Unplugged: A Bad Boy Rockstar Romance (10 page)

Laying on top of her, we made out and pulled desperately
at each other’s bodies with our hands, as if we had never touched one another
before and would never again. A few minutes of that and my dick was practically
begging to be inside of her—and that was to say nothing of my enflamed heart.

After some careful maneuvering, my jeans and boxers
were slid down my legs, and I sat waiting on the bench seat of my truck like
some horny teenager while Laurel wiggled her own pants off, stealing kisses the
whole time. I had just rolled on an old condom from the glove box when she finally
straddled my hips, and I could feel her wet heat dangerously close to my dick,
even through the thin latex.

Grasping my shoulders for leverage and balance, she maneuvered
herself over my cock and looked straight into my eyes as she impaled her pussy
on my dick. It was so fucking hot I had to roll my head back and growl. My
hands gripped her ass cheeks tight as she lowered herself, inch by inch, onto
my stiffness until it filled her completely. Her muscles clenched around me
with sweet pressure as she let out a long, soft sound of contentment. She
paused for just a moment, as if simply enjoying the feel of having me inside
her, and then she began bucking her hips and riding me hard.

We couldn’t keep our mouths off each other in this
cramped space—not that we would have wanted to. I couldn’t get enough of Laurel’s
taste, the heat of her skin, the feel of her soft womanhood around me- hell,
even the sharp but sweet pain of her nails, digging into my neck. I kept one
hand clenched on her ass, helping her rhythm, and tangled the other in the back
of her hair. I pushed her gasping mouth down to mine and she kissed me
ravenously.

“Fuck, Noah, you feel so good,” she cried, her
forehead pressed against mine as she rode me.

“So do you,” I whispered back. “I want you to cum hard
all over my dick, Laurel. I want to see your face.”

“Oh, God.” She shivered at my words, and I felt the
pressure of her bouncing get harder and faster.

One hand ran up and under her shirts until I had a
handful of breast. I rolled her nipple between my fingers and she groaned. “Are
you going to cum for me?”

“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, Noah.”

“Come hard for me, Laurel,” I said.

Her pussy started clenching around me and I knew she
was close. I bucked my hips up to meet hers, driving my cock deep and hard
inside of her, and Laurel screamed at the added pressure. She gripped my shirt
like she was falling off a cliff as her orgasm rocked her body and didn’t stop
fucking me until she had pulled me over the edge with her. When she did, the
waves of her orgasm milked my cock, as if they were desperately trying to draw
every ounce of fluid I had left in my body.

Laurel didn’t seem aware of herself for the first few
moments after she came. She rocked slowly on my hips and cock, her beautiful
face looking calm and still through the dim half-light of the fogged-up truck
windows. I pulled her lips to mine and kissed her, enjoying the soft moans
still escaping from her throat.

“Noah,” she said wistfully. Her eyes were closed.

“Yeah?” I whispered back.

Laurel paused. She rubbed her face against mine
longingly. I had a sense the words that finally came out of her mouth weren’t
the first that she thought of—but I liked hearing them, anyway.

“I’m glad I found you.”

~ THIRTEEN ~

Laurel

I’d
been staring at my laptop for forty-five minutes, just circling around the same
mindless websites and think pieces I had already checked. There was a lot of
important work to do, but my brain was flooded with thoughts of Noah. Yesterday
had been unbelievable, dreamlike. I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening to
me, but it wasn’t like anything I’ve been through before.

In my mind a quiet question was gaining strength,
demanding attention, and it was taking more of my energy than ever to ignore
it.

But I fought it. I had to keep fighting it. I had a
job to do, and now that job was more important than ever. After hearing what
Noah had to say about the festival—exactly the scoop we dreamed of—this hunch
that I had been wrong about him only seemed more certain. Since the first time
I met him, Noah Hardy had thrown me for a curve, yielding layers of complexity
beneath the bullshit image the media had built for him. Wasn’t it reasonable,
then, that there was more to the story of the festival than we expected? It was
true of everything else about Noah.

It had been hard to contain my excitement when he told
me about what really happened at the festival. I found myself flooded with all
sorts of relief; but more than that, I wanted to sprint away from that beach
right then and there to find a solution to his problems.

That night had turned into something I didn’t expect
in a lot of ways. I was still reeling from the incredible sex, from the
intimacy, from the warmth I felt in Noah’s arms that I had never felt anywhere
else before. Warmth I didn’t know was possible to receive from another person.

But I really did have work to do. I had to check out
what Noah had told me. After hearing his story, I started doing some digging,
and I was more certain than ever he was telling the truth. It was just that no
one would listen to him.

Finally, Steve’s knock at the door interrupted my
mindless surfing. He brought coffee and donuts this time, still a little sour
from me wasting the extravagant feast from the other day, and together we
gathered up around the tiny circular table near the window.

“So, you finally remembered you’re not here on
vacation?” he said with a raised eyebrow as he passed out the donuts.

“It’s been like, two days, you big baby. You really
need me around all the time for entertainment? This city is great.”

“I’ll take the Atlantic chill, thank you.”

I shook my head and drank some of the black coffee
he’d brought. “Anyway, shut up, we have a lead on something and we need to
drive at it hard.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I hiked my leg up onto the cozy, round chair. “We’re
missing part of the story. We always have been. Noah killed that guy in
self-defense.”

Steve coughed on a bit of the donut making its way
down his throat. “Are you fuck-drunk? How many times did you watch that video, Laurel?
That dude didn’t even
see
Noah coming, let alone go after him.”

“The guy was going after Quinn with a blade. Noah
stopped him.”

Steve just watched my face like he was waiting for me
to break. I gave him a withering look back and asked him to respond.

“Man, are you in love with this guy or something?”
said Steve.

I rolled my eyes, but didn’t admit to Steve—or
myself—how much my chest tightened up at the question. “That’s not the reason,
Steve. I’m serious about this.”

“It’s not
the
reason, but it’s
a
reason?” Now Steve was smiling like a fucking idiot.

“Steve, goddammit.”

“Big bad Laurel quivering for Noah Hardy? Battista is
never going to believe this,” said Steve as he dug in his pocket for his phone.

“If you don’t put that fucking phone down, I’m going
to call Diane right now and tell her how many mimosas you made me sneak you on
the plane ride over here, I swear to God. Test me.”

Steve froze. Silently he slid his phone back into his
jacket pocket and looked at me with renewed interest, fingers crossed on the
table top. “All right, fine. I’ll bite. Tell me more about this bat-shit theory
of yours.”

“I’m not saying we run with it without proof,” I
assured him, pulling up the pages I wanted on my laptop. “I’m saying we find
proof.”

“Find proof that the dude Hardy killed was on-stage to
attack Quinn with a knife, you mean. Proof that, somehow, both the security
company and the cops missed that during their investigation.”

“Your sarcasm is noted and rejected,” I said, sliding
the laptop around to face him, and then dug into the éclair he had put next to
my coffee. “To answer your immediate concerns, I don’t think the cops and
security missed the proof. I think they’re hiding it.”

“Goddamn, it is too early for this.”

“Just shut up and listen. Our best bet as far as
looking at proof is the video evidence, but that also presents our biggest
problem. We have a lot of cell phone footage from the crowd from different
angles, but none of it helps us. Did you notice why?”

Steve stared at the laptop, his finger sliding over
the mousepad. After a few seconds he said, “They’re all too far away.” He
looked up at me with a curious face, chewing slowly.

I raised an eyebrow at him and nodded. “Exactly. They’re
all too far away. Somehow, not a single person that was in the first ten rows
near the stage was using their phone when the attack happened. Does that sound
right to you?”

“Sounds like straight-up bullshit. Half the crowd at
every show is on their phone, and the ones up-close have more reason than
anyone,” said Steve.

“That’s what I thought too,” I said. “I can’t find a
single video that close. So last night after I got back to the hotel, I started
sniffing around some of the fan message boards and Tumblr and the like, hoping
someone from the crowd posted what they saw happened.” I waved a finger at the
laptop. “Pull up the tabs of the ones I’ve saved, and you’ll see what I saw—a
pattern of a couple different people claiming they had their phones confiscated
by the security team after the attack.”

Steve’s eyes went wide as he browsed over the blog
posts. “Holy shit. Do you think they could be making it up?”

“I found a few bullshit posts among the sites, sure,
but these four share consistent details, and proof they were really at the
festival that day. It’s enough that I don’t think it’s bullshit. I think the
security team working the festival that day took the phones of everyone they
could—everyone reasonably close to the stage barricades.”

“It’s a fucking cover-up,” said Steve, both excitement
and disbelief in his voice.

“It’s a fucking cover-up,” I said with a smile. “That
security company knows it messed up by letting a fan get behind the barricades
and onto the stage in the first place. It makes sense that they would try and
limit any evidence of their wrongdoing.”

“Holy shit, Laurel,” said Steve. “But, the cops… you
really think they wouldn’t notice the security company gathering up phones?”

“You know damn well that security firms are loaded
with current and former cops moonlighting. Or they’re dudes who wish they could
be cops and would do anything to impress someone in uniform. I don’t think it’s
crazy at all to imagine the local PD playing along to protect some of its
officers, even if they weren’t on duty at the time. All the security company
has to do is say they didn’t find anything, and the cops just have to nod and
look the other way. No one’s going to question them.”

“Except the real cowboys, like us, right? Goddamn, we
are good.”

I nodded, overwhelmingly happy to see Steve on board
with my quest. “If we can find even one of the videos from the front rows, we
might be able to find proof of what Noah saw when he was onstage, and show that
he really thought Quinn was in mortal danger. We could completely exonerate him
of this.”

“It’ll be the journalistic bombshell of the fucking
decade!” said Steve, slapping the table.

I laughed. “Also that. At least, in the music world.”

“But what’s the plan? And how do we find videos that
don’t seem to exist?”

I finished off my coffee before I answered. “The name
of the security company is Sentinel. They’ve got headquarters in LA just a few
miles outside the fairgrounds where the festival took place. According to the
calls I made to the festival admins, Sentinel was just an independent contract
hire, working on retainer with the media conglomerate that owns the festival
and a few labels. The woman I spoke with said they pretty much accept the
security firm’s word on the incident. They’re like cops in that way, always
getting the benefit of the doubt.”

“And what’s the firm’s position on the stage breach?”

I rolled my eyes. “They blame that on Noah, too. He
brought a few girls on-stage a couple songs before the attack happened, so
they’re claiming the security guards were reasonable to ignore another fan
trying the same thing during the set. It’s just boilerplate corporate
handwashing. ”

“That’s bullshit. All that pre-planned stage stuff
would have been cleared with them beforehand at a fest this big.”

“Exactly,” I said. “This all stinks, and it all goes
back to Sentinel Security. I’m going to hop a flight down to LA tomorrow night
and see what I can dig up at Sentinel’s headquarters. Local cops usually tend
to be outnumbered by the private security at events like this, and actual cops
would have a much harder time confiscating the cell phones without a fight. If
someone did take the phones, odds are that it was Sentinel. I want to see if I
can find them.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to do that?”

I shook my head. There was no way I was putting Noah’s
future into anyone else’s hands. “I want to do this myself. You should stay
here and keep an eye on Noah.”

Steve pretended to write a note on his hand. “Keep all
other pussy away from Noah, got it.”

“I hate you.”

“What? I said keep all other pussy
away
from
Noah. This is me helping.”