Redeeming You

by Lisa Cardiff

  “Do us both a favor and tell Alec to give her some money and hire a professional PR person.”

  “She won’t take handouts,” Jax said.

  “Great, now I’m her experiment. What’s going to stop her from selling our dirt for money?”

  “She might not give a shit about you, but she’d stick a hot poker in her eye before she hurt Alec, and selling any of us out would hurt the band and, therefore, Alec. She wouldn’t do it. You know their history.”

  He nodded. Alec hadn’t shared all the horrid details of his childhood, but he knew enough to realize it was far from happy and that meant that Alec and Taylor had each other’s backs more than any other brother and sister he’d ever met.

  “Fine. We can trust her. That’s nice,” Cam said sarcastically. “But is she qualified?”

  “By qualified, do you mean does she have any babysitting experience?” Laughing, Jax stood up from the chair. “I think she might have watched a couple of the neighbor’s kids when—”

  “Screw you,” Cam hissed. “You know exactly what I’m asking.”

  Smiling mockingly, Jax folded his arms across his chest. “Sure. She has a degree in marketing. She worked as a band promoter in Seattle while she was in college. She’s smart and she won’t fall for your innocent smile because she already knows you’re full of shit.” Jax shrugged. “The way I see it, she’s perfect.”

  Cam grunted. He wasn’t getting out of this. He actually had a babysitter for the next thirty days. “What are the ground rules?”

  “You can discuss that with her,” Jax looked at his watch. “You’re meeting her in the hotel restaurant in thirty minutes. Do yourself a favor, take a shower before you meet her. You smell like hell.”

  Cam’s jaw dropped. “You had no intention of giving me a choice in this, did you? This was a done deal before you knocked on my door this morning. What if I refused to meet her?”

  “Alec is waiting in the hall. We planned to physically drag you there if you didn’t agree to go.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “I’m a good friend. An asshole would’ve kicked you out of the band.” Jax walked toward the door, opening it a few inches and then he paused. “Don’t screw this up. We need you, but if you can’t be a team player, we won’t hesitate to replace you. We won’t let you take down Chasing Ruin because you refuse to pull your head out of you ass.”

  Fucker. When the door slammed, Cam tossed a pillow at the door. Sadly, he couldn’t even be pissed at Jax because Jax was right, he needed to hold up his end of the bargain and be a team player. Chasing Ruin had carried his dead weight long enough, and he needed to get his shit together and stop wallowing in the past. If that meant having Taylor Reed follow him around for the rest of the tour, he would do it, but he didn’t have to be happy about it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Taylor paced the floor of her brother’s hotel room. Jax and Alec still hadn’t returned from meeting Cam for the so-called intervention. Five more minutes and the carpet beneath her feet would be threadbare.

  She needed this job, even if it only lasted for thirty days. Her savings account was nearly exhausted and she refused to take a penny from Alec. She loved her brother, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that Alec’s money came with strings. He loved her, but he was also one of the most overprotective, overbearing brothers in the history of mankind. She wanted to support herself, otherwise she’d end up exactly like her mom some day: falling into the arms of any man who would throw a couple bucks in her direction.

  Sure, if Chasing Ruin offered her the job, the money she earned would indirectly come from Alec, so in theory, she’d be getting a handout, but at least she’d be doing something for the money even if the job only entailed being Cam’s shadow and conscience. She’d rather dig ditches than live from Alec’s handouts. She needed to make it in life on her own two feet.

  Working with Cam would seriously suck. He was a complete douchebag with his pretty boy smile, his blond hair and cutesy fucking tattoos. He wanted to portray some bad boy from the wrong side of town rocker image, but he didn’t even know the meaning of a hard life.

  From what she’d heard, he had the perfect well-adjusted childhood in a picturesque mountain town with two devoted parents who showered their only child with endless amounts of affection. Even with all that love and support, he still couldn’t stop his downward spiral after he lost Bre, which was his own fault. Self induced misery wasn’t real. He should try being sucker punched by a heavy dose of parental neglect, abject poverty and shit luck. What a loser.

  The door swung open and she spun around. Jax trailed behind her brother. She couldn’t tell from the look on their faces whether she was about to be officially employed by Chasing Ruin as Cam’s babysitter.

  “He agreed,” Jax said, leaning against the doorjamb, his feet crossed at his ankles.

  If Jax weren’t so head over heels in love with Bre, Taylor wouldn’t mind sampling a little of what he had to offer. Being in the same room with him, she could feel his presence as though it were a living, breathing thing. He had a calling and it was on display every time Chasing Ruin took the stage. Too bad he didn’t need a babysitter.

  “So he’s fine with it?” she asked, suddenly a little nervous. She rubbed her hands against her black, shiny, skinny jeans to eliminate some of her anxiety.

  “Fine wouldn’t be the word I’d use, but he agreed and that’s all that matters,” Jax said affirming her suspicions.

  Alec walked toward her and threw his arm around her shoulder. “Tay…are you sure you want to do this? If this is just about money, I’ll give you money to live on until you find a job you love. You don’t have to settle.”

  She shrugged Alec’s hand off of her shoulder. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. It’s only thirty days and then I’ll have some awesomeness to add to my resume. I can spin it as a PR job.” She smiled faintly and even she didn’t think her smile was very convincing. “Trust me.”

  Alec growled. “I trust you. I don’t trust him.”

  Taylor laughed a real laugh, not some phony “I’ll be fine” laugh that she’d been dishing out since she dumped her ex-boyfriend. “Don’t worry about me. He’s just a little kindergartener pretending he’s a badass playboy. His charm won’t work on me.”

  She lifted her brush from the dresser and brushed her long black hair. Last week, she had added a blue streak at the very front on the right side of her face. She liked the way it highlighted her blue eyes. They looked almost navy today. The hair color change was all part of reinventing her image after leaving her ex-boyfriend, Miles, six months ago. It made her feel as though she was recapturing some of the control she lost over her life when she dated him.

  “So what’s the plan? When do I start?”

  Jax pushed away from the wall. “Cam’s meeting you in the hotel lobby restaurant in about five minutes.”

  Great. Now she was nervous again. She thought she’d have until tonight or even a couple hours to mentally prepare for this meeting. “All right. Well, I’ll touch base later tonight and let you know how it goes.”

  “Tay,” her brother called after her. “I can go with you. You don’t have to go alone. I’ll act as a buffer.”

  Shit, her brother could always read her like a book, and right now, he knew the idea of talking to Cam made her nervous. She and Cam hadn’t exchanged more than a few words over the last two years; mostly because she’d never felt comfortable around him, but she had to get over it if she was going to do this job.

  “I can do this on my own. It’s not a big deal. We’ll make a plan that we can both live with over the next thirty days and we’ll stick to it.”

  “Just so you know,” Jax said as she started walking down the hotel hallway. “Cam isn’t happy about this. It’s not going to be easy. He’s going to fight you every step.”

  “Uh huh,” she responded as she walked down the hall holding her hand up to wave. She didn’t expect anything else based on the pictures o
f him flooding the internet over the last month.

  Five minutes later, she walked into the hotel restaurant and she immediately spotted Cam sitting at a corner table with aviator sunglasses shading his eyes from the dim light of the restaurant. She suspected the sunglasses were a part of his attempt to be anonymous and also a tool to protect his sensitive, bloodshot eyes after another night of drunken stupidity. His back rested lazily against the red booth, his arms stretched out on either side of him like he didn’t have a care in the world. He was wearing a black, faded long-sleeved t-shirt, the sleeves pushed up exposing the swirling designs on his forearms that had slowly been growing over the last six months—not that she paid attention to his arms or any other part of his body.

  “Can I help you?” a woman asked as she cruised past the hostess stand.

  “Nope. I see the person I’m meeting,” she answered without turning around.

  When she reached Cam’s table, she stood next to the vacant side of the booth waiting for Cam to acknowledge her presence. He knew she was there, staring at him, but he patiently flipped the pages of the menu refusing to look at her. Typical. After a few prolonged seconds of her temper steadily rising, she cleared her throat.

  Cam still didn’t look at her. “Are you going to sit or do you want to stand there admiring me for a couple more minutes?” he drawled lazily.

  “Are you going to take off your cheesy sunglasses or are you too hung over to act like a normal human being?” she shot back, anger pumping heatedly through her veins as she sat in the booth across from him.

  Cam peeled off his dark sunglasses and carelessly tossed them on the table. “Better?” Cam asked gazing at her with his heavily hooded eyes, a sardonic smile floating on his lips.

  She already wanted to kill him; well, maybe not kill him. That was too extreme. Tossing a glass of ice water at him might be more appropriate, but thirty days of this back and forth shit and one of them would probably be dead. “Slightly, but now I have to look at your eyes and they’re a bit distracting.”

  Cam leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the edge of the table. “Are you trying to tell me something…like you’re attracted to me? I get that a lot, you know.” His lips curled up at the corners sinfully.

  Smiling contemptuously, Taylor purposely let her eyes trail over his face down to his chest and back up again. Blessed with the face of an angel and a body made for sin, he was good-looking; there was no doubt. His messy light blonde hair, his black t-shirt stretched across his obviously muscular chest in all the right ways, his normally piercing blue eyes and perfectly sculpted bone structure made him one smoking hot rocker, but she’d never tell him that. He already knew. She didn’t need to contribute to his already inflated ego.

  “No, not even close. I was trying to tell you that you look like shit. Your eyes are bloodshot and swollen. I think your face is a little waxy and bloated looking too.” Taylor leaned forward, pretending to study him as she tapped her fingers on the table. “Other than that, I guess you’re okay if you’re into the yuppie loser pretending to be the big bad wolf type…and I’m definitely not.”

  And she wasn’t, but there was something about Cam that made her heart beat a little faster and her stomach flutter, and she desperately hoped it came from disgust rather than attraction, because letting Cam into her life would be a disaster. She just walked away from one crappy relationship. She didn’t need to be chasing after another.

  Looking genuinely amused, he burst out laughing, his low husky voice sending a shiver of awareness down her spine and a small part of her wanted to smile, but she ignored it. She had a job to do, and indulging in any part of Cam, even his laugh, would be stupid. Cam was an emotional black hole right now and she’d spent her whole childhood crawling out of one. She didn’t need to jump back in now regardless of how tempting Cam appeared on the surface with his sexy smile, his tattered jeans and his tshirts that highlighted a chest her fingers itched to touch.

  “I’m glad you set the record straight.” Cam relaxed against the booth again. “I wouldn’t want any misunderstandings to impair our professional relationship or your budding career as a rock star babysitter.”

  Taylor rolled her eyes. Jax was right. Cam had no intention of going easy on her. “Speaking of potential misunderstandings and our professional relationship, I thought we should take this opportunity to define our expectations and goals for the next thirty days.”

  Cam stood up and braced his hands on the table next to her. “I’d like to order first. I’m starving. Do you want anything?” he asked, towering over her, invading her space.

  “No. I’m good.” It was a lie. She was starving. She’d hardly eaten anything the entire day, but she would run and get something when their meeting ended. She was too nervous to eat now with Cam judging her every move.

  Cam lifted his eyebrows. “If you say so.”

  Five minutes later, Cam slid back into the booth. “Okay, start talking.”

  Taylor took a sip of her ice water, looking at him over the rim of her glass. “It’s not too complicated. I plan to accompany you wherever you go over the next thirty days and make sure you don’t do anything else that pisses off your label.” She shrugged.

  He watched her not saying a word, his face completely blank. Part of her wished she never asked him to take off his sunglasses. His face was distracting and not in the way she told him. “Do you have any thoughts?”

  “Thoughts?” he questioned, the sardonic smile making another appearance.

  “Yes,” she answered drawing out the word. “You know what those are, right? Or are you still too drunk or whatever else from last night to comprehend this conversation?”

  “I have quite a few thoughts about this arrangement.” His blue eyes sparked with anger.

  He was an ass—a good-looking ass—but an ass all the same. “Do you want to share?” She arched one eyebrow.

  “Sure. I’m just running through all the potential scenarios in my head.”

  “You do that. When you’re done, feel free to share.”

  The waitress slid a burger and a beer in front of him and a tuna sandwich and an iced tea in front of her.

  “I said I wasn’t hungry,” she said looking down at her plate, hoping her stomach wouldn’t inconvenience her by growling at that moment. Her sandwich looked delicious and she loved tuna salad sandwiches, especially on toasted bread, but she didn’t want to take anything from him. He’d probably hold it against her later.

  “Uh huh.” He took a bite of his burger, chewing slowly as he watched her. “I heard you, but you won’t be eating until I’m hungry again, so I went ahead and ordered you something.”

  “How do you figure?” she asked absently picking up a french fry from her plate and twirling it between two fingers.

  “You have to follow me everywhere, right?”

  “Yep,” she said taking a small bite of the fry in her hand. Salty and hot, just the way she liked them.

  “And I’m eating right now.”

  She nodded.

  “And I might not eat again today. I haven’t decided.” He looked at his phone sitting adjacent to his plate of food. “It’s already three in the afternoon. This might be it for us today unless I want a late night snack and I’ve been known to make a run between two and four in the morning.” He shrugged, smiling devilishly, his bright blue eyes twinkling just enough to piss her off. “Just warning you.”

  She glared at him. “No.”

  “No, what?” he asked innocently after he took a sip of his beer.

  “No late night runs. Eating at night makes you fat,” she blurted out because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  His hot gaze traveled over her body and she knew he intended to make her uncomfortable, and it was working…to some extent. She hated being the recipient of his overly attentive examination.

  “You look fine now, but it looks as though you have a tendency to gain weight in your hips. You might want to limit your late night sn
ack to a salad.”

  She threw her napkin on the table. “What’s your problem with me? I didn’t do anything to you. I was offered a job to keep you out of trouble. I didn’t create the job. I’m doing Chasing Ruin a favor. There’s no reason to insult me.”

  “I would’ve happily peed in a cup for the remainder of the tour, but no, you needed a job, so now I’m stuck with you as a sidekick for a month,” Cam shot back.

  “Well, it’s a done deal now so get over it. The label agreed. The band agreed. Let’s work together to make this go as smoothly as possible.” She hoped her voice didn’t sound as though she was pleading with him, but she didn’t want to spend a month bickering with him.

  Cam tapped one of his fingers on his chin, a sly smile pulling on his lips. “How is this little arrangement going to work?”

  “What do you mean?” Taylor asked hesitantly. He was up to something, and judging from the look on his face, she wouldn’t like it, not one bit.

  “After a show, I like to pick up a girl or two and fuck. It’s kind of a ritual for me. It releases some tension.” Cam leaned across the table, tugged on the blue streak at the front of her hair, wrapping it around his finger and then he released it. “What can I expect from you? I mean, you can watch or you can join in. It’s up to you. What do you think? Are you more of a watcher or a doer?” He grinned. “I’m fine with either. I’m into both.”

  His voice was low and inviting as he grinned that crazy sexy grin she’d seen him flash on stage more than a few times. Sadly, it made her heart skip a beat or two when he aimed it at her. He was good—better than she gave him credit for—and he knew it and it kind of pissed her off.

  “Hmm…that’s a hard choice,” she murmured. “I’m not sure.” She leaned forward pretending to contemplate his ridiculously insulting question, her mouth within grazing distance of his, and she smiled coyly. “Good thing I don’t have to decide because your post show groupie gorging days are over, or at least until the end of the tour,” she said leaning back again, feeling completely satisfied when she noticed the exasperation sizzling from his pretty-boy blue eyes. She pressed her lips together so she didn’t laugh. She didn’t need to rub it in his face.