Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (2 page)

I was normally damn good at listening to my inner warning system.

It was hard to listen through that much color.

Her hand landed on my bare arm, two fingers pressing with a feather-light touch against one of my tats. The brush of her fingers made my thighs clench, my throat tighten, and my heart speed up double, as time itself slowed down.

“What’s that?” She gave me a smile so bright it lit up half the world, her eyes guarded but clear. So clear.

“An arm.”

She poked hard with those fingers and nudged me. Making excuses to touch me. My body responded, too. Of course it did. The very small number of words my brain could hold at the same time became even smaller. She smelled like soap and sweat, like sweet wine and kisses.

I couldn’t sleep with her.

Her finger traced a slow line on the border of my tat, following the labyrinth pattern with a kind of aimless wandering. She was using any excuse she could find to touch me and to keep touching me. I looked at her face, her eyes tipped down, her upper lip tucked between her teeth as she tried to breathe nice and steady.

Her pulse fluttered on her neck. She swallowed every few seconds. I narrowed my eyes and really took a good look.

This wasn’t a bad boy fuck pass. She wasn’t slumming. If it had just been that I’d have doubled up on my
no
.

Damn it, she had something
way
deeper going on.

And so did I.

Bzzzz.

I jumped, my ass suddenly tingling. She stumbled slightly, her shoulder brushing against my chest, her scent filling me with a madness that made me need to kiss her. What was she doing? What was
I
doing?

I shoved my hand in my back pocket and pulled out my phone. Looked at the screen.

Double fuck. A text from dad. I scanned it:

Got puled over and stuck n county only had to beers need bail.

Dad wasn’t the best speller, but his English writing skills weren’t exactly his biggest problem.

“Ah, fuck,” I muttered.

“Thought you’d never ask,” Maggie said in a voice that would have made me laugh if I didn’t have a seventeen-year-old brother back home, two thousand miles away, who was about to be abandoned.

And my savings account was about to go to bail out a dad on his third DUI in two years.

We were standing by the rooftop door and she yanked my arm, hard, pulling me behind the brick wall, away from the crowd. My phone almost fell out of my hand but I stuffed it in my front pocket. Her mouth was hot on mine in seconds, my back against gritty brick, the push of my shoulder blades against solid rock registering as her teeth banged against mine.

My brain turned into a pile of ribbons, shiny and slippery and tied in knots. Her hands roped round the back of my neck and she tasted like every drunk girl I’d ever fucked.

I didn’t want her to become just another drunk girl I’d fuck.

That mouth, though. She pulled away, her eyes on my lips, and went for a second kiss, this one less awkward. Warmer, filled with something more than the fumbling of a wasted chick. My hands slipped around her waist and her fingers played with the curve of my ears, trickling down to my jaw line.

She touched me like she hadn’t touched a man in years.

Bzzzz.

“Shit!” I rasped, pushing her gently away, reaching in my front pocket and pressing the power button to turn the fucking phone off. Turn the problem off. Turn my dad off.

Chicks like Maggie didn’t get involved with guys with fucked up lives like mine. Dad’s arrest, my rescue, my brother’s need.

Everybody wanted something from me.

“Tyler,” she said in a voice filled with longing. A very hard part of me softened. Not the part I wished would go soft, though. I shifted myself in my pants, willing the erection way.

Don’t need a boner when duty calls back home.

“Uh, Maggie, I gotta go.”

“Home?” She bit that lip again and my hands itched to grab her and kiss her. For
me
to kiss
her
this time.

No. Women like her don’t get guys like you.

“Something like that.”

“I’ll come home with you,” she said, her words a little hazy. I reached out and touched her chin, tipping her face up. Eyes burning with desire met mine.

I’m sure mine burned, too.

With a layer of rage underneath.

That rage built so fast, like a molotov cocktail, flaring up inside. She was there. She was in front of me. She became the target. I had to protect her from it, but she’d get licked by the flames no matter what.

“I’m not into necrophilia,” I spat out, turning away. Those ribbons in my brain spilled out, unraveling like a kite string as a huge gust of wind hits out of nowhere.

“Huh?” Hurt and fear made those blue eyes the color of an unreal sky.

“You’re two drinks away from passing out, and I don’t do that to chicks. Not my style. I have a thing about that. I like my women awake when I have sex with them. Call me crazy.” Deflect. Turn it around. Make her pissed off. Make her walk away. Then I could just go back to nothing. Forget she ever existed. 

Even as my arm ached where she’d touched me. The same fingers that seconds ago were touching me pulled back, like she was about to hit me. 

She was white with fury but said nothing. Just stood there, her eyes filled with a bunch of pain caused by me.
Me
. Fuck. 

So I spelled it out. “You’re drunk. Try me again some time when you’re sober.”

And then I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always do.

I walked away.

She ran past me to the rooftop door, yanking it open so hard the handle caught my crotch as it ricocheted. I folded in half, the wind knocked out of me.

Guess I deserved that.

At least my boner was gone.

One less thing to worry about as I called the bail bondsman back home.

I had him in my contacts list already.

Chapter One

Two months later

Maggie

There is a point where a person gets sick of watching a video of a naked man hanging from a third-story window with a chicken attached to his ass.

It is, roughly, the thirteenth time in a row.

Of all the days for Charlotte’s car to die. She asked me to give her a ride into Boston to visit Joe Ross, the bass player for the band Random Acts of Crazy. Charlotte’s boyfriend Liam is the lead guitar player and back-up singer. The group is about to start a national tour in five months, and is known for a few crazy on-and-off-stage antics, but this latest one took the cake. 

Er...the chicken.

“Turn that fucking thing off,” Joe screamed for the thirteenth time. Liam cackled and hit Replay. Joe flailed, as if he were going to hit Liam, but he just looked like a T-Rex with casts on his arms. In the unfortunate naked incident with the chicken and the gerbil (yes...
gerbil
), Joe managed to break his wrist and ulna, along with various other bones.

But that’s for later.

Right now, I was trying very hard not to find a coffin and hurl myself into it, because Tyler was here, too.

“Frown,” Joe said, using Tyler’s nickname. “Make him shut that shit off.”

“BAWK!” screeched the chicken from Liam’s phone.

Frown just shrugged, his face a slab of granite. I avoided looking at him, but my skin prickled. I became hyperaware of my breathing and hated myself for it. I held my breath but quickly realized that was silly. I had to breathe, even if it felt impossible around him. 

Men didn’t do this to me. Not since The Incident seven years ago. Seven years of therapy made me ready to get back on the horse of sex and relationships and all that, but it didn’t mean I walked around in a constant state of arousal.

Except when
he
was around. And I hated him for it. 

Tyler was the substitute bass player for the band, and with Joe about as able to play bass as he was to juggle flaming bowling balls, it was clear the national tour scheduled to start in the fall was going to be in jeopardy unless—

“You ready to fill in for Joe?” Darla asked, barging in, holding a sheaf of papers and a bucket of fried chicken. She wasn’t looking at Frown, so her question perplexed everyone. 

Liam snickered at the chicken. “Tactful,” he said, doffing an imaginary hat at her, then reaching for the bucket.

“You didn’t actually...that’s not really...” Trevor asked, his voice filled with horror.

Darla gave him a withering look. “No, I didn’t slice, dice and deep fry Miss Mavis, you asshat.” Mavis was the chicken Trevor stole—twice—in two separate incidents over the course of two years. Not the same chicken, of course. They just kept naming each new chicken Mavis. Whenever he took peyote he stripped naked, ran away, stole chickens and either tried to marry them or make them run for president. 

(Do you have any idea how stupid I feel even trying to explain this?)

Liam fished a drumstick out of the bucket and took a juicy, loud bite. “Joe, your mom sure can grow a mean chicken.”

Charlotte whapped him, hard, with her purse.

“What?” he said, his voice filled with protest and dark meat.

“Have a little discretion,” she shot back.

His eyebrows shot up, eyes twinkling. “Discretion?
Discretion?
Joe, Trevor, Darla and their new sex partners, Mavis and Fluffy the Gerbil—or whatever it’s called—were caught having sex on video and it’s gone viral. You seriously think
I’m
the person with a discretion problem here?”

I told you the gerbil would be explained.

“I did not have sex with the chicken. Or the gerbil,” he added quickly. “No one had sex with any animals.” 

One corner of Frown’s face twitched. Did I just hear the Hallelujah chorus sing? Because that little quirk means Frown had...feelings. Actual emotions. His lack of affect could make a person want to shove a Furby in his pants while lighting his shoes on fire just to see if he’d react.  

Finally,
something
churned inside that tatted-up monolith of a man.

Man.

My body burned again, eyes creeping over his arms, now crossed over that massive chest. His black t-shirt was tight, stretched across rolling pecs that spoke of hard labor. This was a body honed by sweat, tears, and necessity. He moved when he needed to move and he stayed still when inertia ordered his body to do so. 

Damn him for being so hot.

And damn him for rejecting me when I tried to sleep with him a couple of months ago. You don’t forget that—ever. Asking a guy to get slick and sweaty, naked and raw, and being told
no
.

As if he could read my mind, those hooded, dark eyes clicked up so suddenly I thought he was a cyborg. They locked on mine and I couldn’t look away. A rush of adrenaline surged through me like I was touching the third rail, like I was licking an electrical outlet, like I was standing in a puddle in a lightning storm and holding a twenty-foot metal pole.

The force of his look was both grounding and shattering, and curse him for not saying a single word with his mouth.

Those eyes had a thousand languages in them, though.

“Grocery store out of red?” he said to me. Of all the words he could have chosen to speak, he chose
those
? 

“Huh?”

His chin jutted up. “Your hair. Seen it orange. Seen it purple. You got about four more flavors of Kool-aid to blow through before you start doing repeats.”

I looked pointedly at the colorful sleeves of his forearms. The skin popped with more color than the entire aisle of flavored drinks at the store. 

“Speaking of color.”

He looked down, keeping his eyes on his own skin for so long I started to feel a pinprick sensation behind my eyeballs, in my breastbone, along the slope where my breasts brush against my biceps. Watching him examining his tats made eternity feel like a blip. I’d touched that color once. Stroked the lines and inhaled his scent. The memory filled more than enough dreams these days. 

Those eyes clicked back up with military precision and he smiled, the kind of grin you give your best friend. Your mom. Your little sister. And then it morphed into the kind of smile you give someone else. 

Your lover.

“You like it, huh? Staring at my body.”

And the pinpricks turned into knives.

“Fuck you,” I said, turning on me heel, the room suddenly red. I could feel his eyes burning a hole through my back, my ass, my tight shoulders, my strutting legs.  

But he didn’t follow.

And neither did any words.

Tyler

What the fuck? I watched her leave. She was steamed. What the hell did I say? The truth. Just the truth. She liked staring at my tats. My skin. My body.

I was making an observation.

See? Open my mouth and I get in trouble.

Easier to keep it shut.

“Tyler? You see this?” Liam asked me, walking over with his phone in one hand and a greasy piece of chicken in the other. 

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Not the whole thing.”

Darla was murmuring by Joe’s head. I had just arrived. Best I understood it, Joe, Darla and Trevor had been fucking and some kind of sex toy malfunctioned. Joe got thrown out the window of their third-story apartment, and the chicken and Trevor’s brother’s pet gerbil went flying, too. Literally.

The chicken and the gerbil saved themselves by digging their claws into Joe’s ass and back.

One of those duck boat tour things, the kind that holds about fifty people and drives through the streets of Boston then turns into a boat, was outside when it happened. On a detour because of road construction. Fifty tourists with camera phones already recording just tipped those phones up and got the whole thing on video. Like getting a picture of your kid with Mickey Mouse. 

Or James Deen and Ron Jeremy.

Charlotte gently laid her hand on my forearm. The tats didn’t bother her. She was all pale skin and black hair and wide, round eyes. Red lipstick. There was something so clean and focused about her. If she weren’t Liam’s I’d—