April, Dani - Superstar (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (18 page)

“Never more serious, lover,” she whispered back into his ear, turning her face to let him caress her cheek with his own. “You should know I’m just doing this out of pure selfish motives because I’ve become so addicted to you all during this time. You three are better than drugs, and I don’t have the strength to give you up.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that because I haven’t the strength to give you up either.” He ran his fingers through her hair, combing it down past her shoulders. “I’ve become pretty addicted to you also.”

She closed her eyes at his touch. “Maybe you just like fucking a movie star.”

“No, I just like making love to Chrissie.” He kissed the top of her head. “But you should know if you go away with us, we don’t have very much money. It’ll be tight for a while.”

She brought both his arms fully around her waist and held them there. “I want to make love to you and your brothers every day for the rest of my life…to feel you inside me…”

“We want the same.”

“And don’t worry about money, lover,” she told him as she watched more sunbeams shine down on the glory of the mountain peaks outside the window. “I’ve got accounts all over the world. We won’t ever have to worry about money.”

“We’re not going to let you support us, Chrissie,” he assured her. “But we’ll save that conversation for after we’ve made it far away from here.”

“That world out there is so beautiful,” she told him. “And with you guys in my world, there are so many possibilities.”

“I should take a shower and get dressed,” he told her.

“Do you have to?” She wanted to beg him to stay and take her one more time before the sun came up.

“I have to,” he told her. “I promised Scott I’d help him finish plow the drive this morning. We’re going to need it cleared off if we want to make our getaway.”

She turned around to him. He took her fully into his arms. She leaned against his body, breathing in how he smelled in the early-morning chill of the air. “Hold me for five more minutes? Then I’ll let you go.”

“Anything you say, darling.”

“When we leave, where do you want to go, to a warm or a cool climate?”

“Anywhere we can buy a bed big enough to make love in without falling on the floor.”

She laughed, and he cradled her tighter against his body. “Don’t laugh,” she told him. “We did all right on that uncomfortable old floor last night.”

“Almost wore a hole in it,” he told her.

She sighed and wrapped her arms around his back. “I really do love you, Brad Hudson,” she told him and dreaded letting him go even long enough to plow the drive for them.

Chapter Ten

Chrissie went to take a shower. She had the cabin to herself. The guys were all three outside clearing off the last of the snow blocking in the drive. In the shower, she ran the water hot and long, washing off the sticky remnants of the sex from the night before. Her body felt well used, sore all over, but also delicious like she had just accomplished a particularly strenuous workout in her gym back home. She suspected she had experienced a rush of adrenaline akin to what runners described when they were in the zone. She had certainly had a very physical night in the bedroom with her guys. Washing between her legs, she found her lips were still swollen and sensitive to the touch. She smiled as the images from the last night replayed in her brain.

After the shower was over, she wrapped a large bath towel around her body for cover and went out to the front room to wait for her hair to dry. She turned on the giant-screen TV and flipped channels with the remote. At that early hour of the morning, there was nothing good on. She briefly lingered over a morning news show, but it was too depressing, so she quickly found the entertainment news channel and left the TV tuned to it with the sound muted. She was hoping to catch up on some Hollywood gossip. A celebrity herself, she also liked to see what was being said about the other celebrities, most of whom she knew personally or had at least met before.

Then she went out to the kitchen to scavenge for breakfast. She didn’t feel like actually preparing herself anything substantial, mostly because she didn’t know how. Chrissie had spent little time in the kitchen in her life. She found some bread rolls the guys had already placed out and reached in the refrigerator for some jam to spread over them. She reached back inside the well-stocked refrigerator for a half-full pitcher of orange juice. When she turned to pour herself a glass, the pitcher slipped out of her hand and shattered in a hundred pieces on the floor. Peaches and Cream heard the crash and ran to stick their noses around the corner to see what was going on.

“Shit!” Chrissie cursed. “Damn it! It’s all right, babies. Mommy just spilled the orange juice,” she told the little animals watching her with big eyes.

No, she definitely was no good in the kitchen. Already left alone in it for less than five minutes and she had made a mess. She was certain the guys had a broom or some such tool with which to clean up with, but she had no idea where they might have kept it. Basically, the only thing she knew about their kitchen is where the ketchup was.

Damn it!
She would have loved to make breakfast for the guys and have it waiting for them when they got back from working. Well, that was going to have to wait because evidently she couldn’t even make breakfast for herself.

She found some paper towels placed on the counter and tore off a dozen of them to help her wipe up the spilled juice on the floor. She bent down to the spill and let the towels absorb the juice on the floor. After she had completely soaked several of the small paper strips she was becoming impatient and got to her knees and started wiping up the mess in big strokes.

All the while she was still wearing the bath towel over her body and nothing else. The kitchen disaster was delaying her from changing into her clothes. When she took too big of a swipe with the towel on the floor, a glass shard from the shattered pitcher caught her right index finger and tore a shallow, jagged cut down the middle.

“Damn it again!” she yelled. Apparently she couldn’t do anything by herself. She felt totally helpless and grossed out by the blood trickling down her finger.

Now she was going to have to find a bandage to wrap up her finger with. It was harder than she thought it would be without the assistance of serving people.

She was running warm water over her cut finger, scrunching up her face at the sight of the free flow of blood down onto her palm. Turning around, she saw Ethan standing in the doorway watching her.

“Good morning.” She smiled over at him. He looked particularly handsome as the early-morning light shining in the window at his back silhouetted his rugged outline. “Sorry I made a mess out here.”

She realized he didn’t look happy. He was never the bright and chipper type, but this morning he looked to be in a particularly dark mood, almost like how her daddy looked when he was really angry about something. He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and that only added to the feeling of an approaching storm.

“What the hell are you doing with my brothers, Chrissie?” he finally asked.

“So I guess Brad told you about our plan?”

“Just go sit down at the table before you kill yourself,” he told her, making her feel like a scolded child. However, she did as he told her and took a seat. He took a broom and dust pan out of a closet and stooped over the spilled orange juice on the floor, not even bothering to look at her. “You are one selfish little bitch,” he told her.

Chrissie felt a stab of pain at his words. She secured the towel she was wearing under her arms, feeling way underdressed to speak to him. “All right, so you don’t want to go away with us,” she told him, trying to keep the hurt feeling out of her voice. “So don’t go. Brad wants to go with me, and I’m pretty sure Scott will, too, when I talk with him. We don’t need you anyway.”

“Where in the hell do you think you’re going?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ll make it up as we go.”

He dumped the glass shards out of the dust pan into the trash. “What are you running from, Chrissie?” he asked her as he worked.

“You know who I am,” she told him. “I can’t have a normal life.”

“That’s no reason to run away!” He reached in the cabinet under the sink and brought out an old rag, throwing it on the floor. He used his boot to maneuver it over the spill and soak up the remaining orange juice wetting the floor. “Only criminals run away, and you’re not a criminal. Are you?”

“No, but I might as well be the way I’m made to feel sometimes.”

“If you want to run away, be my guest and run away, only leave my brothers out of it. They have lives, and I don’t want you ruining them.”

“I love them,” she told him. “They’re the most important thing in the world to me.”

Finished with his work, he came over to the table and stared down at her. “We’ve got that in common then because they’re the most important thing in the world to me, too.”

“I don’t want to hurt them,” she pleaded with him. “But we want to be together, and this is the only way it will ever work.” She looked down at her cut finger, not wanting to meet his eyes and feeling like a fool sitting there in front of him. “I was hoping maybe you would want to come along with us.”

“You don’t know what you want, Chrissie.” His voice had an angry edge to it. “You’ve fucked with my brothers. I’m not going to allow that.”

“You fucked me, too!” she shouted at him.

“So what?” The flippancy of his retort hurt worse than anything else. “You’re a grown woman. How many guys have you fucked before? It didn’t mean anything. Get over it and grow up, Chrissie.”

She sprang up out of the chair and struck out at him. He was too fast for her and caught her fist in his hand, holding it tightly, painfully even.

“I won’t let you hurt my family, Chrissie.” His voice was threatening.

“Okay, so you hate me,” she spat at him, anger over taking her. “Well, I hate you, too. But I love Scott and Brad, and they love me. If they want to go away with me, what right have you to stop us? You’re just as bad as my father. You’re trying to control their lives and make decisions for them. Who in the fuck are you to be doing that?”

She slashed her arm out of his grasp and stepped away from him. She felt her face turn red from her rush of anger, and she was suddenly able to look him in the eye, feeling she was just as good as he was, just as good as her father was.

“Just leave me alone!” she shouted at him from across the room. “And leave them alone, too! You and my father say you love and care about the people in your lives, but really you’re just trying to manipulate and control them. You don’t know how to really care about anybody. You’re bullies!”

“Oh, come off your high horse, Chrissie!” Ethan came back at her. “You’re too selfish to see past next week. If you ran away with my brothers, you’d get tired of the life in a month. Shit, you don’t even know how to make breakfast for yourself.”

“I hate you, bastard!” she spit at him. “I hate you and all the other bastards like you in the world! I’m sorry I ever let you fuck me.” Though even as she railed against him, his words had soaked into her mind, and they hurt because she knew they were true.

“I predict you would last about a month with my brothers. Then you would get bored and return to your life,” he explained to her. “You could do that, and that would be fine for you because you would have a life to return to. The only problem is they wouldn’t. You would still be a superstar. You could go on to make your next movie, schedule your next concert tour, and fuck your next pretty-boy pop singer. My brothers, on the other hand, would go back to Canyon Creek with their tails between their legs, brokenhearted with no jobs, no homes, no girlfriends, and no future.”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” Chrissie yelled back at him.

He came up close to her and took her chin in his hand. “That’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart,” he told her. “I always know everything about the women who spread their legs for me.”