CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gizmo
M y head pounds like a fucking beat I’d never drum.
At least I’d have enough sense not to when the tequila is still wearing off—or maybe still wreaking havoc on my system.
I go to scrub a hand over my face, and the titanium of my wedding band hits me squarely on the brow bone. Talk about being smacked in the face with the cold, hard truth of yesterday.
I’m married.
Fucking married .
Last night flickers through my mind like a slideshow of someone else’s life. Someone else’s perhaps, yet... every moment of it was lived.
“Dance with me,” Hendrix shouts above the bruising tempo of the music.
I rise from my seat in the darkened corner of our VIP pod and adjust my hat lower over my face. On any other day, it’s okay for Gizmo from BENT to be seen partying in Las Vegas. Just not tonight and not with a woman who has a sixty-thousand-dollar wedding ring on her finger.
People can look back in a week and realize the guy who looked familiar but who they couldn’t place really was me, really was here, and really was with his wife, but the plan is for them to remember I looked like I was hiding. That I was trying to have a private moment.
But those thoughts, the careful planning, dissipate as I step up and slide my hand around Hendrix’s waist. With my front to her back, I pull her against me so that my lips brush against the shell of her ear when I speak. “I don’t dance, Cookie.”
She spins around, her lips pink and her eyes alive as she hops up and down to the beat. I try to ignore the jostle of her breasts or how they rub against me as she does. The enticing sight of her body moving in tune with the beat. She smirks and then leans in close to me. “And I don’t get married, Jase.” She then throws her head back and whoops. “ Now, dance.”
Then there was the two-a.m. snack run that had us sitting cross-legged on the cement of the hotel balcony with two spoons and a gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream between us.
“How many other people in this city do you think are celebrating getting married tonight?” she asks around a bite of ice cream while wielding her spoon like a conductor when she talks.
“A lot. A little. I don’t think all of them are celebrating though.” I take a swig of my beer. It doesn’t pair well with the mint but fuck if I care at this point.
“That’s depressing.” She’s buzzed and the little grunt she makes as she tries to dig another spoonful of ice cream out of the container is adorable.
“But true. Accidental pregnancies. An escape from something worse. I—”
“Oh my God.” Her eyes widen and the alcohol makes her every expression animated.
“What?” I whip my head over my shoulder toward the suite behind us, thinking someone’s in there or something, and it takes a few seconds for the spinning in my head to catch up with the movement.
“Is that what people are going to think of me?” she screeches.
“No. Never.” I take another bite. “Yes. Probably.”
“Besides, no one’s probably going to believe it either. This. Us. I’m the exact opposite of your type.”
“I don’t have a type.” Yes. I do.
“You’re so full of shit.” We both chuckle as the spoons clink on our teeth and we fall silent. “But we’re not fraternizing like that.” Her every word is enunciated.
“Correct. It’s not in the contract.” It may have crossed my mind a time or ten tonight. What she’d feel like beneath me. What those eyes of hers would look like when she came. How her hips would feel gripped in my palms.
“Pretend marriage. Pretend sex.” She giggles and rests her head back to the wall and stares up at the sky. “Best relationship ever.”
She has a soft smile on her lips and her dark lashes rest against the curve of her cheek. I contemplate the words she just said. The things she just implied.
A best relationship means pretend sex?
What the hell does that mean? It’s not my place to ask. Hell, I’m probably drunk and misheard her. Then again, she was pretty fucking clear and my head is full of ways I could show her different.
“Hendrix—”
“Nope. Not talking about it.” She giggles again and I can’t figure out if she’s that buzzed or is using it as an excuse to shove away whatever she thinks I was going to ask.
“Shit. Crap. Brain freeze.” She laughs and hisses as she puts the heel of her hand to her forehead and squints her eyes—while digging into the shared container with the spoon in her other hand.
“That sucks. Are you okay?” I lean over and press a kiss to her forehead.
The action is so natural, so... just there without thinking, and so is her putting her hand over my entire face and pushing me back while laughing. “I’m fine. I can handle a little ol’ brain freeze.”
“You sure?” I fall back onto my ass gracelessly.
“Definitely.” She reaches over and pats my thigh as ice cream drips off the spoon onto my pants. “It’s okay, Jase. You’re not my type either.”
To collapsing onto the bed as the sky turned a light gray and staring at the room spinning all around us.
“The headlines are going to be ridiculous when people find out,” she says.
I turn my head on the pillow and look at her. “Probably run-of-the-mill.”
“Run-of-the-mill for you, not for me.” She purses her lips, clearly trying to think. “Famous Rock Star Eats Her Cookie.”
“Lame.” I snort and then laugh. It takes a second for the joke to register as I’m fucking tired. “It’ll say something about how I like to play with big sticks or how you can handle the big stick.”
She rolls her eyes and laughs. “How did you not get noticed tonight?”
“I have a lot of practice at it. That, and I’m a drummer. People—”
“In the most popular band on the freaking planet.” She reaches over and rests her hand on my forearm. “You sell yourself short. Stop doing that.”
I open my mouth to speak and then bite back the history that might just come out with the words. “We should sleep,” I finally say.
“Hmm.” She’s already almost there. “I should change but I’m too tired.”
“Same.” I start to shift off the bed and she tightens her grip on my arm. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“I’m that irresistible, huh? Think you won’t be able to control yourself and jump me in the middle of the night?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.” I chuckle but know the thought has crossed my mind tonight.
“It’s okay. I know you want me.” Her sleep-drugged voice is as sexy as it is playful.
“I do, do I?” I play along.
“Mm. You do, but you can’t have me.” She turns on her side so that we’re face-to-face on the pillows. Her eyes are closed and her smile’s subtle.
“No? But you have my last name.”
She reaches out and presses a finger to my lips. “Shh.” Her eyes flutter back closed. Just when I think she’s drifted off to sleep, she murmurs slightly above a whisper like it’s a secret she’s keeping from the world. “Paul put cracks in me, but I have a feeling that someone like you would break me. I don’t want to be broken, Jase.”
“Why would you say that?”
Her ghost of a smile is haunted. “Because I have a feeling that’s what you do.”
My chest constricts at those words. “I won’t break you.”
“Promise?” The two syllables slur.
“I promise,” I say and sink a little farther into the bed at the sound of her sigh. “Good night, pretend wife.”
“Good night, pretend husband.”
A soft moan and the slight tug on the sheets beside me have every part of me standing at attention. I open my eyes and am met with Hendrix’s face close to mine.
And then my eyes travel. Down the V-neck shirt she has on—is that my undershirt?—that’s stretched tight over her breasts. The peaks of her nipples are pressed against the fabric, their darkened color sexy as hell.
The shirt’s pulled up, baring her stomach and a hint of something white and lacy just above the sheet pooled at her waist.
Well, then. Whew .
I shift, my morning hard-on aching now that it has fuel to feed its fire.
She looks like something I could lose myself in. Even with this roaring hangover, I’d gladly suffer if I could get lost in her.
How the fuck is this going to work? I scrub a hand over my face. That promise I made Nathaniel? The promise I made last night? I pride myself on being a man of my word but fuck if I think I’m going to be able to keep this one when my wife looks like that.
It’s not fair to ask a man to kiss a woman, to be as comfortable as we were last night, and then not want to fuck her.
It’s a normal reaction. A natural one. One any other man would struggle with especially after he knows how goddamn good her kiss tastes.
The difference? I’m taking her home with me. How will that go?
Sixteen weeks without touching her. Sixteen weeks without sex. Fuck, what was I thinking?
“Hey.” Her raspy voice draws my attention back up to her face, and I’m met with a sleep-drugged smile and eyes that I know for a fact are way clearer than mine.
I don’t want to be broken, Jase.
I look at her across the space, her wedding ring sparkling from the sun streaming through the open blinds, and smile back.
“Hey,” I murmur but don’t move out of the bed like my brain screams I should do.
“Sorry.” She tugs the T-shirt down. “I got up in the middle of the night—morning—whatever. My dress was itchy so I picked up the first thing I could find. I think you threw this off and I picked it up.”
“No worries.”
“I’m probably a disastrous mess.” She starts to pat down her hair that is going in a million different directions. She has black smudges under her eyes from her mascara, but I can’t look away. “I’ve got morning breath and bedhead and no doubt raccoon eyes. I probably—”
“Yes, you’re a disastrous mess.” I chuckle as she goes to shove against my shoulder playfully. I reach out and wrap my fingers around her wrist, but her hand remains there and her skin on mine isn’t doing my cock any favors. I rub my thumb over the diamond on her finger to calm it down with a cold dose of reality. Still didn’t help any . “If your husband can’t handle you first thing in the morning, then it seems we’ll have a serious problem in our marriage.”
She snorts. “Can we cite that as the reason for our divorce? Can’t handle morning version of spouse?”
“Hmm. Not sure that will fly.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“Besides, the bedhead is cute.” I part groan, part grimace as I try to adjust my cock that’s painfully constricted by the pants I still have on from last night.
“Oh,” she says with a start, her eyes wide as she glances down again and then back up. She scoots out of bed in a hurry. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—I should have thought about that. I didn’t—”
“Relax,” I say as I stand up and turn to adjust myself. That only makes matters worse as I know she’s watching. I glance over to her as I slide my hands out of the inside of the waistband and hope that works.
Oh yeah, she’s most definitely watching.
“It’s a cock. It’s morning. You’re...”—standing there with lacy boy shorts and hard nipples beneath my T-shirt. Fuck, man — “a woman,” I finally say and smile through the grimace. “There are some things a guy just can’t control.”
“Yes. Um.” She flits about the room like she seems to do when she gets nervous. But her eyes shift down to my cock again and back up.
No complaints there.
I hook my thumb over my shoulder toward the bathroom. “I’m going to take a shower.” A cold one . “Jet’s on the tarmac. We can leave whenever you want.”
“Jet’s on the tarmac?”
“Yeah.” I wink. “The Gizmodos don’t fly commercial.”
“Oh.”
The shower is indeed cold—has to be—or I might risk marching back out there and showing Hendrix how hard my cock actually is. I’m tempted to jerk off, to relieve the ache, but think better of it.
You don’t jerk off to your fake wife, asshole.
Then again, would that make it a fake orgasm... and technically be okay?