her lashes and then moving on to trace the straight line of her nose. By the time his gaze reached her mouth—that delectable, kissable, cock-fillable mouth—he was beginning to pant.
And his dick was going stiff, too.
Trying to ignore it, he double-downed on his focus, still hopeful that the memories would well inside him if he commanded their return with all he had. But hell, it was only desire that was rising, a need burning like fire in his blood. His fingers tightened on Jewel’s face, and she took a quick, surprised breath.
He instantly loosened his hold, but then had to admit the damned experiment was going south—in the same direction as all the blood in his body.
Muttering a frustrated curse, he let his hands drop. “This isn’t working.”
“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” Jewel suggested. “I felt like your eyes were going to make Swiss cheese out of me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It was a lousy idea from the get-go.”
“Perhaps not.” Jewel reached for his hands and held them loosely in her own smaller, more slender ones. “Try again. But first relax and close your eyes.”
Hyper-aware of her warm hold, he managed to obey, breathing deep to calm his lust that spiked, though their skin-to-skin contact was casual, not carnal. But his blood continued to run hot even as he sternly told himself that control was his talent. How he liked to play, and what Jewel must have liked too.
She’d intimated that they had engaged in dominance games.
Okay, thinking of those wasn’t helping.
“Loosen up,” Jewel said now, and slid her hold to his wrists so she could shake his arms a little. “Try not to be so rigid.”
Beck grimaced, wishing his dick would get the message.
“Now,” Jewel whispered in a hushed voice. “Now touch me again.” She brought his hands to her face.
Her skin felt beautiful. Soft and smooth, warm. Beck tried imagining what might have gone through his head the first time he’d been close to her like this. If she was like this Jewel, this skittish woman, he’d have gone achingly slow, aware fast moves might frighten her off.
Because he’d have wanted her to trust him, so necessary if she was going to ultimately let him control the way sex worked between them.
His fingers moved into her hair, the sleek coolness of the strands kissing the skin between his fingers. He weaved his hands in the stuff, breathing in to catch the scent of it. “Did you use the same shampoo then?” he murmured.
“Mm-hmm.”
He leaned toward her, his eyes still closed, and nuzzled the side of her head. He felt her go still again, but it was an acceptance, not a rejection. Without thinking, he scooped her into his lap, his face still buried in her hair.
Had it been as good as this? With her slight weight pressing down on his hard cock and her scent filling his lungs? He placed one hand on her bare knee and heard her swift intake of air, but she didn’t say a word as he allowed his lips to lower until he found her ear.
Tucking her hair behind it, he traced the curve with the tip of his tongue to find the small lobe. Surely he’d taken the tiniest of nips the first or second time he’d had her in his arms. As he applied the edge of his teeth, she jerked in his hold, but then she relaxed against his chest as he soothed her with a small kiss on that same spot.
“Anything?” she whispered now, her voice a little shaky.
“Maybe,” he said, and maybe it was true because she felt so right. His hand trailed up her bare leg, and she shivered. But again she didn’t protest.
As if they had their own agenda, his fingers kept moving, until his knuckles were beneath the hem of her shorts and his fingertips sensed a tempting damp heat ahead.
Oh, fuck. She was turned on, too.
He froze, then pressed his forehead to the side of her face. “Sorry. I think we’re getting off-track here.”
She stiffened, then slid from his lap to re-take her own cushion.
Beck opened his eyes to see her, face flushed and hair disheveled, looking everywhere but at him.
That weird…tender and protective warmth ran through him again. He needed to fix this situation—obliterate the awkwardness she was obviously experiencing. Reaching out, he combed her hair with his fingers, smoothing the glossy strands with gentle strokes.
“Hey, it’s okay, sweetheart. We had a physical relationship in the past. By my guess, a steamy one. So it makes sense that our bodies remember that even if my mind does not.”
After a moment, she slid him a disgruntled look. “You’re very good at smoothing things over, you know.”
He laughed, trying not to notice the hard points of her nipples pressing against the cotton of her shirt. Shit, she wasn’t wearing a bra. “I take it that you assume I’ve had a lot of practice?”
“Haven’t you?”
“Well, I like…intense encounters. When the heat cools down, sometimes women feel ashamed or embarrassed of their uninhibited responses.”
Jewel tilted her head. “How about you? What do you feel after the heat cools down?”
“Honestly? I feel like a god when I’m able to blow to pieces all that shit women usually have going on in their heads when it comes to sex. Orgasms I can
give myself. Allowing a woman to climax with her passion at full throttle is what turns my crank.”
“Allowing,” she muttered, giving him a quick glance then looking away again.
“Wasn’t that the way it was?” he asked quietly.
She made a face. “Yes.”
“What’s that frown about?” he asked. “Did I ever make you feel ashamed? Embarrassed?”
“No. I…no.”
“Good.” Then he clapped his hands against his knees. “I should leave.”
“So you got nothing out of that?” she asked, her expression wistful.
Blue balls was not the response she hoped for, he figured. “No new memories. I really only have one elusive hint that I keep coming back to.”
“What’s that?”
“Cherries. The taste of cherries.”
She sat up straighter. “What kind of cherries? Like a lifesaver?”
“Maraschino cherries.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“That first night, I had them in my drink. You teased me about it. Do you think if you tasted—?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, shrugging.
“Well, let’s see if they can help.” She hopped up from the couch. “There’s some in our fridge.”
In a few moments she was back, holding a small bowl filled with the red, sticky bar condiment. “All right, let’s try it. Put one in your mouth then close your eyes and chew.”
He cocked a brow at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
She put a hand on her hip, striking a saucy pose. “Do you want to remember me or not?”
“Definitely yes, if only to recall how best to handle you when you’re sassy.”
That jolted her, and he bit back his smile. Oh, yeah, what they’d had between them had been beyond steamy. He picked a cherry from the bowl and popped it into his mouth, began to chew.
“Close your eyes,” she reminded him.
He did and felt her sink to the sofa. The syrupy flavor of the fruit exploded in his mouth, so sweet it made his jaw ache. The concentrated taste rushed down his throat, and he swallowed, then swallowed again as saliva still flooded his mouth.
But after a moment he realized that once again, no great bolt of recollection had struck his brain.
Love Me Two Times (Rock Royalty Book 8) Page 9
