by James, Vicki
The whole world could know now.
I couldn’t hide this shit anymore.
Jules squealed quietly; her laughter untameable as she tried to push me away. When she hitched in a breath, she stiffened in my arms.
“Bobby. Hey!”
Reluctantly, I broke away from her only to see Bobby Hart, an old school rock legend from the 1970s band Zero Heroes. He was notorious for his legendary bass playing skills, and his ability to rival Keith Richards in the Shouldn’t He Be Dead? stakes. His age was hard to place, but given his weathered skin, knowing eyes, and the grey hair that covered both his head and his face… I’d have said he’d have been in his early seventies at the least. The old-school red bandana he had tied around his neck was a wardrobe piece few could pull off, but pull it off, he did.
There weren’t many people that made my eyes widen with appreciation but having Bobby Hart standing in front of us had my chest pounding wildly. My very own Zero Hero. One of the men my mum had swooned over when I was younger. Even Caleb had admired Bobby.
If they could see me now.
“Rhett.” Bobby offered me one of those slow, controlled nods.
“Shit, hey, man.” I was beaming as I held my hand out for him to take. I was holding onto a living legend, and I suddenly felt like a giddy teenage boy meeting his idol. “Good to meet you. Big fan.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” he said smoothly, letting go of my hand.
“No shit!”
“I saw your performance tonight. Digged it.”
If anyone else had said they ‘digged’ a performance, I would have told them the 1990s wanted their lingo back, but this was Bobby Fucking Hart, and he made everything sound cool. His eyes told a million stories, and I wanted to sit down with the legend and listen to them all.
“You got a minute to talk?” he asked.
“Are you shitting me?”
“No.” He laughed roughly, scowling as he did. “I’d love to grab a beer with you and talk music.”
“Hell yes, sir.” Some people deserved that title, and he was one of the few I was willing to hand it out to without question.
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He smirked knowingly before he took a glance at Julia and winked.
I turned to her to see her smiling proudly at me. “Did you set this up?” I asked.
“Me? Never.” She chuckled before she moved to Bobby, gave him a hug, and whispered something in his ear.
He was as smitten with her as I was. Julia held an air of coolness that couldn’t be replicated. She knew people, and people knew her, but she would never brag about it like I would have done. She didn’t need to world to know she knew her shit. She was comfortable with keeping that knowledge to herself. Her lack of desire for attention was one of the many things I loved about her.
Jules and Bobby laughed together, and when she turned back to me, she offered me a smile. “I’ll leave you two to it.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, eyeing her when she began to walk away. Those eyes of mine fell to her perfectly tight arse.
“Not too far. Don’t worry.”
“Damn,” I muttered to myself, taking a moment too long to let my gaze linger before I glanced back up at Bobby Hart again. “Sorry.” I shook my head. “She’s got some crazy ass voodoo spell over me.”
“Don’t apologise. Julia’s the kinda woman who leaves you speechless.”
“You two know each other?”
“Oh, her and I go way back.”
“Yeah?” I scowled. “She never said.”
Bobby moved to wrap an arm around my shoulder, dipping his chin to his chest as he pulled me closer. “Tell me, Rhett.” He began to walk us forward, his pace controlled. “Just how much do you know about this woman you’ve gone ahead and fallen in love with?”
I didn’t like the sound of that question. Mainly because the answer would sound shit compared to those love stories that professed they’d known it was true love from the minute they saw the other part of their soul.
Our story wasn’t like that.
“I know who she is and what she stands for, which is why I’ve fallen hard. As for her history…”
“You don’t know a damn thing.” Bobby smirked.
“I guess not.” I frowned, that pinch in my chest tight again. Why didn’t I know shit? How had I let it get this far without asking more questions than I had?
Because you’re a selfish arsehole, Rhett, and as long as you’re getting what you want out of something, nothing else matters.
“How well do you know her?” I dared myself to ask.
“Pretty well.” He nodded, pressing his lips together.
“Have you—?”
“Careful with that next question, Rhett.” Bobby stopped and turned to face me fully. “A man should always be careful of what he asks a woman’s pops about her life.”
If it hadn’t been for the music, I was sure the whole room would have heard my jaw crash to the floor.
Chapter Forty-One
“You’re… I mean… Jules is your…” Blinking did nothing for me, but it sure did make Bobby’s face light up. “She never said.”
“Why would she?”
“Because you’re Bobby Fucking Hart, man. A legend. The guys and I have spoken about Zero Heroes over the years, and Jules never even looked up from what she was doing when we did.”
“She’s a professional. She’s never bragged about her life on the road with me.”
“Jesus Christ.” I ran a hand through my hair, exasperated. Shook up. “You’re the guy on a pedestal. How could she not tell me?”
“Not to her. To the twins, I’m just good old Pops.”
I closed my eyes for just a moment to try and muster some control before I looked back up at him. “This is a lot to take in. She never mentioned family. I only knew about Sarah when… you know.”
Bobby’s eyes turned sad, but the trained entertainer kept his face straight like any professional should and would.
“I guess that’s another sign Julia really does love you. Not only has she introduced you to me. She’s told you about Sarah and the baby.”
“Shouldn’t she have?”
Bobby glanced over my shoulder, seeking Jules out. I couldn’t stop staring at him, though. When he turned his attention back to me again, he stepped closer.
“Sarah’s… different from Julia. She always has been. From the moment I found them—”
“Found them?” I frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Jesus, she really hasn’t told you anything, has she?” He sighed again, let his hand fall from my shoulder, and he rubbed it across his forehead. The professional entertainer was gone. In front of me was an old man with too much worry on his shoulders. “She could have at least warned me when she asked me to come by tonight.”
“Warned you about what?”
“About you not knowing that her and Sarah were dumped in the middle of nowhere as children and left to fend for themselves.” He dropped his hand and shook his head as the memories flickered through his mind. “The twins aren’t mine… biologically. The girls were no more than six years old, left to rot in the back of some beat-up old Ford Escort on the A14 near Kettering. Their mother was at her wit’s end. Dad was a druggy and didn’t care. The girls didn’t even know his name. The mother was suicidal, and high all the time. She’d gotten pregnant by mistake, and after six years, she’d apparently had enough. So, just like that, she left them with nothing more than a picnic and a bag of clothes each. She took the car keys, told them to stay where they were, and she said someone would be along to pick them up soon. Only nobody was ever coming to get them.”
My heart pinched as I stared at him, unable to say a damn thing.
“The guys and I were on the road at that point. It was… shit, 1994, I think. We’d finished a gig in Cambridge, and we were heading towards Kettering in the middle of the night. I needed to take a piss, and the tour bus toilet was broken. I’d been dr
inking. We all had. I got the driver in a headlock ‘cause the bastard wouldn’t pull over. That made him slam the brakes on and listen. He pulled up behind this car. I barely saw it. It was dark, and the lights were off. I went to take a piss in the bushes at the side of the road, and when I pulled my zipper back up and turned around… bam. A pair of wide brown eyes were staring at me over the ledge of the window. Just this nose and those damn eyes.”
“Julia,” I breathed.
“Yeah, my baby Jules.” Bobby cleared his throat, the memory obviously painful. “She’s seven minutes older than Sarah in body. Her heart, though… that girl was born with a fifty-year-old’s heart. When I looked around for the parents, there weren’t any. That woman they used to call a mother had literally left her kids in the middle of nowhere. When I opened the car door and asked who they were, Jules wrapped herself around Sarah and told me to step back.” A soft, sad smile tugged at the edge of his mouth. “Do you know what she said to me?”
“What?”
“She said ‘Mr, I know karate. I’ll kick you in the nuts if I have to. I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid.’ She sure was afraid, all right. She just wouldn’t show it to a stranger like me.”
I couldn’t smile at the idea of my woman being young and terrified, no matter how much I admired that strength. “So, you just took them home?”
“Home?” He scoffed. “I didn’t have one of those. The road was all I knew, but I couldn’t leave those girls, and something about Julia’s bravery drew me to her. I wasn’t her real pops, and I never wanted to be a dad, but…” He sighed again, speaking to me like he’d known me for three decades already. “I couldn’t let her go.”
“I can’t either,” I admitted.
“Even though we both know it would be better for her in the long run,” Bobby added.
Would it? Would it be better for her to have someone else instead of me and this manic life I lived? Someone away from the cameras. Someone who wouldn’t play everything out in front of the media.
My fucking heart sank at the thought of giving her up.
“Did your family accept her? Take her in?” I asked, my throat dry. I couldn’t get the visuals of a little girl, perhaps somewhat dirty and uncared for, staring into the eyes of a rock god and telling him she wasn’t afraid to hurt him.
“The only family I ever had was the band and those girls.”
“No one else?” I scowled, trying to imagine the loneliness that would bring. Not temporary, fake loneliness like I’d imagined I’d been in just a few weeks or months ago. I mean the kind of lonely where there’s no one waiting at the other end of life for you to go back home to. Even when I’d been a selfish, unbearable arsehole, I’d always had Ma, Caleb, and Cookham to return to.
“Nope.” Bobby shook his head. “She didn’t, either. My bandmates became hers and Sarah’s family. I was the main guy, sure, but they all chipped in. Julia was breaking up our arguments and figuring shit out for us from the moment I dropped her on the bus and said, ‘Welcome to the world of rock ‘n’ roll.’”
“And it worked?”
“Yeah, you know why? Because the lonely seek the lonely. The grieving seek the grieving. The desperate seek the desperate. The sad seek the sad. Together, we found each other… in the craziest of circumstances. We were always meant to be a unit.”
What made you come to me?
I was sad… I knew you were sad, too.
The conversation we’d had came back to me, flashing through my mind like bright, white lightning over a dark and empty piece of mind.
“Shit,” was the only response I could give. I was Rhett Ryan. The singer, the sarcastic motherfucker. The comedian. The deep and meaningful stuff had never come easy, but I suddenly wanted to find Julia, wrap my arms around her, squeeze her tight and ask her if she was okay.
I wanted to offer her pity when what she probably needed from me was silence. None of us liked to live in our pasts, especially not me.
“I need to find her,” I said, no longer completely enamoured by Bobby Hart.
“Rhett?”
“What?”
“We’ve kept all of this a secret from the world for twenty-six years.” He eyed me, the warning clear.
“I won’t tell a soul.”
I wouldn’t. I couldn’t give a shit about the gossip or the scandal. I just needed to speak to Julia. For what reason, I wasn’t sure yet. I was a little pissed she hadn’t told me, but I knew from experience and our time together that shouting at or accusing her of shit did nothing but make her shut down again.
I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid
Yet she’d told me she was scared of what we had.
“Maybe you need to calm down before you go to her.” Bobby frowned, forcing me to focus on him and snap out of my daydream. When he glanced down at my hands, I realised they were balled into tight fists, hard knuckles under stretched, white skin.
I shook them out and cleared my throat.
A pair of arms slid around my waist. “Hey,” Jules said softly. It was her cautious voice. I knew it well now. “Everything okay?
I pulled her into my arms quickly, acting like she was six, and I’d just found her, scared and alone in an abandoned car. I pressed her head to my chest, pushing her against my beating heart.
“I’m never going to abandon you. You know that, right?”
She pulled back to look up at me.
“I won’t abandon you, Julia.”
Her eyes filled. Just a light, misty coating of emotion. “What is it about rock stars not being able to let me go?”
I had so much left to learn about this formidable woman, and I was only going to love her harder until she showed me every last tainted, horrible memory she’d kept bottled up inside. And as I stood there holding her in my arms and staring down into her eyes, I realised that what Julia needed in her life wasn’t control or looking after.
What she needed was to finally be set free.
Chapter Forty-Two
After we’d made it back to the hotel room, we washed, stripped off, and climbed into bed. I kept waiting for her to open her mouth, but so far, fifteen minutes had gone by of us lying there without a single word passing her lips.
“Ma always used to tell me that when someone came along who mattered to you, you’d know it was real because their pain suddenly became your own.” Turning my head in her direction, I studied her, taking in her profile and all the perfectly sharp edges there. “I get it now. You’ve had it a lot harder than you’ve ever told anyone, haven’t you?”
“Sometimes,” she whispered. “But I made a promise to myself when I was younger, not long after Bobby and the others took Sarah and me in, that I didn’t want to go back to the past all the time the way they did. Spending life on the road with the guys was amazing, but it made me realise that rock stars are different to everyone else. They tell stories with their songs, and they release their pain in a way that makes it seem cool out there on the stage. They’re not whining; they’re singing and entertaining. That’s what the world thinks. But I saw them on the tour bus. I saw the regret they drowned themselves in. I saw the whining and the moaning, and the way alcohol was the only thing that numbed their minds for a while. I saw how much they lived in the past, and their present was a constant haze because of it.”
“I guess now I know why you always gave me such a hard time about the booze.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “That, and I knew you could do better.”
I blew out a breath. “Man, how is it possible that the world doesn’t know Bobby Hart rescued two kids?”
“He and the guys knew it would do no good for us to be in the media. Mum would find out, and no doubt ask them for money—exploit the band’s kindness for all she could. The newspapers would have had a field day over it. Bobby and the band had the money and the contacts to make it all go away, so that’s what happened. If anyone ever asked us outright who we were, Sarah and I would make up stories about being one of the roadie
s’ kids.”
“You never wanted to find your real parents.”
“No. I don’t want anyone in my life who doesn’t want me,” she said quietly.
“Why didn’t you tell any of us—me—what Bobby had done for you? I’ve been in your life for years now, and you’ve never mentioned his name.”
“Because his name comes with privilege. People assume in this industry that when you do well, it’s because someone gave you a leg up and put you there.”
“Did he?”
Her fingers rippled against my chest. “He gave me experience in dealing with entertainers. The rest I did for myself.”
“He told me how he found you and Sarah.”
“I was too young to remember it as clearly as he does. It still doesn’t make sense to me… why he took us in the way he did.”
“He told me that the lonely seek the lonely. The sad seek the sad. Maybe that was why.”
“Maybe. Though, I think he did it to give his life purpose.”
“You don’t think the music was doing that for him?”
Jules glanced up, never taking her cheek from my chest as she stared at me. “It wasn’t doing for you, was it?”
I searched her eyes as though the answer to that question would be staring back of me in wide, bright pools of twinkling brown. I had no answers to give, and she knew it.
The music had been a high, but once the shows were over, I’d been kidding myself in thinking I hadn’t felt empty. I’d thought this lifestyle had been everything—my whole fucking life wrapped up in a microphone and bright lights flashing at me as people chanted my name—but Julia was right. Something had been missing. Something like this, where you crawled into bed against warm legs and shuffling feet. Where you were never alone, and your problems could be whispered to each other in your sleep.
Someone to share the successes and the demons with.
“Life on the road threw Sarah and me into the deep end,” she carried on. “I knew I could use it, turn it around and make a career out of it all. Sarah… she liked the party way too much, and over time, that led to problems.”
