Max lifted his eyebrow the faintest bit and I took that to mean it was time.
“I’m still waiting for an explanation.”
He pushed his phone across the table toward me.
The image on display showed me with my back up against the car, one hand low on Carly’s hip, while the other gripped her back. She had her hands fisted on my chest and we looked pretty much like nothing else mattered.
So, that was what we looked like together.
“Ah...” I looked over at Carly. I knew Max already knew what was happening, so I felt sort of stupid telling him what he already knew.
She pressed her lips together, and I realized I wasn’t going to get any help from her. I looked back at Max and he raised an eyebrow.
I gave him a sheepish smile. “Oops?”
A smile jerked at his lips, but he got it under control quickly. “Oops?” he repeated. “That’s the best you can do? Just how long have you two been involved?”
Carly pursed her lips. “Do we count the six months we were keeping it cool because Ryan and Jake asked us to?”
Max made a show of dragging his hands down his face. “Six months?”
“We haven’t been involved for six months,” I said, shrugging. “Not really.”
He perked up a little.
“Well. We had a thing,” Carly said. She smiled a little sadly as some truth came into the story. “Then, after Jake fell, he asked Bobby to wait a while. He figured it wasn’t the best time for me to get involved with anybody. So Bobby waited. Now?”
She looked over at me, and the moment our eyes met, it was clear to me that I’d never stood a chance.
She possessed me, body, mind and soul.
***
“Did you mean it?”
It had been two weeks to the day since I said those three words to Carly, and this was the first time she’d brought it up. I hadn’t said anything about it, but I had a good reason. Sometimes, I was chickenshit.
But I couldn’t avoid it now.
I didn’t even have to ask what she meant.
Carly lay with her head on my chest, staring up at me. Her skin was still slick with sweat and so was mine. My heart hadn’t even come close to returning to normal, and I was happy to say neither had hers. I could feel it beating in a mad rhythm as she continued to watch me with calm eyes.
Did she
feel
calm?
I sure as hell didn’t.
“If I didn’t mean it, I wouldn’t have said it.” It would’ve been easier to tell her that if I’d been staring up at the ceiling when I said it, but I wasn’t a complete coward.
“When?”
I didn’t pretend to not understand that either, but that was an easier one to answer. A stupid kind of smile started to spread across my face.
“I think it might’ve started when you hit me in the head with that damn purse of yours and yelled at me. You almost got run over by a car, but were you worried about that? No. You were too busy being put out because I had the nerve to get in your way.”
She sniffed, but then a grin spread out across her face. “I couldn’t believe you had the nerve to yell at me and call me stupid. Nobody’s
ever
yelled at me.”
“You probably thought I was an idiot,” I said.
“No.” Her voice softened. “I liked it. People never take the time to get to know me for me. They just decide on who they think I am, who they want me to be, based on what they think they know about me. You didn’t do that.”
I slid my hands down her back and caught her hips, tugging her close. “Who everyone else says you are doesn’t matter to me. It never has.”
“I know.” She leaned up and kissed me lightly. “I might have loved you for that alone, Bobby. But then you had to go and be so wonderful. I had no choice but to fall in love with you, you know.”
Chapter 17
Ever since that ‘
oops
’ bit of mine, the media had been on my ass like fleas on a dog. The stories ranged from laughable to lousy, from stupid to sickening, and everything in between. There had been days when it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed and face the people I worked with, the woman I love, hell, strangers on the street.
Then there was the whole surreal aspect of things, like I’d fallen through some weird sci-fi thing and ended up in an alternate reality or something.
Like the one day I’d gone to a local gym. Carly had a great one, but she didn’t have a rock wall and that was one thing I’d discovered I loved – rock climbing. I’d just been coming out of the gym, and these two girls, probably barely out of high school, had come up to me. The blonde had been all giggly and red-faced as she asked if I’d give her and her friend an autograph. I’d been asked before, something I knew I’d never get used to.
But then they’d asked me,
What’s it like to kill somebody? What’s it like...being in prison?
I’d stopped, halfway through the scrawl of my name. If I’d been smart, I would have just finished up, ignored the questions and gone on. If I’d noticed the paps hanging around, I would have. But it hadn’t been until after that I’d noticed them at all.
“You serious?” I’d asked, staring at the girl who asked.
She looked like she’d been trying to make herself out as some sort of street tough, a hoop through her right nostril, the start of what might be a tattoo sleeve on her right arm.
To me, she looked like a little girl trying on her bigger, meaner sister’s clothes. A child playing dress-up.
“Yeah.” She fluttered her lashes, black and thick with too much mascara. “What’s it like...Bobby?”
“It hurts,” I said bluntly, too freaked out to give her anything but the truth. “It tears out a piece that makes you human, and no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try to fix yourself, you can never get that piece back. No matter what you do, you can’t fix the hole you tore in another family when you ended somebody’s life. You’re broken. They’re broken. That’s it.”
She blinked then, caught off-guard, and looked at her friend. “But...”
“No.” I shook my head. “You wanted to know what it’s like and I told you. No buts. Prison? Hell, that’s a bucket of laughs. If you like having to guard your food and bolt it down so nobody steals it from you before you can eat it. Ever had somebody try to shank you while you were eating?”
I half-turned, dragging up my shirt and displaying the long, thin jagged scar that tore up my right side. Carly had gotten the story out of me one night when she’d been tracing all of my scars. It was still the most impressive.
“It barely missed my kidney. Spent some time in the infirmary over that one, and that was just one of my easier stays there. Want to hear about the other times?”
“Um.” She blinked again, her eyes watering.
I should’ve felt bad, and some part of me had, but her questions had been insane. Wanting my autograph because I was dating someone famous was one thing. Wanting it because of what I’d done...no way in hell would I ever be one of those assholes who wore their crime or time like a badge of honor.
Her friend had reached up and wrapped an arm around the blonde’s narrow shoulders.
“Don’t you want to know?” I’d asked softly, not quite done yet. “The first time I went to the infirmary was after I’d been on the inside less than four days. I’m a decent looking guy, and I was still pretty young. You know what that means?”
She had, the quiet one. I’d seen it in her eyes. Her eyes had been a darker shade of blue than Carly’s, but they’d had that same tough look to them. It hadn’t been her idea to come up and talk to me, I’d realized. She’d just decided to come with the blonde.
I’d looked back at the blonde then. “A couple of the bigger guys, the cons who’d been in there a while, they figured I’d make a nice little bitch for them.”
She flinched.
“Does that really sound like some sort of bad boy fantasy?”
“Okay.” Her friend had hugged her tighter. “She gets the point.”
We’d stared at each other for a few more seconds. Then I’d nodded. “Good.”
As they’d walked off, I’d grabbed the gym bag I’d dropped and looked up. That had been when I’d seen the vultures hovering. Son of a bitch. The media and all the paparazzi were something I still couldn’t get used to. Some days they didn’t pay any attention to me at all, but other days...
Sadly, that had been one of those days where my own personal flock of nuisance photographers had decided to zero in on me.
After dealing with the hassle on a personal level for a couple of months now, I’d developed a new appreciation for Carly’s patience with them. Now, as I sat with the rest of the main security detail, trying to pin down a schedule of sorts for the tour, I found myself with a deeper appreciation of the trouble Ryan went through planning everything.
While everyone else was listing places they wanted to go in various cities, I was trying to see what new shit the media had cooked. I skimmed a caption, and then moved on before it hit me. When it did, I went back to it. I read the caption again and then stared at the thumbnail of Carly and me.
Hollywood’s Most Romantic Couples!
“They’ve got to be kidding me.”
We’d been together for nearly four months and the media hadn’t gotten tired of us yet. The VMAs had long since come and gone, as had Christmas. The best Christmas I’d had since my mother had died.
Now, Carly and I were looking at our first Valentine’s Day together as a couple and it seemed we were being subjected to several of these inane lists. If I had my way about it, I’d never look at another of these things again, but while they annoyed the hell out of me, I also couldn’t seem to stop reading them.
Hollywood’s version of a train wreck, I supposed.
Besides, it was easier to brood over this than my media mis-steps. Or the letter I’d had waiting for me this morning.
Don’t say you weren’t warned, Cantrell. Now see how she suffers.
After nearly two months without anything, why in the hell had it come now? Right before we left on her book tour? It was the fifth letter I’d received. She’d just received a fourth. It seemed to echo the sentiment in the one I’d gotten.
You were warned, Ms. Prince. Sometimes the innocent must suffer the consequences of the guilty.
Neither Ryan nor the cops’d had any more luck in tracking down the source. I suspected Ryan was now trying to talk them into getting the FBI involved.
A headache pulsed at the base of my skull and I fought the urge to drag Carly out of the room and up to our bedroom. I’d moved in with her a few weeks back. I still worked my shifts, and nobody seemed to think anything of my relationship with Carly. Well, except Ridley.
But Ridley was an asshole.
Correction. Ridley was actually a lot worse than an asshole.
After Carly publicly sent him away, he’d gotten a lot more subtle with his jabs, and he kept most of them to when the two of us weren’t likely to be overheard, but I knew he was getting into more and more trouble with Ryan and he was being sent out with Carly less and less. Cameo had mentioned a few days earlier that she’d overheard Ryan giving Ridley a warning. Ridley was down to his last chance and that’s all there was to it.
I didn’t know what he’d done to piss Ryan off, but I found myself wishing he’d do it again. Preferably before we left at the end of the week so he didn’t go with us on tour. I knew that would complicate Ryan’s job a lot, but Ridley pissed me off that much.
Having Ridley breathing his rage down my neck was only adding to how on edge I was lately. I could hold it together, and being with Carly made it easier in some ways, but in others, it made it harder. Knowing the letter-writer was still out there, knowing that, no matter what I did, I might not be able to protect the most important person in my life...It was a different kind of stress than I’d known before.
Even Ace had said I’d been a bit on the scary side during training sessions.
“I was wondering when you’d see that,” Carly said, interrupting my thoughts as she leaned over to study the
Top Ten
countdown on my screen. “We only made number seven.”
“Why the hell are we on it at all?” Even as I said it, I wanted to punch myself in the head. Hard.
Cameo narrowed her eyes at me as I floundered for a way to pull my foot out of my mouth. “Look...um...I just…” I shot Ryan a desperate look.
“You’re on your own, kid,” he said, shaking his head.
Carly ignored him. “What’s wrong with us?”
“It’s not us that I can’t figure out.” I should have kept my damn mouth shut. Now I had to fix it. “It’s
me
. Why does anybody want me on a list?”
“Oh, baby,” Carly said, her voice falling to a soft, husky croon.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Ridley muttered.
Cameo gave him a dirty look, and grabbed the remote, turning up the sound on the TV as Carly leaned in to kiss me.
“You’re on
all
of my lists,” she said against my mouth. “The best kisser, the best boyfriend, the best...”
“The best dumbass?” I suggested, trying to lighten the mood. I didn’t mind a little PDA, but sometimes when Carly kissed me, I had a tendency to forget things...like the fact that we had four other people in the room.