Rock Me Gently (11 page)

“Why?”

“Because you scare me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been with a very handsome man before. Look how that turned out.”

“So all of mankind has to pay because your ex is a dog?”

She looked out of the window.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He drove for a few minutes without speaking. “So Jill told you to ask me out for coffee?”

She nodded.

“So she kind of gave you permission. Would you have?”

“I’m not sure. Probably not.”

“Because you’re not ready.”

“Because I thought I wasn’t ready. You are rapidly proving me wrong.”

He grinned, this time with arrogance. “Okay. So did you think about me after we had coffee on Friday morning?”

She bit her lip. “Yes.”

“And when I showed up in your shop, what then?”

“I thought you were aggressive.”

“So then why did you agree to have dinner with me?”

“You are also persuasive. And it doesn’t hurt that I am in the seventy-five percentile of your adoring population.”

“Ditto, baby. And this morning when I kidnapped you for church?”

“That was very well done of you.”

“Scored some points?”

“With me or God?”

“You.”

She shook her head but said, “Yes.”

Jason pulled the Hummer into the recreational area and parked then came around to her side. Jason opened the door and reached for her. Standing on the running board, she was almost as tall as him. She wound her arms around his neck and he encircled her waist.

Lainey pushed his shades up so that she could see his eyes. His erection was already twitching and nudging its way up against her tummy. “You didn’t ask what I thought about what happened right before Jill called.”

His jaw tightened and he swallowed hard, then asked, “What did you think?”

“I think you must be very well-endowed, but I’m just going by feel.” She grinned.

He let out a painful sounding groan. “That’s it, we are getting right back in this truck.”

“Naw-uh.” Lainey attempted to push past him but he held her tightly.

“Well, I can’t walk around like this all day.” He prodded her with his hard-on.

“Then let’s just throw the blanket down and we can eat and talk. We don’t have to hike if you’re not able.” She grinned. “And maybe later we could neck.”

He dove for her mouth but she turned her cheek. “I’m going to kiss you, remember? Your rules.”

“Yeah, I’m a fuckin’ idiot.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not an English teacher.” She smiled, stepping off the running board.

Jason retrieved the cooler from the back and followed as she led them to a fairly secluded spot in a little copse of trees. They spread out the blanket and unpacked the food.

“Are you hungry?” Lainey asked.

“Starving and not for food,” he answered.

“You are a very impatient man, Mr Westlake. We’ve only known each other, what, five days?”

He stretched out on the blanket. “But I’ve wanted you since the minute I laid eyes on you so I’ve been waiting seventy-two hundred minutes and counting. If you think of it that way, I am a very patient man.”

She smiled. “You wanted me to what?” she flirted.

“Do you really want me to answer that? Because I’m very good with detail and I can be quite explicit and raunchy.”

“Mmm, maybe later. But that reminds me. I brought you something.” She stretched to reach for her purse and felt his hand slide up her thigh to cup her bottom.

She gave him a mock look of severity.

“What? I like what you brought me.”

“Not that, huh. This.”

“A book,” he said, less than enthusiastically.

“Not just any book. Historical romance.”

“Oh?” he replied, in the same tone.

“I could read you all the dirty parts.”

“Although at any other time that would be titillating, I honestly couldn’t take sexy words coming from those lips right now. Not unless I was buried between those beautiful thighs while you read.”

“As if I could concentrate enough to read if you were.”

“Are you finished teasing me?”

“Probably not.”

“I’m seriously going to die today.”

“Regardless of what they tell you, you can’t actually die from that. Besides, once we do that, we can’t go back. It’s not like there will ever be that mystery again. Isn’t it exciting all this anticipation?”

“No, anticipation is just downright painful. Wait a minute.” He sat up straighter. “You said once we do that. Not if.”

Choosing to ignore that, she said, “Do you store your guitar in that Hummer or did you put it in there so that you could play it?”

“You’re not going to answer that, are you?” At the negative shake of her head he said, “I thought I might play it.”

“Why don’t you then? Take your mind off your troubles.”

Jason gave a small nod. Lainey watched him walk back to the truck, admiring his fine ass as he did so.

Chapter Seven

Jason didn’t even know if he could play. His cock was in charge of things at the moment. He wanted to fuck Lainey so bad, he hurt. He’d have been better off hiking. At least then all that he’d have had to remember would’ve been one foot in front of the other.

Back on the blanket he crossed his legs, and took the guitar out of the case. Propping it in his lap, he then set his fingers on the neck. He hesitated, his other hand poised over the strings. “I haven’t played in, like, six years. It’s probably gonna be pretty bad.”

Lainey smiled. “I bet it’s like riding a bike. Play for me.”

Jason strummed a few chords. “Is there a pick in there?” he asked, craning to look into the case.

She picked one out and handed it to him.

“My fingers used to be so callused. Sometimes I didn’t even use one. My fingers used to bleed on stage and I didn’t even care.”

Her encouraging smile slipped a little.

Jason decided to play one of his songs for her. It took him a few seconds to remember it all. It
had
been a long time. He was a little rusty. His fingers moved faster than his brain—like muscle memory, they knew what to do before his mind could catch up. He didn’t sing, just played her the melody. He got so wound up in it that he didn’t even see her reaction. Until he’d finished.

When Jase finally opened his eyes, Lainey sat there staring at him as if she’d never seen him before, tears streaming down her face. “You have such a gift. With that voice and the way that you put your heart into the music how could you just stop? Did it not break your heart to give up something that you so obviously love?”

“Don’t cry,” he said, reaching out to wipe a tear from her cheek.

Facing him, she moved closer. “Then you don’t cry,” she said, swiping a tear from his own cheek.

Mopping at his cheek, Jase was astounded—he hadn’t realized that he’d even become emotional. He never cried. Playing the music used to be such a part of him. They’d done the same material night after night so that it had taken all the pleasure right out of it. He’d forgotten how much he loved it.

“It must have been some epiphany for you to have given this up.” She searched his face.

“I didn’t like all the stuff that came with it. It wasn’t really a difficult choice at the time. I guess subconsciously I must have made the decision long before the rest of me caught up to it. Maybe not the teaching part, but quitting. I’d been thinking about it,” he said, placing his hand back to her cheek. Leisurely he stroked his thumb back and forth along her skin.

Her gaze searched his.

“I mean don’t get me wrong, I was grateful—am grateful for all the things that it provided me. But I didn’t like me. But evidently,” he huffed, “I miss the music.”

“Why did you feel that you had to give one up for the other? The music for the teaching?”

“I guess I didn’t really do it consciously. I was just so busy going to school and—” He had been about to say outrunning the press. “…looking long term that I just forgot how much I love it.”

“So why didn’t you combine the two and become a music teacher?”

“Huh, I never thought of that one.”

“Why history?”

“I’ve just always been fascinated by it. And you know that saying ‘doomed to repeat itself’. But I guess because I’m a storyteller. I write my heart in song.”

“You write your own songs too?”

“That was mine.”

“Ohhh. Play something else.”

“But you don’t even know my stuff.”

“That’s okay. I’ll get to know it.”

“Well, how ‘bout we find something that you know?”

“I’m kind of a country girl,” she said, giving a little shrug of her bare shoulder.

“Mmm, okay, how about…” He started playing
Sweet Home Alabama
and when he got to the chorus he started to sing.

The pleasure on her face made him also remember what an audience had made him feel. To have a hundred and eighty thousand fans singing his own words back to him was an indescribable feeling. There was nothing like it. A high all of its own.

“Join in. Sing with me.”

She shook her head. 

He stopped playing. “Come on.”

“No, I can’t sing.”

“I heard you this morning. You can so.”

“That was with a bunch of other people and the organ blaring. I can’t sing in front of someone that sings like you.”

“Why not? I heard you. I think we’d sound good together.”

She shook her head again.

“I won’t play unless you sing with me. Okay, how about this one? He played the first few chords before beginning to sing Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow’s
Picture
—a duet of sorts and about as country as Jason could get. It wasn’t really his genre. “You know it?” he asked, while continuing to play.

She nodded.

When it was Sheryl’s part, Lainey took his cue, timidly at first, but as he started to smile it must have encouraged her and her voice grew stronger. 

They got to the duet part and they sounded great together, just as he’d known they would. He hit the last note, and Lainey’s cheeks reddened.

An abrupt spontaneous burst of applause caught them both off guard. Jason had thought they were in a secluded little patch where they wouldn’t be disturbed or bother anyone else. He hadn’t thought Lainey’s face could get any redder than it already was. He was wrong.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” he called with a little Elvis-style lip curl, waving to the small crowd of onlookers. “We’ll be here all week,” he joked.

“That was awesome, Lainey,” he said, laying the guitar on the blanket. He wrapped his arms around her. “We sounded great.”

“You sound great.”

“No, we did.” She had a natural voice, kind of an alto with a little rasp to it. If she practiced or took lessons she’d be awesome.

Lainey pulled from his embrace as the little crowd moved on. She picked up a sandwich and plunked it in his lap. After opening the grapes, she popped one into her mouth.

“So your parents live nearby then?”

He looked at her as she changed the subject again. “Yeah, they live in Jacksonville.”

“And you go there for Sunday supper?”

“Yeah, my mom said that’s what she missed most about me being on the road. She missed feeding me and knowing that I was eating well. When does a parent finally quit worrying or taking care of their kid?” He took a bite of the ham sandwich with lettuce and cheese.

“I don’t think I’ll ever quit worrying about Jilly. And I’m afraid the time is coming when she’s not going to need me to take care of her. I sort of dread the day she goes off to college. We kinda grew up together. I mean, I want her to go and do everything she wants to, but I’m afraid for her too. I will always want to protect her from, well, everything I guess.”

“She’s a great kid, Lainey. She’s going to be just fine.”

Flipping onto her stomach, Lainey then rested on her elbows with her legs bent and her bare feet in the air.

Jason followed the line of her leg until it disappeared into her shorts. Just the barest tease of the roundness of her shapely butt peeked where her shorts ended.

He grabbed her ankle. “Ah-ha, I did see a tattoo.” He held her foot so that he could look at it. “The number twenty-two. You don’t strike me as a tattoo kinda girl, Lainey. Did you get this while you were drunk? And what does it mean?”

“I wasn’t drunk.” She looked away, laying her head down on her arms. “It was Thad’s number back in high school.”

“Oh,” he said, wishing that he hadn’t asked. Thad and Lainey hadn’t just been married, they’d been together all the way back in high school—the classic high school sweethearts. That was a lot of history.

“I thought about having it removed but”—she shrugged—“it makes me remember him the way he was and not the way that he ended up. I hate the Thad that shows up every once in a while to bring his daughter home or to serve me with more papers.”

“But you were in love with the kid that wore jersey twenty-two.”

Disregarding the statement, she shrugged again. “Besides, Jilly was born on the twenty-second, so I just left it. Don’t tell me you don’t have any tattoos. There’s no way that you were in a band without them.”

“That’s just a cliché, a stereotype.”

She sat up and slid a finger up his T-shirt sleeve and she grinned as she revealed at least one. “And you have the stereotypical tribal arm band that every guy of a certain age group has.” She pushed his sleeve higher, while tugging at the other. “What else ya got?” She pulled at the bottom of his tee releasing it from his shorts. “Let me see.”