Dirty Rock: A Rock Star Romance

by James, Vicki

  “By taking a picture of someone who doesn’t belong to you. Yeah, I got that. You think it’s your right now. That she’s public property because she’s with me.”

  “I—”

  “And let me guess. You can’t believe how much hotter she looks in person, right? As if the pictures you’ve already seen weren’t enough.”

  “Rhett,” Julia warned behind me, but that was a voice I wanted to push away right now. This young gun had a face that was begging to be dented, and I had the means and bad attitude that day to deliver what he deserved. I’d gone from spending twenty-six years not wanting to fight anyone to now wanting to fight the fucking world to protect her.

  I took a step closer to him. “This is a recording studio, you prick.” I hissed. “You’re meant to be a professional. I’m going to ask you one more time to give me… your fucking phone… before I take it from you.”

  The guy’s eyes searched mine wildly. “I said I’m sorry, but you’re not having my phone,” the kid said quietly.

  “I’m not?” I whispered, leaning in and raising a brow. The dude’s lips parted, and he held his breath. “Fine.” With a sigh, I began to turn away. I took one step in the opposite direction before I spun around, grabbed him by his T-shirt, and I slammed him up against the nearest wall. His phone dropped to the floor with a clatter.

  “Hey, fuck, let go!” he cried. “You crazy bastard.”

  My whole body felt crazy fucking wired as I held the guy up, my fist trembling inside the twisted material of his shirt. “You’re pushing your luck here, brother,” I growled. I’d become feral, the need to see what picture he’d taken of my Jules tearing me apart. “You have no business doing that shit in here.”

  “It’s just a picture.”

  “Yeah. Just a picture.” I pulled him forward only to slam him back against the wall. “That’s what they all say. It’s just a picture. Just a rumour. Just a story. Just, just, fucking just.”

  A smooth hand slid over my arm. “Rhett, stop this.”

  I blinked through my anger, slowly turning to look at Julia.

  Her eyes were focused solely on me. “This isn’t about him, and you know it. Let him go.”

  “He needs teaching a lesson.”

  “I’ll take care of the picture.” Without looking away from me, she bent down to pick up the phone before she stood taller again and waved it in my face.

  The guy in my grip wiggled against the wall, and it took me a few seconds before I growled and dropped him, watching his body sag before he corrected himself and dusted his T-shirt down.

  “You owe her an apology.” I pointed right in his face.

  “He can apologise by showing me his pictures, and we’ll get it deleted right here, right now,” Julia said.

  The two of them worked the phone while I watched over the process. The dude kept glancing at me from under the heaviness of his brows, and if Jules wasn’t here, there’d have been a ruck between the two of us. I wished there had. This weird, negative energy was flowing through me, and I needed to get rid of it by taking it out on someone else.

  Once Julia was satisfied that he’d deleted what he needed to, she told him to get out of here, and he did, but not without a parting look of newfound hatred my way.

  “Prick!” I called after him.

  “I haven’t seen Rhett react like that since the lead singer of Silent Soul told him he sucked,” Coops said quietly.

  “Dude, don’t bring that shit up again,” Big D grumbled.

  “I don’t know about anyone else, but I need a drink.” Hawk laughed.

  “And a cigarette,” Big D suggested.

  Jules stepped up in front of me, and I turned us away from the guys, so my back was to them.

  “If you keep behaving like this, I’m never going to be able to leave you, you know.” She pressed her hands to my chest. I was Rhett gone wild, willing to put everyone and anyone in their place if they so much as looked at Jules the wrong way.

  “Why the fuck would you be intending on leaving me?”

  “Well, since you’re already angry. Now might be a good time for us to talk about—” She didn’t get chance to finish that sentence.

  Her phone rang, the tone unfamiliar to the usual default alert she’d always had on there. This time a song rang out, the tune of UB40’s Kingston Town filling the air.

  Jules moved with urgency. Her face fell and paled as she brought the phone up to her ear.

  “Sarah?”

  Her sister?

  “What’s wrong? Okay. No, don’t do that. Calm down,” Jules said, her eyes cast down as she spoke. “It’s going to be okay.” She spun away from me and began to walk towards the door.

  I cast a glance at the rest of the band, who were looking at me like I had any idea what was happening, before I took off after her and followed Jules into the corridor. Her back came against a wall, and she raised her free hand to her forehead and closed her eyes.

  “Sarah, I need you to listen to me,” she said quietly. I didn’t even think she knew I was with her. “You can’t keep doing this. I know you’re hurting, and everything feels like shit, but… sweetie, it’s time to stop. This isn’t his fault. None of this is anybody’s fault. It’s going to be okay, okay? You have to trust me.” Her eyes popped open, and she stood taller. “No, Sarah. No. Don’t…”

  The call must have ended because when Jules lowered her phone and turned her pale face and terrified eyes my way, she seemed to look right through me.

  “Jules?” I whispered, taking a careful step closer. “What’s going on?”

  “I need to go.”

  “Where to?”

  “To Sarah.”

  “Is she okay?” I dared myself to ask.

  Julia closed her eyes and kept them that way for a few seconds before she unleashed them on me, filled with tears. “She’s never been okay, Rhett. I need to go to her. She’s just threatened to kill herself again. And it’s all because of us.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “Should we call the police?” I asked Jules as we made our way out of the building in a hurry.

  “No.” She swallowed as she shoved things into her bag and tried to keep it together. “She won’t do it.”

  “She’s done this before?”

  Jules sighed heavily, readjusted the bag on her shoulder, and she wiped a tear I couldn’t see from her eye. “Erm. Yeah. A… a few times.”

  “Fuck, Jules.”

  The driver of the car we’d jumped in had taken one look at the usually composed Julia Speed, asked me what was wrong, and then put his foot on the accelerator. I tried talking to her in the backseat, asking about the history of her sister, but Jules just kept saying the same old thing.

  “I can’t talk about it, Rhett. Let me get there. Let me see her first.”

  “I don’t like seeing you like this.”

  She turned to me, a weak version of the strongest woman I’d ever known. “Why do you think I enjoy being away with you guys so much?”

  Swallowing down all the shit I wanted to ask, I wrapped my hand in hers and pressed them both down into the seat between us. She didn’t want to expand, and I suddenly had little to say.

  The blues, greens, and yellows all whizzed by in the back of the car until we ended up driving down roads that were now becoming familiar to me.

  The home of our multi-coloured, beachfront houses.

  The place I’d first taken Jules’s body and claimed it as my own.

  The place I kept coming back to because of her.

  “Just up here?” the driver asked her through the rearview mirror.

  Unclipping her belt, she leaned forward and began directing him to where she needed him to go.

  Sarah’s house wasn’t far away from ours, but I was barely paying attention as the roads morphed into one. Whatever was about to go down, I had a bad feeling about it, and the thought of finding a young woman hurting herself, or even worse, dead, made my stomach roll.

  I was
n’t the kind of guy who could handle that sort of shit. Rational thought wasn’t my strong point. I was the opposite of Presley, Big D, and the rest of them. The reality of that made my stomach churn, until Jules turned to me, waiting for something.

  Her pretty brown eyes needed me.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I found myself admitting.

  A tear fell down her cheek. “Neither do I.”

  “I’m here for you, though.”

  She nodded gently, swallowing whatever emotion she felt.

  “I fucking mean it, Julia Speed.”

  “Don’t make me cry, Rhett. I need to stay strong for just a little bit longer.”

  She moved to open the door and climbed out. I followed her cautiously, thanking the driver and asking him to stick around as Jules walked up a pathway to a little white, two-storey house. It was thinner, yet more modern than Julia’s home, or my shitty, beat-up blue one. I sighed as I hitched my jeans up to try and find some fortitude, and then I raced after her. If she was about to walk in on something bad, I was going to be there by her side, whether I knew what the fuck I was doing or not.

  I loved her, and that love felt protective.

  I could do it all, whatever it was, because of her. Because seeing that fucking sadness in her eyes and imagining not doing something about it cut me up inside.

  “Hey,” I panted, catching her hand in mine as I came up beside her.

  “You can wait in the car if you want,” she offered.

  “I’m right where I want to be.”

  Another tear fell from the corner of her eye, and I was struggling to think of strong, loveable, laughing Jules showing so much raw emotion like this. She’d shown more in the last few days than I’d seen from her in the three and a half years before.

  Was being with me making her… miserable?

  The thought was pushed aside before it had time to gain traction, and Jules slipped a key into the black front door. The click of the lock sounded like a bomb going off when she pushed through and stepped inside.

  The silence was eerie as I followed her, the only noise being our shoes against the dark wooden flooring. The place smelled of cinnamon and vanilla. Like wax melts or expensive candles that had been left on too long. It was homely, but a catalogue home. One you’d think people would want to see. Not one you’d actually want to live in.

  It felt cold.

  “Sarah?” Jules called out carefully.

  There was no response.

  After laying her bag down in the hallway, Jules began to check the place. The living room was empty. The kitchen too.

  “Sarah!”

  Julia looked at me, and I had no advice to offer other than to point upstairs and shrug. I saw the caution in her eyes. She wasn’t convinced Sarah wouldn’t hurt herself after all. She was worried this time was going to be real.

  “I’ll go first,” I offered.

  “Maybe I should—”

  “I said I’ll go.”

  Without protest, Julia curled her arms over her chest and brought a thumb up to her mouth to chew on. The mental images of that little girl peeking over the window ledge in the car when Bobby Hart found her made my chest ache.

  I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid.

  “Stay here,” I ordered, my need to shelter her from anything bad taking over.

  She nodded, and I began to climb the stairs as carefully as I could.

  They creaked under my feet, but nobody reacted from anywhere in the house. There wasn’t a sound above. No running water, music, or quiet cries. The silence made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.

  Once at the top, I took a glance at Julia to see she’d closed her eyes. Her lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. If she was praying, I wasn’t going to question it. I felt like praying, too.

  I checked the first room on the right, which happened to be a white, empty study.

  The second door held nobody inside it either, just a single bed with white bedding and white curtains that were far too sterile to be homely.

  The third door led to a bathroom, and that was empty, too. I was surrounded by pristine white fittings that made my blackest of black clothes, worn tattoos, and dark features stand out like a notorious sinner stepping through the pearly gates of Heaven.

  But there was no sign of anyone hurting themselves, which was both a relief and terrifying. If someone were going to hurt themselves, a bathroom or bedroom would be a likely place.

  With two doors left, I took a deep breath.

  “Sarah?” I said quietly, not wanting to scare her. “Sarah, if you’re up here, I need you to know I’m here to help. It’s Rhett. Rhett Ryan?” I offered her my name like it would bring peace when all my name had ever delivered was disaster and carnage—too much noise and too many mistakes.

  No response came back.

  I opened the fourth door to find it empty. A double bed sat in the middle of the room—a room decorated completely white apart from two pale pink scatter cushions in the middle of the bed.

  My chest deflated, and all the air left my lungs in a hurry.

  I spun on the heels of my boots and made my way to the final door. When I pushed it open carefully, I saw the cot first.

  A huge, oak cot that took up most of the floor space.

  Inside it laid a human figure, curled up into a ball with a cushion pressed tightly to their chest and a halo of blonde hair covering her face.

  “Sarah?”

  A sniff was her only response. She didn’t even look up.

  My lips parted to call for Julia, and I half turned in her direction before the memory of those sad eyes flashed through my mind.

  She’d been clinging onto love and saving those around her, her entire life.

  I didn’t want her to see this. I didn’t want her to grieve again and to have to piece her sister back together while she broke herself apart.

  “Shit,” I mouthed, before I turned back into the nursery and slowly made my way over to the cot Sarah was lying in.

  My chest ached for the broken human curled up in a ball like a baby. Too weak to speak. Too lost to know she wasn’t supposed to be there.

  I wasn’t supposed to be there either. This room was untainted. Untouched and meant for an innocent newborn to call its home. Not me with my heavy, black boots and my cigarette smelling jacket.

  Running my hands along the edge of the cot, I stopped in Sarah’s direct line of sight, and I bent at the knees until I was down at her level.

  “Hey, Sarah,” I said softly.

  I heard her swallow, and her vacant brown eyes moved around the space between us before she looked up at my face.

  All I could do was smile with the sympathy I felt.

  “Hi,” I whispered. “Don’t be scared. I know you don’t know me, but I’m here to help, I promise.”

  “W-what are you…?”

  I pushed a hand through the bars of the cot and left it lying in between us. An offer of affection if she wanted it. Something she could touch to remind her she wasn’t alone.

  “I’m Rhett.”

  “I know who you are,” she croaked. “Where’s Julia?”

  “She’s downstairs. You threatened to hurt yourself, Sarah, and your sister couldn’t handle seeing that if you’d gone through with it.”

  “She knows I wouldn’t.”

  “Does she?”

  “I wouldn’t…”

  “Ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?” A tear fell from Sarah’s eye, and it ran down her nose, but she never moved to wipe it away. “Of course you have. We all know how that story ends. The day she doesn’t come running to save you, that’s the day you’re going to do something you can never take back. You mean everything to her. She’ll always come running to you.”

  Sarah’s eyes creased together, and I couldn’t tell if she was angered or sad.

  I pushed my hand in farther, the tips of my fingers catching the edge of hers.

  “Let me help you.”r />
  “You can’t. No one can.” She squeezed her cushion tighter to her chest, and more tears fell.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “What do you care?” she croaked. “What do you know about grieving for someone you’ve never met.”

  I swallowed the sharp lump in my throat. “I know a bit.”

  “What do you know about grief for a baby? A baby I never got to hold while it cried. A baby whose breath I never felt.” Her quiet voice broke. “A baby who never got to look into my eyes and hear me say that I loved it.”

  “I don’t know about any of that,” I admitted tightly. “I don’t have the words to comfort you, Sarah. I don’t even have a suitable song to sing to take away your pain for a few minutes. I have no answers. Neither does Julia. Anything we say will seem like a pathetic attempt to make you forget. But do you know what we do have?”

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Breath in our lungs.”

  Sarah looked up at me as she pushed the wet strands of hair out of her eyes. Her brows were knitted together.

  “It’s totally fucking shit that some people don’t make it. It’s totally fucking shit that there’s a god out there who could take a child from you. It’s totally fucking shit, Sarah, that you’re going to spend the rest of your life grieving for someone you didn’t know.” I rocked forward on my boots and pressed my head against the oak bars. “It’s fucked up. All of it. Life can be the worst thing we endure, but we have to do that—endure it. It’s a gift, and we can’t throw it away.”

  She swallowed again, and I saw the grip on her cushion loosen as she stared at me.

  “Your life doesn’t end because someone else’s has. It feels like it should, and man, that guilt that you’re living and they’re not grabs hold of you, and it fucks you the hell up. But that heart that’s beating frantically right now is yours, Sarah. Yours. Your baby listened to that every day. That’s all she heard. The beat, beat, beat and her mama’s voice.” I smiled sadly, holding her gaze. “You owe it to her to keep her favourite song alive for a very long time.”

  She looked straight into my eyes for what felt like a lifetime before her face crumpled, and the tears started all over again.