Beneath the Burn (55 page)

During daily band practices, she perched on the basement stairs, watching and sketching. Sometimes a smile bent her lips when the guys teased one another, but it never lingered. He doubted anyone noticed her silent grief, but he glimpsed it in the languor of her gestures and felt it when her gaze flitted from his.

Each morning, Tony brought in a martial arts practitioner to teach him basics of self-defense. Charlee watched and often participated in the drills. His flashbacks surfaced once during a weapon disarming technique under the strike of her hand. She’d coaxed him back to the present by singing a
Pixies
song. Her endearing, off-key rendition of
Where Is My Mind
shooed away the nightmare, but it cast a lasting pall over her eyes.

He knew she carried a hefty load of guilt regarding Roy’s potential threat to the band, but their lack of offensive strategy seemed to plague her most. Hell, restlessness vented from the pores of every member of the household. The estate bristled with it. The band and the staff argued over canceling the tour, how many guards to hire if they went, and how best to protect Charlee. During one of the debates in the basement studio, Faye jumped from her laptop and announced that the seventy-show tour was officially sold out.

“Maybe the Oxford prick won’t fuck with the tour now.” Laz adjusted a tuning peg on his guitar and plucked the string. “Think of the millions his new acquisition would lose if he did.”

Impatience bunched Jay’s shoulders. The tour babble had grown old an hour earlier. He had what Roy wanted, and she was right freaking there, stretched on the couch and studying the ceiling tiles. Jay wanted nothing more than to protect her, tour be damned. Trouble was, the decision affected his best friends and hundreds of thousands of fans. “Roy can’t cancel the tour. Technically, he owns our record company not our production company. He can pull our CDs from the stores and prevent radio stations from playing our songs. He can’t tamper with our performances.”

“Windsor Records owns our production company,” Laz said around the pick between his teeth, angling his head near the fingerboard of his guitar. “All of the subsidiary labels and corporations report to the same damn head.”

“And that head got away with murder.” Her voice floated from the couch, hushed and distant. She rolled to her side, pillowing her face with the bend of her arm, and looked at Jay. “He has a weakness. Use it against him.”

The challenge in her eyes boiled his blood. What the fuck was she suggesting? Use her as bait? He would never use her for anything related to Roy. The set jaws and hard faces around him indicated his friends wouldn’t have either.

That night, another band meeting sprung from an impromptu argument in the kitchen. The fifth one in three days. When it fizzled to a close with no resolution, Charlee rose to her feet and slammed her hands on the island. “Keep the tour dates, and double the protective team. Because you know what? Roy can’t do much while you’re standing in the limelight. If you cancel, you might as well break up the band and sell your home. Gonna let him win that easy?”

Silence. The kind of silence in which ideas were formed and fashioned together. His girl had her fire back, and it burned in a fierce glow on her face. He wasn’t sure if her decision was a sound one, but his stance had been clear. No matter the consensus, she would not leave his sight.

A collective breath released through the room and disintegrated the animosity from moments earlier. Rio kissed her first. A peck on the check. Wil and Laz followed in turn, and Jay surprised himself by smiling as he watched the reciprocal effect. They didn’t want to cancel the tour, but each man’s kiss confirmed they would’ve given it up to keep her safe.

Grins radiated from them as they reminisced about their debauchery on their last tour together.

Nathan stormed from the kitchen, his ears blood red. His job had just become impossibly more challenging. For the first time since Jay met him, a feeling of sympathy swelled for the poor guy.

Since the news of the murders, Nathan had pulled in every law enforcement and private security connection he had to pin the crime on Roy. Three days into the effort, Jay didn’t have to see the defeat in Nathan’s eyes to know the case wasn’t reopening.

The next day, Colson lumbered through the front door, balancing five boxes.

Expecting the delivery, Jay bounded from the kitchen island and abandoned the repairs he’d been making to his guitar’s bridge pickup. “Thanks, Colson.” He accepted the packages and strode to the couch, his nerves alight with anticipation.

Charlee sat cross-legged at one end, angled over a sketchbook. Multicolored arcs leapt off the page she was shading with art pencils.

Rainbows? What, was she twelve? He bit back the impulse to tease her, unsure if the illustrations had emotional meaning. “Charlee?”

She looked up and blew a rampant lock away from her eye. It drifted back and clung to her long lashes.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Wil pounded the buttons of a controller, ass hovering over the other couch, eyes fastened on the zombies shuffling across the TV screen. “Come on!” More pounding. “Aw yeah. You got owned, beyotch.”

She shook her head, a smile gracing her beautiful face.

Privacy would’ve been preferred for this, but Wil’s energy seemed to return some vividness to her face. Jay stacked the boxes on the coffee table and perched on the edge, facing her.

She reached up and skimmed a tentative finger over his lips. He held still, lost in the blues animating her eyes.

She poked his dimple, rose from the couch, and stretched over his shoulder to look at the packages. “Whatcha got there?”

The press of her tits against his chest and the sweet scent of her hair tickling his nose were hell on his focus. He was there to give her something, and it wasn’t the pest jerking in his jeans.

Despite her somberness, their bed hadn’t grown cold. Whenever she’d led him there, he followed, feeling his way through her mood. Since the morning he’d feinted choking her, she refused pain or any semblance of it. Knowing how that impacted her, he wanted to refuse her. But she’d pull him close and he’d sink into her, his intentions scuttling.

So for four days, he’d had orgasms and she had no-gasms. She claimed the comfort he gave her was all she wanted, but it rubbed at the back of his mind, a persistent and consuming thing.

“These are for you.” He reached behind him and offered her the largest box. “But I’ll reap the benefits, so I’m pretty fucking excited about them.”

Her eyes blurred as she sat back. She blinked at the package, once, twice, and tore it open. Bubble wrap and box discarded, she balanced three tattoo machines on her thighs. One hand pressed against her mouth. Fingers of the other fluttered over every detail.

Flames engraved the steel frames. In his e-mail to the artist, he’d tried to convey the design Charlee had outlined on his back. Given her shining smile as she stared at him in amazement, he figured he’d succeeded.

“The black steel is the liner machine.” He picked it up and tested the one-pound weight. “The red one is the shader. Blue is the cut-back shader. Each has been tuned, tweaked, and set-up to do what it’s supposed to.”

She turned the cut-back shader over. “I’ve always used one machine. Had to jack with the tension in the rear spring to adjust the gaping from front coil to arm bar. You know, to switch between outlining and shading? Could never get the precision right. It was a poor man’s way to do it, but three irons? This is…How’d you even know what I’d need? And custom crafted so quickly?”

Money and fame had its benefits. “The artist was very accommodating.”

She lifted the liner machine from his hand. “All hand crafted and the engravings match your tat. My God, Jay, they must have cost…I don’t even want to know.” She glanced up, eyes clear and bright. “I don’t know what to say.”

The wonder in her voice filled him with pride. He stole a kiss from her curved lips. “Say ‘thank you’.”

She set the machines on the cushion beside her and stared at them, lashes fluttering rapidly. In the next thump of his heart, she tackled him, hands in his hair, mouth crushing his. She smothered kisses over his face, sparking every happy receptor in his body, and rested her forehead against his. “Thank you.”

“It’s full on double rainbow time.” Wil reached into one of the boxes behind Jay and pulled out several bottles of ink.

The boxes should’ve held every color available, along with needles, tubes, stencil stuff, and anything else the supplier thought she might or might not want.

Wil dropped the bottles in the box and scooped up her sketchbook. “Hell yeah. We’re so doing this tattoodle.”

His bassist might’ve been hippie, but a rainbow tattoo? “Seriously?”

She grabbed the book. “It’s not for Wil. Since inking Laz’s dick is a sensitive subject—”

“It’s not a subject, because it’s not happening.”

“—Wil settled on an alternative tat.” She tapped the cartoon rainbow.

Jay cocked one eyebrow and glared at Wil. “The issue isn’t the design. It’s the placement.”

“Lose the bitchbrow, man.” Wil returned one of his own. “Laz is getting a tramp stamp.”

Nice. Jay could live with that, though he wasn’t sure Laz could.

Wil cupped his hands around his mouth and angled toward the patio. “Laz! Get in here!”

Two hours later, Jay forced himself to recline in the chair across the room in a guise of cool collection. His jealousy would’ve shattered the morale Charlee had so effectively lifted.

Laz lay face down on the couch, arms bent above his head, expression a picture of tranquility. She knelt beside him, hands low on his bare back, tattoo machine vibrating the air.

His bandmates and some of the security staff had gathered to watch, and a heady buzz bounced around them. Even Nathan hovered, a smile floating on his face.

As Laz’s rainbow-shaped embarrassment arced from the rise of one ass cheek to the other, the tiny movements of her machine held the room captivated. Humming her out-of-tune melodies, she brushed the needle over the cartoon of colors with a vivacity that put everyone in a lively mood.

His shoulder blades tingled. He wished it was him on the stabbing end, but when she’d snagged his gaze before she began, the silent question arching her brow, he shook his head. He hadn’t wanted to quash the excitement whirring between his friends. And when the time came to complete his tattoo, it would be an intimate session. Momentous. Just like the night he met her.

A groan drifted from the couch.

Jay’s graciousness slipped, his face heating. “Laz, if you’re trapping a hard-on under there, so help me God, I will break it off. With a sledgehammer.”

He groaned again. Louder. “Cool story, bro.”

“Wow. I missed this. I haven’t inked in a week.” She winked at Jay. “It’s been a very long week.”

Her wink spiraled through his chest and stole his breath. There she was. His girl was back with light flickering in her eyes. As relief settled over him, he relaxed in the chair and watched her work. Her scrunched nose, brow pinched in concentration, and the tune drifting from her throat hurtled him back to Kilroy Tattoo. He’d changed his life that night to earn a future with her. It was time to confront the past so he could hold onto that future.

A shiver passed through him. It had been his lot to suffer an abusive childhood, but he would make damn sure her lot didn’t include another second in chains. He’d accept a death penalty if that was what it took to eliminate Roy.

He wanted her safe and happy. More than he wanted freedom, or music, or breath.

72

Charlee focused on the tattoo equipment in her hands, scrubbing the shiny steel until it shone and tucking it into a box. If she glanced up, she knew she’d be ensnared once again by the heat of Jay’s gaze. She was also certain that one more shared look and her devotion to equipment care would be deserted for sex.

Hard, rough, painful sex. The promise radiated from his stiff posture. Oh, he had one leg draped over the arm of the chair, the other stretched out in front of him to accommodate a full-body slouch.

He wasn’t fooling her. Aggressive arousal emanated from him in the unmoving way he watched her, the slack of his parted lips, the minute press of his fingertips in the armrest, and the tell-tale stretch of his fly. Her fingers itched to slip out that top button and free him.