Rough Rhythm: A Made in Jersey Novella (1001 Dark Nights) (3 page)

“Stop being so cryptic,” she whispered. “You’re scaring me.”

Another tick in his expression, so fleeting she might have imagined it. He stared over her head, though, not directly at her. “Are you hurt in any way?”

“I’m fine.”

He gave a single nod and left her in the doorway to unlock the passenger side door. Lita had no choice but to climb inside and engage her seatbelt, as if in a daydream. One from which she desperately needed to wake up. Granted, she hadn’t known exactly how James would break—what it would look like—but gut instinct told her this reaction wasn’t what she’d been after. She’d wanted James so angry that he’d have no choice but to stop hiding. Stop pretending they weren’t denying themselves something vital. Something they both needed.

The hotel she’d been living in since their international tour ended was a fifteen-minute drive from the jail. Silence filled the car, growing denser by the mile until a scream clawed at Lita’s throat. “James—”

“You could have been killed.”

Finally, a reaction. Disapproval. Lita soaked it in like a sponge, sounding breathless when she said, “I’ve never seen you this mad.” Was this the breaking point?
Please, please let this be it.

“I don’t know what mad is supposed to feel like anymore.” His deep voice reached out and smothered her from across the car. “Admit why you did it.”

“What do you mean?”

They pulled to a stop at a red light. “You stole a police car last night.” His eyes closed, then opened to reveal more nothing.
Nothing
. Just emptiness. “You could have gotten in an accident. Or been shot by the responding officers. And I want to hear you admit why you did it. No more games, Lita.”

“I’m not the only one playing games,” she whispered.

James was silent for too long. “So you admit it. This is my fault.”

“
Yes
.” Hearing herself confess to such recklessness out loud brought home the reality of what she’d done, forcing redness to spread up from her neck. “I don’t know how else to get
through
to you.” Lita’s voice vibrated, her mind scrambling for the right words to make him understand. “This is what it takes just to get a crumb of what I need. The rest of the time you’re a statue just watching and watching and
watching
me. At least when you’re angry, I can feel a tiny part of what I felt that night.”

Gray eyes grew even more shuttered, and his hands flexed on the steering wheel at the forbidden mention of the night they’d met. They pulled into the valet driveway outside her hotel, but James held up a finger to the attendant who stood outside the driver’s side window. “I can’t give you what you need, Lita.” His hand paused on the door handle, his voice grave as she’d ever heard it. “And I will not stay around knowing I’m the reason you continually put yourself at risk.”

Lita’s reality slowed down, every tick of the imaginary clock sounding like a gong in her ears. Denial expanded, pushing to the furthest edges of her insides, leaving no room for air. “What d-does that mean?”

James stared straight forward as he delivered words that stalled her heart mid-beat. “I’ve found my replacement. One week from today, I’ll no longer be managing Old News.”

Chapter Two

James couldn’t even look at Lita. Not without feeling as though his stomach were being extracted through his throat. The jail-issued plastic bag containing her possessions was clutched in his right hand as they walked down the carpeted hallway of her hotel. On the way through the revolving glass doors, he’d caught sight of her reflection and knew it would be imprinted on the back of his eyelids for life.

Abandoned. She’d looked abandoned.

James drew a long, deep breath that did nothing to ease or fortify him. It had to be this way. This dysfunctional game between the two of them had gone on too long. He’d found a way to justify it, found a way to stay close by any means necessary, until last night. By simply being in her presence, he put her life at risk. Considering his life’s dedication had become the exact opposite four years ago, James had no choice but to get a safe distance away. He hadn’t fooled himself into thinking he could give her up completely, but his role in Lita’s life now would have to be…peripheral. Much as it would kill him.

Even now, his decision-making remained shoddy, as had been the case since their first meeting. With good-bye on the line, the least wise place James could be was inside Lita’s hotel room. Amidst her smell, her clothes…
her
. Always her.

The fucking jig is up.
James wasn’t a band manager. Nor was he a decent man. The longer he kept the charade up, the harder it would be to walk away from Lita. And since the night he’d taken away any chance of normalcy between them—because once that particular beast was woken, it didn’t go back to sleep—he’d known this day would come to pass. His appetite had no business with a fragile girl, twelve years his junior. One who’d raced from one tragedy to another more permanent one. Him.

James didn’t question Lita’s intelligence. She happened to be the most astute person he’d ever met. A huge heart reserved for her friends and an accurate judge of character. When it came to him, however, she couldn’t see below the surface. Had no idea what moved in the shadows of his psyche. Lita wanted something she didn’t understand—and worse, James didn’t fully understand it either. How could he get a bead on something that constantly shifted and grew, wanting more?

Without thinking, James removed Lita’s room key from his pocket and dipped it into the metal reader. As natural as breathing, except it shouldn’t be. Lovers kept keys to one another’s rooms. He hadn’t laid a hand on Lita in four years.

James pushed open the door and set the plastic bag inside, refusing to take one step inside the room. He held out the card for Lita to take as she passed, eyes fastened on the air above her head, but so aware of her nearness his stomach muscles protested from being clenched so tight.

“Oh, god
damn
you.” Lita plucked the card from his fingers and hurled it back into the hallway with a muffled scream. “Four years leads to this, huh? You’re just going to dump me in this fucking…”—she waved her hands to encompass the hotel—“…rock star purgatory and bail? If you’re doing this to teach me a lesson, I will never forgive you, James.”

“I’m not.” He cleared the cobwebs from his throat. “That’s not what this is.”

Without looking at Lita, he knew she’d be chewing her bottom lip, leaving teeth marks that would take until nighttime to fade. “I guess we really meant a lot to you if it’s this easy. No notice. Just…peace out, suckers.”

James swallowed the urge to shake her. “I think you know this is the furthest thing from easy.”

“
No
. I don’t know
anything
,” she shouted before several silent beats passed. “Except that you’re a coward. You can’t even look me in the eye.”

He surged forward, pushing her back against the doorjamb.
Going to break. Too much. I shouldn’t have come up here.
He’d made the mistake of looking down into green eyes swimming with moisture, calling her bluff. “Does the thought of you hurting yourself to get my attention make me a coward? Yes?
So be it
, Lita.” His fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms. “If something happened to you, I wouldn’t make it to the next sunrise.”

Lita’s body deflated, head falling back. “You can’t say something like that and leave,” she said, lips hardly moving. “It’s cruel.”

“I’m a cruel man.”

“No.” Lita moved into the elegant room, booted feet dragging. A miniature hurricane in a gilded cage. He’d chosen the room himself, another sign of his madness, his need to control her surroundings. Have knowledge of everything she touched. His neck grew hot when she turned, sliding a gaze down his front.

Turning and leaving was imperative at that moment, but he couldn’t resist hearing what she would say next. Delaying the good-bye.

“Remember what you called me the first night we met?” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Before you leave, call me that one more time.”

Panic spread dots across his vision. “
No
.”

There was calculation in her expression, but a thread of desperation he’d never witnessed in Lita before. A hint of hysteria. Gone was the sarcasm and wit he’d come to rely on. The difference held him in thrall as she toed off her boots…and peeled the T-shirt over her head, leaving her in a black bra and jeans
. Jesus Christ.
The flesh behind his fly fought to be free of its denim prison. Needing her. Forever needing her. His lungs couldn’t find satisfaction, ripping at the air to no avail.

“
Enough
.”

Shaking her head, Lita’s tongue danced across her bottom lip. “Maybe I’ll ask the new manager to call me that name.”

The world turned a dangerous color of red, blood pumping in waves behind his eardrums. James had traversed the room to tower over Lita without a conscious decision. Inside him, something shook, a rattle of chains against a cage, warning him to pull back, but he couldn’t. Couldn’t. Visions of another man’s hands on Lita’s skin were all he could process. James’s hands circled her biceps, lifting her off the bed and tossing her backward into the mattress’s center, finding perverse pleasure in the way her little figure bounced, green eyes widening.

James crawled over Lita, the bed dipping beneath his knees. “The new manager is a woman. Did you think for a second, after everything, that I would overlook a detail so important?” He planted his fists on either side of her head, every inch of his skin feeling raw, exposed.
I’m starving
. “I had no plans to manage a band. Not until you. Now I’ve spent the last four years deciding where you slept. Where you ate. It’s not normal. Not good for you.”

“James,” she whispered, falling back on the bed beneath him. “We—”

“Stop.” He devoured the indentation of her belly button with his gaze, the slope of her ribcage. God, he would sell his soul for a single lick. To feel that shudder against his tongue. “These things I do to keep control, to keep you in places that allow me to sleep at night…that need only grows. Eventually I would stop you from being Lita and you would hate me for it. I would hate me, too.”

“I couldn’t.” She turned her head and laid her lips on his forearm, severing his heart in eighteen places. “I push you to it. I’ll stop. I promise I’ll stop pushing if you stay. If you just…kiss me, you’ll know that everything is going to be fine.
Please?
”

Begging was so uncharacteristic for Lita, so unusual, that James wasn’t prepared for the pleasure that skated over his senses like a revelation. He loved hearing her pleas? God, what a sickness he had. “I want
bad
things.” Was that
his
voice? “
Need
them.”

Lita pushed up on her elbows, bringing their mouths close. “Bring it.”

Her husky challenge untethered urges he’d held in check too long. Electric energy scratched at the insides of his veins, an unnamed force gripping him by the nape. If he didn’t release some of the mounting pressure, he would implode. What was left of his common sense twisted around, turned inside out, reasoning that if he exposed some of the need to Lita, she would make this easer. She would stop begging him to finally fuck her and start begging him to leave.

Too late to turn back
. Coming to his knees above her, James curled his right hand around her throat, exerting just enough pressure to keep her still. Pink, teeth-marked lips popped open to suck in a breath. A breath James could feel being inhaled against his palm.
So perfect.
“There’s my little plaything.” He adjusted his grip. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Lita’s eyelids fluttered down to conceal her gaze, an acknowledgment of the pet name he’d growled in her ear so long ago in the dark. Just once. But it had been enough to remain poised on his tongue ever since, pleading to be uttered aloud.

James leaned down to inspect the curve of her cheek. “If another man called you his plaything, Lita, I would
gut
him.”

Beneath him, Lita’s stomach dipped and lifted, making contact with his abdomen and calling attention to the position of his ready cock. A few quick maneuvers of their clothing and he’d be seated in her look-but-do-not-touch pussy. And
Christ
, he’d looked. She’d paraded that sweet spot around him in every manner of thin material known to man. Spandex, ripped denim, threadbare cotton. Just for his eyes. His torment.

“You haven’t been fucked since we met. I’ve seen to it. Do you know how?” Damning himself, James dropped his hips into the cradle of her thighs, choking back the moan that emerged from his mouth, savoring the answering moan Lita let loose. “I put the fear of God into them. I paid them to fuck off. I’ve used my fists on a few that proved…overeager. Whatever it took.”

Craving the sight of her body, James released her throat and trailed fingertips down the center of her chest, tracing the front snap of her bra. His mouth turned to a desert at the idea of sucking her nipples, but no…
no
, that would be too sweet. Too pleasurable. She would like it. And his mission was to make her understand. This…him…was not what she wanted. With regret screaming in his head, James trailed his fingers lower, down her trembling belly, to tuck inside the waistband of Lita’s jeans.
Not here, either. No touching here.

 “Who’s going to stop them now?” Her winded—and somewhat hesitant—

 question interrupted his fevered thoughts. “The men. Who will stop them?”

Fuuuuck.
The denim ripped inside his shaking fist, his rebelling mind demanding more of the satisfying sound. He yanked down the zipper behind her already tattered fly, giving himself a leveraging handhold before tearing the jeans down her body. It left the very tops of her thighs exposed, along with the little white triangle of her panties. “Stop
provoking
me.”

“No,” Lita breathed. “I
won’t
.”