Unplugged: A Bad Boy Rockstar Romance (5 page)

“My first thought, too,” said Steve, scooping eggs
into his mouth. “Will it be?”

Noah. When I used to think of him, all I saw was
concert footage, publicity photo, or paparazzi flash bulb versions of him. But
something was different now. I felt his breath, his hands, his lips. I saw him
in the mosh pit. It was disorienting. It was making it difficult to think
clearly about my job.

I cleared my throat before I answered Steve. “Yes.
Look, a man is dead, and there’s practically no question Noah Hardy killed him.
The question now is why, and we’re going to figure that out. And then
Slipstream
is going to publish it before anybody else in this fucking industry has a clue.
I’ve gotten in with Noah. It’s just a matter of time now.”

Steve grinned suggestively. “Yeah?”

“Hell, this Duke announcement probably helps us. Every
other rag will be busy trying to speculate on that bullshit.”

“And while they’re distracted, we kick ‘em in the dick
with the first exclusive words of Noah Hardy about being a goddamn murderer.”

“
Alleged
,” I said with a sarcastic wag of my
finger. “Press ethics, dear Steve.”

“Right, alleged,” he said. “This is seriously going to
send your stock through the roof, Laurel.”

He meant well, but Steve was cutting open old wounds
that instantly sent poison through my mood. “Shit, it better, or else I’m gonna
be serving you coffee at the lobby Starbucks by next year.”

“It’s not all that bad,” said Steve with a sour face.
“Domino loves you way too much to throw you to the curb.”

Even hearing my editor’s name sent my pulse racing. “But
not enough to have my back when I make a mistake or two,” I complained before I
could stop myself.

“Laurel,” said Steve. He had that stern, rational
voice I’d heard him use on his ex-girlfriend’s kids a time or two. “I love you,
girl, but don’t fool yourself. That Tusk story was not just a mistake.”

I sighed, angry, ashamed at his words. I turned my
gaze out the window. “So you think I went in to write a hit piece, too, huh?”

“No,” said Steve. He put down his fork. “But I think
it’s clear that you went in with an
agenda
, and when it didn’t go your
way, you just chopped up the story to make it look like it did. You lost your
objectivity, Laurel. It happens to all of us—you can’t pretend you’re above it.
And we all have to pay for it when it happens. The key is not to make that same
mistake twice.”

I knew what he was alluding to. If I was sleeping with
Noah, then there was a chance my objectivity might get lost again. He was
right, of course, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Maybe I was being
childish, but that old wound still festered and burned. Being here, now, in
Seattle, chasing Noah Hardy—this was the salve to that wound, and I wasn’t
going to let Noah’s big dick change my opinion of what happened. I was sticking
to the facts this time, whatever they may be. This story was going to fix all
the shit I had broken, and undo all the bullshit heat I’d taken in the past six
months. The past didn’t matter when I was in the middle of fixing it, right?

“Laurel?”

Steve was looking at me curiously. I sighed. “Fine.
Right. You win. I’m paying for my past sins, like I deserve, so all is right
with the world. And I won’t make the same mistakes again.” I got up from the
chair and started digging through one of my suitcases for clean underwear. Even
though I had just showered a few hours ago, suddenly I wanted another one.

“You didn’t even touch your breakfast!” Steve called
after me as I shut the bathroom door.

Just before the door clicked shut, I said through the
crack, “I’m not hungry.”

~ SIX ~

Noah

Laurel
…

She writhed underneath me, her beautiful body
glistening with sweat, pressing her ass against me as I drove inside her only
made my cock sink deeper. She leaned back with my name on her lips and I kissed
it off of them until she was moaning into my mouth. In one hand I held her neck
gently, forcing her to face me as I fucked her from behind. I kept the other
wrapped tight around her waist, holding her close.

In the back of the room a phone rang, distant and
foggy.

Laurel…

The dream began to break up in my mind like smoke
rising into the sky. Every chime of the phone yanked me further into
consciousness without mercy. The warmth of Laurel’s skin faded away, replaced
with the cold white sheets of my own empty bed. The only sweat was my own.

I should have turned my fucking phone on silent before
I crashed, but I was so deliriously drunk on both booze and lust that it
slipped my mind before I fell into bed. I hazily remembered ignoring its
beeping hours earlier, rolling over and going back to sleep. But there was no
ignoring it this time. The ring was incessant.

I rolled until the bedside table was within reach, and
pulled my phone to my face. A picture lit up of my guitarist, Quinn, standing
with a beer bong next to angry tourists at the Christ the Redeemer statue in
Rio. My thumb slid across the screen. “What?”

“Dude,” said Quinn, “I’ve been trying to reach you for
hours.”

Quinn grew up with me in Thornwood, and there wasn’t a
single band I had ever been in without him. He was as close to a brother as I
was ever going to get, and currently the only fucking member of my band who
gave a single shit about me.

Even being a hardcore kid, Quinn had never been
particularly alpha. He’d fight if he had to, but he was a worrier before he was
anything else. Something in his voice today sounded very worried, even by his
standards.

“I had a long night. What’s going on?” I said, checking
the clock on my bedside table. Man, when was the last time I slept past noon?

“So you haven’t been online yet today?”

I rubbed my face and ran my hand through my hair. “You
literally pulled me out of a wet dream, bro, so in consideration of that, maybe
we could get to the point…”

Quinn sighed and muttered under his breath. “It’s
Duke. He says he’s going solo, starting his own thing. It’s all over the
fucking Internet.”

My blood stopped pumping for a split second. Skin
cold, I said, “He fucking said
what
?”

“That’s why I’ve been trying to call you, man! He did
an interview with Roc, said he’s gotta look out for himself and find a lifeboat
off the Titanic before whatever happens to you goes down. What the fuck are we
gonna do, Noah?”

I sat on the edge of my bed and tried to pull in all
my focus from the remnants of sleep, the memories of Laurel, and the hangover
threatening the horizon of my mind. “He’s not supposed to be talking about any
of this shit—how did he get away with it? Where’s Gavin?”

“That’s the thing, dude—technically, he didn’t talk
about it. He talked about everything he could without breaking the agreement
like the fucking little troll he is.”

Rage bubbled up in my gut, under my skin. I never
should have ignored my instinct the day we met Duke Rogers at that studio in
New Orleans. Life to him was a Shakespearean drama and he was just trying to
stab his way to the top of the mountain. He didn’t give a single fuck about
anyone who was in his way. I never should have trusted him with my life’s work.

I rubbed my hand over my face. “He’s doing this to
undermine me. He can’t talk about the festival, but he
can
do something
that says what he would’ve said, anyway. This is him finally throwing me under
the fucking bus.”

“He’s a cowardly prick,” growled Quinn. “And he’s
gonna get what’s coming to him.”

“We’re too famous to be beating the shit out of dudes
anymore, Quinn,” I said, but it was with a bitter laugh. Quinn’s loyalty and
fire for his friends went a long way on a dark night.

“We can’t do
nothing,”
said Quinn.

I didn’t reply. I wanted nothing more than to agree
with Quinn and dive head-first into a black revenge fantasy, but it wasn’t
there. My mind felt like a raging storm, formless.

Quinn was quiet a moment. Then he said, “I don’t
fucking get why they don’t believe you, Noah.”

I sighed. Of all the thorns splitting open my
proverbial flesh through this whole nightmare, that particular thorn was buried
deepest, threatening arteries and organs. At first it had felt like only blind
anger, but now… now it was starting to feel like numbness. Like death.

And I knew that numbness would be death if I didn’t
find a way to stop it. A cornered animal only has two options, when it comes
right down to it. They can either lie down, hoping for the mercy of a quick
death, or they can charge and fight with every last breath. The former option
was despair, and the latter required anger.

Anger has always kept me alive. And it was going to
keep me fighting now. Even if I had to start imagining Duke’s smug, stupid face
every night before I went to bed, I was going to find a way to stay angry and
save myself.

It was getting tiring, carrying all this weight alone.
In all the chaos… in all the confusion and horror of what had happened at the
festival and since, not a single person—not even Quinn—had even bothered to ask
me how I’m handling the fact that I’ve taken a fucking life.

People think I’m just a cold-blooded killer because
that’s what they want me to be. They’re all wrong, but they don’t care. Truth
doesn’t matter to them. They’ll take what makes them feel good to think about.
And somehow, I’m the fucked-up one in this equation.

“Noah?” Quinn’s voice broke through the cloud of
thoughts swirling in my brain.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I don’t know why they
don’t believe me, Quinn.”

We both fell silent. I guess Quinn wasn’t eager to
talk about the answer to that, either. He knew me better than anyone on this
planet knew me, and I know it killed him to see what was happening. We were
both equally powerless—and we were not men who were used to being powerless.

“Look, I’m going to hit up Gavin and find out what
he’s doing about all this,” I said. “I’ll call you a bit later and check in.”

“All right, man.”

I hung up with Quinn and dialed our manager, Gavin.
After a few rings he picked up, sounding somehow both relieved and stressed. I
could hear his assistant in the background, angrily talking on the phone with
someone else. “Good goddamn, Noah, where in the hell have you been?”

“Jesus, you guys act like the planet’s exploding
because I can’t be reached twenty-four-seven.”

“The planet
is
exploding.”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Yeah, I
heard. That’s why I’m calling.”

“I’m trying to call an emergency meeting together in
the office in Seattle right now, but Mister Hot Shit can’t be bothered to
answer his phone since his interview went live,” said Gavin, venom in his voice
like I’d never heard before. “And it’s the same story with Ash and Jeff.”

Even though I knew it was bullshit in my gut, I tried
to stick up for the other guys. Nothing in our past suggested Ash and Jeff had
it out for me like Duke did. We didn’t always get along, but no bands did. You
were lucky to keep your shit together long enough for a few good albums and
enough industry recognition to get you into another band or a respectable job
behind the scenes when it all inevitably fell apart. The only way bands like
Sabbath and Metallica and Motörhead made it through half-centuries of success
was by being filthy rich, and completely fucked up all the goddamn time. And
depending on the musician, that level was either their ultimate Valhalla, or a
shitty purgatory of walking death. For me, it was certainly the latter. I’d
rather have something short and meaningful than vapid and endless.

“We are technically on break,” I said to Gavin. “They
could be legitimately relaxing somewhere away from all this bullshit.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” said Gavin. The question
wasn’t accusatory, but he was trying to make a point regardless. “Do you feel
relaxed, Noah? Like you’re on vacation?”

“Fuck no.”

“Neither do the rest of us. If those guys aren’t
answering
my
calls, it’s strategic. They don’t want to answer,” said
Gavin.

“Why wouldn’t they want to answer you?” I asked.

Gavin spoke quietly to his assistant in the background
for a moment, a mumbled gibberish I couldn’t hear. He came back to the phone. “Probably
because they’re planning a coup.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “What? Like you’re a
fucking dictator, or some shit?”

“Duke’s pulling the rug out from under you by doing
this, Noah. You see that, don’t you? He’s declaring he has no faith in your
innocence.”

“Of course.”

“And now, two of your other bandmates aren’t getting
back to their manager—even in this time of crisis when their very jobs and
futures are at stake. It means they’re making their own plans, and they don’t
want me, or you, in on those plans.”

Gavin had a flair for drama, and we had all gotten
used to it. But this felt different. The truth of his words descended down on
me like a heavy gray cloud. “You think maybe they’re… working with Duke against
me?” The thought was frankly almost too much to bear.

“Maybe,” said Gavin. “Or maybe they saw the video this
morning like the rest of us and are starting to think he’s at least got the
right idea. Whatever it is, they’re not confident enough to face me over it.
Something’s wrong, and we need to figure out what it is before the rest of the
fucking world does. We cannot afford another sneak attack like Rogers pulled
today.”

My stomach felt empty and hollow. The soft pitter of
the rain outside made it feel like the room was closing in on me.

Anger. Find your anger.

In my mind, I replayed the day of the festival.
Traumatic as it was, it also galvanized me. The truth had to be the fire that
kept me raging on.

“Let them run,” I said. “I don’t fucking need them.
Quinn has my back, and you have my back. The truth will come out.”

Gavin sighed. “I want to believe that, Noah.”

A sour hollow opened up in my gut. “Gavin, if you’re
telling me you don’t believe me…”

“Hey, whoa, that’s not what I’m saying at fucking
all,” said Gavin, and I believed him. I trusted him completely. He had never
done me wrong, not for a single second since he found me in the Graveyard Club
almost fifteen years ago. “What I want to believe is that everyone else will
get on board. I don’t know that they will. Every day that passes is going to
make it harder and harder to convince people of your side of the story. People
are eating this story up.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, of course they are. Every
single bar fight and bullshit tussle with the cops I’ve ever been in has just
been a step toward this moment to them. It’s high fucking drama.”

“I’d agree, and even be a little thrilled at the
exposure, if I wasn’t sincerely concerned about you spending time in a federal
prison,” said Gavin. Hearing the words said out loud made me drop my head in my
hands, sick to my stomach.

Gavin continued. “There are things that even I can’t
untangle. But we’re going to fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening,
Noah, all right? I have your back. I’m not just going to let you fall down for
this without drawing blood.”

A wave of sincere relief melted down my skin. “Thank
you. I would be fucked without you.”

“We’ll get you through this. I hate to run but I have
a meeting. Call me if you hear from any of the guys.”

“Will do,” I said, and hung up.

Quiet descended on the room like slow death. For what
felt like days, I sat at the edge of the bed and watched the rain roll down the
windows. Food would help my mood, I knew, but I couldn’t make my feet move for
the kitchen.

Instead I looked at my clock and saw, thanks to my sleeping
in, that I only had a few short hours before Laurel would be expecting me at
the Graveyard Club. And through all the gray numbness trying to swallow me
whole, the thought of her red-lipped smile shone like the sun.

It was the best—hell, the only reason I had not to
crawl right back into bed and sleep the storm away.

I carried far dirtier thoughts of her with me to the
shower.