Chapter Seventeen #2
Going with him, Roland, and a plethora of other women isn’t what I had in mind either.
I pick my nail, thinking of something to say that isn’t that.
My eyes flick to his wrist, to a small tattoo of a guitar that I don’t remember.
He catches me looking and holds his arm out. I take his wrist in my hands.
“When…” I trail off.
“Last year,” he breathes. His pulse beats hot in his wrist and surges through my body, making me warm in places that have nothing to do with the hot tub.
“You know when.” His voice is so quiet that it melts into the water right along with me.
After us. After me.
“It’s…” He trails off, the pencil line between his brows more evident than ever. “It’s a reminder, I—” He runs a hand through his hair. “Last year, I was in a bad spot. I lost sight of what I came to Nashville, then LA, to do. Music.”
He shrugs and pulls his arm back. Instantly, I feel the absence of his touch deep in my bones. The ache is familiar, like I’ve woken up to find him gone, but he’s right there in front of me.
“So that’s your reminder—to follow what you love?”
His smile grows and he glances down, then at me. “Better than I could have put it. I’m not always the best with words.”
It’s so innocent, so vulnerable, that I can’t help but smile. “You don’t use enough words to know whether you’re good or not. But also,” I add, “I disagree. Your lyrics are beautiful.”
He deadpans, folding his lips into a smooth line. “‘Is There a Heaven for Horses?’ is beautiful?”
I fight to keep from laughing. “In its own way, yes.”
He lets out a bark of a laugh and shakes his head, then picks up his guitar. Putting his twang back on, he starts to sing.
Is there a heaven for horses?
God willing, it better be true.
’ Cause I know whenever my time comes,
I ain’t leavin’ if I’m without you.
A smile worms its way onto my face. “Fine. Point made. But your other lyrics—from your second album especially—they’re much more personal, almost like—”
“Like I actually wrote those?” He sets the guitar back on the pavement.
“Wait, you didn’t—”
“I wrote some of the lyrics on my debut. But the more … egregious ones, those were other people. It didn’t feel like me, but they said there was a market, and…”—he looks out over the sunset, face set in grim lines—“there was.”
I wait, hoping he’ll go on, continue giving me more words than he ever has.
“So, the second album was all me,” he says. “Which is why it flopped.”
“It didn’t flop,” I protest. “It just wasn’t as … as…” I search for the right words.
“As truck-driving, beer-drinking, dust-flying as the first?”
I giggle and accidentally snort. “Yeah—that. Well, for what it’s worth, I liked the second one better.”
A wry smile lifts his lips, the same smile he turned on me in my bedroom, teasing me about my selection of records. “It’s worth a lot, actually.”
We’re in dangerous waters. He’s not saying this because I’m a music journalist, and we both know it.
I try to dislodge the ball of heat that’s taken residence in the back of my throat, but he diffuses the situation before I can even try, sliding down into the pool across from me until his chest is obscured by the water.
“It makes sense—the music journalism thing. Good cover. Those pieces … they’re more you.”
“I—” I stop myself, the weight of what he’s said crashing down. “How do you know?” I ask quietly. How can you know when you didn’t even give us a chance?
The green in his eyes is shadowed, but every emerald fleck winks at me.
“You’re creative,” he says. “Your voice is unmistakable. But it comes out more when you write about music.”
“Music is…” It’s hard to put into words, but he nods like he understands. It’s exactly what he said last year: You can get lost in it. The echo is a painful reminder of how much I’ve held on to. “It’s special.”
Rhett swallows, and when he speaks, his voice is thick.
“Music … It’s a place that holds you. Good music, anyway.
” A muscle flexes in his chest with the effort of keeping himself together.
I want to extract all the reasons he has to lose himself, lay them all out side by side like sources leading me to the real Rhett.
I want to be the one to hold him.
But instead, I tear my eyes away and keep it light.
“Is that what you’re working on now? Good music?”
“Something like that.” He smiles.
I kick my feet up onto the opposite bench, accidentally grazing my toes against his thigh.
“Sorry,” I say, but he shakes his head.
“S’okay,” he murmurs. He reaches through the water and takes my foot between his hands, running his thumb over my arch and up to my ankle. The feeling of it pulls all the way through me.
“Can I look?” he asks, then clarifies, “At your tattoos?”
A heat more boiling than the water races up my chest. Fighting (and failing) to keep my voice from wobbling, I raise an eyebrow at him. “You’ve already seen one of them.”
He shrugs. “I’d like to see it again.”
All I can do is stare into his dark eyes.
He lifts my foot out of the water to examine the constellation inked on my ankle.
This one, he already knows, has already pressed his lips to, left his own muggy imprint on me.
Warmth shoots up my leg, burning in my thighs as his fingers absently stroke the skin stretching across my bone.
“The other?” Rhett asks, voice hoarse.
I tug my foot from his grasp and stand so I’m looking down at him. He stares up at me, eyes wide, his arms stretched out on the edge of the hot tub. His eyes flick down to my shirt, soaked and see-through, and my stomach tugs with want.
I pull down the waistband of my underwear to reveal the small treble clef stamped there, right below my pelvic bone.
A trace of a smile flits across his lips.
Slowly, he reaches out his fingers and brushes them over the tattoo.
My skin erupts in goosebumps under his fingers; a range of tiny mountains all my own.
“When did you get it?” His voice rips through me, carving space for him to crawl closer. I never want him to stop.
“After,” I murmur.
He nods.
It’s a flipped universe to imagine Rhett in Nashville, walking into a tattoo parlor as I did the same in LA.
Asking for a guitar as I asked for a treble clef.
As the needle shot into my skin, I thought about each touch his fingers dropped on me.
When the tattoo was done, the pain receded to a dull ache, and I vowed never to think of him again.
“Georgia,” he whispers. His fingers drop to the hem at my hips, leaving my skin tingling and my breath coming short and fast. He catches my wrist in his hand, and I don’t protest. I let myself fall into him, sinking through the water and straddling his lap.
He runs his fingers slowly down my back.
Being this close to him is a shock to my system, an open flame devouring paper.
I’m only touching him in a few places, elbows resting on his shoulders, insides of my thighs pressed against the outsides of his.
Then his hands clasp over my hips, pulling me against every bit of him, and I gasp.
He breathes into my neck, his lips grazing my skin, my ear, his hands tangling in my hair.
“It’s fucking torture watching you with him,” he breathes.
I pull back sharply, hoisted into reality by his words. I can’t do this. If I give him too much, it’ll only hurt more.
“What are we doing?” I whisper.
His tongue runs feverishly across my clavicle, up my neck. “Georgia,” he murmurs. The doubts in my mind slow to a crawl, punch-drunk on his touch.
He takes my face in his hands, the fire of the ebbing sunset in his eyes.
Slowly, so achingly slowly, he pulls my mouth down to his and I let myself go.
I gasp him in, parting my lips as his warm tongue skims across my teeth and his fingers slide down my waist, flexing into the skin of my thighs.
Just like last time, his body says more than he ever does with words.
I press down on his lap, feeling him hard beneath me. He breaks away from our kiss just long enough to grasp my waist and pull me up. Deftly, he turns us around so I’m sitting on the edge of the hot tub and he’s in front of me, hands still on my hips.
“I want you to watch the sunset,” he says.
My stomach swoops, pooling all the need and want I’ve suppressed into one pulsing point between my legs.
His hands rest on my thighs, his thumbs press into my skin, moving closer and closer.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my underwear and tugs it down a few centimeters.
Behind him, the Malibu sky is darker, deeper shades of candy pastel. He kisses his way down my neck, and I want it—I want him—but it’s not enough. I can’t risk everything just for this.
“No,” I gasp. “We can’t do this.” I can’t do this. There’s too much going on in my head—Rhett knowing my secrets, everything that’s happened with Lainey and Addison, and now Rhett’s hands on my body rewinding time, coiling it back like a live wire.
He pulls away, his brow creasing. His hands still on my skin. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I mutter. I can’t meet his eyes. “I just … I don’t want this. You.” The word is out of my mouth before I can consider how it might hurt him. It kills me, treating him like this—acting like the problem is him. I want to tell him everything. But I can’t.
To make it worse, the sunset bursting over the horizon is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. For a second, I consider what I’m giving up—probably the hottest sex of my life in a once-in-a-lifetime location. But I’ve already had my once with him.
I crawl out of the hot tub and grab my sandals, shoving them onto my feet. “I have to get back.”
“Of course.” He clambers out of the hot tub and grabs a towel from one of the chairs off to the side. I sneak a glance at him and see that he’s still, without a doubt, aroused.
“Or…” I hedge. “I—we can, but … just…” I’m not exactly sure what I’m offering—jerking him off before I rush out the door? A quick poolside bang?
He lets out a harsh breath of a laugh and shakes his head. A faint blush creeps up his chest. “No, I don’t want … Not like that,” he mutters finally, rubbing the back of his neck.
My mouth drops open as he turns and trudges back inside. I could go after him, but he’s giving me an easy escape.
I grab my towel and toss it into the basket next to the hot tub. Where are my jeans? My phone? I try to remember the last time I had it, shoving it in my pocket away from Olie’s snooping hands. And then …
Then I took my jeans off before jumping in the pool with the others. I tried to grab my clothes after, but maybe I didn’t get them all. I’d make a terrible spy. I do make a terrible spy.
Face steaming with embarrassment, I step back into Rhett’s bedroom and drop to my knees.
I crawl forward to peek under the bed. Nothing. “Do you see my jeans anywhere?”
He emerges from the bathroom, halfway through pulling on a tight black V-neck shirt. I bite my lip as I get to my feet. Now is not the time to wonder over his tanned stomach.
He looks around and shakes his head. “Don’t think so.” His face is closed off, all traces of heat completely erased. It kills me a little, how quickly he can stop wanting me, but I have bigger problems.
“I think…” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to picture the last place I saw them. “I think I left them by the pool.”
“Okay,” he says slowly. He tugs on his own jeans and zips up the fly, buttons them, puts his hands on his hips, his lips twisting into a frustrated frown. “So go get them.”
“Shit,” I hiss to myself. I stumble through the front door of his suite, then back into the bowels of the mansion.