IMPACT: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (44 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Rane

Seven times. I was counting. That was how many times I had made her laugh today. I counted each little burst of giggle, each loud, surprised guffaw, as a personal triumph.

She held herself back, tight and reserved. But when she laughed, I could see the little wild thing that stalked under her skin. It was fascinating, like peering down through dark water into the murky depths below. When she laughed, the murkiness cleared for a moment, and I felt like I could catch a glimpse of the real person drowning underneath all that caution.

The more she drank, the more she laughed, so I kept encouraging her to drink more. Then the more I laughed, the more she laughed, and even though I knew she was making fun of my stupid honking laughter, I kept laughing because it was so fucking great to see her lose control.

Yeah, I wanted to be her friend, but I couldn't stop thinking about adding a few benefits to that equation.

The sounds of the party were raging around us. There was a suspicious sounding crash, followed by a chorus of "oh shits."

I leaned back and stared at the loose-limbed girl lolling on my couch. There was nothing that was going to get me to move from this spot, close to her.

She peered out from under heavy lashes. "You're really gorgeous," she slurred. She sounded startled. "Stop it."

My ego soared alongside my cock. "You really mean that?" I didn't know if I was asking her if she really meant I was gorgeous, or if she really wanted me to stop "being gorgeous" or whatever the fuck. The whiskey was settling into my limbs, and the leg she had been so carefully holding upright in front of her, a barrier between us, was falling down to the side, pressing heavily into my thigh. I could feel her heat.

"No," she murmured, eyes closing again.

"Good," I answered. I don't think I was even answering her. I was answering that heavy leg slung against mine. My mind was flashing to a tangle of limbs, her sleepy head on my pillow, the sheets spaghettied across my floor.

She made a sound that might have been a reply. And then her full lips parted and she was asleep.

I froze.

Her wet hair was pressed against her cheek, a dark red flashing arrow leading directly to those lips. Her pussy was right there, so hot against my leg it was scalding. I could picture it perfectly, that tight little slit, pearly pink and glistening. I wondered if she really was a natural redhead like she claimed. I was only inches away from finding out.

Her head lolled forward heavily, landing on my chest. She exhaled a soft sigh, like she was giving in. Giving up.

"Fuck."

When I was back in high school, this guy in my class, Frankie Falconi, or Falcon as he insisted we call him, knocked up Rachel Everheart under the bleachers. She dropped out of school to have the baby and Frankie strutted around like some fucking cock on wheels, like he was the first man virile enough to ever shoot his load unprotected. He badgered me every day to come "see the little fucker," until I finally gave in and went.

Rachel looked proud and tired and really fucking young when she greeted us. Then she promptly deposited the "little fucker" right in my arms.

I froze, just like I did right now.

There is a trust that innocence requires. Beautiful, fragile things need to be cared for by the strong. It's the way of the fucking world. When I held little Frankie Junior, I realized that code of protection was universal. Here I had no blood tie to this little potatoey looking thing, but the deep, tribal part of me made me stand straighter, move more slowly, shield his soft little head and hunch my shoulders around him protectively when Frankie's stupid yappy mutt came barreling around the corner.

Protective. Possessive. If that was how I felt when I cradled a baby with no connection to me whatsoever, then there wasn't a word strong enough for what I was feeling right now, with Madeline Cole trusting me enough to pass out on my chest.

"Fuck," I said again. She was warm, wet, almost naked, her perfect breasts pressed against my chest. My cock was nestled against her softness and was starting to stir. 

I didn't know what else to do.

I scooped her up and headed to my bedroom.

Chapter Eighteen

Madeline

I first thought I was swimming in the ocean, until it resolved itself into a bed only fractionally smaller than the Pacific. I was under a down comforter as lofty as a cloud, and could blinkingly see patches of the unfamiliar room around me. A huge window, flooding the blond wood floor with light. Puddles of clothing left in heaps. A bathroom off the corner, the door opened slightly to reveal a pattern of white subway tile.

I had no idea where the fuck I was and
if my head would just stop pounding for one fucking second....

Fragments of memory stitched themselves painfully together and all at once, I was awake. And terrified.

I heard a rustle from the corner and froze. I peeked out from under the comforter.

There was an easy chair, a Dad-like Barcalounger, old and worn and decidedly out of place in this beautiful, light-filled room. It looked like it was covered in a snowdrift of dirty laundry.

The snowdrift snorted and stretched.

It was Rane.

When I saw him, some of the panic subsided.

Then a new and more sinister panic took its place.

I'm in his bed.

I don't remember how I got here...

Did we...?

Did he..?

I lifted the covers slightly and looked down at my body.

I was wearing last night's clothes.

And I was completely untouched.

"Harlow dressed you, not me. Don't worry." Rane's voice wafted up from the easy chair, cranky and muzzy with sleep. "Your suit was still wet."

I pulled the comforter down and eyed him warily. "You put me to bed?"

He didn't open his eyes. "You passed out," he grunted, shifting his big body in the too-small chair.

For some reason, this wasn't processing the way it should. "
Your
bed?"

His eyes fluttered open and he sighed moodily. "Yeah, well, the other ones were in use. You missed a good party."

I lifted the comforter to glance at myself again. "And we didn't.... I mean, you didn't..."

From across the room, he leveled his gaze on mine. "Maddie. I said I wasn't a nice guy. That doesn't mean I'm not a good one."

Why was there a lump in my throat?

"Okay...." I whispered.

"You need anything? Water? Aspirin?"

"Both," I croaked. My mouth tasted like a gym sock and I couldn't imagine what my eye makeup must be doing right now. I didn't want him getting too close to me. "I'll get it, though."

"Yeah, no. If I feel like warm ass, you gotta feel like death incarnate. You're like, a tenth of my size."

I smiled half-heartedly. "Let's say a third?"

He smiled lazily. "I'm not sure I have children's aspirin lying around."

"Don't you dare," I moaned. "I need the big guns. Give me the whole bottle."

He chuckled and heaved himself out of the easy chair. I watched as he twisted and stretched, then rolled his head from side to side, and something finally clicked. "Wait, Rane...did you, did you
sleep
in that old chair?"

Rane looked at it. "Wouldn't be the first time. One of the few things I threw in the back of my Jeep when I moved cross-country. I stole it from my dad."

"But...your bed. It's like, really comfy."

"You were in it." He seemed genuinely confused.

"But...I'm like a tenth of your size. I could have fit on that chair a lot better."

He waved his hand. "What are friends for?" And he disappeared out the bedroom door.

I lay back in Rane's monstrously huge bed and closed my eyes. The sheets were suffused with the smell of him, a smell I had only known existed two days ago but now seemed integral to my well-being. As I took a deep breath, I tried to calm my racing thoughts and put them into some sort of logical, factual order.

Fact: I had gotten completely wasted in the company of an achingly sexy rock star.

Fact: I had passed out in said company.

Fact: The sexy rock star had carefully and caringly put me to bed, preserving my modesty by enlisting a friend to change my clothes.

Fact: He let me sleep in his bed while he took the uncomfortable chair

Fact: He was fetching me hangover helpers right now.

These were the facts as I understood them, and yet they didn't make sense.

Rane returned, carefully balancing a massive jar of aspirin and two sloshing water glasses. "Why didn't you sleep somewhere else?" I blurted.

He set the glasses down, shook out two pills from the jar, looked at me, then added a third to his open palm. He extended it to me. "Why didn't I what now?" he asked mildly. Matter-of-factly.

I could feel my cheeks reddening, even before I had to touch his warm, dry palm to retrieve my aspirin. "I'm just asking. You had a party. There were a ton of girls here. Girls with...beds. You could have..."

"Found myself alternate lodging for the evening?"

I swallowed the aspirin and looked up at him. The way that tiny little scar twisted his lip upward was fast becoming my favorite part of him. It made everything seem light. Unserious. It made me feel happier just to see it was still there. I reminded myself to ask how he got it, but for now..."Yeah. Since I was taking up your bed."

"You took it up, too," he said, perching on the edge. "You're a sprawler."

I blushed harder. "Shut up."

"I don't think there'd be room for me even if I had slipped in there with you."

"Why didn't you?" I blurted. Again. Oh god, why couldn't I keep from spilling my shit with this guy? He was like sodium pentothal in human form.

It was the tiniest little slip. Just a ragged little twitch of that lip that I would have never noticed if I hadn't spent the last two days memorizing every detail of his face. A grimace of guilt.

He wanted to slip in here with me.

And I wished that he had.

Fucking hell, Maddie.

Just as quickly as the grimace flickered, it was gone, and a mask, much like my own, settled in its place. Takes one to know one, for sure. "Well, the kink in my neck right now is wondering the same thing," he said lightly. "But that ship has sailed, huh?"

In more ways than one.

"I guess it has."

Silence stretched out for millennia. I tried to look around, anywhere, but no matter where I turned, my gaze fell right back onto him. The way his lashes cast shadows on his cheekbones made me wish I had one iota of skill with a paintbrush. 
His face was as calm as a lake on a still day. And for a blinding second, his name was perfect for him. Rane. Washing away the mud and grime from my life and making it clean again.

Fuck did that come from?

"Any plans today?" I blurted. All I did was blurt. I was a preeminent blurtologist.

He shifted. "I've got a few things goin' on."

"That's...specific."

"Industry shit. Boring," he growled. "We've gotta rehearse, get a set list together before the buzz gig."

"Buzz gig?"

"A show for fancy-ass people. Playing while they study their reflections in their iPhones." He glowered for a moment, then his face brightened. "Hey. You wanna come?"

I laughed out loud, hurting the delicate equilibrium of my head. "Well, when you make it sound so enticing...."

"Aw, come on. It'd be nice to see a friendly face in the crowd. Someone who actually would look at us as we play."

"I'm only going to be looking at Twitch."

"I can see why. You have a thing for him?"

"What can I say? I like jumpy guys. Laid-back, effortless cool is totally not my thing."

Too much, Maddie.

He blinked slowly. "Yeah, that'd bore the shit out of me."

"Glad we agree."

"So you'll come?"

"You didn't say when it was, idiot."

"Thursday night."

"Is it going to be loud and testosterone-fueled?"

"Only way I roll, baby."

"That's not really my scene."

"I think you'll like it."

"You do, huh?"

"I think underneath all that forced calm is a rocker chick waiting to let loose and break some faces."

"Or paintings?"

"Tell you what. You come to this thing, and I'll let you kick in every single piece of shit art I have hanging on my walls."

Chapter Nineteen

Rane

Keir held the last note of "Saintly Sinner," then knocked his mic stand to the floor. "That sounded like shit," he growled.

I rolled my head from side to side to dispel some of the tension in my shoulders. "You wanna try again?"

Keir nodded, picked up his stand...then exhaled an explosive sigh. "Yeah, no," he gritted through clenched teeth. "It's not fucking working for me."

"Well, we literally haven't played it since it was recorded, Keir." My brother had that look, that wild dog, trapped animal look, and I needed to head him off at the pass before he had us playing into next morning in the pursuit of perfection. "It's not the single, and it's not even the best track on the album. Let's let it go. The set list is tight enough without it." I looked back at the rest of the band. Twitch looked strung out as hell and Pepper was staring at her nails like she wanted to incinerate something. Even unflappable Balzac was looking a little frayed around the edges. We had been rehearsing for tonight's gig for nearly five hours now, and Keir was approaching maniacal dictator levels of perfectionism. I needed to rein him in. "Let's take a fucking break, at least."

"
Take a fucking break
," he repeated back in a grunting caveman voice...which I guess was supposed to be an imitation of me. "
Calm down, take it easy, let it go
." Keir looked up at me. "Don't you ever want to work at anything?"

Maddie
, I didn't say.

Three days had gone by since she woke up in my bed, startled and vulnerable and fucking perfect looking. If she kept her word, she'd be here tonight. The idea of her seeing me play had swelled my head to the point where I had agreed to Keir's fanatical fixation on hammering out a live set of Saintly Sinner.

But of course I couldn't tell him that. "Yeah. I want to work on my tan. That what you want to hear, dickwad?"

"Yeah, the truth comes out."

"Oh, fuck off, Keir. Ruthless is a democracy and we're voting you down. It's break time."

Murder flickered across Keir's face for a hot second, then he relaxed. "Fuck you all," he growled amiably, and headed back to the green room.

The crew had arrived before us this morning, our usual guys used to their usual load-in, but the space Keith had booked us was so tiny that our regular gear couldn't even fit. Five hours of rehearsal/sound checks had left me feeling claustrophobic and irritable. The too-warm hallway that snaked underneath the stage was set off by huge, clanking fire doors and each section of hallway had its own weird smell. The second we set foot in the relatively spacious green room, I rushed to snag one of the beat up folding chairs and stretch my legs out on the table.

It was a little subterranean cave with a wall of mirrors that was probably supposed to make it feel bigger but failed. The counter that ran the length of the wall underneath the mirrors was strewn with the left-behind detritus of the bands that had the misfortune to play this space before us. A crushed, half-empty cigarette pack. Guitar picks scattered like snowflakes. A rumpled back issue of Grip magazine, which Keir grabbed and started quickly leafing through.

Pepper found a corner, like always, and immediately plugged herself into her iPhone and closed her eyes. The metronomic sight of Twitch's pacing was soothing in its familiarity. I felt, rather than heard, Balzac settle into the beat up couch. The band. They were like extensions of my own body. I knew them, I could predict what they would do next. When we were on, the music just flowed through us without even pausing to check in. We were at the top of our game. We were the kings (and one bad-tempered queen) of rock-and-roll.

I leaned back and threaded my hands across my chest, intending to grab a few seconds of shut-eye.

"No fucking way." Keir smacked the magazine down onto the table.

I must have fallen asleep for a few seconds because the sound of his explosive cursing startled me badly. "What the hell?" I grumbled, shaking myself.

Keir stabbed an astonished finger into the page. "That's Scarlett." He held up the copy of Grip. "Scar wrote this."

"What?" I repeated. Keir looked like he had been set on fire.

I got up and looked over his shoulder as he gawped at the page.
Scarlet Sawyer
read the byline, and next to it was a tiny little smudge of a picture that was unmistakably the girl that stole Keir's heart a million years ago.

There were two ways I could play this. Relive the past and ask him the questions I knew he wanted to answer and risk Keir spiraling back down into the depression he had only just climbed out of. 

Or I could be a dick and piss him off enough that his anger would keep him firmly planted in the present.

Being the good big brother that I am, I chose the latter option.

"An entire world of pussy for the taking, and you still literally carry a torch for the girl next door." I shook my head in mock sadness. "I'm throwing a funeral for your dick."

"Hey, fuck you." Keir was reading the story with increasingly wide eyes. "Holy shit, Rane. She's a music journalist."

I actually was surprised, but I still played it cool, for Keir's sake. "Glad to see being forced to sit in the crowd at all our shitty early gigs didn't ruin that for her."

Shit, Keir wasn't rising to the bait. He was still staring at the picture like he could will her to step through it and come to him. "No, says here she actually won some award last year."

There was unmistakable pride in his voice. Fuck. "Keir, where're you at?"

"I dunno, man." He brushed his fingers across his head and down his face like he was trying to wipe the big stupid grin away. "It's just kinda cool, right? She's a music journalist, I'm a musician. Maybe she'd, I dunno, wanna write about Ruthless or something."

"Abso-fucking-lutely not. You are not going back down that road. That's a bad idea."

Keir smacked the magazine down and stared at me, eyes blazing. "Yeah, like you're one to lecture about bad ideas."

"The fuck are you going on about?"

"Maddie? Our stepsister?"

"There's nothing going on there."

Keir snorted. "Maybe. But you sure as fuck want something going on there."

I don't know why I shoved him. Maybe to get him to stop talking. If he would just shut the fuck up, I could keep pretending what I felt about Maddie was only friendship.

Keir shoved me right back. I grunted as the counter caught me in the small of my back and a sharp pain radiated down my leg, sharpening my anger. I came out roaring and took a swing. Keir ducked his head out of the way and my fist connected with his shoulder. "Fuck!" he yelled, and used the momentum of the spin to clap me right in the arm.

My whole right arm went dead.

"Shit." I backed up, rubbing the spot where Keir's fist had hit bone.

He went white. "Fuck, your arm."

"Yeah." It was hanging like a dead thing at my side. I waited, hoping for the pins and needles that were taking forever to come.

"Can you play?"

I heaved my hand upward.
Throb throb throb.
I nearly sagged in relief as the pins and needles marched up my nerves. "Yeah, I'll be okay. Though I should throat punch you for that cheap shot."

Keir looked at me steadily. "You deserved it."

"Yeah, maybe I did. But if I can't play guitar...."

Keir shook his head. I didn't need to finish the sentence. Playing guitar was my life. The only thing I was good at. I had no skills, barely a high school education and no real work ethic to speak of. Without music, I was royally fucked.

And Maddie,
my traitor brain insisted on reminding me.
Maddie is coming tonight.

My fingers twitched on their own as the feeling returned to them.  "Okay, guys. Break's over. Let's get ready to blow their minds."