Rock Courtship Rock Courtship (Rock Kiss #1.5) (2 page)

D
avid didn’t bother to tell
any of the others he was heading out. The rest of the band, as well as the long-term crew, all knew he liked to take a long, quiet walk the night before a show. Sometimes it took a bit of fancy footwork to slip out unnoticed, but on the whole, it wasn’t too bad. He was lucky; he tended to attract far less media attention than Fox, Noah, and Abe.

Tonight it had been even easier than usual. Most of the media hounds had gone home, and the ones still hanging around weren’t going to waste their time tailing the “Gentleman of Rock” when they might get a titillating shot of one of the others doing sexy things with a beautiful woman.

Leaving the area immediately around the Sydney hotel where the band was staying pre-concert, he flipped up the hood of his dark gray sweatshirt, shoved his hands into the pockets of his black pants, and started walking. He should’ve changed from his tailored white shirt and black pants to jeans and a tee, but he’d wanted to get out of the hotel too much to waste even five more minutes.

He could remember exactly when he’d begun to take these walks—way back during Schoolboy Choir’s first ever national tour. Overwhelmed by the attention and the constant demands from people who wanted a piece of him, he’d just needed to
breathe
. Ironic how that was. When he’d been a kid in a tiny apartment in the Bronx, he’d dreamed of a shiny car and a big house, and when he could afford all that and more, the only thing he wanted was the anonymity of walking the city streets.

Sydney was a city he’d visited before with the band, so instead of sticking to the main drags, he wandered off the beaten path. It was on his way back to the hotel over an hour later that he found himself on what appeared to be the fringe of a red-light district. The shadowed and slightly seedy streets filled with strip clubs and hole-in-the-wall bars suited his current mood.

“Get over her, David,” he told himself, not for the first time. “Take a woman home and fuck it out.”

Except even as he spoke, he knew it wasn’t that easy. He’d tried after Thea made it clear she had no interest in him. Two nights after her rejection, he’d found himself at a party overflowing with leggy models who had a soft spot for rock musicians. A raven-haired beauty with pillowy lips and generous breasts had draped herself all over him, whispering an explicit invitation in his ear. It had involved the bathroom floor and her on her knees in front of him.

How fucked up was it that he’d turned her down? As fucked up as the fact that he was being faithful to a woman who
didn’t want him
. Frustrated with himself for still being so damn hurt, he shoved a hand through his hair, pushing off the hood as he came within sight of another random bar with a beat-up black door and no bouncer.

Deciding he might as well get a beer if he was going to brood, he walked into the dark and dingy place full of scarred wooden tables and hard men. They looked like the construction workers and bricklayers he’d run errands for as a boy, before he’d won the scholarship to the boarding school where he’d met his best friends.

His shoulders eased.

He felt far more comfortable in a place like this than in the five-star restaurants and fancy clubs where everyone expected chart-topping musicians to hang out. “Beer—whatever you have on tap,” he said to the grizzled bartender and grabbed a stool, his eye on the rugby game in progress on the TV screen bolted above the bar.

He’d hardly taken a sip of his beer, the dark liquid bitingly cold, when he felt a presence at his back. Instincts honed by a childhood in one of the toughest areas of New York had him focusing on the mirror behind the bar to check out the situation before he turned. A big, bald, and heavily muscled male with a spiderweb tattoo on his neck was standing behind and just to the side of David, a smirk on his pockmarked face.

Belly heating, David turned with a slight smile. “Problem?”

The bald man bared his teeth and, laughing, looked to a table to his right. “Hear that, boys?” he called out to his friends. “The pussy rock star here wants to know if there’s a problem.”

Laughter and shouts from that particular table, while the rest of the men in the bar went quiet. David didn’t move, taking a measure of the players without letting it show. “Always know your opponent” had been one of the first things his father had taught him—Vicente Rivera didn’t believe in turning the other cheek; he believed in teaching his sons how to put bullies on the ground and keep them there.

“Yeah, there’s a problem,” the bald guy said, shoving at David’s shoulder. “This is a real bar for real men. Not pussies.”

Like that, then.
Good
. He was in the mood to do some violence. Lifting his beer, David took a long drink, then slammed it down… and punched Bald Head in the jaw at the same time that he kicked out with his foot to connect with the other man’s knee. The jackass went down like a ton of bricks.

Roaring in rage, the man’s friends came at David.

He grinned and started to show them what this “pussy rock star” could do.

It wasn’t until they’d broken a table and several chairs, and the bartender had called the cops that David realized Thea would have to deal with the fallout from this. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought as he was shoved into a cell alone, his erstwhile opponents in the cell opposite. Sliding down the graffiti-marked wall to the floor, he thought about the phone call the desk sergeant had said he could make and decided against it.

Fox had Molly with him—the band’s lead singer had been waiting for his girl to arrive since the instant Schoolboy Choir set foot in the city. As for Noah and Abe, they both had their own plans. He knew any one of the three men would drop those plans in an instant to come to his aid, but since the cops had made it clear he’d be spending the night in a cell no matter what, why mess up their plans?

“You do or say anything that’ll hit the media, you call me. Day or night. I hate surprises—so don’t you dare surprise me.”

Thea had given that order to all four of them when she’d agreed to act as their publicist. Her up-front nature and dedication to her job was part of the reason they’d hired her; Thea was the best and she didn’t take any shit from her clients. He wasn’t doing himself any favors by not calling her.

Right then, David couldn’t find it in himself to care. It wasn’t as if she could hurt him any more than she already had. And Jesus, how long was he going to carry this torch that was burning him alive? “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said aloud, banging the back of his head against the wall.

T
hea was on her third
cup of coffee when the phone rang. Seeing Fox’s name on the screen, she frowned. She was awake at this hour because she wanted to finalize a few things before she headed off on vacation later today—after handling the band’s scheduled media interviews. Fox, however, was with Molly, so if he was wasting time calling her, it had to mean trouble. “Fox, what’s happened?”

“David’s in jail.”

Thea collapsed onto a sofa, her mind spinning. “
David?
Don’t you mean Abe or Noah?”

“David,” Fox repeated. “He got in a bar fight, did enough damage that—”

Heart thumping, she broke into his words. “Is he all right?”

“Black eye, bruised ribs, but he came out better than the other guys. I’m on my way to pick him up from the station, but the media’s probably already gotten hold of the story.”

Eyes narrowing, Thea sat up. “When was this bar fight?”

“Last night. And yeah, I know he should’ve called you then, but he didn’t. Can you handle it?”

“Of course I can handle it.” Taking down the details he had, including the name of the bar, she disconnected and began to do her job, which in this case meant damage control. A rock star misbehaving wasn’t a big deal generally, but it all depended on how the media decided to report it—and it could get nasty if they pitched it as an arrogant international musician throwing his weight around against locals.

First, she rang up the bar and spoke to the owner.

“Mr. Rivera apologizes for the damage,” she said, putting words in David’s mouth. “We’d be happy to cover the bill for any repairs. Please send it straight to me.”

The bar owner guffawed, loud and long. “Naw, don’t worry. I’m making the dipshits pay for it, the ones who started it. Your guy was just having a beer and watching the rugby until Bruiser decided to prove his dick was bigger. Picked the wrong mark this time.”

David had gone up against someone named
Bruiser?
Not only that, he’d come out of the altercation better off? And both Fox’s use of the word “guys” and the bar owner’s of “dipshits” meant Bruiser hadn’t been David’s only opponent.

Thea was having difficulty comprehending any of this. Of all the men in the band, David was the most stable. He was the one who made the band a family—and she wasn’t sure any of the four men even realized it. David was the calm center in the midst of the storm, rooted and so sure of who he was that nothing could shake him.

He
did not
get into bar fights.

He
did not
put Thea in the position of having to clean up after him.

He
did not
end up in
jail
with a black eye and bruised ribs.

Except he’d done exactly that. “Here are my contact details just in case,” she said to the bar owner, not about to allow her frustration and shock to stop her from doing her job. “You’ll probably get some media attention—”

“Already spoke to a few reporters,” the man replied cheerfully. “Phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

Thea slapped a hand silently over her forehead and bit back a groan. She was seriously going to strangle David. “Well,” she said, trying to salvage what she could of the situation, “if you need any assistance dealing with them—”

The bar owner interrupted her again. “Naw, I can handle it. I told them the drummer guy beat the crap out of the bozos who were hassling him. That boy learned his moves somewhere where they don’t fight pretty, that’s for sure.”

Thea released a relieved breath, the publicist in her immediately seeing the positive angle. Yes, the Gentleman of Rock had been in a bar fight against locals, but he hadn’t started it and he’d come out of it the victor against multiple opponents. Everyone liked the underdog who’d beaten the bullies. Especially when the underdog was a sexy, straight-arrow rock star who generally stayed out of the media spotlight.

So she played that angle, laughed good-naturedly with reporters as she gently nudged things in the direction she wanted them to go. Then, logging into David’s main social-media account—which he usually only used to answer fan questions—she pretended to be him and began to type out a message.

He could yell at her later. Not that David ever yelled. But he’d made it clear she was only ever to touch his account if he was held up somewhere and fans were waiting for a concert, or something else equally important. As far as Thea was concerned, this qualified.

“Damn it,” she muttered, erasing what she’d already written to start all over again. A laughing, smirking admission wouldn’t work, wouldn’t sound like David. But she couldn’t allow him to maintain radio silence, not this time. The print and online media could still spin the story the wrong way if she didn’t give them another angle bolstered by fan support.

That boy learned his moves somewhere where they don’t fight pretty, that’s for sure.

The memory of the bar owner’s admiring statement made her mind click. Fingers to the keyboard of the lightweight laptop that acted as her virtual office, she wrote:
I guess no one told them I was born and raised in the South Bronx.

There, she thought, that was David. No explanations, just a proud shout-out to his old neighborhood, a neighborhood his parents and siblings continued to call home. Of course, his folks and younger brothers were no longer in a shoebox apartment in a tenement building, but on the top floor of a spacious new five-story complex. Because David was a man who respected the meaning of family—the one he’d created with the band and the one into which he’d been born.

She knew he’d offered to move his family to a more gentrified area of New York and an even nicer place, but the Riveras liked their part of the Bronx and didn’t want to “sit on their asses all day, mooching off their son.” David had said that to her, paraphrasing his parents, when he’d told her his folks had no intention of retiring; the admiration and affection in his tone had made her want to kiss him.

In quiet respect for their pride, he’d bought the complex, then convinced Vicente and Alicia Rivera that he needed them as live-in managers. They were meant to oversee the small staff that took care of any physical maintenance, but his father apparently couldn’t help himself at times, and neither could his mother. Their building not only had a thriving rooftop garden but was so spick-and-span that there was a waiting list of potential tenants.

Grinning, she added another line to “David’s” message:
Anyone mentions this to my mother, I
will
find you.

The band’s fans all knew Mrs. Rivera, the mom who’d helped bring up David and his two younger brothers by cleaning business offices and rich people’s homes from five in the morning to two in the afternoon. His father was a construction worker who’d pulled fourteen-hour shifts after getting the kids off to school, with his mom always there when they returned home. Despite their hard work, the family had lived on fumes at times.

The poverty in his past was something David had never hidden. He had, however, made sure his younger brothers weren’t hounded by the media by scrupulously keeping them out of his public profile. His beaming mom, on the other hand, he’d brought as his date to the Grammys two years running.

Mrs. Rivera had charmed everyone who met her.

David’s dad wasn’t as comfortable in the spotlight, but his pride in his “boy” was clear in the rare interviews he’d granted. Thea knew for a fact that David returned to New York regularly to help his parents with anything they needed and that he was the first port of call for his brothers—both of whom were now at Ivy League universities, thanks to the educational trust funds David had set up.