Rebel Rockstar (30 page)

R
iver isn’t
the same boy he used to be, but somehow he is. I know he is. He’s been gone for about five minutes, and I’m closing my eyes about to drift off to sleep thinking of him… Or try to sleep thinking of him, at least… When the door opens.

I open them immediately, knowing exactly what I’ll find there. I’ve never really been much for eye contact, but there’s something River’s gate that make me drop my eyes and blush when I see him.

I’m a mess.

But I’m his mess.

He’s changed from his swim shorts to a loose pair of sweats I dimly remember him owning, although I haven’t seen them on him before. They’re dark, navy, more loose-fitting than I’d expected them to be when I saw them at the bottom of the pile in his luggage. But they’re flattering.

“River,” I open my mouth, whispering to him, the words barely coming out in my excitement. He looks at me, and I realize I’m still lying on the bed, almost naked.

My whole body flushes.

“Faith,” he says, and he walks over to the bed. He wasn’t there for me today, at least not as much as I was expecting. But when he moves to me and throws his arm around my body, I realize I was wrong.

He is there for me. Something was going on, but… He’s okay. He has to be. Like he said, I can ask him about it in the morning. But I don’t want to think about that right now.

I look over at him and feel his hand brush over my cheek through my hair, and I close my eyes.

The in-between of my thighs tingle, and I know I won’t be able to control myself with him touching me. But I don’t want to control myself, and I don’t want him to stop. His hands roam my body through the sheets, and I just wish he would pull the thin piece of fabric away from me and make love to me.

We’re finally together. But we’ve been so busy bonding and exploring… We’ve still only really been together once.

This desperate want is horrible and I crave his body more than anything. My mouth drops to his shoulder, kissing him and moving so he can slip his knee between my thighs and push them open, to get to me like he wants. But he doesn’t.

Instead, he brings his hands under my shoulders and slips them over to my back, pulling the sheet away from me like I wish he would have just a few seconds ago.

He kisses me on the lips again, short and sweet. Not as deep as I was expecting and I open my mouth to protest. He takes advantage of that, using the way my mouth opens to kiss me so deeply I feel like I’m going to suffocate in the taste of him.

He pulls me out from under the blankets, gripping me and turning me so that I fall below him. He throws himself down on top of me – fully, instead of just a light touch – and I wonder if he’ll crush me beneath him, even though I know he would never hurt me. He never will. He had before, but that wasn’t his fault…

The hand at my back unclasps my bra strap, and I thank myself for choosing the bra that’s easy to get undone – not that River would have struggled with any of them. Probably. My face gets hot, and I wonder if it’s because of embarrassment or because of his proximity.

“Stop squirming,” he bites down on my shoulder, harsher than usual but not cruelly, and I realize I’ve been wriggling around as he touches me.

I’m not sorry. I’m just desperate to get as close to him as I possibly can.

He starts pulling my bra from my body and I raise a hand to help him, pulling it away from my body. He just growls at me, taking my hand from me and bending it behind me again as he moves his mouth down to my chest.

He showers the skin there in kisses, moving down to my nipple as he sucks it into his mouth. I groan again, my hips rising to meet his as I raise myself up from the bed.

Finally.

We’re finally going to sleep together again.

But he pulls himself away from me, and I cry out with a begging mewl that sounds desperate even to me. But I need him. I need him inside me and I don’t care how embarrassing it is for him to know that, as long as he knows and takes me as his. He grabs my hair at the base of my scalp, pulling my hair so I look up at him.

“Faith,” he grins. “You don’t need to be upset. Please, baby.”

Has my face really fallen as totally as I think it has? It must’ve, by the way he’s talking… But his voice drips down lower and I see his eyes narrow with lust. He’s not sorry for me. He’s…

“I’m horny as fuck and I’m going to make you mine completely,” he says, grabbing my thighs and pulling them open so my panties draw tight over my sex and the wetness is even more noticeable.

I whimper and try to close them so he can’t see just how much I want him, but he doesn’t let me. He looks up at me, his jaw tightening as he takes a hand and slaps me… There.

It’s light but my hips buck up at the sheer surprise of it.

Then he grabs the undersides of both my thighs, throwing my body up and over his shoulder like he carried me down to the ice cream shop in the more modern of Santorini earlier. But it’s not the same. It’s more possessive, as if he’s carrying me so people would know I’m his. But there’s no one around, except us.

I gasp in horror as we walk down the stairs, and I hope he’s not intending for us to do this on the couch… I want him more than anything and I wouldn’t say no if he did, but if Sabrina and Dawn saw us, that would be the end for me.

He doesn’t.

He walks right past the sofa and out the door, and as soon as we’re out of sight of the house, he lays me down gently onto the sand.

It’s light and I start rolling to catch myself, but he grabs my leg. His hand trails up to my upper thigh, pulling them apart again as his other hand reaches up to my hip. His hand at my thigh finally meets it there, and he’s pulling my panties down past my thighs, and suddenly I’m naked, the cool night wind tickling against every part of me.

My nipples get harder in the cold and he smiles, kissing from one to the other one, sucking them both into his mouth as desperately as he can.

He’s on top of me again, my back against the sand as another hand moves between my thighs. He clutches my sex completely, stroking the cleft there in circles as I moan for him. I run my hands down his arms, shaking beneath him, desperate for him to take me…

I move my mouth to his neck and give him kisses there, looking at him and arching my own neck for him when he looks back. He smiles, pleased, knowing I knew what he wants.

And he kisses me.

I pull his shorts from him, pulling him farther down so I’m completely flat on the sand below him with his weight crushing me beneath him. I couldn’t get up if I wanted to. I don’t want to. I run a hand over his jaw, bringing his face to mine and his kiss is hungrier now.

One of his hands falls away from my body to his cock, and he frees it completely, kicking his shorts away to the beach as the waves crash gently around us. I don’t want him to have to do this… Especially when I so need to. I can feel my body shake as I think about it, and I’m desperate to have inside me.

I take his cock in my hand, running my fingers along it gently as I bring it to my slit, closing my eyes as I imagine it pushing inside me. But that doesn’t happen. My eyes open to River shaking his head at me, and I groan.

He runs the head of his cock along my slit, teasing me as he rubs, and I know that he’s loving my moans and, for now, I will get nothing more.

Until I do, and he’s pushing himself inside me, us both holding each other in our arms as the beach continues its daily life. It’s so cold, and we’re each other’s only source of heat…

We kiss and bite each other, tasting each other, moving slowly so we can savor the other’s body like the night will never end.

We stay there, me beneath him and us together as one. It’s beautiful, perfect, and right… So right, that we stay there until morning.

W
e’re
both covered in sand. Faith is so sleepy and beautiful, her eyes fluttering open as she smiles, cuddling closer to me when she finds we’ve drifted apart in our sleep – no longer one on top of the other, but still so close that her cuteness is silly.

I stretch away from her, making her moan in protest.

It’s not that I want to be away from her, but I know what I’m doing. I lift a pile of sand into the palm of my hand, trying not to let too many grains of it escape. When she turns to get more attention from me, I raise my hand above her head, dropping the sand into her hair before I tap her on the forehead, grinning.

“You’re a mess,” I tease her, my eyes running down her body to where I can still see all the kisses I left there last night. She blushes, like I’d hoped she would, and I run a hand down her neck. It isn’t even sexual. I just want to touch her, and I let her know it.

“You did it to me!” She bats my hand away with a smile, her voice rising. Then she picks up sand and throws it at me, and we’re play fighting, careful not to get the grains of sand in each other’s eyes.

“Whatever,” I flick her forehead. Fuck. I’m way too soft. But… I’m soft with her. Only her. “More importantly,” I cough, changing the subject from my supposed inability to defend myself, as she says, “we need to figure out a way to get back to the house without being seen.”

It’s early morning now. It’s light and people will be here, and there is no way in hell I’m sticking my dick back in those sand-filled boxers now. I don’t expect Faith to want to put her clothes back on, either, not that she was wearing much in the first place. I reach out and grab one of her nipples, hard, pinching it and watching as sand falls from her skin.

“See,” I growl, feeling my cock getting hard again. “You’re a mess.”

I see her react to my touch, her hands immediately going to me as her thighs squeeze together.

But it’s early morning… I don’t care if we’re seen – fuck, I would probably enjoy having someone watch and see me claim Faith as mine. I just want to fuck her right now – but it’d probably embarrass Faith for strangers to see her impaled on my cock the way I’m imagining.

So I deny her, keeping distance enough as I tease her pussy with my thumb. She narrows her eyes, lusty and annoyed.

This woman is mine, and she knows it.

I cough again, pretending that I only care about getting back to the house. Truth is, I want to drive her wild, tease her until she’s begging me to fuck her, like I still haven’t… I want to rile her up and then deny her wants until she’s almost over the edge.

Oh, yeah. Just not now.

The villa is a way’s up a hill from here, and I can see that we wound up a little farther away from it then either of us was expecting.

We start our walk. Almost immediately, I lift Faith into my arms. I like feeling her there, and her feet are bare. Mine are, too, but Faith is smaller, softer, and I don’t want her to hit a rock and hurt herself. We decide to try to enter the house from a side door, and get to our bedroom and to a shower after walking through the kitchen.

As soon as we get there, I realize it’s a mistake.

“What the fu—“

“River!” Faith silences me, her voice almost a hiss as she stands on her toes to keep me from swearing in front of Dawn. But I can’t help it. The rest of the word slips out and gets caught in the palm of her hand as I stare at him – Thomas.

My PR manager.

“…are you doing here?” Shit.

I finish my sentence, realizing that Dawn is here, that’s why Faith didn’t want me swearing. We both jump, hiding behind a table as Sabrina grabs her, moving away and mumbling something about not knowing where we were to give warning.

I glance to Dawn as she leaves, making sure she hasn’t noticed. She hasn’t. Good. But I don’t get why this guy is here bothering my family.

Except I know exactly why he’s here. I’ve run off from my job to be with them.

Gave no notice, no warning.

No fucks, basically, but I can’t exactly say that with a toddler around.

Thomas looks at both of us, his eyes lingering too long on Faith and I growl at him, not the way I’d growl at Faith, but in the way that tells him to knock his shit off or get his shit knocked out.

He’s been there for me and he’s helped me out with lots of things. I’m pretty sure I have most of my career to thank him for, him and his advertising. But he’s not helping now.

He raises both of his eyebrows, clearly amused and a little pissed off as well. “I’ll give you two a second to get adjusted. And dressed,” he turns his back, but doesn’t leave.

“Faith, you go upstairs,” I nod to the staircase and put a hand on her back, comforting her as she runs up the stairs with a confused look on her face. “I don’t care about being naked.”

I move back in front of Thomas from behind the table. I was only back there because Faith was nervous and she’d jumped first, and I wanted to protect her.

I sit in a white stool next to the table – four of them, I notice. And there’s four of us already here, so clearly Thomas is unnecessary.

I voice the thought to him.

“Nice to see you, too, River,” he says, grabbing a stool and turning it so he sits across from me. He has it positioned so the back is to me and his arms are over it, with his legs sprawled across either side of it.

I hate it when other guys sit like that. Douches.

“You’ve been ignoring our calls.”

“Our?” I say, raising an eyebrow and mocking him.

“Our,” he repeats, pulling out his phone and showing me all the calls he’s sent me. Ones I hadn’t even noticed. I’d only given Coach’s any merit.

“Mine. And Daniels. And…” He continues off a list of names of people and their petty bullshit, and I don’t listen until he pulls out an envelope. He throws it on the table and motions for me to open it with a nod of his head.

I grimace at him, and push the envelope back with two fingers. “If there’s supposed to be bad news in there,” I warn him, “you can just tell me. Actually,” I add, “I expect you to tell me.”

He shakes his head in disdain and rips it open. A stack of photos falls out onto the table and he pushes these towards me.

“Are you going to look through these yourself? Or are you going to make me do it?”

“Now that you say it, actually,” I smile, “I think I’ll make you do it. Thanks.”

Christ, I’m an asshole. It’s more noticeable now because of how soft I’ve been around Faith and Dawn and…

Shit.

He grins at me.

“That’s the stuff, kid,” he says. And for a second, I’m confused. Until he flips over the pictures.

“The news has been going crazy. This is what they have of you, so far. There’s this one, and this one, and…”

Pictures.

Of me and Faith.

Standing on the boat. Me fighting Jason. The news reads that she’s my wife, and that we have a daughter together. There’s photos of us landing in Santorini, and my eyes flash to the last photo as he holds it up, his face grim.

“And this,” he says, “Is probably the worst of all of them. What the fuck are you doing, River?”

The photo shows us wrapped together on the beach, from last night. But I hadn’t seen it in any magazines…

Wait a second.

“I won’t send this to anyone if you come back, River.” He says.

So the bastard took it.

I clench my fists at my sides, not wanting to beat the shit out of my own PR guy and ruin what I have with Faith and Dawn here.

“This isn’t going great for you, X. You aren’t a father,” he continues.

“Fuck, you’re, twenty-three. You have a bright future ahead of you, kid. You don’t love this girl, much as you think you do. You could pay to take care of them from a distance, if you want, but you’ll find another one. You have a match coming up. Six days from now. You have a flight in three to make it there in time for some autographs and some damage control. Be there or be square.”

I watch as he pushes himself up from the chair and I don’t even feel angry anymore, just sick. And I know that I have nothing to say in response.

He’s got me.

And I’ve got to go back to my career.

Since when the fuck had Thomas turned into such a heartless bastard? I remember him as sweet. Cutthroat with other executives and the media, though. I’m just on the other side of the knife now.

He turns to me, winking. “Think about it, Xavier.”