Not Quite Juliet: A Club Imperial Novel (Silver Soul Book 1) (25 page)

There were images of all sorts, including little Nick, a family picture of him, what I guessed were his parents and an older sister. He hadn’t mentioned her. There was a wedding picture of his parents, and wedding pictures of both sets of grandparents. There was a picture of him with three other guys, looking very much like they had been puked right out of the Grunge scene in Seattle. I didn’t recognize any of the guys, so I guessed it was an older band. Despot Heroes? I think he had mentioned that name.

There was another one of him with Sal, Jose, and Van. No sign of Dave at that point. I wondered if Dave realized his days were numbered in the band. Hell, I wondered if the band knew Dave’s days were numbered. It was so easy to see he didn’t have the same goals as the rest of the band. I wasn’t going to be sad to see him go.

I picked through a few more frames of friends and family. And then I found a small three picture frame all the way in the back, and I froze. Three pictures. One of a tiny baby, a newborn at best. Possibly a preemie. Another with Nick and the baby, his face looking wrecked, overwhelmed and lost. And the last was Casey with the baby, looked just as wrecked as Nick.

Casey. The alcoholic maniac who’d been at the rehearsal the other night. The one for whom Nick had paid rent, was in a picture with a baby on his mantel.

What the fuck was this?

“Hey, kitten.” Nick walked into the den.

I spun around still holding the frame.

“Oh.” Nick’s face fell. He knew the frame on sight and knew I wasn’t pleased. “You found Casey.”

“You said she was an ex.” I held the frame out.

“She is.” He answered as if it should be obvious. He took the pictures from my hand and put the frame back where I’d found it on the mantle. “She’s my ex-fiancée.”

“That’s a little note I could have used.” I wanted to sound angry, but since I had forced the issue, I also didn’t want to get him mad at me. “The baby?”

He took a deep breath and put a hand around my shoulder. “Let’s eat.”

“Evasion number one.”

He pulled his hand off my shoulder, and it seemed like the room filled with his anger. “Not ready to tell you about that. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I prefer your angry honesty to an evasion.” I kept my voice quiet and soft. He was rip-roaring pissed and I’d thought the guy couldn’t get that angry. “I found the picture on your mantle, Nick. I didn’t think looking at a picture you had out was against the rules. And after what happened the other day at rehearsal, you can’t blame me for being confused and little upset.” He was trembling and it wasn’t the good kind of trembling. Time for a detour. I looked at him. “Food?”

Nick stared at me. He could see it was deflection, and a moment later he realized I was trying to help him calm down. He glanced at the kitchen. “Delasante’s. I called and picked up.”

“Chicken Francese?” I was hopeful.

“Penne ala vodka with chicken and eggplant parm.”

I screwed up my face. “Eggplant is all you, rock god.”

He offered me a hand. “Come on, kitten. Let’s eat.”

The kitchen smelled divine. But as it turned out, he had a little furry thief who was nosing at my dinner. I stopped and stared at the little beast and then back at Nick, and laughed. “You have a cat!”

He pushed around me. “Serafina, down!” He marched over to the table and picked the cat up. “You are a naughty cat and you’re not welcome to my eggplant!”

I held my hands out for the cat. She eyed me warily, but allowed Nick to pass her to me. I scratched her chin, and she instantly settled in my arms purring. “Serafina?”

“That’s her naughty cat name.” Nick shrugged. “Most of the time I call her Butter.”

Butter was a good name for her. That was her color and she was soft and a little on the plump side. She had green eyes and a typical tabby ‘M’ on her face, barely visible in her light coloring. She was purring away now, settled against me. Nick stared at her and the rest of his anger dissolved. “Damn cat. Apparently I’m not the only one who likes your boobs.”

“She’s sweet,” I said, and put her down on the floor. “How come you never mentioned her before?”

“A dude with a cat?”

“I think guys who have cats are sexy.” I gave Butter a good scratch between the shoulder blades and she arched up, pleased. “It shows you have a softer side. What made you get her?”

“She found me at the warehouse just about two years ago. She wasn’t much more than a scrappy kitten, about six months old.” He started moving around the kitchen, getting the dinner plated. He made me sit down. “She was hanging around and hanging around and I felt bad for her. I started bringing her some dry food every day, and putting out water. I was terrified that something had happened to her when she didn’t show for a few days. Then, about four days later she showed up and she was nuzzling my leg and seemed to want me to follow her. I did, and I discovered she’d had 3 healthy kittens. The guys and I trapped every one, and the kittens were adopted immediately. No one was interested in Serafina, so I took her. She’d been so sweet during the whole thing, and I wanted to give her a good home.”

“She was a feral?”

“I don’t think so.” He put a bottle of wine and two candles for the table and lowered the lights in the room. “I think she was a kitten who was adopted and either got away or got dumped when her owners realized she was pregnant. She’s too sweet to be a real feral.”

Nick poured the wine into two Ikea tumblers and he plunked a few frozen grapes into the glasses. I picked up the glass with the light golden liquid in and took a sip. It was sweet and light and ever-so-lightly fizzy. I gestured to the table. “Interesting ambiance.”

“Well, since our date keeps getting canceled, I’m improvising. Bring the food here. That way you can wear your yoga pants, and I can take off my tie and not worry about the inevitable hard on I’m going to get at some point.”

“Whatever would bring that on, Doctor Dovadsky?” It was a relief to hear he had calmed down.

“Couldn’t be the sexy woman sitting across from me.”

“Doctor, there is nothing sexy about an unshowered law student who has a brief due Tuesday at five p.m.”

Nick sat down across the table from me, taking a sip of wine. “How much longer do you have?”

“One and a half very fucking long semesters.” It was only the end of October, and I was already dying.

“Then you join a firm?”

“Oh no.” I shook my head. “Then I beg for a law clerk position and remain piss poor for another three or four years while I get the experience.”

“You’re not going into practice?”

“I want to be a judge. I can go into practice, but it’s better if I do the law clerking and try to get in as an assistant DA. Then I have a better chance of getting noticed and appointed or elected.”

“A judge?” He was really surprised.

“Yeah, you’re not the only thing I want to bang.”

“Mm, a lady with power.” Nick took a bite of his eggplant. “I like that.”

“The eggplant or the power?”

“Both.”

I carefully picked at the chicken and slowly chewed a bit of it. It was time for us to really have a talk about all the stuff that wasn’t sex. There were things he did I had a lot of questions about. And there was that tattoo and the picture. I had to tread lightly here... “So why does the Rock Sex God Nick D keep his life so secret?”

Nick sighed deeply. “I was wondering when you were going to ask about that. The picture was a clincher?”

“No, had to happen eventually,” I smiled. “I can’t keep shagging you and not get curious.”

He pushed his dinner around a little bit. “I was part of another band in college called Despot Heroes. Huge college scene band. Enormous. Even after I got into the doctoral program, we were so popular we couldn’t give it up. We were making a living off of the gigs we were playing all over New Jersey and New York. There were fangirls everywhere, which my girlfriend at the time despised. Hell, I did too. I just wanted to be left alone at the end of the night so I could study.” He pushed some more of the eggplant around but didn’t eat it.

“Nick, if this is too much...”

“Nah, it’s not.” His emphatic head shake made me think otherwise. “Just...well anyway. You know some of the fans are a little maniacal in a bad way. They’ll do anything to get into the dressing room, or find out more about you. And these three were really bad. The first time they broke in, Casey and I were asleep upstairs—”

I interrupted him. “Casey. The same Casey?”

“Yes.” I could hear his ire.

“Nick, please don’t get mad. I just needed to know that it was the same person.”

He took a deep breath, and nodded. “Right. Sorry.” He paused, then continued. “They broke in again about three weeks later, and then six weeks later again, when Casey was out of town. And this time, they tried to blackmail me. They knocked me out with chloroform and stripped me naked. They took pictures of me naked with them. Casey believed me when I said they were staged; she’d been there the first time they’d gotten in. We moved two weeks later, and I dropped out of the band at the same time. I just stayed away. And as soon as my degrees were signed, we moved again, back out here. I just resolved when I got into a new band, there was going to be the stage persona and the private persona.”

I chewed on my dinner thoughtfully. “You know, you’re good at it about ninety percent of the time, too. You keep screwing up around me.” I didn’t want to harp on something that he clearly didn’t want to talk about.

“I do?” he asked.

“Yeah, you do.” He had a look of horror on his face. “You have this sweet, romantic, face you show me when you’re Doctor Dovadsky, and then there’s this hot, rocker-god, sex fiend you turn on when it’s just you and me. I never saw that on stage, even. And it’s
incredibly
hot.”

He smiled. “I haven’t had someone make me feel like a hot rocker-god in the bedroom in a long time.” He stabbed the eggplant mercilessly, but I couldn’t tell if it was sexual or if he was angry. I didn’t want him to be upset, not on the first night we really had together alone.

“What about you, Miss Kirkbride?” he asked. “You’re not from around here. What the hell made you decide on Pittsburgh?”

“Duquesne was the furthest school that accepted me,” I answered. “One year of hell at Rasmussen, and I was done. I needed to get the hell away from everything and everyone that was Wisconsin.” I halted my speech, and he knew I’d cut myself off. I tried to head off his questions. “I wish I could be proud of my Badger heritage, but every time I think about what got me out of there, I’d rather just forget.”

“Your sister is making all of this worse, isn’t she?”

I sighed. “No. She’s just bringing up the memories I want to forget.” I hadn’t wanted to tell him the whole story, but since I now had my sister living with me, I didn’t want to keep dodging his questions. I had been a wreck with the retelling, too.

“I want to know more about you, Morgan,” he said. “They were all fools.”

“All because I was overweight and I liked sex.” My voice quivered; Goddamn it. This was ridiculous. “It was six years ago. Why am I still reacting? That video was...awful. What Mad and I did was no one else’s business. But because I enjoyed it, because I liked to take a few risks, and liked getting my orgasm, I was a freak. Because the fat girl liked getting some, I was something to ridicule. Even my own parents thought there was something wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Nick moved to the chair next to me and pulled me close. His voice was gentle. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. I’m sorry they hurt you. Family shouldn’t be like that.”

“When I landed in that club, I
knew
there was nothing wrong with me. I finally felt like I’d found home and a place where I could just be me. Your kink is not my kink, and safe, sane and consensual. It was awesome finally being able to just have people understand I liked it. I liked being aggressive, I liked being submissive.”

I turned and looked at him. My freight-train-brain kept barreling on. “What happened the other night in the locker room with Tricia walking in? Fit right into my voyeurism fetish. I loved it. I loved everything that happened, with her walking in and the danger of me screaming your name. The broom closet was right there too. I like when you push me up against a wall, or you shove me in the backseat of the car and rip my stockings off. It all turns me on. Tasting you. Tasting me on you. I want to go so much further with you. Being at the club pushed my limits and I need someone who can keep pushing them. I need someone who enjoys sex, who’s as bold in bed as I am. Who doesn’t mind that I’m never going to be a size two.” I took a deep breath. “Who understands the kinky motherfuckers at the club are my family now. Even though I’m going to have to leave my job there, I won’t give up the friendships and I won’t forget what they’ve shown me.”

I slumped into the crook of his arm. “I just want someone to love me. For me.”

He cupped my hand with his chin and tipped my head towards him. He brushed a tear off my cheek again and brought his lips to mine. The kiss was so tender, so careful, so full of promise and love that it broke down every wall I’d ever erected to get where I was. It all crumbled around me and left me standing there, alone and strong, bathed in the sensual, tender touch of his lips and gentle fingers on my face. He breathed his words across my lips. “You found him.”

I just enjoyed him there for a moment. “I’m sorry I got you mad before.”

“No, don’t be.” He ran his fingers over the back of my neck. “Don’t be. I didn’t expect you to find that picture and it’s... a painful subject.”

I stared at the chicken on the plate. “Can I ask you a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Will you tell me about the tattoo? And the picture on your mantle?”

He froze, then swallowed hard. “Morgan—”

“Someday? You don’t have to do it right now. I feel like my resolution to get to know you better has been defeated in Congress. There’s so much we don’t know about each other, and we clearly both have a lot of past we need to share with each other.” I pointed to his dinner. “And preferences. Because eggplant? Really?”