by K. A. Linde
Take Me with You
By K.A. Linde
Copyright © 2015 by K.A. Linde
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All rights reserved.
Cover Designer: Najla Qamber Design
Editor and Interior Designer: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visit my website at http://www.kalinde.com
Other Titles by K.A. Linde
Avoiding Series
AVOIDING COMMITMENT (#1)
AVOIDING RESPONSIBILITY (#2)
AVOIDING INTIMACY (#2.5)
AVOIDING DECISIONS (#1.5)
AVOIDING TEMPTATION (#3)
Record Series
OFF THE RECORD
ON THE RECORD
FOR THE RECORD
Take Me Series
TAKE ME FOR GRANTED
TAKE ME WITH YOU
FOLLOWING ME
Chapter 1: Grant
Chapter 2: Aribel
Chapter 3: Grant
Chapter 4: Aribel
Chapter 5: Grant
Chapter 6: Aribel
Chapter 7: Grant
Chapter 8: Aribel
Chapter 9: Grant
Chapter 10: Aribel
Chapter 11: Grant
Chapter 12: Aribel
Chapter 13: Grant
Chapter 14: Aribel
Chapter 15: Grant
Chapter 16: Aribel
Chapter 17: Grant
Chapter 18: Aribel
Chapter 19: Grant
Chapter 20: Aribel
Chapter 21: Grant
Chapter 22: Aribel
Chapter 23: Grant
Chapter 24: Aribel
Chapter 25: Grant
Chapter 26: Aribel
Chapter 27: Grant
Chapter 28: Aribel
Chapter 29: Grant
Chapter 30: Aribel
Chapter 31: Grant
Chapter 32: Aribel
Chapter 33: Grant
Chapter 34: Aribel
Chapter 35: Grant
Chapter 36: Aribel
Chapter 37: Grant
Chapter 38: Aribel
Chapter 39: Grant
Chapter 40: Aribel
Chapter 41: Grant
Chapter 42: Aribel
Chapter 43: Grant
Chapter 44: Aribel
Chapter 45: Grant
Chapter 46: Aribel
Chapter 47: Grant
Chapter 48: Aribel
Chapter 49: Grant
Chapter 50: Aribel
Chapter 51: Grant
Chapter 52: Aribel
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I’d never given much thought to falling in love.
For someone like me, it’d seemed like an impossibility. Why dwell on something that would never happen? I’d had no interest in chicks for more than what they could give me in one night. Fuck ’em and then show ’em the door.
There were always clinger groupies, who would claim to love me. But they loved what I could offer them—sex, a one-night stand, a story to tell their friends about how they’d slept with a rocker, with Grant McDermott.
I was a name.
A symbol.
Nothing more.
My eyes slid over to the blonde sleeping in my bed. I brushed a strand of hair out of her mouth and pressed a kiss to her lips.
That was before Ari.
“Grant?” she whispered in her sleep.
My name on her lips was better than a thousand one-night stands.
I’d almost lost her to a whole lot of stupidity. Some groupie slut, Kristin, had come on to me at the ski lodge where my band, ContraBand, was playing the Poconos music festival. And by come on to me, I meant she had stripped down naked in my room and ambushed me, thinking I’d fuck her desperate ass. Ari had walked in, and all hell had broken loose.
After a month of miscommunication over Christmas break, we’d reconnected on the shore at my uncle’s beachside pizza place, Duffie’s.
The past two weeks, we’d been pretending that nothing had happened, but I knew something was brewing behind her big blue eyes.
“Yeah, Princess?” I said, sliding my body against hers. My hand ran over the dip in her waist and down to the curve of her tight ass. I tugged her closer to me, rocking her against my dick.
“Mmm,” she groaned. Her eyes fluttered open. “Again?” Her voice held groggy disbelief.
Ari really hadn’t believed me when I said my appetite was insatiable. I could fuck her all day long, and it wouldn’t be enough. I’d still want more. Sex had been my escape for too long for me to ignore the pull now that the same person was frequenting my bed.
“Again,” I agreed.
I rolled her onto her back and kissed my way down her front—between her breasts, over her soft stomach that often made her self-conscious from my attention, to her hip bones that peeked out from her cotton underwear, and down between her legs. My breath came out hot and urgent as I blew on her through the material. She whimpered and writhed in my grasp.
“Grant…Grant.” Her words were a moan, an encouragement.
My fingers hooked under the elastic and pulled them off. She stiffened beneath me and pushed herself up to the top of the bed. I reached for her, but she shook her head.
“I have class.” Ari looked at the comforter, the desk, my cherry red guitar—anywhere but at me.
“Not for an hour.”
“I need to shower and change.”
“I can take you,” I insisted.
“Don’t worry about it.” She slid off the bed and shrugged on her jeans. “Don’t you have to work at the recording studio today?”
I’d gotten a job working at a studio in Trenton when I wanted to show Ari that I was serious about something other than playing in a band. Her dad was the CEO of a bank in Boston, and I’d never seen money like that before. I couldn’t give her that, but I wanted to.
“Yeah. Later.”
I wanted to throw her down on the bed and fuck her until she stopped suggesting ways to keep us apart. But I couldn’t finesse my way into that—at least not with Ari. She would call me on my bullshit.
“Okay. Well, I’ll see you after work then,” she said, sidestepping the issue.
She threw her cardigan back on, tossed my old man’s dog tags over her head that I’d given to her last semester when I asked her to be my girlfriend, gave me a peck on the lips, and then dashed out of the room.
I crashed back into bed and stared up at the blank ceiling. I didn’t fucking understand what had just happened. I had my fucking girlfriend back. We were fucking together all the fucking time.
Yet I felt like the pussy getting ditched after a one-night stand.
I roughly slammed my hands down on the steering wheel of my BMW. What the hell was wrong with me?
I coul
dn’t believe I’d run out of Grant’s bedroom like a crazy person. I wanted to sleep with him. I wanted to be with him. But I had been acting like a total idiot, and if he hadn’t already noticed, then he certainly had after that spectacular performance.
Unlike most people my age, I actually knew who I was, and I’d never pretended to be anyone but myself in a relationship. Not everyone liked that I wasn’t afraid to speak my mind, and I didn’t need someone else for my own personal validation.
Then, Grant McDermott had walked into my life.
He loved everything about me that intimidated other guys. He’d push back when I tried to pull away. He fought for me and sacrificed for me and…loved me.
And lately, all I could think about were the million logical reasons that we would never work, like the fact that ContraBand had been selling an insane number of copies of their new single, “Life Raft”—a song Grant had written for me last semester. They weren’t hitting the Billboard charts, but I saw fame on the horizon even if Grant acted as if he didn’t. As much as that excited me, it also terrified me. I couldn’t think about losing him.
Not to mention, there was the scary fact that his dad was about to get out of prison where he had resided for the last thirteen years after murdering Grant’s mom in front of him.
On top of that, we’d never really talked about what had happened over Christmas break when we were apart. We’d both swept it all under the rug, assuming it was fine now since we’d slept together, but there was still so much we needed to address, so we could move forward and trust each other. Our month apart had been a reality check that things weren’t always going to be perfect between us, and after we’d gotten back together, it was easier to ignore that than to face it head-on.
Plus, I still hadn’t even told him about Henry, the guy who worked for my father. My parents had tried setting me up with him, and he had kissed me while I was drunk one night in Boston. It had only happened because I thought that Grant had slept with some groupie slut on New Year’s. But still…he didn’t know about it, and this would never work out if we couldn’t be honest.
I shuddered. The last person I wanted to think about was Henry.
Parking at the apartment that I shared with my three crazy roommates—Cheyenne, Gabi, and Shelby—I bounded up the stairs and went inside. Since Grant and I had gotten back together three weeks ago, I hadn’t been home this early in the morning. I usually kept a change of clothes at his place and would leave for campus from there. Staring at my roommates’ surprised faces after I’d barreled through the door, I could see they thought three weeks seemed more like a year.
“What are you doing home?” Cheyenne asked. She flipped her crazy red hair over one shoulder and cocked an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be in the throes of passion or whatever?”
I rolled my eyes and kept walking toward my room. “What? Just because I’m home early one morning, I haven’t been in the throes of passion? Jeez, I don’t see you and Vin together every morning.”
“Whoa! Chill. Vin and I aren’t even dating.”
“That’s because he’s a douche bag.” I pushed open the door to my room and leaned against the doorframe, waiting to see Cheyenne’s response.
Cheyenne shrugged. “Well, yeah.”
“Would the both of you shut it?” Shelby asked. “This feels like last semester all over again with you two bickering like an old married couple.”
“We do not!” I said defensively.
“She doesn’t like to give us the goods,” Cheyenne complained.
Shelby looked at Gabi for backup, but she had her nose buried in her laptop while dripping milk from her cereal onto the table.
“Gab?”
“Oh. Huh?” Gabi asked.
“Never mind,” Shelby said.
“You guys can’t sit there and act like you don’t want to know what’s going on with them.” Cheyenne threw her hand out at me.
“Actually, since she’s never home, I assume that the sex is pretty amazing,” Gabi said, looking at her computer screen.
“I never thought she’d be the one to go from proud holder of her V-card to sexpot living at her boyfriend’s house in a matter of a couple of weeks.”
I huffed at Cheyenne’s comment. “I’m still standing right here.”
I hadn’t even considered what my roommates might be saying about me while I was away. I knew that I’d made a drastic change in my life by agreeing to date Grant, but I’d thought they would be happy for me. Maybe they were, and this was their backward way of showing it.
“Anyway, I have to get ready for class.”
I disappeared into my room and changed into a purple V-neck sweater and jeans. Instead of taking the time to straighten my hair, I pulled it up into a tight ponytail at the nape of my neck. After applying some mascara and baby-pink lip gloss, I made a hasty retreat.
“You know,” Cheyenne said when I walked back into the living room.
“No, I don’t.”
“You’d think you’d be in a better mood with how often you’re getting laid.”
I slung my backpack over my shoulder. “I probably would be if you stopped badgering me about it.”
“Yeah, Cheyenne. If she wanted to tell you how big Grant’s dick was, she probably would have already,” Shelby cut in.
“Grant would probably show you before I’d tell you,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Noted,” Cheyenne said with a wink.
“Cheyenne!” Shelby cried. “You’re not going to ask Grant to show you his dick.”
“You’re right. That doesn’t sound like me at all.” Sarcasm dripped out of every word.
Laughter bubbled up out of me. I couldn’t help it. I’d been on edge all morning, and now, I was clearly losing my mind. I was sure that it all had something to do with my crazy course load and the issues with Grant. I wished I knew why Grant and I couldn’t work out our problems. When we had gotten back together on the beach, I’d thought the worst was over, but I had a feeling that the worst was yet to come.
“Dude, I got that track from last week,” Corey called out.
His hair was spiked up into a fauxhawk with a backward trucker hat resting about halfway back on his head. He wore black shades at all times, even in the studio, and alternated between different colored deep V-neck T-shirts underneath loose plaid button-ups.
I’d been working for Corey for almost two months now, and I still didn’t know what to make of him. The guy was a genius in the studio, but his social skills were limited to which obscure band he was into that week.
“Can I listen to it?”
Corey shrugged. “Yeah, man.”
He fiddled with the controls as I walked into the sound room and crashed back into one of the plush leather armchairs. A few seconds later, “Life Raft” filtered in through the speakers. I sat forward in the chair as the guitar riff picked up, and I belted out the first verse.
It was…perfect.
Our shit demo that thousands of people had listened to was nothing compared to this version. A real studio made a hell of a lot of difference. That fucking meant I’d get the talk from Miller again today at rehearsal.
I hadn’t told Ari yet, but Hollis—the Pacific Entertainment manager for the popular rock band, The Drift—had called Miller to try to recruit us. This was despite the fact that I’d managed to piss off Hollis after storming off stage on New Year’s Eve before proceeding to get into a fistfight with Donovan Jenkins, the lead singer of The Drift.
Apparently, the success of “Life Raft” had jolted ContraBand into the spotlight, but part of me didn’t want it to be a reality. I fucking liked waking up to my beautiful blonde every morning, going to the studio, and playing local gigs. But the guys weren’t content with playing at The Ivy League, a local Princeton bar, and I knew they weren’t fucking going anywhere without me.
“This is the fucking shit. Can you send it to me?”
Corey nodded. “I had extra time.”
He popped a disc out of the network of computers, dropped it into a case, and passed it over to me. It had a black cover with the band name, ContraBand, slashed across the front in lime green. The words Life Raft EP were scrawled underneath.
“EP?”
“I couldn’t get ‘Hemorrhage’ out of my head, so I put together the other tracks you were working on.”
“Fuck, man. Thanks.” I reached my hand out and shook Corey’s.
“Sure thing. Just get me tickets to Madison Square Garden when you guys make it.”
I laughed. Madison Square Garden. Yeah, right. “Will do.”
Once I reached my blue truck, I stuck the CD into the player and listened to our music on the drive home. Corey deserved a fucking medal for this shit. Every song was flawless, so clear and crisp.
It was exactly what I’d needed after Ari’s mad dash out of my apartment this morning. Work had kept me from thinking about her, but “Life Raft” was her song. I couldn’t keep my mind off of her with those lyrics pouring through the speakers.
I’d never been in a relationship before, so this was all new to me, but chicks didn’t run away from me. I knew we had issues we still had to deal with from before Christmas break, but something with her wasn’t right, and she was going to fucking tell me what the problem was.
“Hey, dipshit,” I said when I walked through the garage door at my place.
I smacked Vin on the back of his head and veered toward the sound system.
“Fucker!” Vin shot back. “Where the fuck have you been all damn day?”
“At work. Where the fuck do you think I’ve been?”
“Following around your piece of ass like a whipped motherfucker.”
“What did you say about Ari?” I growled, taking two steps toward Vin.
Miller intervened, “Can we go two days without you two at each other’s throats?”
Vin glared at Miller and crashed back into the couch. He still hadn’t gotten over the fact that Miller had hooked up with my cousin, Sydney, at the ski lodge the weekend we’d performed at the Poconos music festival. Vin had taken Syd’s virginity in high school and acted as if he had some claim over her. The truth was, she was even more of a slut than I had been before Ari, and that was fucking saying something.
