Dare (The Dare Trilogy) (18 page)

Turning on the water in the shower, she stripped from her clothes, glad to remove the grime of travelling before she stepped beneath the hot spray. Within moments her hair was plastered against her neck and shoulders as she reached out for the soap and began to rub along her arms, across her chest, massaging the suds into her heavy breasts. The water
made her skin alive, reviving its freshness, and soon she had forgotten all her cares, singing aloud as she cleaned herself.

So lost was she in her toilette that she did not hear Cam enter the bathroom and jumped when he pulled aside the curtain that sealed off the shower from the rest of the room.

“Now that is a sight for sore eyes,” he said, grinning.

Instinctively, she had crossed her arms across her breasts, but the sight of his handsome face made her naughty and she opened them again, stretching out wet fingers towards him.

“Why don’t you come and join me?” she asked. Her eyes glanced downwards, towards a familiar lump in his jeans. He sighed.

“I’d love to,” he told her. “But there’s dissension in the ranks. I’ve got to go with the others and check out the venue. They won’t be happy until they see that we’ve not been dumped in a similar dive as that place in Paris.”

She frowned at this, her lips pouting outwards. “Surely you don’t have to go
now
,” she said.

Instead of moving, Cam was staring at her, his eyes clear and piercing, that lump in his trousers becoming larger every second. “I should find more time for you,” he said, quietly.

She leaned forward, placing one hand around his neck, suds running down the fabric of his shirt and his skin. Pulling herself closer to him, her wet breasts squashing against his broad chest, she rubbed her hips against his thigh and lifted her face so that her mouth was millimetres against his.

“You’re all wet,” she told him, “and you can’t go out like that. You need to clean up before you do anything else, Mister Fraser
—and before you get clean, you have to get
really
dirty first.”

His grin was irrepressible as he allowed her to lead him gently into the shower, hot water splashing over his hair and clothes.

Dianne felt slightly apprehensive as she waited near the front of the stage for Black Ark to come on. The nightclub
—
Feuerwerk
—was by no means the largest in Berlin but nor was it as dingy as its alternative exterior had led her to believe. Outside, various smaller bars and clubs promised cabaret acts and other, more esoteric, delights, and certainly the clientele filling the room seemed to be dressed overwhelmingly in black, some of them affecting the powdery white makeup that Darius wore on stage. If nothing else, the lead singer of Optima would be at home.

As she usually did, she had no desire to hang around backstage with Darius’s other camp followers. Even after ten days on tour, the experience of seeing Optimus play (and Black Ark, of course) was still enough of a thrill for her to want to get among the crowd, to see the performance as it was meant to be seen and to throw herself into a frenzied dance. In any case, the conversation with Darius on his coach had unsettled her, and she had no desire to be alone with him while Black Ark played their set.

In any case, although she had to admit that the strange glamour of Optima did cast its spell over her during their performances—even if Darius Optimus himself failed to live up to the illusion—she also wanted to be there, to be visible, for Cam and the rest of his crew. Black Ark had spent the afternoon scrupulously checking and double checking their sound system. Cam’s face was set in grim determination, and though he did not speak about it to the others Dianne knew that he was intent on showing Optima that his band was a force to be reckoned with.

She was standing among a few people, idly curious as to what the support band would be like, before the stage, her arms wrapped around her chest. The air was warm and a little humid in the club, and her posture was more due to nerves than anything else
—and also to cover her breasts from the stunted local, in his fifties if he was a day, who was ogling her with a leer that made her skin crawl.

For the most part, the crowd was not a million miles away from the others she had seen since that first night in London, though there was a harder edge to them she felt. This also
made her nervous: clearly many of them would greet Optima adoringly, but Black Ark would have their work cut out to impress this lot.

Not for the first time, however, she pondered the size of this venue. From the way Darius spoke, he intended to be playing stadiums across Europe, but in the end she had found herself in nightclubs similar in size to
Feuerwerk
. That would not have surprised her—one of the things she had always appreciated about Optima was that although they were undoubtedly popular, they were also something of an acquired taste for most listeners. Darius’s ambition and hubris, however, clearly wanted much more.

She was disturbed from these and other musings by Cam leading out the rest of the crew onto the stage. There was a murmur among the crowd, and one isolated cheer. Before Dianne could add her voice to it, however, a plastic glass half-filled with beer sailed through the air before tipping its contents over Cam, soaking his shirt.

Dianne’s heart stopped in her chest and she wanted to scream in anger at the member of the audience who had thrown the missile. Cam, however, surprised her by not displaying any temper. Instead, he calmly strode to the microphone at the front and called out: “Danke, Berlin! Sie haben mein Durst gestillt!”

This raised a laugh from some members of the audience, but then Cam followed it with a flourish that changed the atmosphere completely. Tugging the front of his shirt, he sucked some of the beer with a comic look that made more people laugh, but when he lifted the fabric and pulled it over his shoulders, revealing a broad chest and muscular arms decorated with black tattoos, his abs a rippling washboard above the waistband of his jeans, more people began to cheer
—mainly women, Dianne noted with a mixture of jealousy and satisfaction. There were a few catcalls and whistles, and she was sure that plenty of those females around her could not help but see the large, solid bulge in his jeans. Dianne suddenly felt herself becoming wet between the legs, her heart beating more rapidly in her chest.

Cam gave a huge grin at this, his eyes glittering and his teeth shining white, his face carved in its beauty. His eyes scanned the audience until they came to rest on Dianne at last, and now his grin transformed into a warm smile, his whole face shining when he saw her.

The look between them could only have lasted a few seconds, but to Dianne it felt as though hours had passed. She was giddy, and as she watched him turn to Tony, James and Dan, nodding to them with complete self-composure as he strapped his guitar across his bare shoulders, she realised that something had subtly changed. Darius had goaded him, and now Cam refused to hide his talents. This was where he belonged.

The drums kicked in with a steady, powerful beat, joined shortly after by Cam and Dan on guitar and bass. For someone who had not even heard of Black Ark two weeks before, Dianne was quickly becoming an aficionado of the groups (admittedly limited) back catalogue: Fire, one of those songs that Cam thought was his best. When he moved to the microphone, however, glaring into the space before him with a determined intensity, as he began to sing Dianne was shocked.

“Du bist mein Feuer, meine ewige Flamme—immer, wenn ich dein Gesicht sehen, Ich durch die Nacht brennen.” The whistles and calls from the audience suddenly turned into a mighty cheer from those people who were nearest the stage, and the rest of the club, intrigued at the very least by what they had supposed to be a British band, now started to surge forward.

The music was fast, powerful, impulsive. Sensing that at last she was no longer surrounded by potentially antagonistic people, Dianne gave herself up to the music, letting it surge through her as she threw her head back, her long, black hair whipping her face, her muscles twitching in her limbs as she lost herself in her dance.

“Du bist alles was ich will, meine Lust für dich wird niemals sterben.” Dianne understood little of what Cam sang, but his voice, growling and deep, echoed deep within her chest, her belly, her loins, and she felt a wetness and desire for him that astonished her as it surged. His voice raged in her ears, her mind, her heart, her groin, passionate and powerful.

“Du alles tun, aber ich brauche mehr. Ich war schon immer dein, jetzt gib mir dich.”

At that moment, Dianne opened her eyes and looked up—straight into Cam’s handsome, dominant face, his blue eyes glittering with an icy fire, staring directly at her.

It had been a while, but in that instant she experienced an orgasm, gasping and shrieking with pleasure simply by looking at him, hearing him.

For the rest of the set, Dianne was a mess, her body throbbing, desperate, flinging itself to the front of the stage, ignoring the other bodies that pummelled into her as Black Ark played with a fury that she had never heard before. The sound was loud, clear, perfect, and her thighs were shaking, her nipples stiff and hurting inside her bra, her own voice hoarse as she screamed more loudly than anyone around her. She had no care how she appeared to anyone else: she was lost, willingly abandoning herself to the emotions she felt at that moment.

By the time Black Ark finished, the crowd let out an enormous cheer that filled
Feuerwerk
. Cam was grinning wildly, waving a tightly-muscled arm, glistening with sweat, above his head. His expression was shared by the rest of the band—even Dan was smiling—and Dianne jumped up and down, whooping with glee.

If she had been nervous with apprehension before they had come on stage, her body now trembled with different desires. She did not rush backstage, however: she had no wish to see Darius, not now, but instead hopped and jiggled in excitement, waiting for Cam to emerge. When he did, pushing his way through the crowd, some of whom recognised him and slapped his back or hugged him in a spirit of camaraderie, she rushed up to him, grabbing the still-damp shirt he had pulled back on and kissing him deeply, letting herself be swept up in his arms.

“Wow!” he said at last when she finally moved her mouth from his, her lips wet. “What’s that for?”

“It’s the first part of your reward,” she told him, her eyes blazing. “You wait till I get you back to the hotel and fuck the life out of you!” Some of those closest to the pair of them heard and evidently understood, not a few of the women looking at Dianne with clear jealousy.

He laughed at this and placed an arm around her shoulder, pulling her into his chest. After the petty humiliation he had been subjected to not a day before by Darius, he was now obviously in his element, strutting with the most beautiful woman in
Feuerwerk
by his side, wild and dishevelled as Dianne was, the two of them laughing and kissing as they strode towards the exit.

Their immediate satisfaction, however, encountered an obstacle. A figure stepped from the shadows, barely visible at first to Dianne, so fixated was she on Cam by her side. Then the woman became clear to her and she scowled as Elizabeth laid a hand on Cam’s arm.

“Leaving so soon?”

Cam opened his mouth to speak but then thought better of it and shrugged away Elizabeth’s hand, pulling Dianne even closer to him as he prepared to move away.

“That’s not a good idea, Cam.” Something about Elizabeth’s tone of voice made both of them pause.

“Why isn’t it?” Dianne asked, feeling spiteful at this interruption. “We’re going to celebrate.”

Elizabeth didn’t even glance back at her but instead kept her gaze focussed on Cam, her red lips pursed in disapproval. “Darius has something planned for afterwards,” she said tersely. “He wants you there—both of you.” Only now did she look at Dianne, and there was an evil glint in her eye. “He was very explicit about that.”

“Well, tell Gary he can go and fuck himself,” Cam retorted with a sneer. “We’ve got better things to do.”

He made to walk onwards again, but Elizabeth grabbed his arm again, her bony fingers digging tightly into fabric and skin as she lifted her lithe figure upwards slightly, whispering something in his ear. At first Cam’s face was bemused, then incredulous, and finally angry.

“You are fucking kidding me!” he exploded, his hold on Dianne loosening as he reared himself up even taller so that Elizabeth stood back quickly, a look of fear on her face. “Tell me you are fucking joking!”

“That’s what he said.” Elizabeth’s composure had been shaken, confronted by this flash of anger and she took another step backwards. “It’s your choice, but if I were you, I’d be there.” Without waiting for a reply she quickly turned on her heels and walked away.

“What did
she say?” Dianne could feel Cam’s rage, but also felt more concerned than afraid for herself, realising instinctively that she was neither its source nor its target. She wanted to hold him, console him.

Cam shook his head, unable to speak for a moment. His face had gone white, the colour draining out of it and his lips were pressed into a thin line. “I should just tell him to go and fuck himself,” he muttered at last.

“Come on,” she said gently, placing a hand tenderly on his arm, guiding him where Elizabeth had sought to restrain him. “Let’s go back to the hotel—or we can get a drink if you want.”