Tangled Up In You (Rogue #1)

Chapter 63

63

CONOR

T hough it was well past eight in the evening, Conor kept his sunglasses on to withstand the bright flashes coming from dozens of photographers crowding the red-carpet premiere of his friend Jackson Armstrong’s latest splashy romantic comedy. He obliged the frantic paparazzi for several minutes, turning ever so slightly from one side to another as they shouted his name familiarly.

Coming to London for this event had been a last-minute decision, one born out of post-tour restlessness. Rogue had been home less than a month and he had yet to make the transition from the touring routine to quiet home life. They had performed better than they ever had, turning each show into a thrilling display of their cohesion as a band. And he ached for the adrenaline rush of performing before a rowdy audience on a near nightly basis. Going to pubs and parties once home was no substitution. He needed a distraction and he wasn’t going to get it by working with his bandmates on a new album.

Gavin was sullenly lost in his own head, overcome by worries of when and how the story of his mother’s abandonment might surface. There was little Conor could do to pull him out of his funk, and besides, he knew that if it was anyone’s job to do that, it was Sophie’s.

Martin was dedicated to making up for lost time with his wife and sons. Donal was now a big brother and the two boys kept Martin and Celia busy. Martin had arranged for the family to go away for a month to live in a cottage in a small town outside of Burgundy, France.

An opportunity had come up for Shay to score an independent movie soundtrack, which he promptly accepted, and was thus spending all his free time in New York.

All of which meant Conor was now attending a movie premiere in London where he would be lucky to get five minutes of the star’s time. The media crush was intense, and he was beginning to regret his decision to make a spectacle of himself when he felt a hand on his arm.

He turned with the expectation that it was a publicity person urging him along and was delighted to instead find himself face to face with Colette Devereaux.

She was as stunning as the last time he saw her some six months ago when she’d tagged along with Sophie to Rogue’s New York gig. They had shared one fiery night together and left it at that, partly because she was living with her photographer boyfriend at the time. She was also very young. Barely twenty-one, if he remembered correctly. Now twenty-nine, he was beginning to feel age differences like that more acutely.

Tonight, she was wearing a filmy cream dress with black lace trim that fell short against her thighs and strappy heels that made her slightly taller than him. With olive skin, rich brown eyes, and a wild mane of chestnut hair, she was a knockout. The addition of long legs, slim waist, and large breasts explained her rapid rise in modeling.

“Aren’t you a vision,” Conor murmured to her as he leaned in and gave her cheek a tender, lingering kiss.

“Good to see you, too,” she said with a smile.

They had inadvertently set off a vigorous round of new photographs that would catch their revealing body language as they stood close together, her hand still on his forearm.

“Are you going inside or straight to the party?” she asked.

“That depends.”

“On?”

“You,” he said, as he pulled his sunglasses off to look her in the eye.

Colette watched him for a moment, and he knew she was prolonging this to tease him.

“That simple, is it?” she finally asked with a small smile.

“It is,” he replied matter-of-factly.

They stood staring into each other’s eyes for a moment longer, ignoring the cries of their names and the continued clicking of cameras.

“Then take me out of here,” she finally said, and Conor smiled in return.

“Mate, you missed a great party last night. Where’d you go?” Jackson asked over the phone.

“I, em, ran into a friend,” Conor said softly, eyeing Colette as she slept soundly next to him. They had spent a good part of the night exploring each other’s bodies, leaving little room for talk. Their chemistry was phenomenal. He had forgotten how much fun she was, and it made him wonder if she still had a boyfriend.

“I take it by the whisper that the girl is still there,” Jackson said with an amiable laugh. “Well, anyway, you weren’t the only no-show. I was expecting a girl—a woman—to come but, alas, I was disappointed.”

“I didn’t know movie stars got stood up,” Conor said with a laugh.

“No, you wouldn’t think so, would you? I’ll track her down yet.”

“So, who is the lovely?”

“She’s a model I’ve seen once or twice. Sophie probably knows her—Colette Devereaux.”

“Fuck me,” Conor muttered.

“What?”

“Seems we have a mutual friend.”

There was an uncomfortable silence on the line.

“I see. Well, there it is. No use getting upset about it,” Jackson finally said.

“I really had no idea, Jack. I guess I should have sorted it out, though.”

“No, there wasn’t anything to be sorted out. She’s slippery, Conor. At least with me she was. She couldn’t stand to think five minutes into the future. So I didn’t really lose much.”

“Still …”

“Fuck it, you know? There’s plenty more out there and it’s not like I went without last night.”

Conor laughed. “Well, you free tonight? Let’s grab a drink.”

“Perfect. Come ’round about nine. Oh, and give Colette my regards,” Jackson said before hanging up.

Conor looked at Colette again. She lay on her side, facing him. Her thick hair fell like a blanket over her bare shoulder. There was no doubt that she was vibrant and beautiful, but Jackson’s call made Conor wonder what he was in for with her.

After a lazy, sex-fueled morning, Conor suggested he and Colette come up for air. Though their time together had been ridiculously satisfying, he realized they would have to leave the hotel room to actually have a conversation. They reluctantly separated so she could go to her hotel room to clean up while he did the same in his.

When they met up again, they wandered around Covent Garden, content to mingle with the tourists and admire the disparate mix of architecture of the Market Hall and Royal Opera House. As they window-shopped at Burberry, Sandro, and Paul Smith, conversation was easy, and Conor enjoyed the feel of Colette holding onto his arm.

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at Champagne & Fromage on Wellington Street. It was a picturesque wine and cheese cafe with the menu displayed on blackboards, olive-colored walls, and perfectly weathered wood tables paired with rustic red metal chairs set under an enormous stainless-steel wine-glass rack hung from the ceiling.

Conor felt like they could have been in the middle of Paris, especially with Colette’s perfect pronunciation of the Gallic offerings. The daughter of a Greek father and a French mother, she had been raised in Quebec before beginning to model at age fifteen. She was fluent in French and preferred to play up that part of her heritage, even taking her mother’s surname.

They were well into their bottle of champagne when she asked about his history with women.

“What about them?”

“I know— everyone knows—all about the models and actresses you’ve dated .”

He laughed. “Why do you say ‘dated’ with such suspicion?”

“You do have a reputation for liking, let’s call it, volume and variety.”

Sipping his champagne, he gave that thought. “I enjoy women,” he conceded.

“What was your most serious relationship?”

He smiled at her bluntness. “I suppose that was with a woman I lived with for a short time.”

“Were you in love?”

He didn’t need to think about it but he hesitated as if he did. “No. I wasn’t very fair to her in that sense.”

Colette shrugged and took a bite of a crostini topped with figs and melted Fourme d’Ambert cheese.

“It happens,” she said. “Most of the time people come together wanting different things and pretending that’s not the case.”

This declaration struck him as something relatively deep, especially coming from a twenty-one-year-old model. “You’re probably right.”

“So, have you ever been in love?”

“Yes,” he replied, this time without hesitation and regretted it.

“Who with?” she asked, intrigued.

“Someone who was unavailable to me.”

“You were never with her?”

“No.”

“But yet you fell in love? That’s sort of sad.”

Now, he was the one to shrug. “It happens.”

She watched him for a moment, seeing something he couldn’t hide. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“No, not at all,” he said quickly.

A knowing smile came to her lips. “Then you and I are a good match—we both don’t want anything serious and we both could use some fun and distraction,” she declared.

He shook off the thoughts of Sophie this conversation had raised and focused on the beautiful young woman before him. “A good match. So that means we’ll be seeing each other again?”

She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “We can be friends. I’m not interested in anything more.”

He recognized this as a bit of game playing. The paparazzi attention they had already garnered was on a Gavin and Sophie level. He could foresee it only getting more intense if they continued on. Normally, he’d try to minimize the kind of drama being involved with someone like Colette seemed to promise, but both the timing of being between albums and the desire for simple “fun and distraction,” as she called it, was hard to resist.

“I would love your friendship, honey,” he told her.