He nodded briefly and went back to his beer. “I got you covered, Ayd.”
I spun on my heel and dashed down the steps and across the wide general admission floor to the stairs at the side of the stage. The first band was playing and it was getting more crowded, so I had to wiggle and shimmy a little more than I planned. At the top of the stairs, the security guard tried to stop me from going by, but I told him I was with the band. I said that I was with Jet, and like Rowdy had said, the guy did a quick sweep of my outfit (and lingered on my legs) before letting me by. It took me a minute to find the right room, and when I did it, I found only Von and Catcher sitting in big leather chairs messing around with their instruments. They looked up at me in surprise and I felt my heart trip when I didn’t see Jet anywhere.
“Uh, hey.”
“Hey,” they chorused in unison.
“I’m, uh, looking for Jet. Have you seen him?” They shared a look that I didn’t understand, and Catcher cleared his throat. He inclined his head toward the door at the back of the room.
“He came in and smashed a bottle of Jameson against the wall. He went in there a few minutes ago.”
I looked at the door and back at them. If the door was locked and he didn’t let me in, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I stepped gingerly around the piles of cords and switches littering the floor. I was about to try to pull the door open when Von called out, “We sorta need him to get his shit together ASAP, so try not to get him even more riled up than he already is.”
I nodded absently and knocked lightly on the door. “Jet?”
There was no answer, but the knob turned easily under my hand, so I slipped in and silently prayed he wasn’t doing something that would embarrass us both. He had his back to me and was leaning over the sink staring at himself in the dingy mirror. His gaze snapped up to mine in the dirty glass and there was no misreading the hostility stamped on his handsome face or the wildness in those dark eyes. The gold rims were melting and hot, and he looked like he was on the very edge of losing control. His biceps flexed and tensed like he was going to pull the sink off the wall and hurl it.
“What do you want, Ayden?”
That was a loaded question if there ever was one.
“I just wanted to see what was wrong with you. You’ve been acting like you’re mad at me all week and I don’t understand why.”
I saw his hands tighten and his fingers flex. I also noticed that instead of his usual black nail polish, he had painted the middle fingernail on each hand the same bloodred as my dress. That shouldn’t be hot, but on him it just totally was.
“Why did you bring that guy to my show?” The bathroom felt stifling and small. I could sense the intensity of whatever he was feeling, vibrating across my skin. I had never seen him this raw unless he was on stage performing, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it in such close quarters.
“I didn’t bring him. We went to dinner and I was planning on getting dropped off, but he kind of freaked out when he saw everyone running around outside and insisted on coming in with me. What does that have to do with why you’re acting like such a prick toward me? You can’t be mad I’m hanging out with a guy I’ve been seeing for months, when you had a girl leave your room with her panties in her back pocket less than a week ago.” I paused.
“Come on, Jet, what gives?”
I thought maybe he was going to lay into me. I thought maybe he was going to tell me that I had no right to judge him. I thought maybe he was going to yell that I shouldn’t be bringing someone I knew he didn’t like around, when he was getting ready to play a big, important show.
What I wasn’t prepared for was for him to let go of his death grip on the sink and stalk toward me with fire and something else burning in his dark eyes. Or for rough hands heavy with rings pushing me back up against the bathroom door, and then traveling up higher, through my hair. Jet slammed his mouth down hard enough on mine that it made me whimper, and for a second I was so shocked all I could do was stand there and let him devour me with those hands I’d stared at for months and with a tongue that had the glide of metal in it.
By the time my brain reengaged, he was starting to pull away, but now that the seal had been broken there was no stopping the flood. Desire blazed first and foremost, and I wrapped my arms around his neck. keeping him right where he was. He tasted like whiskey and the sweetest kind of temptation there was. Lust had me pressing as close to him as I could and I felt his knee slide up under the skirt of my dress. The shock from the contrast of cold and hot as the barbell he had through his tongue moved back and forth across my own, made me gasp. That only gave him better access to everything he was trying to invade. On my tiptoes now, all of the best parts of him were pressing hard and insistent against all the wanting parts of me, and I couldn’t ever remember a simple kiss being something as powerful as this.
I didn’t want to let him go.
Chapter 4
I was living in a state of perpetual fury. I was still furious that my narcissistic and overbearing father thought he could blackmail me, using my mom. I was livid that my mom would let him use her like that. I was incensed that I couldn’t get Ayden out of my head, and I was just flat-out angry that it mattered to me whether she wanted to spend Valentine’s Day with me or with Mr. Perfect. As a result I was acting like an ass**le to anyone and everyone that dared cross my path the past few days. The guys in the band were sick of my shit and if Rowdy told me to just take her to bed and get it over with one more time, I was pretty sure I was going to knock all his front teeth out.
All I wanted to do was get through the show, figure out what I was going to do about my folks, and maybe set up a short tour so I could get out of town and put some distance between me and a certain brunette who was buried under my skin.
But then she had to show up in a bloodred dress, looking like she just stepped off the pages of a hot-rod magazine, with that sweater-vest-wearing douche trailing behind her like a lost dog. She was just too much for me to handle at the moment. Those endless legs and bright-red lips had my head going to all kinds of places it shouldn’t. She was there with a date, so I walked away in the middle of whatever Rowdy was trying to tell me, and headed to the band room backstage. The rest of the guys were warming up and getting ready, but the idea of going onstage while I felt so volatile made something inside me snap. I grabbed the closest thing to me—a bottle of whiskey I had been drinking from earlier—and chucked it against the wall.