The Rock Star's Daughter (9 page)

"Dance music!" I teased. "You're not a Pound
fan?"

"Not exactly," he said.

His mom worked the school year as a
substitute teacher and sometimes waited tables at a pancake house
when she needed the money. She basically saved up all year so that
she and Jake could follow bands. I guessed there was more to the
story than Jake was telling me but I didn't dare ask.

I was a little surprised at myself, the way I
was behaving around him. I dismissed his desire to drop out of high
school as completely practical. At Treadwell, I would have thought
any guy who sold t-shirts at concerts and would consider dropping
out of school to instead spin records at night clubs to be a total
loser. But here I was, in Alpharetta, Georgia, wanting nothing more
than for Jake to think I was cool. And I was terrified that I was
anything but cool; I was a violin-playing bookworm with an
authority problem (I was realizing) and just happened to have a
famous dad.

Jake's eyes were so, so brown, the shade of
black coffee, and his teeth were really straight and white. Allison
would have even thought he was a total babe, and she had pretty
high standards. I resisted the urge to take a picture of him with
my mobile phone.

"What about you? You go to school?" he
asked.

"I go to the prestigious Treadwell
Preparatory Academy," I informed him in a mock stodgy voice. "It's
a boarding school in Massachusetts."

"Fancy," he said. But he said it in a way
that made me feel kind of bad, like perhaps he assumed I was a
spoiled rich kid.

"It's not like that," I explained. "My life
with my mom, before, was nothing like this. At all. We… you know,
we didn't have much. My dad paid for me to go to school, but that
was it."

I wanted to tell him more, about how
sometimes in the summer I would ask my mom for bus fare to go to
The Grove with Allison and she wouldn't have it because she would
have spent her entire royalty check on liquor for a party. And
about how in ninth grade I had wanted to go with my Treadwell class
on a school trip to London and my mom asked my dad to pay for it,
but then she spent the money on having her breasts surgically
lifted and told me I was too young for international travel,
anyway. I had to suffer through looking at everyone else's
souvenirs from Kensington Palace and Portobello Road in a jealous
rage.

Instead I told him about our house in West
Hollywood, and how beautiful it was in late spring when all the
flowers were in bloom, and how my mom loved to grill shrimp kebobs
all summer long. I told him about how I had always wanted to have a
brother or sister but my mother never seemed to want to keep any of
her boyfriends around for more than six months. I had no idea how
long we walked around swapping anecdotes about our mothers. I was
starting to feel like I had known Jake for a really long time and
we had our entire childhoods in common.

Unexpectedly, a flashbulb went off in my
face.

And then another.

"Are you having a good time on the road with
your dad?" a reporter asked me.

A photographer took another picture.

"Excuse me? Who are you?" I asked.

"Russ Whitcomb,
Expose Magazine
. Are
you adjusting to your new life with Chase Atwood?"

Jake grabbed my hand and pulled me in the
other direction. "You don't have to talk to them, Taylor," he told
me.

"I just want a quote," Russ said, pushing
Jake out of his way. "Anything you can tell us about your new
life?"

Jake pushed Russ back on the shoulders and
said, "Back off, man!"

Just then, one of my dad's bodyguards, a big
guy who the band called Moose, appeared and grabbed me by the
wrist.

"You need to get backstage," he told me
sternly, leading me away. He gave Jake a dirty look. "Jill's
worried sick about you. You can't just wander off during a
show."

"But," I began, not even sure what I was
going to say. I turned to wave goodbye to Jake, but he was walking
away, and didn't look back at me. "I'm not a prisoner. I can go
wherever I want."

"Not anymore you can't," Moose told me.
"There are a lot of crazy people in this world, and you aren't safe
just walking around in the open in a place like this."

I argued and complained until Moose got me
backstage, where Jill was waiting, completely pissed off, with her
arms folded over her chest.

"Where on earth were you?" she roared.

I was mortified. I had never been yelled at
like that before in my life. "I was just… walking around."

"Well you can't just walk around!" Jill
screamed. "You see all these people? These people work here. They
work for your father. It is not their job to go looking for you
because you feel like exploring. Who do you think you are?"

The band was still playing, so it was already
ear-splittingly loud, but Jill was yelling louder than the music.
All of the roadies were looking away, not wanting to get involved.
Keith was watching nearby with a serious expression on his
face.

"I just, I didn't think it was such a big
deal if I just looked around," I said feebly.

"It is a big deal! If you can't follow rules
then you can stay at the hotel!"

End of lecture.

Previously, I had been unaware that there
were rules. In fact, if there were specific rules, I had yet to
hear them listed out for me.

"God," I muttered under my breath as Jill
stormed off.

Keith approached me. "Touring is hard on
her," he offered up as an excuse.

I stood still for the last forty minutes of
the concert trying to calm myself down. After my heart resumed a
normal pace, I remembered that Jake had grabbed my hand. And then
my heart fluttered - I know it sounds over the top, but it actually
did. I couldn't stop thinking about how and when I would see him
again. I wondered if he and his mom were staying at the same hotel
as we were in Atlanta.

Back at the hotel, I could hear Jill and my
father discussing something – which I presumed to be the trouble I
had caused at the concert – in muffled voices in their bedroom. I
told Keith and Tanya, who were reviewing travel plans in our
suite's office area, that I was going for a walk and went looking
for Jake. Don't ask me what kind of a plan I had to find him other
than roaming the halls, which is what I did. I sauntered past the
hotel gym, past the rows of soda machines in the snack lobby, past
the miniature arcade. I drifted past the hotel bar, and noticed the
members of Sigma doing shots.

"Hey, Chase's girl!" Brice called out to
me.

I halted in my tracks and realized Brice was
talking to me.

"You wanna come have a shot with us?"

He was motioning for me to join them.
Unbelievable. The lead singer of Sigma was asking me to have a shot
with the band. My feet were moving in their direction before my
brain had a chance to tell them "no."

Since I grew up with my mom, alcohol and
getting drunk has never held much allure for me. My mom let me
taste wine and beer at home and even sometimes let me try cocktails
at parties, but I never especially enjoyed the taste. Mostly, I
think, because I saw how sick she became when she drank too much,
and was always so annoyed when an entire day was ruined because she
wanted to sleep off a buzz.

"A round of lemon drops," Brice told the
bartender.

"She looks a little young," the hotel
bartender said.

The hotel bar was pretty empty aside from
Sigma, who all looked like they had already had a few drinks
each.

"C'mon, man, she's with us," Brice
pleaded.

The bartender begrudgingly began mixing
drinks. I thought I had read somewhere that the guys in Sigma were
all nineteen. Not old enough to be drinking. But it was becoming
apparent to me that no rules, or laws, applied when it came to rock
stardom.

"What's your name again?" the Sigma drummer,
who wore eyeliner, asked me.

"Taylor," I replied.

"Taylor," he repeated. "Are you having fun on
the tour so far?"

"I'd have more fun if I actually got to
explore the cities we're visiting," I said honestly.

"Yeah," Brice agreed. "It's impossible when
you're touring, though. After a show all you want to do is kick
back. You don't have energy to go to museums."

The drinks were served and I lifted mine
gingerly. Brice counted down from three and we all downed our
shot.

"That was good, right, Taylor?" Brice
asked.

Actually, it was good. It was delicious. It
tasted like candy.

"Another round," Brice told the
bartender.

"I can't," I said shyly. "I don't want to get
in trouble with my dad."

"Yeah, dude," the bassist told Brice. "I
don't need Chase pissed at us for getting his kid wasted."

"Or his bitch wife," the drummer added with a
smirk.

This made me laugh. At least Jill was earning
a reputation for herself.

"All right, you get on up to your room
safely, Taylor," Brice told me in a very flirtatious voice.

And then he winked at me. Allison was
seriously going to die when I told her this story.

I turned to leave and heard the drummer say,
"Brice, dude, come on."

"What? She's cute," Brice objected.

My ego soared about as high as an ego can
soar. No one at Treadwell would ever believe that a major rock star
had referred to me as cute.

As I hurried down the long hallway to the
elevator lobby, I heard a voice behind me say, "You shouldn't hang
out with those guys."

I almost had a heart attack, fearing that one
of my dad's roadies or bodyguards had seen me. But when I turned to
see who it was, it was Jake.

"Oh," I said. "I wasn't hanging out,
really."

"You were," he teased with a smile. "I saw
you drink a shot with them."

I put my hands on my hips, all too aware that
he and I were alone in the lobby and he was standing pretty close
to me.

"Are you going to tell my dad?" I asked,
knowing that he never would.

"I'm not going to tell your dad," Jake
assured me. His voice was kind of husky and rough, and it was even
huskier when he was nearly whispering, as he was then. "Just stay
away from those guys. They're tools. They brought some really young
girls back to the hotel in Florida."

I had pushed the button for the elevator
before I had noticed Jake following me, and now I heard the ding!
of an elevator arriving and ignored it. I could see his chest
rising and falling as he breathed. I felt kind of dizzy and I'm
pretty sure it wasn't from the lemon drop.

"OK," I agreed.

My eyes locked on Jake's mouth, and with
every cell in my body I prayed that he would kiss me, and he leaned
forward and did exactly that, only on my cheek.

"Get some sleep," he told me and put me on
the elevator.

I rode up to the sixth floor of the hotel
feeling like I might pass out. I had never been in love before, and
I'm not sure if it's possible to fall in love with a boy in just
three brief encounters, but I was pretty sure in that elevator that
I had fallen in love completely.

CHAPTER
6

The next morning, my dad asked me to go for a
drive with him alone.

"Am I in some kind of trouble?" I asked when
we got into the rental car and he started its engine. It was
already hot and steamy at eight in the morning.

"No, not trouble," my dad assured me. "Jill
just told me that you went off on your own during the show last
night. I wanted to remind you that you're only fifteen. If someone
were to walk off with you, I'm not sure what we'd do, Taylor."

"Dad, I'm not a piece of luggage. No one is
going to walk off with me," I complained. "Besides, you told me
that if I came with this summer I'd get to see all this great
stuff. So far I haven't seen anything except a couple stores in
downtown Atlanta, I have to spend every day with Jill while you're
off rehearsing and doing sound checks and I don't think she likes
me."

We drove along a broad highway with an
enormous expanse of blue sky above us and skyscrapers in the
distance.

"What do you mean, doesn't like you? She told
me this morning that you guys had a great time yesterday," Dad
corrected me. "Look, she's taking this whole thing with you joining
our family very seriously. She wants you to be friends but she also
knows she's going to have to do a lot of the parenting this summer
while I'm on stage. I get that you didn't have a lot of
disciplining with your mom. It's cool, all right? If Jill's coming
on too strong then we should sit down and talk it out."

My dad could make anything sound so easy. It
was part of his appeal and no doubt part of why the band had been
successful.

We drove into downtown Atlanta and went to a
small diner. As we walked in, conversations stopped mid-sentence
and heads turned. The buxom middle-aged waitress who greeted us was
smiling from ear to ear.

"Welcome to Buster's Diner," she cooed,
motioning for us to follow her to an empty table. "Why this is so
exciting! Chase Atwood at our very own little diner! Can I get you
coffee to get started, Mr. Atwood?"

My father loved the attention, I noticed. He
really was a bit of a fame whore.

"Why certainly, Doris," he told the waitress,
reading her nametag. "And an orange juice for the little lady,
here, too."

Did I mention that he was also an
incorrigible flirt?

"I'll have coffee," I corrected him.

"Go easy on Jill," Dad told me. "I know
sometimes… she can be tough. But she keeps me in line. She really
takes care of me. I know it's her intention to do the same for
you."

After we finished our breakfast, Dad pulled
two tickets out of his wallet for the show that night and handed
them to Doris along with cash to pay our check. "Two tickets for
tonight's sold out show," he told her. "I'd love for you to join us
if you don't have plans."