Lucky Girl (New Adult Rock Star Romance) (11 page)

“Okay, I give up.”
She snorted, jerking her chin away and rolling her eyes.

“And then he asked you to marry him, so you were BEEtrothed.” I couldn’t resist.

“The most BEEutiful bride to ever BEEcome a wife.” Matt winked at me.

“Awwww.”
I raised my eyebrows at Aimee and she grinned.

“You’re so mean to me.”
She nudged him with her elbow, not so hard this time.

“You love it.”
He grinned too, putting an arm over her shoulder and reaching into her lap his other hand. “And I love you. And the little BEEn.”

It took me a moment but I realized his hand was on her stomach.

“The little… what?” Dale frowned, picking croutons out of his salad and putting them on mine.

“Bean? Little… bean?”
I sat straight up, gaping at them. “Aimee, are you pregnant?”

“
Shhh!” Aimee elbowed him again, harder this time. “I wanted to wait until after dessert.”

“That makes sense,” Matt replied as Aimee
dug through her purse. “Those ultrasound photos could spoil anyone’s appetite.”

“Shut up!” She laughed, handing
a slippery piece of paper over to me.

“How far along?” I asked, looking at the grainy image
s. I couldn’t see anything. I leaned over and let Dale see but he looked just as puzzled as I was.

“About three months.” She
started pointing things out. “This is the face. And this is the belly. These are the legs.”

“I told you.” Matt made a face. “I think she’s having an alien.”

Poor Matt had to get tired of that elbow.

“So you were pregnant at the wedding.” My eyes widened.

“Just a little bit.” She looked sheepish. “We’re telling everyone else a different date. Because you know… his mom and the whole Catholic thing.”

“Well I’ll BEE damned.” Dale sat back and looked over at me.

That made me snort Diet Coke.

“Which brings us back to God or Fate,” Matt reminded us.

“Or just plain coincidence,” I countered.

“Let’s no
t BEElabor the point.” Aimee sighed.

We all looked at her and cracked up.

“What? I can’t do bee puns?” She looked at us like we were crazy, laughing like hyenas. Then she smiled. “If you can’t BEEt them, join them, right?”

This time it was Dale who choked on my Diet Coke and I had to beat on his back with my fists to get him to stop. Finally, the
waitress arrived with our food and I think we all must have been hungry because most of the conversation stopped except for the occasional, “Pass me the salt,” or “Oh my God, you have to try this!”

Dessert was tiramisu. The boys didn’t order any so Aimee and I split one, both of us moaning and sighing over its pure deliciousness.

“She doesn’t even make those sounds in bed,” Matt grumbled, tossing his napkin on the table.

“Then you’re doing something wrong.” Dale laughed when I stuck a chocolate covered tongue out at him.

“I still can’t believe you’re going to have a baby.” I met Aimee’s eyes over our dessert.

“Well, you did it before I did,” she reminded me. “I still remember putting that stuffed bear on your belly and watching her kick it off. “

“Aimee!” Matt exclaimed, eyes wide. “Jeez! She doesn’t want to be reminded—”

“It’s okay, Matt.” I felt tears stinging my eyes but they weren’t sad ones, exactly.
I felt Dale’s hand on my back, comforting. “It’s okay to talk about her. For a long time I didn’t, but Aimee was there, she knows. If we talk about her, if she’s remembered, then she still lives on, in some small way.”

Besides, if you believed in fate or God, then you had to believe the bad stuff had a purpose too. And while my pregnancy had come about in a truly horrific way, I never once blamed the baby I was carrying.

“She was unbelievable,” Aimee said, meeting my eyes. “Did the whole thing without drugs.”

“They didn’t do a c-section?” Matt blinked in surprise.

“No, they induced me.” I felt Dale’s hand rubbing my lower back. He was closer now. He’d heard this story. I leaned my head against his shoulder.

“They said recovering from major surgery would be harder than labor,” Aimee told him. “But I don’t know. It sure looked like it hurt like hell.
And she did it all without drugs!”

“It did
hurt.” Although I couldn’t tell them, any of them, even Dale, that it hurt far less than knowing the baby I was giving birth to wouldn’t ever take a breath. “But you can do it. I’ll be there with you, just like you were for me.”

Aimee picked up the last bit of tiramisu with her fork and put it to my lips. I took it, chewing and swallowing.

“Besides, the midwife said it was so hard for me because the baby wasn’t helping,” I reminded her.

“The baby helps?” Matt gulped his beer.

“Sure,” I replied. “The baby pushes with its feet and moves its head, arches its neck.”

“But
Dharma didn’t.” Aimee picked up her napkin, dabbing it at the corners of her eyes.

“I didn’t know you named her,” Dale said softly.

I still had a box of her things packed away I’d still never shown him—the hospital bracelet they put on her, some booties, a hat. The nurses even took a lock of her hair for me—fine blond fuzz. They took Polaroid pictures of me and Aimee holding her. My mother refused. She waited out in the lobby and asked, “All done?” when I limped out. That’s all she ever said about it.

“
Dharma Naomi.” I half-smiled at Dale’s eye-roll. “I know, my Tyler Vincent obsession is showing again.”

“Huh?” Matt looked at me, puzzled.

“Tyler Vincent’s oldest daughter’s name is Naomi,” I explained. “I was pretty far gone on him at the time.”

“How was dessert, ladies?” the waitress asked, picking up our tiramisu plate. We’d done everything but lick it clean.

“Great,” Aimee replied. “Can you bring separate checks?”

“Nope, just bring one,” Dale said, digging his wallet out. “I’m buying.”

“Big spender.” I made a face at him. “They paid him an advance but everything comes out of it. The recording sessions, the tour costs, everything.”

“We’ll make it back on the tour.” Dale handed the waitress his card. “Besides, we’re
still number one, remember?”

“You’re Dale Diamond!” The waitress looked at the card and then back to him.
“I’ll Always Come For You
is my favorite song!”

“
You can come here us live,” Dale said with a smile. “We’re going on tour at the end of August. We’re opening for Dark Wing.”

“Oh, I love them too!”

“Oh for pete’s sake.” I slid out of the booth, shaking my head at my rock star fiancé who was grinning from ear to ear. He still loved being stopped for autographs. “Go ahead and sign autographs. I’ll meet you in the car. Come on, Aimee, let’s hit the ladies room.”

“Are you okay?”
Aimee asked when we were done using the facilities and standing at the mirror, fixing our make-up. “I was really scared about telling you. I didn’t want you to feel bad.”

“Bad?” I met her eyes in the mirror. “Are you kidding me? I’m over the moon for you!”

“And you’ll be there to hold my hand?” She reached out and squeezed mine.

“Every step of the way.”

Dale and Matt were waiting for us in the lobby, which had mostly cleared out. I made it all the way to the car, even waving as Aimee and Matt passed us, before I burst into tears. Dale wrapped his arms around me, stroking my hair, just letting me sob against his shirt.

“It’s so stupid,” I finally sniffed. “Crying over a baby that never should have been conceived.”

“Well that wasn’t her fault, or yours,” he reminded me softly, kissing my forehead.

“I remember
thinking about keeping her,” I whispered in the dark heat of the car. Of course the stepbeast said I had to give it up. It was too late to abort the pregnancy by the time my mother told him about it. “I thought if I could run away with her and start over…”

I sat up, wiping my eyes. “I wonder if that’s what my mother did?”

He cupped my face in his hands, wiping my tears with his thumbs. They just wouldn’t stop falling.

“
You didn’t do anything wrong.” His lips met mine, my salty tears pressed between us. “None of it was your fault, Sara. Don’t take it on.”

“I know.” I did know. T
wice-weekly sessions with Dr. Jarvis had cured me of that. I didn’t blame myself for it anymore, at least not like I used to. “I just miss her.”

“I know.” Dale held me, and it didn’t occur to me until later that he never asked, “Who? The baby or your mother?” Because of course, it didn’t matter.

I missed them both.

      CHAPTER
TEN     

If I had to spend one more minute with Dale’s sister, one of us was going to die.

It wasn’t just that Chrissy used my moisturizer in the bathroom without asking and left the lid off so it got hard. It wasn’t just that she left her clothes and shoes at the bottom of the stairs so I tripped over them every single time I went upstairs. It wasn’t just her fashion magazines all over the living room couch—I couldn’t count how many times I’d sat down on a
Cosmo
—and she painted her nails in there too, leaving her nail polish and red brush marks on the coffee table.

All of those things made living with her annoying but not impossible. Even her incessant whining was tolerable if I tuned her out. It was the way she treated her father and brother that infuriated
me to the point of no return. She hadn’t said more than two words to me since she’d arrived two weeks ago—and I thought those had been, “Hi, Sara.” She pretended I didn’t exist, unless she was using me to make a point.

“You told Sara she could eat in the living room! Why can’t I?” She’d complained to John.

“Because Sara doesn’t wipe her fingers on my couch or leave her ice cream sandwich wrappers in the cushions like a two-year-old.”

Yeah, that didn’t go over so well. John came home from his long teaching day on Tuesday—that was the night I cooked dinner and I was busy in the kitchen with no clue to what she was doing in the other room—to find that she’d purposely opened every single ice cream sandwich in the box and left them to melt on the living room couch.

And when John called her downstairs from her room, she utterly denied it. I couldn’t believe it. It was truly like we were living with a two-year-old, not a girl about to enter college. John demanded she clean it up and she called him names I didn’t even know existed. Then she grabbed her purse and left the house.

“She’s just testing me.” John sighed and sank into a kitchen chair.

That’s what he said when he had his new girlfriend, Debra, over to dinner one night and Chrissy threw the entire bowl of mashed potatoes on the floor because John left lumps in them. I’d cleaned up the mashed potatoes—just like I cleaned up the sofa. Thankfully the kitchen floor was tile and the sofa was leather. But at the end of a very long two weeks I’d spent going out of my way to try to make her feel more at home (which is what John said she needed) and mediating fights between brother and sister (Dale ignored her until she got right in his face) I was getting very tired of cleaning up Chrissy’s messes.

And still, I might have continued to tolerate it if they were just toddler outbursts, adult temper tantrums. But Chrissy had an axe to grind and she was shining up the blade, waiting for just the right moment to use it.

She got into her father’s face, screaming at him until spittle flew from her lips.

“You’re a fucking coward, you know that?” She would shove him with both hands, trying to provoke him. “You’re a wimp. Fucking limp-dick! You couldn’t keep your wife happy and she left you! You should be ashamed of yourself! I hate you! I wish you were dead!”

And off she would go again, either to her room, slamming the door with such force the whole house shook, turning her heavy metal music up to deafening neighbors-likely-to-call-the-police volume, or she’d head out the door, God only knows where. I was beginning to prefer the latter, because at least we were spared the noise.

The strangest part was, an hour later, she was back, sweet as could be, pretending like nothing happened. In fact, if you mentioned it, she would get teary-eyed and upset, as if she was the one who had been hurt. And John would put his arms around her and hug her and she would ask for something—money to go to the mall, a leather bomber jacket, a fifty dollar pair of shoes—and he would give it to her.

I had asked Dale if that’s how it had always been with his sister.

“No.” He had
stared up at the ceiling, arms behind his head. “I mean, she was always a little spoiled. But not like this. I don’t know, maybe my mother poisoned her against my dad.”

It was a reasonable explanation. I’d met Dale’s mother when she
dropped Chrissy off. We all went out to dinner at Red Lobster—Chrissy’s favorite—and Dale’s mother had done nothing but talk about how she was making a killing in the real estate market. It was the only time I’d seen Chrissy be relatively quiet and behave, probably because her mother corrected her every few minutes.

Chrissy, sit up straight.

Chrissy, don’t use your fingers.

Chrissy, your napkin goes in your lap.

No dessert for you, Chrissy.

I said
no.

And she’d say those thing
s right in the middle of a sentence, then going on like they’d never happened. It was no wonder Chrissy acted like a child. Her mother treated her like one.

It was early on a warm
August Monday morning that Chrissy really crossed her brother’s line. And Dale had a very long fuse, but when it reached the end, the explosion was formidable.

Dale
loved sleeping with the windows open, and I liked waking up to a gentle breeze blowing the curtains over our head. I woke up first, a full half an hour before the alarm. Dale hated alarms and refused to use one. I’d searched high and low for an alarm that would wake us up with gentle sounds like ocean waves or crickets so they wouldn’t disturb him. And if Dale had to be up, well, I was his human alarm clock.

Today he didn’t have anywhere to go
—the band had been practicing hard for the tour, getting together four times a week—and I thought about going to take a shower and just letting him sleep, since I had appointments to keep. But he was on his back, sheet tangled around his waist, one arm thrown over his head, the other resting on his chest, looking so tantalizing—and I did have an extra half hour.

I loved watching him sleep. He was so sweet and peaceful, his mouth slightly open, the first peek of the sun on the horizon kissing his cheeks and those full, pouty lips, turning them a rosy color. My gaze paused at that sexy little dimple in his chin, the one that made him look so much like Tyler. I had marveled about how much he looked like Tyler, even before I knew.

His chest hair was sparse and widespread. My gaze dipped lower, drinking in those glorious abs. He worked his ass off to keep them, doing crunches every night. But it paid off when he tore off his shirt mid-concert and tossed it into the crowd. The girls went insane. Not that I blamed them.

His navel was rimmed with dark hair, a fact everyone knew because girls all over the country already had him pasted to their walls. The one in
Tiger Beat
, a full-size foldout, reminded me of a Playboy centerfold—only this one was for thirteen year old girls. A shirtless, barefoot Dale with his thumbs hooked in the waistband of acid-washed jeans, pulling that inexplicably sexy studded belt down on his hips, revealing his lower abdominal muscles, those firm, external obliques making a delicious indentation on either side of his body like an arrow pointing south.

Dale had done that photo shoot on one of his many trips away during the past two years, so girls everywhere could put him on their walls, at just the right height, and stand tiptoe so they could look into those dark, animal eyes and practice kissing on his pouty lips.

But those pouty lips were mine. I was the only girl in the world who got to kiss them for real and knew just how soft they were. Listening to the deep, even sound of his breathing, I let my fingers lightly follow the dark line of hair that traveled down from his navel. I heard his breath catch when I slipped my hand under the sheet. He was already at half-mast and it didn’t take much stimulation before he was tenting the sheet.

He moaned softly when I stopped teasing and really started moving my hand rhythmically up and down his shaft. When I lifted my head to look at his face, his eyes were half-open, lips parted, and I managed to elicit another moan
from him when I rubbed my thumb back and forth over the head.

“Good morning,” I whispered. We always whispered now and tried to keep it down because Chrissy was right next door. Before she moved in, I’d felt less inhibited because John’s room was on the first floor, on the other side of the house.

“Very good.” His voice was hoarse from sleep. I felt his hand moving in my hair, sliding down the curve of my back to lift the t-shirt I’d worn to bed. I wasn’t wearing any panties. “Wanna go for a ride with me?”

“I wanna go for a ride
on
you.” I grinned, shoving the sheet aside and admiring my handiwork for a moment—straight up hard and ready for me—before straddling him.

Dale’s eyes lit up when I peeled my t-shirt off, tossing it onto the floor. His hands went instantly to my breasts and my nipples hardened in response. I stroked him against my lower belly, anticipating the feel of him inside of me. Holding off was such sweet torture.
But Dale had other plans.

“
Come here.” He grabbed my hips, seating me easily over his face, his tongue already exploring.

I gasped, leaning against the windowsill, the curtains fluttering around me as Dale drank me in. Our room was at the back of the house and
the window overlooked over a field of tall unmowed grass and wildflowers. There was no one to see me as I rolled my hips and arched, nails raking the window screen when he pushed me over the edge with the slick lash of his tongue. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, hanging onto the window ledge, my thighs trembling with the force of my orgasm.

“Mmmm.” Dale wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as I slid down his body.”Breakfast of Champions.”

“You’re so bad.” But I was smiling as I caught his hard shaft between us, rocking my hips so he parted that slippery seam, so wet from his mouth.

“Taste.”

Slipping a hand behind my head, he brought me down for a long, hot kiss. I moaned, rocking on top of him, the sensation almost too intense as his hips began to move, seeking entrance. Then his hands moved down my sides, grabbing and guiding me, rolling my hips forward so he was right there, poised for entry.

I moaned as he lifted his pelvis, his cock parting my labia, sinking slowly into my flesh. Savoring the sensation, I held perfectly still, my eyes locked with his. Then he began to move, rolling his hips, not sliding out all the way, just making slow, short, easy strokes
, in and out. He knew exactly how to drive me crazy. I cried out when he moved one hand off my hip, to focus between my thighs, thumb rubbing me in fast little circles.

“Shh,” he urged, pulling me down to him, kissing me quiet as he thrust up into my flesh. I couldn’t help rocking with him, feeling the cool morning breeze
caressing our sweat-dampened skin. Dale was so warm and solid, I clung to him, burying my face in his neck, my breath coming hot and fast. His hands were back on my hips, rocking me against him with every upward thrust. I felt how swollen he was inside of me, ready to burst. And I was too.

“Oh sweetheart,” he moaned, thumbs digging into the wings of my pelvis. “I’m so close.”

“Yes,” I urged, squeezing his thick, pistoning flesh with my muscles, massaging him. That elicited a low growl from his throat and Dale rolled me quickly over onto my back, parting my thighs with his and rutting deep into me.

“Yes!” I cried, the sight of him poised above me, arms thick ropes of mus
cle, belly undulating as he drove himself into me again and again. “Oh God, yes, Dale! Do it! Harder!”