Feverish (Bullet #3) (21 page)

And then he let go, a burst of pleasure that
lasted only seconds but where time seemed to slow to nothing—there
was no sound, no motion, no taste or smell, just pure, intense,
bright, hardcore feeling, a raw down-to-the-bone sensation,
followed by an emptiness that felt cleansing. He kept his eyes
closed with his forehead pressed into the seat next to her head,
and that’s when he became aware that it was goddamn hot in that car
in the garage without the AC. But he still felt like a million
bucks—or more.

* * *

So it made him a pussy. He didn’t give a
shit. He’d tried to talk Emily into sleeping in his bed that night,
but she wasn’t having any of it. “Mary will find out,” she’d said.
Yeah, he knew she was right, but he was close to not caring
anymore.

He was starting to feel more for Emily than
he should have.

And that was fucking stupid. He knew it was a
bad idea. There were a thousand reasons why he should just let her
live her life. She herself had named one earlier. She had goals and
dreams based on her job. Clay wasn’t convinced she knew what she
wanted, but really he had no right to try to talk her out of it.
And what if he managed to? Would she resent him later?

There was the educational gap too. Clay had
finished high school. That was it. His music teacher had tried to
talk him into attending a post-secondary music school, but Clay
knew he couldn’t afford it. He’d felt like he was good enough for
what he wanted to do. It turned out he was right…and wrong. He
wasn’t good enough to begin with, but after playing plenty of live
gigs, he got much better. And he challenged himself continually to
improve. Emily had two degrees. She was smart. He’d never admit it,
but she would once in a while use a word that he didn’t understand.
He’d been able to figure them out in context, but the woman was
amazingly intelligent. He felt privileged to have her as his
PA.

Then there was what was his biggest downfall
and probably the clincher—she was young. She might be twenty-five,
by Clay’s estimates, and he was now thirty-two. She found him
exciting now, but what about a year from now, five years from now,
ten?

What the fuck?
Why did he feel the
need to worry that far in the future? Why couldn’t he just enjoy
the here and now like he always did?

It was because Emily was more to him than
just another fuck. She was becoming so much more.

* * *

When Mary arrived Thursday morning, Emily was
glad she’d turned down Clay’s offer of sleeping next to him. He was
tempting, but that was also a no-no. Bad enough she’d decided she
wanted to have more fun with him.

Her dad would flip out if he knew she was
dating—or, uh,
fucking
—a rock star. Well, he’d freak out if
he’d known about some of her past relationships anyway, but for his
daughter, he wanted stable, secure, respectable.

Her dad loved Bryce.

There was more, though. Yeah, Clay was a
super sweet guy, even when he tried to act all tough playing Jet.
She could see right through him, and she loved that about him. And
he was hotter than hell. She didn’t know that she’d ever been with
a guy quite as sexy as Clay, and she’d been with some mega-hot
guys. But that was part of the problem. Those kinds of guys were
not
stable or reliable.

Yeah, Clay had plenty of money. That wasn’t
the problem. The issue was that he didn’t have a necessarily steady
income, and he was a rock star, for heaven’s sake. Right now, he
might act like he was all eyes for her, but how long before he’d
grow bored of her and need some other woman to keep him excited?
She’d been there with guys before. She didn’t want to do it
again.

That thought, too, brought her back to Bryce.
The guy who was supposed to be the right guy, the good guy, had
already screwed around on her, and they were barely engaged. Maybe
no man could be trusted.

No…surely, there were guys out there who’d
never do that, but her fiancé wasn’t one of them.

Was he still her fiancé? She hadn’t decided
yet. She hadn’t officially ended it. She was going to have to
communicate with him soon. Based on his last email to her, she knew
her dad had told him to give Emily some time—but she was beginning
to wonder if time would change her feelings.

She’d email him sometime today, but she had
work to attend to first, so she got a cup of coffee and thanked
Mary for making it (Emily was convinced the woman was either a
saint or she was a reformed sinner doing penance, because she was
one of the most thoughtful people she’d ever met, paid or
otherwise). Then she headed to the office to hunker down to work.
Her goal by week’s end was to get the social media stuff
underway.

The emails presented a problem, though,
because the second one she opened was from Clay’s accountant,
reminding him that quarterly taxes were due on the fifteenth of
July…just a few days away. Emily chuckled. Even his accountant knew
he needed help. She imagined the forms needed would be around the
office somewhere. She’d organized most of his files already, but
maybe it was in one of the piles on the bookshelf that she hadn’t
finished going through yet. It didn’t take her long to sort through
all that paperwork, though, and she added taking care of the rest
of it soon on her list. Where the hell did he keep his tax
information, though? If he paid quarterly taxes, there would have
to be a lot of paperwork.

She’d heard the doorbell ring at the front
earlier. Before she left the office, she heard Clay and, she
thought, Brian enter the music room and close the door. She decided
then, that instead of asking Clay where he kept his tax stuff,
she’d ask Mary. If Mary didn’t know, then Emily would have to bug
Clay, but she hated to bother him when he was working on his
livelihood.

She couldn’t find Mary at first, but then she
called her from the living room. “In here.”

Her voice came from Clay’s room, so Emily
walked in. She hadn’t been in there since the morning she’d
awakened in his arms. It still didn’t feel like a place she
belonged, so she stayed near the door. Mary was making his bed.
“Mary, I didn’t want to bug Clay, because he’s busy doing music
stuff, but I wondered if you knew where he kept his tax
paperwork.”

Mary tilted her head. “What do you need that
for?”

“We got an email this morning as a reminder
that his quarterly taxes are due soon.”

“Oh. It’s not in the office?”

Emily shook her head. “Not that I can
find.”

Mary frowned, smoothing the sheet with her
hand. Emily felt guilty just watching her work, so she came in and
got on the other side of the bed—the side she now thought of as
Clay’s side
—and started smoothing it out there. “Did you
look in all the drawers and through all the papers on the
shelves?”

“Yep. Nothing.”

Mary started pulling the comforter up the
bed, but Emily could see that the woman was pondering. She
continued helping her make the bed, and she got lost in thought,
imagining Clay lying there. Mary finally said, “Actually, I cleaned
up a lot of crap in the office. I put it in boxes. It was right
before the interviews, because I didn’t want to horrify any of
you.”

Emily started laughing. “Well, you did with
that stupid piece of pizza.”

“I wanted you to know what working for him
could be like so you’d be prepared. I didn’t want to scare you away
for good. Actually, it’s stuff you should probably sort through
anyway.”

Depending on how much was there, she might
have to postpone her social media plans until next week. “Okay. So
where is it?”

Mary frowned again. “I made Clay carry them.
There were two or three of them. I can’t remember, because I was
trying to consolidate them. I might have just kept what was left in
the third one. Anyway, I told him to take care of them. They were
kind of heavy. But where did he take them?” All Emily knew was she
hadn’t seen random boxes anywhere in any of the rooms she’d been
in. There were a few boxes on shelves in the garage. Maybe that was
where they were, and she was getting ready to suggest that when
Mary said, “I think he took them downstairs. He has a storage room
down there. Why don’t you go look there and see if you can find
them? They’re those file storage type boxes—white with lids, almost
the size of a box of paper you’d by at an office supply store. You
know the ones I mean?”

“Yeah.” Emily made sure she helped finish
putting the comforter over the pillows, and she slid her hand over
Clay’s pillow, as if she were touching him. “Thanks, Mary.”

Well, this was going to be interesting. She’d
never been in the basement before, hadn’t had a reason to go down
there. She made her way back to the kitchen and then went to the
door to the basement. She opened it and was going to flip the light
switch, but she saw that there was a lot of natural light down
there, so she just walked down the wooden stairs. As she got
further in, she noticed it was a large space—huge. Just past the
stairs were a washer and dryer against the wall, and there were two
windows behind them. They were at and below ground level, and Emily
could see some kind of well, for lack of a better word, that dipped
below the level of the lawn and so there were full-sized windows.
The sun was streaming in the room. There was also an ironing board
hanging on the wall, and Emily wondered if Mary ever actually had
to do any ironing.

She turned away from the washer and dryer and
saw a vast empty space, but beyond that were four doors—one right
in front and then three on the right side, the last one nearest
her. She started with the one directly in front—it would be the
largest room, since the door faced forward and seemed to take up
the rest of the space.

She opened the door, and it was pitch black
in the room. She felt around for a light switch. As her eyes
adjusted to the space, she gasped. It was a mini movie theater, and
it had the feel of an old cinema. There was a long table to her
left against the wall with a laptop that she figured played the
movies. She looked to the ceiling and saw that there was, in fact,
a projector. To her right was a large popcorn machine in glass,
just like she’d seen in an occasional convenience store or, yes, at
a movie theater. There were two rows of plush velvet seats and she
counted—sixteen in all. How cool was that? She felt like she was
seeing a secret side of Clay and wondered why he’d never shared
this with her. She was still smiling when she turned off the light
and closed the door.

She walked to the next room, the door on a
different wall. She opened it and saw that it was a large closet.
There weren’t just three white boxes with lids on the floor. There
were lots of boxes, some on shelves, most not. This was a storage
closet and, she knew, the room Mary had told her about. But she
wanted to look in the other rooms, because maybe she’d get another
cool surprise about her secret lover. She just couldn’t help
herself.

She was disappointed, though, because the
next room was a small guest bedroom, nothing exciting, and the
other was a bathroom that appeared to never be used.

She went back to the closet, still smiling
about her little discovery. She opened the lid of the white box
nearest her and saw that there were lots of papers, some that
looked important. This would go upstairs then. She could shred the
stuff they didn’t need, but there was no sense keeping it
otherwise. She dragged it into the open expanse of the large room.
Then she opened the lid of the next box and concluded it was the
same thing, so she dragged it out with the other one.

She returned to the closet and opened the
next box. It was full of a bunch of crap, but nothing that looked
like important documentation. If she couldn’t find the tax files in
any of the boxes she would take upstairs, she’d keep this one in
mind, but for now, she’d pass. Maybe the two boxes she already had
were it, but she wanted to look in a couple more just to be
sure.

The next box she lifted the lid of gave her
pause. It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at.
They were DVD boxes, but not anything she recognized. She took one
out of its neat stack to be sure, and it was confirmed when the
front had a blonde’s tits front and center. A tiny picture in the
corner showed said blonde on her knees holding a big guy’s cock in
her hand and slapping her own face with it.

Emily let out a breath. Okay…so guys like
porn. Yeah. She got that. But she had to know. She took out enough
of the cases to see the ones underneath, and they all appeared to
be porn. Wow. That was some serious stuff.

She shook her head and put the lid back on,
wondering why they hadn’t labeled it with an
X
or three. She
pushed it under one of the shelves and grabbed the next box. When
she lifted the lid, she felt her mouth—and spirits—drop. Another
box of what appeared to be all pornography. Next box, same
thing.

She didn’t have the heart to keep looking.
And then, suddenly, she felt dirty. What if that little movie
theater was just for some sick fantasy of Clay’s so he could jerk
off in a porn movie theater without getting arrested?

She couldn’t bear to think of it anymore and
turned off the closet light and closed the door. She leaned against
it, disheartened, trying to think of her next move.

Chapter Twenty-two

“SURE YOU DON’T want to stay for dinner?”

“No, man. Didn’t I tell you I have a
date?”

“What? You dog. Then get the hell out of
here.”

Brian paused at the door. “What about you?
Scored lately?”

“Aw, you know…”

“What? Last skank give you crabs?”

Clay started laughing. God, if Brian only
knew he was banging his PA.