Wild Child (Rock Royalty #6) (18 page)

Her best friend snorted. “It’s fun. Maybe you haven’t had the opportunity to find that out yet about sex…but I hope you do. When it’s new, the act can feel so serious—it’s not easy to bare yourself to someone after all—but other times, and with the right man…”

Ash swallowed. “Go on.”

“If you trust him and you trust yourself, you can have a hell of a good time. Like I said, fun.”

She’d been too wound up last night for what happened between her and Brody to qualify as fun exactly, Ash decided. Too worried about her defenses, even when her inhibitions had been lowered to below sea-level.

“Well, we might not have played stern tutor and failing student, but I’m not complaining.” A ray of sun struck her face, and it warmed her from the outside in. She stretched out her legs. “Not complaining at all.”

“That’s more than fine,” Marcy said, then hesitated. “And I don’t want to kill your buzz, but…”

“But?”

Marcy sighed. “You mother called this morning. She implored me to talk you out of trying to run the roadhouse.”

“I’ve
been
running the roadhouse.”

“As in a permanent plan.”

Ash grimaced. “She told you about that, huh?”

“I noticed
you
didn’t.”

“Maybe I was avoiding an argument about it,” she mumbled, trying to ignore the prick to her conscience. “Or another nay-sayer.”

“Ash.” Marcy sounded hurt.

“I’m sorry.” She rubbed the beginning of a headache from her temple. “I didn’t mean that.”

“You know I’m behind you, whatever you choose to do.” Her friend’s voice turned sly. “
Whoever
you choose to do. Give me his name, and I’ll forgive you.”

Just then, the door behind Ash opened. She turned her head, saw a stunning specimen of decadent male beauty pause in the frame. His jeans hung low on his hips, and his feet and chest were bare. His jawline bristled with a morning beard, and his hair hung messily over his forehead.

But his blue eyes were as startling and as sharp as ever, and they took her in from top to toe. Even though dressed in jeans, running shoes, and a long-sleeved T-shirt that read “Topanga” down one arm, she felt that hot gaze all the way to bare skin. He must have approved of what he saw, because after a moment he smiled.

“Good morning.”

In her ear, Marcy was screeching for attention. “I hear him! I hear him! Who is it?”

“Brody, good morning,” she said, by way of greeting and to appease her friend. Then she ended the call, even as the other woman was sputtering over the line.

Standing, Ashlynn faced her nighttime companion, eyeing him as she tried to imagine him with a pointer and chalkboard. Nah. Couldn’t see it. No schoolgirl and tutor scenario would work for them. Now, barbarian and innocent peasant lass perhaps…

One of his brows quirked up. “What are you thinking?”

Whoops.
She stifled the urge to fan herself. “How you might like a cup of coffee,” she said and stepped to slip past him and into the kitchen.

He caught her arm as she brushed past. “Are you okay?”

His hold was heated but gentle, and she liked the connection, liked it a
lot
. A sense of safety washed over her, making chide herself for all her concerns of the night before. How wrong she’d been to be so worried.

“I’m doing well. How about you?”

He smiled then brushed a kiss at the point where her hairline and forehead met. “I like to see you smiling.”

Oh, yeah, she was doing really well, she thought, almost skipping into the kitchen when he released her. This morning-after thing was a piece of cake. She served him some, too—a piece of the homemade coffeecake that roadhouse regulars Irv and Viv had presented to her a couple of days before.

Afterward, he insisted she fetch a tube of healing ointment. Then, he tipped up her face with one hand and dabbed some of the gooey stuff over the cut held closed by the butterfly bandages. She stared at his spiky lashes and firm mouth as he paid serious attention to what he was doing.

“You’re looking at me in that weird way again,” he murmured, then stepped back to cap the tube. “What’s going on in your head?”

“It’s that… I just…” She shrugged. “I may be looking at you weird, but
this
isn’t.” Her hand waved between the two of them. “Thanks for that.”

He smiled again.

Good God, he was handsome.

“Welcome,” he said, then stepped close again and kissed her forehead once more. “Can I borrow your shower?”

“Of course.” She towed him toward the big one on the first floor. “Let me get you fresh towels.”

Once supplied, he disappeared behind the bathroom door, and she listened as the water
shushed
on. It was nice to have someone in the house with her, she decided, and the sound of water running reminded her of what she’d been tasked with doing that day. Though she avoided the third floor as much as possible, in this mood she felt capable of tackling anything.

As she mounted the stairs, she hummed to herself. How long would Brody hang out? Would he leave shortly or stay a while longer? Now that her fears about him had been put to rest, she wouldn’t mind his company a little longer.

Three doors opened off the third floor landing—one to the bedroom, one to the bathroom, and another to a storage room that had served as a playroom when she was small. Taking a deep breath, Ashlynn turned the third knob, crossed the threshold, and flipped the light. From the plethora of boxes in haphazard stacks came a mildewed odor.

She sighed. The guy who’d been working on her roof had suggested she clear out the space because the obvious damage above meant the items in storage could be damp if not downright waterlogged.

It smelled as if he was right.

Wishing it wasn’t so didn’t change a thing, she reminded herself, so she moved forward to address the first tower of cardboard.

Ten minutes later, her hands were filthy, and she’d divided the landing into areas she mentally designated as Garbage, More Garbage, and Why Did Anyone Keep This Trash. She brushed her hair off her forehead with her arm and waded in to inspect another pile as she heard Brody climb up the stairs.

He smelled clean and she felt bedraggled as they met in the doorway, her arms around a box of old magazines.

“A set of
National Geographic
from 1978,” she said, as he peeled open the dusty flaps to peer inside.

“They could be worth something.”

“Damp magazines from 1978.”

“Oh.” He released the flaps. “In that case, keep your eyes out for silver fish.”

The box slipped from Ash’s loosened grasp and dropped like a stone to the floor between their feet.

Humor glinted in his eyes. “Not a fan?”

“Not a fan.” She stepped back and gave a wary glance to the boxes she’d already dragged onto the landing. “Maybe I can do this another day.”

After an extended visit by an exterminator.

“It seems to be mostly junk anyway,” she added.

Brody looked around the landing then over her shoulder at the still-loaded storage room. “Tell you what,” he said. “I can stuff what you have out here into my car, and I’ll get rid of it for you this afternoon. Why don’t you poke around and see if there’s anything you want to save. Whatever’s left I’ll get my crew to collect and dispose of for you.”

She was too smart—and too bug-averse—to demur. So as he made trips up and down the staircase, she waded cautiously back into the storeroom.

Near the rear wall she found it, sitting on a low stool and wrapped in a threadbare sheet covered with faded yellow roses. She stared, its shape giving it away, and cold traced her spine like a wandering drop of rain.

As she unwound the fabric to reveal the childhood toy, her belly hollowed. Her knees buckled.

Her butt hit the threadbare braided rug, and she stared at the dollhouse as if it were a crystal ball in which she could watch the past. An apt, she thought, description.

The miniature had been crafted by an artist friend of her father’s. He’d painstakingly recreated the Topanga Canyon Childe house, from the turquoise front door to the third floor bedroom with its twin beds... including the two little blonde girl dolls who now lay like accident victims on the space between those beds.

She picked up the Braelynn figure, dressed in tiny jeans and a red shirt, with a golden Wonder Woman-inspired crown and matching bracelets. Her hair was in a messy braid, and there was a scratch on her plastic arm from the time she’d duked it out with GI Joe. Brae had left him tied up in one of the dollhouse closets, though he seemed to have escaped.

Ashlynn left her replica where it was, in a Sunday-best blue dress, white tights, and white Mary Jane shoes. Her hair was smooth and her eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

“What’s this?” a deep voice said.

Then Brody was on his knees behind her, his big body radiating a warmth that barely penetrated her frozen one. Even though he’d used her shampoo, he mostly smelled like himself, a minty, masculine scent.

“What have we here?”

My life. What I was banished from. My regrets, my grief, my great failing.

It was all of those things, captured between three walls and in two similar but disparate little figures.

The bleak and bitter poison inside her started to bubble, seeking any cracks in her heart in its need to release. But she shut her eyes and visualized closing fissures and impenetrable walls and breathed deep to force back the panic. What was inside her was too big, too intense, too violent to release. If she let it free she would shatter into a zillion pieces that the poison would then destroy, eating them away to nothing.

Then
she
would be nothing.

Brody’s hand fell to her shoulder. She glanced over it, saw the concern and the steadiness in his gaze. Brae would have leaned back…No, Brae wouldn’t have needed to lean at all. She would have stood strong against the poison and against the need for a man to make it better.

The best twin was gone.

Leaving Ashlynn alone.

Brody’s hand shifted to the back of her hair. He stroked it. “Are you all right?”

No. Never.

Ash closed her fingers over her sister’s replica as if she was holding her sister’s hand.

Funny. Though she’d survived the night, now she wasn’t sure if she would make it through the morning.

In an abrupt move, Ash stood up, the top of her head nearly clipping Brody’s chin.

“Let’s go downstairs,” she said, her voice sharply edged. “There’s nothing here that I want.”

He rose more slowly as she rushed toward the landing, her hand still clutching one of the dolls. “Ash—”

“You probably need to get on your way. I’ve taken up enough of your time.” Her words became more distant as she descended the staircase. “It looks like it’s going to rain again. You should get home before the storm hits.”

It was the perfect opening. Wasn’t it the right moment to leave her? He’d kept his promises to her the night before, making her come and making her enjoy it with an enthusiasm and energy not limited by the narrow confines of the couch.

He’d more than enjoyed himself as well, and when they took time off to sleep he’d sunk into the cushions both satisfied and relaxed.

But mindless-fuck buddies didn’t spend entire mornings together.

Because he’d promised her—and himself—that mindless business, too.

Stepping toward the stairs, he glanced back. The dollhouse sat in a ray of muted light coming through a dusty window overhead. A superb craftsman had made the toy, and Brody admired the miniature cedar shingles and the handmade furniture set about the rooms. It was too special an item to leave moldering in this dingy space, he decided, so he reversed direction and scooped it up in his arms.

In the kitchen, Ash was washing their coffee mugs at the sink when he entered the room and slid the plaything onto the beat-up farm table.

“I thought you’d want to be sure to save this.”

She turned, and her gaze snapped to the dollhouse.

His gaze was riveted on her face. The look of it—her bruised eye, bandaged chin, and pensive expression—filled his chest with an unfamiliar heaviness. He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep himself from touching her.

But God, he wanted to hold her again, to warm her with his body and make her smile with a tickling kiss on her neck or make her sigh with the stroke of his fingers on the small of her back.

Get going, Maddox. Get on your way.

But not even a muscle twitched as he watched her retrieve from the bottom casing of the kitchen window the blonde doll she’d brought downstairs with her. Ash moved like a sleepwalker back to the dollhouse where she placed the figure in the living room near a miniscule kite that sat upon the seat of a rocking chair. She balanced the figure on its feet and positioned its jointed arms so that it stood, hands on hips.

“Who made it?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“A family friend.” She adjusted the position of the tiny table in the kitchen and picked up a pan that had fallen to the floor, hanging it from a hook in the ceiling.

“This is Brae,” she said, nudging the braid of the standing figure with a fingertip.

He responded with the first comment that came into his head. “She looks like fun.”

Ash’s silvery eyes sliced to his. “She is. Was.”

Then her expression clouded, and she half-turned from him.

Shit.
Though he should be heading for the door, instead he took three steps toward the beautiful woman who had rocked his world on the sofa less than twenty feet away. Leaving her in an unhappy state of mind seemed beyond callous after what she’d done to brighten his the night before.

“Ash…”

But her shoulders stiffened as he neared, so he shifted his attention to the doll she’d left in the upper bedroom.

“Is this supposed to be you?” he asked, touching the still figure.

Its dead-like posture didn’t sit well with him, so he picked the doll up and bent it into a tiny chair.

He felt Ash’s regard. Then her arm reached out, and she adjusted the figurine’s dress, tugging and tweaking until it was just so.