Unplugged: A Bad Boy Rockstar Romance (30 page)

But then there was her body to consider,
this sweet, short, curvy body that reminded him of history books and pictures
of goddesses carved out of marble. He practically groaned as he ran his big
hands up from her hips to her
breasts, mapping the
feel of every curve. He kneaded her breasts firmly through her shirt and bra,
and the moan that floated from Maggie
’
s lips made Jase even hungrier for her.
He leaned all the way over and smashed his lips onto hers. She welcomed him bac
k with arms draped over his neck, fingers caressing his
hair.

Jase didn’t want
to leave her mouth again. He fumbled between them to unhook her jeans and his;
the latter fell to the floor with ease. Jase enjoyed the feeling of the denim
on Maggie
’
s legs s
lowly
revealing her soft, most secret skin as he peeled her jeans off. Impatient, he
let them bunch up around her ankles as they dangled from the pool table.

Maggie moaned into his mouth, her
kissing a ferocious aphrodisiac. The feel of her tongue sliding
over his was almost too much to bear. He climbed up on the
table and lay over Maggie, pressing his hardened dick against her panties. Her
moans only grew louder and more desperate, and the hands roaming his shoulders
stopped to dig their nails into his sk
in.

“
Please
…”
she whispered against his lips, her
voice shaking with lust.

Jase reached down between them and put
anxious fingers on her sex, rubbing her clit. She squirmed and cried out with
such pleasure that Jase had to smile before he covered her mou
th with his again. He could only take it a few more moments
before he felt like he was going to burst himself. Fingers already soaked with
her wetness, Jase simply moved her silk panties aside and pushed his full, hard
length into her. Both of them seized
up at the sudden
and overwhelming ecstasy. Beneath him, Maggie shoved her own fist in her mouth
to keep from screaming loud enough to wake whoever was still in the clubhouse.

As Jase pumped into her with forceful
passion, he leaned over her and kept her b
ody close.
He felt her nails and teeth dig into his shoulder, tiny muffled moans coming
with every thrust of his body against hers. Over the pounding of his own heart
and the sound of his own baritone growling, he could hear Maggie saying his
name with eac
h desperate breath.

He wasn’t going to last long and he
didn’t care enough to be worried about it. Every second he spent inside her was
a second he would never regret. He put one hand under her ass and the other
under her shoulders and lifted them both up
at an
angle where he could kiss her easily. He held onto her beautiful ass tightly as
he fucked her, his rhythm quickening as he came close to the edge. The way
Maggie
’
s cries had become high-pitched and
breathless, the feel of her wetness tightening aroun
d
him as he thrust, he knew he had found her spot. He didn’t slow until he was
finally coming. When it happened, he pulled Maggie tight against him, pressing
their foreheads together so he could watch the orgasm ripple across her
gorgeous, sweat-sheened fa
ce.

Slowly, they both began to descend from
sexual bliss. The den echoed with the sounds of their heavy breathing, the
escaping trail of leftover moans falling from Maggie
’
s lips. Jase looked at her face, pressed
against his, eyes still closed. He hadn’t
seen her
face look so calm and peaceful in years.

He lifted up a hand and put it to her
face, rubbing his thumb softly across her cheek as he moved in to kiss her.
Maggie opened her eyes and returned the kiss for only a split-second before she
pulled away
.

Words failed him as he looked at her
apprehensive expression with confused eyes. Maggie started to say something,
but whatever it was got stuck behind her teeth. Jase felt her hands on his
chest, pushing him back from the table. He felt his half-hard man
hood leave her warmth as he watched her jump off the table,
immediately pulling her jeans back up. There wasn’t a part of Jase coherent
enough in that moment to consider his own naked vulnerability. He stared at
her, waiting for an explanation.

Maggie coul
d
barely look at him as she fastened up her jeans and adjusted her shirt.
“
This can’t
…”
She said nothing else before she
hurriedly left the den and headed down towards the bedrooms. Jase heard a door
open and shut in the dark hallway, and then he felt his
heart screaming as if someone had dropped it down a mine shaft.

~
ELEVEN ~

Maggie couldn’t sleep. She finished off
one of the joints Tommy had given her, and which Jase had rescued from the
debris of the gun-riddled bedroom. She took a long, hot shower. She tried to
dive into a twenty-year-old John Grisham novel that someone had
left in the bedside drawer. None of it seemed to make her
anything but more anxious.

She would have tried booze, but every
time she peeked out the bedroom door to see if Jase had finally gone to his own
room, she could see the lights still blazing in the
den,
and the tiny view of the back of his cut, hunched over the bar. She didn’t have
the guts to face him. 

Maggie spent several of the night
’
s hours crying, overwhelmed. Feeling
Jase
’
s body again, his want and ache for her,
his warm kiss on her lips
…
she
had spent so long evicting
such thoughts from even her most intimate daydreams. They always felt like
false hope, like she was setting herself up to be knocked down into
unimaginable pain. She hadn’t let herself dream about Jase. But now
…
hell, ever since
she had seen him that first day in the den
…
he was all she could think about.

Their coupling played over and over in
her mind like a movie without her consent or control. Every time she lay down
and tried to and sleep, she could feel Jase
’
s touch on her
skin;
his hips bucking against hers; the sweet, aching pressure of him buried inside
of her. She could smell his scent in her hair. She could hear herself begging
him in a whispered word.

But along with the ecstasy of this came
shame, riding in like the i
nevitable tsunami after an
earthquake. All she had ever
done—
all she was doing
—
was turn Jase
’
s life upside-down as soon as she got back into town. She
could see in his eyes, and hear in his voice, all the work he had done since
she left to pull himself bac
k together. He was twice
the man he had been when she loved him before. In just a few days, he had
already done more to help her take care of herself than any other man had. He
wasn’t like Evan, who fed on her weakness; Jase wanted her strong. And she real
ized this only made her own love return all the stronger.

It was a love she had no right to claim,
not anymore. After everything she had done, how could she even think about
asking Jase to forgive her?

She missed him. She missed every inch of
him. She had
hoped the passing of time would flood
out the fire of young love which had burned in both their hearts, but that
flood had never come. Instead it waited for her, this whirlwind of a woman, to
return and reignite it with a fury.

Already Maggie missed Juli
e, too. If ever she needed a lady friend to help her make
sense of her feelings, it was here and now. Having her around had lifted Maggie
’
s spirits, and she was horrified that it
had ended with Julie running for safety back to Eagleton.

The stark memories
from earlier in the evening returned. As she had said her
goodbyes to Julie before she left, she had wrapped her in a hug and cried in
Julie
’
s hair, despite her best efforts.
“
I am so sorry, Julie. I
’
m so sorry you had to be a part of this.
I promise I
will fix it.
”

Julie nodded, trying to be brave, but
the drive-by was unlike anything she had ever experienced in her relatively
normal life. Maggie could see the change in her eyes. Still, she wrapped her
thin hands on Maggie
’
s face and made their
eyes
mee
t
. “I’ll
be fine. You
—
you take care of yourself, Maggie.
Please don’t make our next visit be at a funeral home.
”
She flicked eyes to something behind
Maggie.
“
And don’t
make the same mistake with Jase twice.
”

Maggie shook her head, in tears. She
couldn’t f
ind any words to respond. She had fallen
into a tight hug with Julie which lasted several minutes.

Maggie had given indiscriminate threats
to Julie
’
s two escorts, Bones and Martin, that
she would murder them herself if Julie didn’t get home safely, and bo
th men had saluted her. The sight of the taillights fading
down the driveway was still burned into Maggie
’
s mind.

Maggie itched to call and check on them,
but it was too soon for Julie to have gotten all the way back to Eagleton yet,
and she didn’t want t
o be a distraction. Instead, she
pulled the big box of stuff Julie had brought her and began to inspect it. When
she moved to Eagleton, Maggie had adopted a bit of a Spartan attitude towards
her belongings in some kind of overcompensation to her new advent
ure. She wanted to be lean and mean and ready for anything,
and so she didn’t buy more than she needed. After the first year and a half,
and a bit of comfort, Maggie changed her tune on that and her apartment started
to look like a real domestic space
—
the
kind she
had daydreamed about when she was a little girl with no mother to influence the
household. No more yellowed posters of Johnny Cash on the dining room wall;
there was a cupboard full of actual matching plates and cups; and a more
thoughtful and var
ied décor
 
than a few dusty models of motorcycles
and armored tanks. Maggie had loved her little space. For the first time in a
long time, she enjoyed coming home. She looked forward to it.

Of course, that peace had been shattered
by her downward spiral wi
th Evan. Any of her bigger,
pricier possessions were heartlessly pawned while she was at work. Piles of
laundry and dirty dishes became common features of the kitchen. Beer, blood,
and heroin stained the carpets. Evan broke a great deal of her smaller trea
sures as punishments, or in one of his untargeted fits of
rage. By the time her escape approached, Maggie didn’t actually have much left
that hadn’t been sold, broken, or defiled in some way. It made her feel sick
and violated when she thought about just h
ow much she
had lost. Suddenly everything in the box Julie had brought felt worth its
weight in gold.

Inside Maggie found a few pieces of
clothing that hadn’t gotten ruined or sold, including an ugly flowered scarf
that Maggie remembered Julie pressuring h
er to buy
one Saturday out. Maggie laughed at the irony that it had survived, and
lovingly wrapped it around the lampshade by her bed. There were a few scattered
book titles, and a small black photo album from her first years in Eagleton.
Some random paper
work covered the bottom of the box,
and squished in the corner, a stuffed penguin Maggie used to keep on a shelf in
her bedroom.

Digging deeper, she found two small
black squares hiding in the shadows. One was a plain black cell phone she only
sort of rec
ognized. The battery had died long ago, so
she couldn’t investigate the texts or contacts. But Maggie felt the hairs stand
on the back of her neck as she realized this phone had probably belonged to
Evan, or one of his friends. It looked like the burners t
hey frequently used.

Even though the point of the burner was
to be untraceable, Maggie figured it was worth handing over to the
investigation efforts. She put the phone on her bedside table, reminding
herself to take it to Henry in the morning.

The other
black
square felt soft under her fingertips: a velvet jewelry box. She opened it up
and gasped to find her mother
’
s rosary safely tucked within. Carved
from rosewood and interspersed with actual tiny clay rose blooms, it had been a
gift from Henry to Sara
during their honeymoon in
Rome. Henry almost buried his wife with the beads, but at the last moment had
decided against it. He gave it to Maggie on her 8
^th
birthday, telling her how her mother
had carried it with her everywhere after that trip. It was the
first time Maggie could remember seeing tears in her father
’
s eyes, even if only just for a moment.

As a kid, Maggie had been torn between
wanting to carry the rosary everywhere as Sara had, or wanting to protect it,
locked up in her room. The latter urge
had won; she
simply peeked in on the beads in the jewelry box every so often when she was
alone in her room. And apparently, it had survived Evan, too. Maggie felt tears
in her own eyes as she lifted it out and enjoyed the smooth feel of the
rosewood beads
on her fingertips. She didn’t know any
of the prayers, had never been to church, but it comforted her just the same.
She replaced all the other items to the box and lay in bed, rubbing the rosary
beads by lamplight, until she finally dozed off.

Maggie sl
ept
fitfully. The sounds of the MC gathering for their morning briefing in the den
began in earnest around 8am, and she knew that was the end of her sleep for the
time being. As she took another shower to wake herself up, she tried to steel
herself to face
Jase after last night. Her stomach
clenched at the thought. She had no idea where to even begin with him.

She waited until she knew at least
several of the men were out there to act as a buffer zone, so she wouldn’t find
herself alone with Jase. She knew
that time would
come soon enough. Then Maggie got dressed and stuffed her phone in one pocket,
and her mother
’
s rosary into the other. She frowned for a minute at the
other strange phone on the nightstand, then remembered it from the box, and
decided she w
ould bring it to Henry now.

A couple of rookies were serving coffee
to the gathered men in the den. More than a few were pouring their own
“
creamer
”
from flasks secreted into inner jacket
pockets. Forgetting that most of them hadn’t seen her since the dri
ve-by, Maggie froze in the doorway when they gave her more
cheerful greetings and pats on the back than usual, asking if they could get
her anything. Their attention destroyed any attempts at flying under the radar.

She tried not to look around for Jase, b
ut found him anyway, standing next to the jukebox talking
to Will. He was already looking at her with a stony expression that she
couldn’t read. Everything about him was aching sadness. She couldn’t look at
him long; now wasn’t the time to deal with it.

Ma
ggie pushed
through the group until she stood next to her father. When he saw her, he put
down his coffee cup and gave her a strong hug. It surprised her.
“
How are you feeling?
”
He asked.
“
Get enough sleep?
”

Like an idiot with no instincts, Maggie
’
s eyes i
mmediately
flicked over to look at Jase. He was listening to Will, quite obviously trying
to keep his eyes off her, too. The tension between them, even in a room full of
people, was suffocating.
“
I slept some.
”

“
Good. We’ll
get you set up in a new house wh
en this is all finished, a better one,
”
said Henry.

“
Any word from Julie?
”
asked Maggie.