A Lush Rhapsody: A Rhapsody Novel (6 page)

“You dicks!” I holler as I come to the surface sputtering.

The four of them sit there on the edge laughing, and something hard and brittle inside of me just melts. My own brothers would never tease me by tossing me in the pool. Their view is that the less I’m seen and heard the better. That these four men, who have every reason to resent and dislike me, actually bother to tease me is like a gift. I’ve invaded their club, crashed the successful machine they’ve spent all of their adult lives building, and they should treat me like an outsider. And they have—in certain ways—but they’ve also made sure that I’m comfortable, safe, and treated with respect.

They might not always like my intrusion in their music, but they haven’t carried that over to my intrusion in their lives.

“Sorry, Tully,” Joss says with mock sympathy on his face. “It was too easy.”

“Come on, champ,” Mike adds, holding his hand out. “Hop out and get dried off and we’ll take you out to dinner.”

I swim to the edge, and Mike grabs my hand, literally lifting me clean out of the water before depositing me on the concrete deck. Colin’s found a towel and tosses it over my shoulders. As we all walk toward the building, Walsh strides by, wraps an arm around my neck and gives me a noogie.

When he releases me I toss my head back to get the wet hair out of my eyes. The first thing I see is the balcony of Blaze’s room. He stands there, leaning a hip against the railing, big arms folded across his chest.

I stop, unable to break away from his dark gaze. We’re both trapped there for what I’m sure is only seconds, but feels like days. I shiver, because it’s as though he’s stripped away my towel and swimsuit with his eyes. Then he gives a subtle shake of his head, and I can sense his disgust from three floors away. He shoves off the railing and is gone before I can remember to breathe again.

All the good feels from our photo session drain out of me, and I swallow around my now-tight throat.

“Come on T-squared,” Colin calls out. “Time’s a wastin’.” I breathe deeply and put one foot in front of the other. Lush is my band. I need to focus on them, not the brooding, confusing, dangerous guy on the third floor. Even though he makes my insides do things they’ve never done before. Not even when I’m playing music.

I
walk
in off the balcony of my hotel room, head swimming with images of Tully in those little furry boots and not much else, the Lush guys all wrapped around her like fucking snakes. I’ve done enough photo shoots to know that was the money shot. They’ll use some of the others on the inside with the article, but that one, that was the cover, and it’ll make her famous faster than twenty concerts and an album will. I don’t know who came up with the concept, but whoever it was, is a fucking genius. It’ll make her a star.

And from everything I’m seeing and hearing, the fame won’t be misplaced. She’s the real deal—talented, beautiful, charismatic. Even though she’s prickly a lot of the time, you can’t help but be drawn to her. The only problem is that it’s not just my eyes that are drawn to her. My dick is leading the charge, and it’s fucking with my head—the other head.

I wanted to leap off my balcony and pry Lush off of her, make all those onlookers close their eyes so that I was the only one seeing all that pearlescent skin, those inky locks, the curves that are ripe and full and begging for my hands and my mouth. It’s like Tully O’Roark is a giant buffet and I’m a starving man. Seeing her, talking to her, it gives me a rush that reminds me a bit of the rush I got the first time I touched a guitar—or the first time I snorted a line of coke. The rush I get every time I think about the look on my old man’s face when he sees me onstage at his precious fucking Super Bowl.

Thoughts of the Super Bowl help move the focus from my pants to my business. I flip open my laptop and pull up the browser tab I was watching earlier before the commotion of the photo shoot. It’s Lush’s performance at the Super Bowl five years ago, and I’m watching it to memorize every little detail—everything they did right, and most importantly, everything they did wrong. Because if I’m going to beat them for this year’s slot I’ve got to understand their game as well as I do my own. The best defense is a good offense. My dad hammered that into my head from the time I was old enough to know what defense and offense were, and it applies in most things in life, not just football.

My phone buzzes and I absentmindedly glance at the screen.

DP-PI:
I’ve got some info that I think you’ll want to hear.

I pause the video and hit “callback”.

“You see my text?” the guy on the other end asks.

“Yeah. What do you have for me?” I look longingly at the minibar across the room. I’ll admit it, I had them remove all the booze before I checked in. But damn, every time I talk to this guy my stomach churns a little, and I wish for a quick shot of something to settle it.

“It looks like Walsh Clark hasn’t had as easy a time of the recovery as everyone’s been led to believe.”

“Yeah?” My eyes dart to the minibar again. Fuck.

I can hear the guy clicking away on a keyboard while he talks. “Seems that when he was living down in Texas at that halfway house he fell off the wagon and got kicked out. He didn’t check back into rehab that time, but since then he not only attends three to four AA meetings a week, but the band has guys in the crew whose only job is to keep an eye on him, drag him to a meeting if they think he’s about to crash and burn.”

I nod my head silently. “Okay, that’s good to know. In spite of the kids and wives, they’re no more family-friendly than we are then.”

“But I’ve got something better for you.”

My heart rate kicks up a notch, but it’s not a pleasant sensation. More like a grating pain.

“Colin Douglas.”

Shit. He’s a good guy. Even I can see that. Really, Mike is the asshole. Joss is an arrogant prick, but not a bad person. It figures that it’d be Walsh and Colin that might provide the threads I can use to unravel them all.

“Yeah, he’s the bass player.”

“He’s married to his high school sweetheart, Marsha.”

“Yeah, I saw her just a while ago, she’s staying here in the hotel.”

“Well, twelve years ago when she was eighteen and he was seventeen she aborted his kid.”

My heart drops in my chest. Fucking hell.

“Are you sure? How could you know that? Medical records are confidential, right? I’ve never seen anything in the papers about that.”

“No, and you won’t. Douglas strangled that jewel with a legal noose so tight that an entire town of people have kept quiet for nearly three years now. It’s that same little Texas town that Walsh was living in. But, if you ask around after those townies have had a few drinks you can get bits and pieces of the story.”

Well, goddamn. I lean back in my chair, wishing that I could undo the last ten minutes of my life. Information might be power, but honestly I didn’t expect to get information like this when I hired the P.I. I run a hand across the scruff on my jaw and clutch the phone so tightly it makes my hand cramp.

“She was a teenager,” I tell him. “I mean, how could anyone blame them for that?”

“She was eighteen, and they’re married now, so anything she does reflects on him.”

“I don’t know…”

“Look, you told me to get whatever I could on them, especially if it threatened their image with a conservative organization like the NFL. What you do with the info is your business, but I can’t help what comes to light when I start digging.”

I sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I got it. Anything else?”

“Not today. I’m looking into Owens and Jamison more in the next few days. I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Okay.”

I hang up without saying goodbye. I feel dirty somehow, as if I’ve had my hands buried in shit. It stinks. I stink.

I sit in the darkening room and listen to the sounds of people outside the open doors to the balcony. They’re walking, laughing, splashing. It’s a world out there, and since I left rehab I’m afraid to go into it. Because I’m not sure that if I go out there I can avoid the life-ending, career-ending collision. But if I stay in here, I can focus. I can ignore the itch, the way my nerves feel like they’ve been pulled so taut they might snap in a stiff breeze. I can work on the ultimate win—the crown jewel that will mean I’ve finally beaten the one person who matters most.

I’ve never hesitated to do what I need to in order to get what I want. I learned a long time ago that principles are a nice thing for people who have the luxury, but if you want to make it to the top you can’t be bothered. So there’s no reason why
this
should bother me.

There’s no reason why, when I think about exposing Walsh Clark or Colin Douglas, I see Tully’s face…and her crushing disappointment.

* * *

I
’m not
sure why I decide to sit at the pool in the dark. I could easily sit on the balcony of my room and get the same view. But somehow the three floors of distance between my room and the pool deck seems too much tonight. I want to be by the water, I want to feel the chill in the air around it, and if I’m being completely honest, I want to feel some residual sensation of Tully rising out of that pool, droplets of water clinging to her breasts, skin glistening with the moisture.

I have one of the hotel servers bring me a plate of fries and a Coke in the can so I can imagine that it’s beer, then I sit back on a cushioned lounge chair and let my mind wander, reminding myself of why it’s so important that I always do what’s necessary to win, no matter what the cost.

Until I was about ten, I wasn’t much more than a nuisance to my dad. He left most of the early childhood rearing to my mom, and only paid attention when I had a baseball or football game. But at ten I shot up to become one of the tallest kids on my teams, and suddenly, Dad was around more, coaching me, making me work out, signing me up for extra tournaments, and private training. At the time, I was willing to put up with almost anything in order to finally have the attention of this guy who I idolized. He was the former Penn State QB, and the CEO of this huge corporation. Everyone talked about how special my dad was, and how lucky I was to be his son—rich, athletic, good looking.

The older—and bigger—I got, the more attention Dad paid. But by the time I was fifteen it felt different than it had at ten. I didn’t view it as an honor anymore, I didn’t feel like I was special. In fact, it felt like pretty much the opposite.

The constant haranguing, the daily battles over my “lack of commitment” and my “training needs,” became the bane of my teenage existence. It was never enough—
I
was never enough. Not fast enough, not tough enough, not good enough. The rest of the world told me I was gifted, a football talent that hadn’t been seen in Pennsylvania high school athletics in twenty years, but not my old man. To him I was always ten push-ups too few, thirty seconds too slow, one touchdown short.

There’s nothing like being told you’re not good enough. But I know that this Super Bowl gig is it. The chance I’ve been searching for all these years to finally prove him wrong. The hunt for that perfect opportunity has kept me going a long time, and I can almost taste the triumph now.

I hear a small intake of breath from behind me and turn just in time to see Tully frozen, mid-step between the doors into the hotel and my chair.

“Hey short stack,” I say quietly. For some reason I know that if I do anything too suddenly she’ll bolt, like a deer in the forest.

“Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was out here.”

“No problem. It’s a big pool, there are lots of chairs, why don’t you have a seat, or a swim. Whatever you came out for.”

She watches me for a moment, indecision rippling across her features. I notice now that she’s wearing a short sundress and high wedge-heeled sandals. She looks like she’s been out somewhere, and I get a rush of jealousy, wondering if she was out with someone in particular. Or if she met anyone tonight. I shouldn’t be thinking shit like that about her of all people, but I can’t seem to control it.

“Okay,” she concedes. “But I’m not out here with you. I’m just doing my own thing.”

I give her a wry smile. “I never even saw you here,” I answer.

She chooses a lounge chair a few away from mine, and sits down with a sigh, sliding off her shoes before stretching her legs out in front of her.

“You go out tonight?” I ask.

She leans her head back and closes her eyes. “I thought you didn’t see me here.”

I chuckle. My voice is low and rough when I answer her. “Short stack, I might not admit to seeing you, but it’s damn well impossible for me not to notice you. In case you haven’t caught on, I think you’re pretty fucking hot.”

She swivels her head my direction and opens one eye briefly before turning away again. “Given what I’ve heard about you I’m not sure that’s much of a compliment.”

I try not to be offended, but I am. Yeah, I’ve done my share of one-night stands, and when I was using life was a blur of powder, women, and music. But I’m far from one of the worst in the business. Hell, her good buddy Mike put me to shame before he settled down with his blonde country princess, Jenny.

“I can’t help it that I’m a popular guy, but if you’d been paying any attention at all, you’d know that while I haven’t turned down offers that were thrown at me, I also don’t usually go out of my way to seduce anyone. Being a woman I’d pursue puts you in an elite club.”

Her laughter rings out in the dark night air. “An elite club? Really? Is that the best you can come up with?”

I have to laugh too. It was pretty bad. “Look, all I’m saying is, yes, I’ve been around the block a few times. Name one dude with this job who hasn’t been. But sleeping with a groupie and telling a colleague you think she’s hot and you’d like to get to know her are two very different things.”

There’s silence then. Crickets. And I wonder what I’ve done wrong. Well, aside from the whole elite club thing.

“You’d like to get to know me?” she asks in a smaller voice.

“Yeah.” My heart beats faster and I take a second to catch my breath. She’s sitting eight feet away from me, it’s so dark I can’t see her expression, and she never looks over at me once, but this feels more real than most of the sex I’ve had in my life. The tension in the air is palpable. A buzzing of energy—sexual, emotional—that runs through me like a current.

“Why?”

I breathe deeply, willing my body to calm down. “Well, aside from the fact that you’re hot as fuck—”

“I think we’ve covered that,” she inserts.

“Hey, it’s important, don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.”

She laughs.

“You’re a damn good musician.”

“You’ve heard me play?”

“I might have been around for your rehearsals earlier. I also know that no matter what jackasses your bandmates are, they would never hire you if you weren’t pretty damn special.”

I pause. “But it’s more than all that obvious stuff, short stack.”

My throat feels thick now. I feel thick, awkward. “It’s like I’m connected to some part of you—because of the stuff with your family. Like maybe we understand each other in a way a lot of other people might not. I guess it makes me curious. I want to know what makes you tick, how you’ve gotten this far when you haven’t had much support. Where that magic music inside of you comes from. You’re an enticing package. Can’t blame a guy for being interested.”