But right now, I’d take it. Because when had it become okay for me to go through life without smiling?
Smiling was something I used to do easily, and regularly. Why wouldn’t I? I had an amazing life. I had the band, my career. I had the music. Unlike a lot of other rock stars I knew, I had a solid family, too. Two loving parents, and I grew up with money. I never really wanted for anything, including love.
But then there was Jesse.
And everyone on Earth knew how that turned out.
I took a swig of my beer and just tried to feel grateful, for everything I had. I tried to feel, really feel, deep down, happy for Jesse and the love he’d found.
But just like every other time I’d tried to do that since we broke up, and he met Katie… I just couldn’t.
I felt the tears sparking in my eyes before I could stop them.
And Ash said, “It’s okay to still be pissed. And hurt. And totally fucking sad. Or whatever the fuck you feel, Elle. Maybe no one’s told you that. But it’s okay.”
“Summer’s told me,” I said. “And Jessa, and Maggie. And now you. But I think everyone else is just waiting to exhale when I stop feeling what I’m feeling, so we can all go back to life as usual.”
“Well, fuck them,” he said. “There is no ‘life as usual.’ Life is whatever the fuck it is, right now. And if it’s you with a broken heart sitting here with me drinking beer on Jesse’s wedding night while he fucks his bride in their cabin, so fucking be it.”
Yeah. Never one to mince words.
But I kinda loved that about Ash. The truth was, I was surrounded by yes men, and yes women, all fucking day. I preferred it when people gave it to me straight. Never more so than after Jesse broke up with me—and told me he hadn’t really been happy with me all along.
Because who needed that?
I never wanted to be in that situation again. Thinking things were something that they totally weren’t.
“Alright,” I said, and I raised my beer, sniffing back the half-formed tears. “Here’s to me and my broken heart. And to Jesse and his bride.”
Ash raised what was left of his joint and tapped it to the neck of my beer bottle. I took a swig and he took a drag.
“Her name’s Katie,” he said, in the silence that followed.
“Uh-huh.”
How could I forget? Her name was as cute as the rest of her. And now her name was Katie Mayes. So there was really no getting away from it.
“If you use her name, it humanizes her, and makes it harder to hate her.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“You need any others,” he offered, “I’ve got a few.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
He was still watching me. Actually, I didn’t think he’d taken his eyes off me more than once or twice since he joined me in the pool.
And right now, it was more than flattering.
But it still wasn’t enough.
“Do you think I’ll ever have that?” I asked him quietly, as if anyone could hear us. “You know, what they have. The way they looked up there at the altar…”
Ash seemed to consider that. “Do you think I will?” he countered.
“I don’t know. Do you want that?”
He shrugged and kind of smiled at me. That killer, I’m a crazy-hot-lead-singer-without-a-care-in-the-world smile. “I don’t know.”
I nodded, like I understood that. But really, I didn’t. Then I confessed, “I do.”
“Then you will.”
He was probably right about that. I knew he was.
Right now, though, I just couldn’t feel it.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know about any of this standing-up-at-the-altar shit, Elle. Weddings aren’t exactly my thing. But I do know a thing or two about women and men in bed.”
“You don’t say.”
“And I’d take you to bed over Katie in a hot minute, any day of the week.”
I didn’t want to be flattered by that, but… “She’s not your flavor?”
“Not even close.”
“You’re saying that because she’s with Jesse and she’s unavailable anyway.”
“I’m saying that because it’s true.”
Maybe. But even if he meant it, he was just flirting. I knew that. And just like every other time he’d done it, I knew I couldn’t take it seriously.
I couldn’t take him seriously.
I didn’t want more with Ash than friendship. One tall, dark and complicated rock star was enough for me. No more guitar players; I’d promised myself that after the breakup with Jesse.
And Ash wasn’t only a lead guitarist. He was a lead singer, which was worse.
Double the ego.
Double the drama.
Not what I needed in my life.
What I needed, probably, was an accountant. Someone logical and dependable and predictable, with not one tattoo, who couldn’t play a musical instrument to save his life, who’d never been on tour, never stepped onstage, never had swarms of groupies begging to fuck him—and fucking with his head.
A normal guy, with a normal life.
Yeah. That was probably where my love life was headed, if I had any sense at all.
But a little flirting along the way… It felt good. I could admit that to myself. Ash was scorching hot, and yes, he’d had more than his share of women, but right now, he was all about me. Maybe it was only for a few minutes in the middle of the night when no one else was around to compete for his attention, but I’d take his compliments.
“Thank you for saying that. It shouldn’t feel good, but it does.”
“It’s meant to feel good,” he said, still watching me. Still flirting.
“Yeah,” I said, sipping my beer. “I guess I just haven’t heard enough of that kind of thing lately.”
He laughed. His teeth were white against his skin in the moonlight, and his face lit up. His eyes crinkled at the corners. And, damn…
Ash just sitting around, looking all restless and angsty? Gorgeous.
But Ash laughing? Devastating.
“Shiiit,” he teased. “You’re shitting me, right?”
Wish I was. “Nope.”
“Not possible. You’re Elle Goddamn Delacroix. As if you don’t hear it everyday. People telling you how hot you are?”
“It’s different, though.” I shrugged. “Different coming from a man. You know, a man…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish that. Not sure I wanted to.
“A man who wants to fuck you,” he finished for me. Our eyes locked. “You must hear it from those on a daily basis too.”
I wish.
“You’d be surprised,” I confessed. “I don’t exactly let men get close lately. You know, I could go entire days talking to no one at all. Have Joanie take my calls. Hole up somewhere and shut everyone out. It’s kind of… pathetic.”
It was true. And I’d done it, often enough; had my assistant screen the shit out of my personal calls, emails, everything.
“Really,” he said, like he didn’t believe me. “So it’s true, then. The hottest girls sit at home alone on Friday night?”
“What can I say. You’d be surprised how lonely it is at the top.” I said it casually, like it wasn’t a big thing. But in reality, it was the biggest thing.
I knew I still had my band, my career, my family and my friends. I’d probably always have them. I still had Jesse, even, as a bandmate.
But I’d never felt more lonely, more alone, than when he broke up with me.
“Wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Ash said.
He fished out a fresh joint and lit up. He offered it to me, but I waved it away. I didn’t feel like smoking up. The booze I’d drank tonight was bad enough; I was afraid, with this wedding, I was hovering on the edge of some kind of deep, ugly, bottomless depression, and drugs were hardly gonna help.
Ash took a drag, eying me.
“Joanie always puts my calls through,” he said after a moment.
�
��Yeah,” I admitted. “She does.”
“And why is that?”
“Because…” I stopped there. Because I like talking to you, didn’t seem like the right thing to say. Sounded too much like flirting back—or giving him the green light to feel me up. “Because you’re my friend.”
“So is Zane,” he challenged. “Willing to bet you’ve screened his ass plenty of times.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “A time or two, over the years.”
“How about Jesse?” he asked. “You take all his calls these days?”
“Most of them,” I mumbled into my beer.
“Uh-huh. So how come you take mine?”
“Because… You never make me feel bad about myself for being so… fucking broken.”
Because talking to you always makes me feel better.
That was the whole truth of it, but I didn’t say that either.
“How about now?” he pressed. “You sorry you let me in here with you?”
“There’s hardly a door on the hot springs,” I said dryly. “Couldn’t exactly keep you out.”
“Sure you could. You want me to leave, you just say the word.”
I didn’t say a thing.
And the water seemed to heat up several more degrees off the look he gave me.
Wow…
I wasn’t even sure what to think about my male friend’s sex eyes hitting me so hard between the legs.
But I definitely wasn’t ignoring them like I usually did.
“So how is it that no man’s told you he wants to fuck you lately?” he asked.
I considered that. Considered how far I wanted to take that answer. But I was starting to feel a little daring here. Enjoying Ash’s flirting just a little too much. Because it was making me feel something I hadn’t felt in a really long time. Hadn’t allowed myself to feel, maybe, since Jesse rejected me.
Desired.
“I don’t know. Maybe they did and I just wasn’t listening.”
“That sounds a hell of a lot more likely,” he said.
Then I decided to make a bold confession, that was definitely in the realm of TMI. “I haven’t been with anyone since Jesse.”
Ash stared at me. The joint stopped partway to his mouth. “No one?”
“Nope.”
“But… you guys broke up in, like, March.”
“April,” I said.
Which meant it had been exactly nine months since I’d gotten any.
Well, actually… it had been about ten months. Because those last few weeks between Jesse and I were not good. And he’d barely touched me.
I cringed at that awful memory. The way I did every time I remembered how rough things had become between us toward the end. How quickly I went from feeling over the moon to terrified he was going to leave me.
I’d never feared losing anyone or anything so much. And I’d never been more bereaved over a loss. It was like trying to get over a death; it was that painful. And that near-impossible.
Ash was still looking at me, and suddenly I felt uncomfortable exposing my total lack of sex life to him—a male rock star. A gorgeous, sexually promiscuous rock star.
In other words, a guy who probably got laid within minutes, if not seconds, of any old time he felt like it.
“What about all the guys I see you with?” he asked. “All the fucking time. You’ve got, like, a dude harem swarming around you wherever you go.”
“Right. They’re called security guys. And roadies. And publicists, and personal trainers, and massage therapists—”
“And horny fans,” he concluded, clearly not buying my excuses.
I shrugged that off. “I don’t know. Guess I just never close the deal.” I sipped my beer, washing down the truth of it. “I blow them off, or I get Jude or someone to do it for me.”
“Huh.” He seemed to be digesting that, gradually. “Well, you know you could remedy that anytime you want, right? At least you have options.”
“Maybe I don’t want options,” I said, and the truth of it was painful.
Embarrassing.
Because even though I knew I shouldn’t, even though it was fucking bullshit and it was painful and masochistic and he was totally fucking taken by someone else, there was a part of me that was still hanging on. A really fucking stupid part of me, that hadn’t gotten the message yet. That just couldn’t fucking process the fact that my chance with Jesse Mayes had passed, and that he would never again be mine.
That he never really was mine.
Because he never loved me that way.
The way I loved him.
“So…” Ash said. “You don’t love him anymore, but you still want him. Is that it?”
He waited, staring at me, until I could bring myself to answer that.
“Does that make me pathetic?” I asked, my voice small in the night, as I surrendered to the fact. “Please just tell me I’m fucking pathetic. Maybe it will help me to snap out of it, once and for all.”
“No, Elle,” he said, his voice low and unusually serious. Actually, it was filled with compassion, and roughened by just the slightest edge of envy. “It makes you human.”
Chapter 3
Ash
Yeah. She wanted him.
And if she was still this hung up on Jesse, after all this time, and after just watching him marry someone else, she obviously hadn’t gotten whatever closure she needed out of that situation.
All you had to do was take one look at Jesse with Katie to know Elle wasn’t getting one last romp with him, for old time’s sake, to get him out of her system. So no closure was coming there. And if she still wasn’t fucking anyone else, there had to be something holding her back from getting on with her fucking life. Because this girl could get laid in a hot minute.
For example: right here. Right now.
Any-fucking-where she wanted.
I knew female musicians on the road—even married ones—who had a steady stream of fanboys snuck up to their hotel rooms and out the back door again by their staff. Men weren’t the only ones who played those games. And Elle had the power—and the looks—to do it. She could’ve had them lined up around the block if that was what she wanted.
But clearly, she didn’t want that at all.
“You never had the breakup party, did you?” I ventured, already knowing the answer.
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Breakup party?”
“Whenever you have a breakup, you’ve gotta have a party. Like an epic party. The worse the loss, the bigger the party’s gotta be, to balance everything out.”
Which meant Elle needed one hell of an epic breakup party.
She smiled at me, slowly, so maybe we were getting somewhere. “That’s kinda ridiculous, Ash.”
I shrugged. “Works. Every time. When I broke up with Summer, had the biggest breakup party ever, at Zane’s place in L.A.. Woke up at some ski lodge in Alaska, I shit you not, with this hot Iranian-American couple who ran a traveling freak show. Think I picked them up at the airport. Had a new tattoo. Hangover lasted three days.” I grinned at the memory. “Best breakup ever.”
“I heard about that,” she said, not nearly as impressed as I was with that little tale. “The Alaska part, anyway. You know Zane put you on that plane, right?”
I shrugged. “I would’ve done the same to him.”
It was true; Elle’s lead singer and I had spent the better part of the last five years in an ongoing swinging dick contest. Clash of the lead singers. He won, most of the time, since he had the bigger band and the bigger bank. Bigger everything—dick included.
But the fact was, the dude made me laugh. He rivaled my antics with women. He had a voice I’d never admit I envied like I did. If I wasn’t lead singer of my own band, I’d definitely want to be in his. I could never get in bed with his inflated ego, but other than that, Zane Traynor was a hard guy to find fault with.
Unless, maybe, if you were a chick.
“Hmm,” Elle said, with a tone that said Fuckin
g men. “And what’s the tattoo?”
“That’s the part that concerns you about that story, babe?”
She leaned over and poked me in the shoulder. “You’re not gonna show it to me?”
“Undercarriage. Trust me, you don’t wanna see it.”
She leaned back and stared at me. “Undercarriage…?”
“It’s under my balls, way up my thigh.” When she just kept staring at me, her slim eyebrows rising higher on her forehead, I sighed and elaborated, “It’s a prissy fucking pink flower that says Danny 4Ever.”
She smashed her lips together, maybe stifling a laugh. “Who’s Danny?”
“No idea.”
At that, she burst out laughing.
Fucking finally.
I’d searched my memory banks, and I was pretty fucking sure it’d been about a goddamn year since I’d heard the girl laugh—like really fucking laugh.
“You’ve got a tattoo between your legs that says Danny 4Ever, and you don’t know who Danny is?”
“Yup.”
She was silent a moment as she sipped her beer. Then she said, “You must have some idea. Like is Danny a girl? Or a guy?”
“No clue.”
“Wow, Ash.”
“I know, right?”
“I don’t think you do know.”
I narrowed my eyes at her through the smoke of my joint. “I know you think I’m a loose cannon.”
“Not a loose cannon. More of a… free spirit, dancing to the beat of your own drum.” Her smile faltered, then vanished. “You know… the kind that’s always breaking shit along the way.” As she looked at me, my heart sped up a little, doing this weird, heavy throb in my chest. Because there was something in her tone…
Like she cared that I was always breaking shit?
“And why do you say that?”
“Because,” she said, still serious. “You don’t remember who Danny is. But I’d bet you anything at all that he or she remembers you.”
I didn’t know how to take that.
I just stared at her in the dark, the steam off the water and the smoke from my joint softening my vision. Then I looked up at the stars.
Let her words sink into me.
It was either the most romantically flattering thing anyone had ever said to me… or it was just plain sad.
A Dirty Wedding Night_A Dirty Rockstar Romance Page 13
