The Girl's Got Secrets (Forbidden Men #7) (39 page)

And then I remembered telling her about Incubus shirt girl. My head really went all over the place with that one. I’d talked to her about
her
! Why hadn’t she said anything? She knew how I’d reacted to Incubus shirt girl, how I’d looked for her for months. Or, wait.
Had
she known how I’d looked for her? Maybe I hadn’t mentioned that part. I’d only tried to convey how much I wanted to be over the entire ordeal, so maybe I’d made her feel as if she couldn’t tell me because I’d made her believe I’d wanted nothing to do with her—as a woman.

But none of that explained why she’d gone incognito as a man in the first place.

Down the hall, the apartment door came open and someone called, “Hey, hooker. I’m home, and I come bearing food. Double chocolate fudge ice cream. You are so helping me eat this.”

I blew out a breath. That was definitely Remy’s voice. All my questions were about to be answered. Jodi and I silently watched each other as we listened to footsteps move to the kitchen, probably to drop off the ice cream.

Then Remy called, “Jodi? Hello? You home?”

“Uh...yeah.” Jodi cast me a leery glance as if she thought I’d slit her throat or something if she answered wrong. “In your room, puta.”

“What’re you doing in
my
room? Doesn’t matter. I’m glad you’re there. You need to help me come up with a way to tell Asher—”

She rounded the corner to enter her room and gasped when she saw me, skidding to a halt and clutching her chest.

I had no idea what I’d been expecting, maybe that she’d be dressed as Sticks with the mask on, even though I held the damn mask in my hand.

But the very last thing I did expect to see was...Elisa.

My mouth fell open, my jaw worked, but no words came.

Her wild-eyed panicked gaze darted to Jodi, then back to me. When her attention fell to the mask I clutched in my hand, she turned back to her roommate.

“He already knows,” Jodi whispered with a sympathetic wince.

Remy, Elisa, or whoever the hell she was, whirled back to me. “Asher...” she started softly, her eyes crinkled in apology as she took a step toward me.

I lurched backward and held up a hand, warding her off, trying to make sense of what was going on.

But, shit, fuck, hell, and damn. This changed everything. When she’d merely been a girl, masquerading as a man, that was one thing. I hadn’t been too awfully mad then. But tricking me as Elisa too, deceiving me until she’d tumbled me right into bed with her...

“What the fucking hell is going on?” I demanded. “I go into work tonight and learn you’re not only a girl, but THE girl I wrote a song about and had been seeking for
months
. And now I see you walk into this room, and you’re
Elisa
too? Who the hell are you really?”

Oh, Jesus, I hadn’t realized until that moment, I honestly didn’t know her real name.

“I...I’m Remy,” she answered in a small voice.

I narrowed my eyes, silently commanding her not to fuck with me right now.

She lifted both hands. “I swear. My full name’s Remy Elisa Curran. Elisa is my middle name, but only my uncle at the restaurant calls me that.”

“And you apparently understand English perfectly fine,” I sneered. Then it hit me.
Fuck
, she knew English. She’d understood everything I’d told her when we’d been together, things I never would’ve admitted to a girl I’d just met.

Jesus, how the lies were piling up.

I ran my fingers through my hair, tugging at my scalp, trying to calm down, but I just...this blew my mind.

She reached out toward me, concern lacing her features. “Do you need to sit down?”

I cast her a killer glare. “No, I don’t need to fucking sit down. I need a fucking explanation.
Why
?”

“I just...” Her lashes blinked rapidly, and I could see tears glaze over her eyes. Then she hugged herself and admitted, “I just wanted a chance to be in the band.”

I shook my head, confused and not at all expecting that answer. “What?”

“Non-Castrato,” she said. “I went to audition for the drummer spot as myself...but that bastard Galloway wouldn’t even let me play one song with you guys.”

My mouth fell open. “Punk rocker girl?” I whispered in horror. She was punk rocker girl too? “That was
you
?”

When she nodded, I threw my arms into the air and snorted. But of course. It was just my luck that the biggest liar on the planet would end up being all three ladies I’d been daydreaming and fantasizing about lately. Fucking perfect.

“What was up with the Tina Turner wig?” I demanded.

She shrugged and looked a little ill. “Nothing. I just thought it looked badass for the part.”

The part? Yeah, she’d definitely been playing a part...all fucking month long.

“How many other secret identities do you have?”

She shook her head and bowed her face. “That’s it.” When I sniffed, she looked up, scowling. “It
is
!”

“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes and ran my hands through my hair, trying to straighten everything in my muddled head. “So you made up ‘Sticks,’ the gay male drummer, to get into the band—” I broke off abruptly to wince because it suddenly struck me...Sticks didn’t exist. All the rounds of Call of Duty we’d played, the teasing, songwriting together, all the shit he’d helped me with and times he had my back. I recalled the night in Chicago when he—
she’d
—been ready to defend me with nothing but mace and a whistle, and an arrow of pain passed through me. Sticks, my friend, was gone forever.

And why the hell hadn’t it thumped me right over the head that mace and a whistle were the classic rape preventatives—
lady
protection. I was such a fucking dumbass. How many times she must’ve laughed over my idiotic cluelessness.

I narrowed my eyes on her as she said, “I actually didn’t even mean to join the band. I was just so pissed after you wouldn’t listen to me; I planned on ripping off the mask afterward and telling you, ha, a woman could play drums just as well as a man could. But then you went and invited me to play with you guys
that
Friday. I’d never played in front of an audience before. I wanted to know what it was like. And then that very night, we got the gig for Chicago and you sounded so excited, I couldn’t let you down and tell you I was a girl then. What if Gally kicked me out and you’d never gotten to go to Chicago?”

“Oh, so this was all to help
me
?” I snarled.

She flushed and let out a small sigh. “Of course not. But it did contribute to the reason I didn’t tell you immediately, until I passed the point that I could tell you without causing a huge ordeal, and then I was just too afraid to...because I knew you’d react
this way
.”

This way? So she thought I was overreacting, huh? I rolled my eyes. Nice. “Where does Incubus shirt girl fit into all this?” I had to know.

She blinked, confused. “She doesn’t.”

When I only lifted an eyebrow, telling her to try again, she gritted her teeth and growled out a sound. “I didn’t even know that song existed until after I joined the band, and Ten told me about it.”

I growled. Fucking Ten. “But you knew it was about you?”

She cringed. “After I read the lyrics, I knew it was a distinct possibility I was that girl, yes.”

“Un-fucking-believable.”

I wiped my hands over my face and had to spin away because it was so hard to look at her and not see Elisa, not remember every detail of everything we’d done in my bed.

“I can vouch for that part,” Jodi spoke up. “She really had no clue she was the girl in your song until—”

I whirled to glare at her, promptly shutting her up. “You know...” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder as she backed toward the doorway. “I’m just going to leave you two alone to hash this out.” And she shot out of the room.

I glanced at Remy, who seemed to shrink smaller into herself as if she expected me to physically attack her.

I’d been inside this woman, seen her naked, touched her, tasted her, had the best sex of my life with her. I’d dreamed of some kind of future with her and had actually thought we’d been starting something big.

But it’d all been a lie.

I wasn’t sure if I bought her story about Incubus shirt girl, but I figured she was going to stick to her tale, so I proceeded to the issue that meant the most to me...and hurt the most to ask about. “And Elisa?” I whispered.

Tears filled her eyes as she shook her head. “You were never supposed to meet her. You weren’t supposed to return to the hotel room for your wallet and discover her in your shower. You weren’t supposed to go to Castañeda’s and see her at work. And you were never supposed to take her home with you. I told you—dammit—did I or did I not warn you to stay away from her?”

I snorted and shook my head. “A little hypocritical of you, don’t you think, since you
are
her? Why didn’t you just fucking pull away when I first kissed you?”

Her mouth fell open as if that was the most ridiculous question anyone had ever asked her. “Have you
met
you?” she cried. “You’re freaking amazing. No hetero woman in her right mind could even remotely resist all that.”

When she waved her hand to encompass me from head to toe, I hissed out a harsh laugh. “Right.”

“I’m serious.” Her face fell as she watched me, as if she knew then that no matter what she said, everything between us was over. “The last thing I wanted to do was fall for you. Hell, after one dipshit lead singer of a band crushed my faith in men altogether, I fully expected to despise you. But then I got to know you, and I...well, it’s just a testament of how amazing you are to break through the stereotype I’d set up against you, and you actually got me to
like
you.”

“Well then it must suck to be you, because right now, I’m not very fond of you in return. Jesus, I actually don’t even know a goddamn thing about you. You’re a complete fucking stranger to me.”

“Asher,” she whispered, pressing her fist to her chest as a couple of tears slid down her cheek. I hated to see her cry, but the tightness in my own chest made it impossible for me to go to her and try to soothe her. She was breaking my damn heart here.

“You
do
know me,” she entreated. “You know everything there is to know about me. Everything I told you when I was Sticks, that was all me.”

“Except that you’re not really a man, you’re not really gay, and oh yeah...you understand English perfectly. Jesus.” I gripped my hair. “How many times did you
laugh
at me because I was too stupid to figure it out myself?”

“Never,” she swore, shaking her head adamantly. “I never once laughed at you.”

“I’ll bet,” I muttered. “I treated you like a guy. Jostled and joked, called you things I’d never call a woman.”

Remy hugged herself. “I didn’t mind. It let me know we were friends.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, nodding in agreement. “We
were
. You’d probably become one of the closest friends I’d ever had. And you just...you just took that away from me. Then you walked through this doorway and let me know Elisa, the one woman who rocked my world, doesn’t exist either.”

“No.” She shook her head some more. “They both still exist. Sticks and Elisa are still here.” She tapped her hands against her chest. “They’re just one person now. It’s just Remy.”

This time it was my turn to shake my head and say, “No. The only person I’m looking at is a fucking liar.”

I turned away to storm out the door when she called, “Wait! What about tomorrow?”

I paused and glanced back, frowning. “
What
?”

“It’s Friday. The band,” she reminded me. “We’re supposed to play at Forbidden.”

Shit
. And to top everything else, she’d just broken up my band, too. “Oh, you’re not in the band anymore,” I announced in a soft voice.

Devastation lit her gaze, but she nodded respectfully. “And Sunday? You still need someone to deejay at Pick’s wedding.”

Damn it. I clutched my temples as a headache began. How the hell had she became so essential in just a few short weeks? I didn’t have time to find Pick a new deejay and I didn’t trust anyone else to work the sound system the way I trusted Sticks...aka,
her
.

“If you’re still willing, Pick needs you,” I managed to grit out reluctantly, wishing I could tell her to fuck off instead. But I couldn’t do that to my brother, who was counting on someone to play “Baby Love” for him to dance to with Eva.

She nodded. “Of course I’ll still do it.”

I gave my own grateful nod before glaring and growling, “Just stay out of my way and don’t fucking talk to me there. In fact, if I never see you again after Sunday, it’ll be too soon.”

Tears filled her eyes, but she nodded her understanding and acceptance.

Unable to stick around a second longer, I lit out of there, practically running from the building until I reached my apartment. I hissed a curse when I realized I’d forgotten to lock my place before leaving for work earlier...because I’d been too occupied with thoughts of finding Elisa.