Sympathy For Diablo (Breathless Eternity #1)

by S. E. Chardou

  I raised my eyebrows in frustration, mostly because I couldn’t even bring myself to really care what we were discussing. “What do you expect me to say? I don’t own you—your body is yours to do what you want with it.”

  “Fabulous!” Sorsha kissed me on the side of my mouth. Then I’ll see you upstairs, lover.”

  I began to pace, waiting for my brother’s arrival, as I stole more glances of the brunette from my phone. She was so beautiful but she had to be young—younger than Sorsha, which appeared to be her only flaw until now.

  Unlike some men who practiced “the younger the better,” mantra, I was quite satisfied with pursuing women in my own age bracket or older. I was twenty-eight years old and a rock god but that didn’t make me fucking ancient. My brother was thirty-one, and although this wasn’t the first time we’d shared Sorsha, he didn’t seem to mind how young or old a woman was—as long as she was of age. Me, I think I’d grown picky over the years and preferred women with life experience. I was tired of entitled, rich bitches like Sorsha and the greedy, unscrupulous groupies who would do anything. It wasn’t my scene.

  A woman didn’t have to be virginal and innocent—hell, I’d prefer if she weren’t a virgin because she deserved someone other than me to be her first. Sometimes I could control the beast deep inside of me and sometimes he lashed out on his own, famished for blood and living up to the reason why everyone called me Diablo as opposed to my Christian name, Adrien.

  I didn’t have anger issues per se, but I was far from the gentleman a woman would introduce to her parents.

  I liked my sex how I liked my booze—with a kick and a bit of kink to it. Hell, only I had made a habit of mixing cognac and Jack Daniels. They even had named a drink after me that consisted of Hennessy cognac, JD and a splash of Coke—the soft drink, not the drug. It was appropriately called “The Diablo”. I was quite proud of that achievement despite all the many other accolades the band managed to keep racking up.

  Damien walked into the front door and slammed it behind himself. Although deep in thought, it would be a cold day in hell before my brother would ever catch me unaware. We might not have been twins but we knew each better than we knew ourselves at times.

  I walked side by side with him, his mood not exactly peppy or upbeat. “What’s wrong with you? Not excited about dirty, sexy fun with Sorsha?”

  “Your salope called—she said she was up for a little threesome action.”

  I turned toward my older brother, who was dressed impeccably as usual. He might have been the manager for a hard rocking band but you would never know it by the designer clothes he wore, the way his hair was styled to metrosexual perfection and his smooth, clean-shaven appearance. In fact, of the two, most people assumed he was a much better person than I was based upon his appearance alone. However, I learned a long time ago that looks could be deceiving.

  Damien’s icy interior, petty jealousy, and ability to hold a grudge tagged him for the man-child he truly was behind his tailored Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior suits. If anyone had a heart of stone and a brain for a calculator, it was my brother, not me.

  I was much too easy to hurt—emotionally speaking—which was the very reason why I kept my feelings locked away from almost everyone. I couldn’t stand for a woman to break my heart so I never allowed for one to get that close to me. I was brash, irrational and when I fell, I fell head over feet fucking hard.

  There was plenty of evidence of my control—or lack thereof—when it came to the opposite sex. Why had this brunette beauty invaded my thoughts and interested me in her to the point of obsession. I wasn’t used to hearing the word, “no,” and whatever I wanted, I could have. I would do anything to claim this brunette but first, I had to find out why and how she’d gotten on Damien’s bad side.

  “The beauty in the picture you sent me—”

  “Sierra.” My brother’s voice was cold, detached and unlike the usual easy-going, jovial mask he wore for the rest of the world.

  “She’s not the woman you’re dating. She’s obviously American—her straight white teeth give her away.”

  Damien snickered. “If you want her, you can have her. In fact . . . Angelina knows her. They are close friends. She is the woman I am dating, brother, not Sierra.”

  I turned towards him, his blue eyes arctic to the point there was little green left around his pupils. “What has this Sierra done to you? I don’t understand why you despise her so much.”

  “You mean besides being born?”

  “That’s not an answer, Damien. You should know better than anyone that children are never to be held responsible for the actions of their elders.”

  My brother tossed his coat aside and began to unbutton his silk shirt. “She’s not a child and this isn’t about revenge. It’s about justice. There is a big difference.” He walked past me with all the interest of a monkey being observed at the zoo. “Come on, let’s get this over with. I already feel like shit for cheating on Angelina.”

  “I thought that wasn’t serious,” I responded as I followed him through the hallway of my apartment.

  “Yeah? Well things change and I decided I want to keep her around after all.”

  It was my turn to chuckle underneath my breath. “Damien, could you be any more typical?”

  “Touché, mon frère,” was his only jaded response.

  I’D GROWN EXTREMELY frustrated and incredibly irritated because sex shouldn’t have been this goddamn hard to get off on. I was the quintessential Frenchman in that I enjoyed fucking, making love, et cetera very much but not when it became a fucking chore. Tonight, I couldn’t seem to get off for the life of me and it made me that much more frustrated with Sorsha.

  She had to go. I’d been with her too long and she’d become like the furniture in my apartment. I had no wish to marry her, and although I cared about her, my feelings never ventured into love. Hell, I didn’t even like her all that much let alone being anywhere near in love with her.

  There was one part of my personality that frustrated many—including my brother. I may have been a man and I had no problems with fucking women without a single emotion attached but I would never make a woman my bride unless I had that can’t-breathe-can’t-live-without-her love. It was perhaps a bit whimsical and immature but it was my philosophy and anyone who didn’t agree with me could go to hell. No way was I spending the rest of my life with someone I was only “kind of into.” It didn’t make any sense to me.

  Society’s rules or the club’s didn’t burden me, fortunately. Though I was the son of a powerful MC President, I’d never joined the club and never expressed any interest. My father had plenty of good men around him to take his place. All I wanted to do was pursue my passion for hard rocking music and sing songs that touched people to their very core. That was what I found important—everything else was simply window-dressing as far as I was concerned.

  My mind wandering didn’t help the current situation at hand as Sorsha sucked my cock like a goddamn vacuum cleaner while Damien plowed into her from behind. He wore a condom so I assumed whatever he had with this other woman he was quite close-lipped about must have been serious. The sex between him and my girlfriend was as unattached as possible. It was about him getting his rocks off, and nothing else entered the picture. In fact, his eyes were closed and I assumed he was imagining the mystery woman he told me so very little about.

  Meanwhile, I took a page out of his book and closed my eyes. I blocked out the vibrations coming from Sorsha’s mouth on my dick and imagined that gorgeous brunette with her pink lips wrapped around my length. I was not a small man and would take some getting used to but I could train her to crave my cock like no other man who’d ever fucked her, and she’d worship at my altar the same way my current flame was doing at the moment.

  The slurping, the feel of entering her throat as she looked up at me with those doe eyes, wanting to please me as much as possible, started my heart racing sporadically. It was no longer just a vision or f
antasy but this mysterious beauty had replaced Sorsha.

  No longer was my brother anywhere in the picture because he’d never touch her—ever. She was all mine and the very thought of a man with his hands on her drove me toward the brink of madness.

  My balls tightened and I flexed my hips against her mouth, shoving my dick deeper down her throat. I wanted to feel all of me inside her wet mouth. I gyrated a little too harshly and heard a choking sound; I had to slow down and take it easy with my beauty that was young, and with little experience on how to please a man. I stroked her silky hair and allowed her to take the lead but that’s all it took before I could hear the animalistic grunts leaving my mouth and I came.

  She swallowed all of my cum like the most expensive bottle of Cristal and came back for more, moaning her approval.

  Unfortunately, Sorsha’s voice brought me back to reality and my cock deflated like an old helium balloon. I stood and walked away from the bed as Damien discarded his used condom in a trashcan and had begun to dress as if nothing out of the ordinary had recently occurred. He’d take a shower at his own apartment; although I considered myself clean, my brother was fastidious to the point of obsession. Unfortunately, even as neat as my apartment was, it wasn’t perfect enough for him.

  “Salut,” I heard him say before he left my bedroom and I closed the door to my en suite bathroom.

  I started the shower and washed all the grime off my body. I couldn’t stand to know Sorsha had gotten me off while I was thinking about a woman I didn’t know. She had turned a mild obsession into something else and it scared me more than she would ever know.

  She probably had no idea who I was.

  Did she even listen to our music at all?

  I remember my brother mentioning something about her showing up at the concert tomorrow night but that didn’t necessarily make her a fan of ours. She could have been accompanying her friends though she might have thought our sound was pedestrian and simply below her musical tastes.

  My heart thundered in my chest and I realized the only person who could tell me more about her had left for the night.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The whole “Sorsha situation” would be handled by the following day but until then, Damien couldn’t simply leave me hanging.

  I needed to know more about this mystery brunette who had mystified me, and changed me beyond recognition in just one night.

  “NOW THIS, MY best friends forever, is paradise.”

  I turned toward Lizzy, the speaker of said declaration. She wore a content smile on her face that could have been rays from the sun itself while I simply rolled my eyes.

  “How do you come to that conclusion?” Angelina inquired as she pinched the features of her gorgeous face. “You know I’m allergic to grass, we barely saw the Versailles palace and we’re out here on a fleece blanket in a park surrounded by cigarette butts. Ugh! Why can’t people put them in the trashcan where they belong?”

  I laughed out loud now while both Angelina and Lizzy glanced at me with looks of thinly veiled disdain.

  “It is a slice of paradise,” I finally chimed in. “No rain today, beautiful sunny weather and so what if we didn’t get to see the palace at our leisure. We’re in beautiful France the first month of our summer vacation. Come on, how many young, drop-dead beautiful college graduates get to say that?”

  Angelina glowered at me, her amber-brown eyes bright with conflicting emotion but she finally broke into a heartwarming smile. She was beautiful—probably the most stunning out of the three of us. With her naturally olive complexion, gorgeous brown hair tinged with natural chestnut highlights, a body to die for at five feet, six inches and a face perfectly in proportion to her features. I blamed her alluring mixture of Romanian, Serbian, Croatian and Hungarian.

  Most Americans pretended like they didn’t give a shit about ethnicity as long as you were white but that was not the case in Angelina’s household. She’d grown up in a fiercely religious and proud family that emphasized their European roots and were quite proud of the countries where they came from.

  “Fine, you win,” she said before she broke into a perfectly white, capped American smile. “It’s not so bad. We get to see Breathless Eternity later on tonight!”

  “Hell yeah!” Lizzy chimed in.

  “All thanks to my boyfriend—the delicious Damien Bissette—who managed to get us tickets and backstage passes,” Angelina added for good measure, as if we could possibly forget who she happened to be dating. She bragged about the guy enough to drive Lizzy and me insane.

  Lizzy glanced at me and rolled her eyes. It was obvious she thought Angelina was crazy in love with someone who would never go the distance.

  “You met him online—how serious do you think he can be?” she questioned with wide cornflower-blue eyes. “Seriously, he probably leads women on all the time.”

  Angelina bristled and her amber eyes glared at Lizzy. “We didn’t meet online. He started following me on Instagram because I was already following him and the band. Then, we chatted on Skype. It’s not like we traded profiles on Match.com. Stop being so damn cynical.”

  I couldn’t help stirring the pot. “Technically, Instagram is on the worldwide web . . . so yeah, you did meet him online.”

  My BFF glowered at me. “Hey—did you finish Asking Alexandria about how they planned on Breaking Benjamin?”

  “No but I did tell The Weeknd to Bring Me The Horizon,” I said in a cynical manner.

  “I personally believe a Halestorm totally just sizzled Papa Roach,” Lizzy offered though she wasn’t nearly as good at the “Musician Name Game” as Angie and I were.

  Angie smirked. “In this Moment, I am convinced One Direction are definitely children of the Korn. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know, smart ass,” I replied. “Does Tina turn her? Does Stevie wonder?”

  Lizzy laughed hysterically. “You two are both the biggest nerds but I love ya both! Let’s just enjoy being wild and free before real life interrupts our brief interlude.”

  There was a reason why these two crazy chicks were my best friends. There was no denying they were truly opposites in almost every way.

  Lizzy, also known as Elizabeth, was a dazzling blonde—no peroxide necessary. She was a natural beauty from Minnesota transplanted to the Boston area by her parents at a fairly young age. We’d been best friends since the first grade when she tentatively approached me, and inquired what color my eyes were.

  There wasn’t an evil bone in Lizzy’s body. She had that perfect creamy complexion from a Scandinavian and Teutonic heritage, blue eyes that changed like the sky, blonde hair the color of ripe wheat that was both thick and gorgeous. Pale eyebrows she penciled in to make darker so that they suited her perfect pixie features and an almost perfectly symmetrical face rounded out her innocent yet compelling looks. Another beautiful woman, she had some height on her and a man’s dream body with killer curves and perky mid-sized breasts but she still managed to look awesome in a bikini.

  These two women I loved like no other and it was the last summer we would be able to revel in being irresponsible adults still attached to our parents’ pocketbooks.

  The autumn brought change for all of us.

  Angelina was off to MIT as a graduate student in some kind of pharmaceutical MBA program.

  Lizzy would be leaving Boston University for Harvard where she would be studying corporate law.

  I was the only one who’d decided to stay at BU, only because the tuition wasn’t nearly as outrageous, they’d offered me a scholarship, and I could still go on to get my masters in Political Science with a minor in French language. I was the dreamer, the one who wanted to change the world.

  Where as Angelina wanted to work for Pfizer or Novartis, and Lizzy dreamed of getting a job at Baker & McKenzie, I would have been more than happy to get a job at the United Nations or an NGO—non-governmental organization—like the International Monetary Fund or World Health Organization.

  I
really believed we could all make a difference in our own eclectic ways but that’s why we had such a strong bond. None of us ever criticized or condescended each other about what we wanted out of life. We knew our strengths and weaknesses—we complimented each other and it was the perfect reason we remained close friends.

  “So, um . . .” I trailed off as I sat up and poured more red wine in a clear plastic cup. “What kind of sexual favors have you been performing for Damien? We know you’ve met him yet you refuse to bring him around. Why is that?”

  Angelina smiled again though she revealed nothing of importance. “Never you mind. I didn’t have to do anything sexual with Damien. We met a few times, had a meeting of the minds . . . he’s quite fascinating you know. Not all men are pervs who need to get some shortly after meeting an attractive woman.”

  “True but this guy is the manager of one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Are you telling me he’s as hot as he is and he’s never tried to get into your pants?” I questioned as Lizzy grabbed the bottle of wine from me and refilled her own plastic cup.

  “I never said that. I merely mentioned we haven’t had sex . . . yet.”

  I swigged from my wine. “Mmm, and this is why I am going into political science. After a summer of hedonism and debauchery, I have to soothe my tattered conscience by at least trying to make the world a better place.”

  “The world isn’t ever gonna be a better place, Sierra,” Angelina responded in a cynical, cold tone. “We used it all up. Climate change is ravaging the earth, we face more international enemies than any time in the world, and the refugee problem to developed nations from third world countries keeps getting worse—not better. Look at how many times we’ve been hit up by gypsies and the lot since we’ve been here in Paris?”

  “We’re in Versailles, genius,” Lizzy interrupted. “Last time I checked, this is not Paris proper.”