Exclusive Contract (3 page)

It wasn't just a jam session—it was a little masterpiece, aching and longing, something dark curled up inside each of them clawing its way out through the notes. The drums weren't like drums at all, not really. They followed, tripped over the beat but somehow only danced around it, never losing it. The piano wailed, the notes rising and falling, a slow cry like a banshee above the pounding, almost as though the keyboard itself dreamed of being a violin. When Sonya began to sing a string of nonsense words into the microphone, her strong, classical voice rang out like an old bell, clear, but with a tarnished edge, as though with each peal it came closer and closer to cracking.

And Carter... I knew the music world was abuzz about his guitar and songwriting abilities, and I enjoyed his songs, but I'd never really listened to his guitar as a separate entity from the group. Now that I did, I suddenly saw what everyone was so excited about. In his hands, the guitar truly did sing. No shredding, no showing off, no raw edges and fumbling fingers—just pure, smooth melody. I was so used to grime and grunge that for a moment it barely sounded like rock music. The hard edge needed seemed to be missing. Frowning, I lifted my head and watched Carter closely, studying his face.

But it revealed nothing to me. That was the strange thing. Carter playing the guitar looked just like Carter talking or falling over drunk. It looked just like Carter walking or laughing. No concentration, no thought. As if he were meditating, as if the melody that he played were something he had played a hundred thousand times before, even though the rest of the band would occasionally stumble in the jam. There was none of that with Carter. He played guitar as though it were more natural to him than breathing.

And Kent?

I tried hard not to look at him. But I had to. The thrum of his beat pounded into me, and I felt my heart pumping in time with it.

My eyes found his face.

He was staring right back at me.

I couldn't breathe. Couldn't even think. Our eyes locked across the room. While the others played their instruments, rising and falling with the music—I saw Sonya swaying in her seat from the corner of my eye, and over Kent's shoulder Manny bobbed and wove like a sword-wielding duelist, fighting with this drum set, dragging the beat from it—Kent kept his eyes on me. His dark brows were drawn down hard into a scowl so black it should have made me shiver, but his blue-green eyes burned bright enough to eclipse that darkness in his face.

If guitar was as easy to Carter as breathing, then bass was as essential to Kent as fucking.

He'd eschewed a chair and stood, the bass slung low across his body, lying against his crotch. Lean, sinewy muscles rippled beneath his inked skin as he strummed his driving beat, and if I kept my eyes on his, the swift strumming looked almost like the stroke of a man masturbating. The moment the thought crossed my mind I couldn't get it out of my head: Kent's long-fingered hand wrapped around that thick, long cock, pumping and thrusting into his fist as he watched me, as if I were some vital component in his arousal. As if he couldn't stand to be without me.

I had no idea what he saw in me—only that I saw the same thing in him. The attraction was so raw, so close to the surface that it couldn't be denied. Something about the curve of his body around the bass, something about the subtle thrusting of his hips in time to the music, something about the way his tongue slipped out from between his teeth to wet his lips as we stared at each other—all of it reminded me of the way he'd kissed me and sent a bolt of lightning through my body, burning away my reason and immolating my common sense in the sudden conflagration of our meeting bodies.

My face grew hot as I sat on the floor, my breathing uneven. The thrusts of his hips became more pronounced, and I began to fear that the others would notice him grinding into his bass the same way he ground his cock against my ass. The memory seared through me and made me squirm where I sat. My swollen pussy lips rubbed together between my thighs and I bit my lip, trying to ground myself in reality, but I couldn't. My skin was on fire, the beat pulsing low in my belly. My clit was a hard nub, aching for attention, and a sweet gush of wet warmth had already drenched my panties. Inside my shirt, my nipples had tightened painfully, standing out from my soft breasts and aching for even the barest of touches.

What would Kent's hands feel like on my bare tits? Would they be rough? Yes, of course they would be. They would be harsh and demanding. He would pinch me until I shrieked, twist and pull, wringing pain and pleasure from me in equal measure. His huge hands would flatten them, leave bruises on the soft, pale flesh, and I would love every second of it.

A man like Kent fucked you so painfully the pure avalanche of sensation would push you over the edge. He was the kind of man you fucked because you wanted to stop feeling. The kind of man you fucked because you hated your life. A self-destructive fuck, one that would end in tears and arson.

No wonder I was so attracted to him.

He wouldn't stop staring at me. In self-defense I closed my eyes, but it just made it worse. The music rode a harsh, painful beat, and to my shock my core squeezed tight, contracting around empty space, aching to be filled. Without my consent my tongue slipped from between my teeth and I began to lick my lips, my breath coming in quick, hot bursts.

This was bad. This was very very bad. I had to get out of here—but I couldn't leave, and I couldn't very well stick my fingers into my panties in front of everyone. I mean, I probably could, but it wasn't late enough for that and no one was inebriated enough. Opening my eyes I tore my face away from Kent's and glanced wildly around the room, searching for something, anything to occupy my mind.

There was nothing around me. I could always pull out my phone and try to find something on my crappy data connection that would distract me long enough to escape from the sensations of the music, but my skin was starting to tingle. If I sat here any longer I would spread my legs and begin grinding into the floor.

Abruptly I stood, stumbling, feeling drunk. No one paid me any mind except Carter, who looked up with a question on his face—and Kent. I felt his gaze burning into me. I had to escape it. I couldn't breathe.

My eyes alighted on the white ladder leading up to the small loft above the practice area. Sucking air through my teeth I practically sprinted across the small room and scrambled up the rungs. I ignored the stumbling of the bass beat and hauled myself up over the edge, panting hard as the music crowded the space between the floor of the loft and the ceiling. Kent had dropped out and I was glad that his pounding rhythm no longer pursued me.

That didn't change the fact that my pussy still pulsed and ached, begging for a pounding, for skilled fingers to stroke me into a sweet, hot frenzy, for a firm tongue to flutter against my clit until I exploded. Licking my lips, I rubbed my thighs together restlessly, my eyes flitting about the loft, searching for that fridge full of beer Carter had mentioned.

What I got instead was an eyeful. An eyeful of disaster, that is.

The music faded from my consciousness as I was assaulted on all sides by
mess.

The loft was terrifying in its thorough destruction. Clothes, old pizza boxes, tragically abandoned beer bottles, cigarette butts and old roaches of both the drug and the insect kind—all of them blotted out the sensations of the music, completely and thoroughly. All thoughts of surreptitiously masturbating up here in the loft flew from my skull. There was no way—
no way—
anyone, anywhere, could be sexy up here unless they were high as hell.

Which would probably explain the used condoms sitting in an old peanut butter jar next to the ladder. Suddenly I wished I had a hazmat suit.

Cleaning. Making home wherever you found it. Aside from being a sadsack that let life happen to her, asserting control over my environment was the only thing I was good at it, and as the thrum of the bass picked up again I knew I had to block it out by whatever means necessary. Kent Hudson was dangerous to me; I'd just escaped one destructive relationship, and I didn't need another one. That was all I saw on the horizon with a man who had contracted me to play the part of girlfriend to his wayward brother, and who could not, it seemed, keep himself from trying to fuck me. Destruction. Conflagration. A rider on a pale horse. Civilization falls. Millions dead.
Oh, the humanity.

I could not control the reactions of my body. Deep breaths only led to swells of desire. So I did the only thing I could do, there in that hideous excuse for a loft: I cleaned it.

Start in one spot. Clean that spot. Move onto the next.

Gather the clothes—they would have to be washed—and put them in a pile. A pile of papers, at first glance a contract—set those in a neat stack. Another pile of papers—receipts? Again on the stack. More paper, poetry and lyrics and scrawled musical notes—new pile.

Trash. Beer bottles, beer cans, a mirror with traces of white powder on it—no trash bags yet, but slated for an inevitable end. Blankets piled high in the corner on a bare mattress, faded and looking as though they had last been washed before Lollapalooza. Debate, but into the trash. Flip the mattress over, find it fairly clean. Fine. Leave it there.

Two extra guitars and a bass, one violin, and a set of bagpipes—set them up along the far wall, as gently as possible. I had no idea how bagpipes are supposed to be properly stored, but what the hell. Ah—a few small bags from the local drugstore. Excellent. All smaller trash—grocery receipts, candy bar wrappers, old pens and broken pencils—headed into the plastic bags. The condom jar went straight in without a second thought. I unearthed several cell phones—they went next to the pile of contracts, but the torn paperback books belonged on top of the papers full of poetry and music...and on... and on... and on...

“Um.”

The fog receded and I blinked, finding myself on my hands and knees, using a torn old t-shirt to wipe down the baseboards surrounding the loft. I looked up to see Carter hanging off the white ladder, staring at me as though he had never seen me before.

“Yes?” I asked him, annoyed. The baseboards were
filthy...

His face was almost comical as he surveyed the suddenly emptied loft. Except for a few small piles in the corner of junk and trash carefully sequestered from the well organized space, it was remarkably livable now. Throw a few sheets on the bed, maybe install a bathroom and a lamp and you could live the rest of your days in this place. If you wanted to be a bohemian poet, that is. And sometimes I did.

He appeared to shake himself, though the expression of shock did not leave his features. “I, uh, I just wanted to tell you that rehearsal was over,” he said. “I thought you'd be up here drinking the beer...”

“Oh, you mean the fridge full of no beer?” I said. “I think you guys need to start cutting back. All I found in it was a mostly-empty pint of pineapple-coconut ice cream. I did find a ton of empty beer bottles, though...”

He blinked, shaking his head again. “Yeah... but why? Why would you clean the loft?”

I shrugged. “I was bored?”

A noise at the bottom of the ladder, and Carter looked down, then scooted over. Kent's head popped up over the lip of the loft. His face betrayed no surprise, but his eyes narrowed as he surveyed me, on my hands and knees, wiping away years of grime and caked-on cigarette smoke.

“Rebecca's cleaning is a compulsive reaction to stress,” he said mildly.

Carter turned and looked at him. “What? How do you know that?”

His mouth quirked. “She told me so herself.”

“Shit,” Carter said. “If I cleaned when I got stressed I'd have the cleanest house in the universe. It'd be, like, all Japanese simplicity and shit.”

“If your response to stress was cleaning, you'd be sober,” Kent said.

Kent wasn't watching Carter's face, but I saw the wince there. “Yeah,” he muttered. “And then we'd all be broke.”

Tension. Tension, tension, tension. If I could just get these baseboards
clean...

“Rebecca.”
Kent's voice cut through my thoughts and I was mildly amused to find that I had been reaching for the closest grime-covered bit of molding. Maybe I did have a bit of a compulsive cleaning problem, but so what? It was better than a compulsive drinking problem, or a compulsive fucking problem. I bet that Kent had a compulsive fucking problem, considering how much fucking stress everyone put him through. Well, I wasn't going to be that way. I would be useful. I would never be a rock star or whatever, but at least I knew how to get blood out of a carpet...

“Rebecca!” A hand alighted on my back and I about jumped out of my skin. Turning, I found Kent kneeling next to me, his hand on me. Warmth spread from where his broad palm touched my spine, slithering up and down my body, sweeping into places where it had no business going. I jerked away.

For the strangest moment, he looked contrite. “Sorry,” he said. “You just kept cleaning. Rehearsal's over, we need to go get your things from your sister's house.”

I swallowed around my dry tongue. “Oh. Right.” I shifted my gaze to Carter, who was staring at the two of us.

“How do you two know each other so well already?” he asked.

I felt my brows raise up to my hairline. “Excuse me?” I said, while, at the same time, Kent said, “I interviewed her for the job, remember?”

Carter looked between us, then shook his head. “Fuck,” he said. “I have a headache. I'm going home. I need to take a nap or something.

Immediately beside me Kent's whole body tensed. “You're going home?” he said. “For real going home?”

Carter shot him an irritated look. “Yes, of course I'm going home.
God,
I'm not a kid any more.”

I practically heard the words vibrating in Kent's throat—
Then stop acting like one!
—but I jumped in.

“You had a hard night last night,” I told him. “Don't worry, Kent and I will take care of it. There's really not much to take care of. I got it all to LA in two garbage bags, so...”