Eye of the Storms (Eye of the Storms #1) (3 page)

“Yeah. I’m starting to get that. Again, I’m sorry.” His dark brows were now straight, instead of drawn together, and the incredible dark eyes beneath softened. “Obviously, I’m Jack. And I guess you can join the legion of women who add ‘ass’ to that.”

Jackass.
I felt my lips twitch in mirth but controlled them.

“Marissa.” I supplied my own introduction, and southern manners prevailed, causing my hand to shoot out automatically.

Moving closer, he squeezed my fingers in his, and a tingle of awareness buzzed every cell as our palms lightly met. The husky timbre of his voice was an intriguing rumble to my eardrums. “You look hot, Marissa.”

Determined to take the compliment as smoothly as Olivia would, I conjured a sultry look. “Thanks. You too…”

Surprise flickered through those dark eyes, and when he quirked a smile, a dimple actually revealed itself as he further explained. “I meant hot.” A slight breeze had begun to blow, and the next gust, from the southerly direction of the ocean, enlightened me to my misunderstanding when it cooled the sweat on my face. But, just as quickly, he amended, “And, of course, hot in every way.” The eyes that slid to the neckline of my shirt, and down for a fraction of a second, supported that endearing statement. “Want something to drink?”

“Sure,” Lifting a shoulder in a shrug, I continued to stand, expecting him to pop inside the bus and out again. But upon ascending the stairs, he held the door invitationally open.

My knees felt as if they were going to knock together as I closed the distance to the tour bus. When I stepped up, his fingers closed around my wrist in a supporting tug upward.

Immediately blinded by the shade, I flipped my glasses to rest on the top of my head. The thump of music bounced around, a familiar band, hot on the charts this summer. As I gaped around, taking in the extravagant interior, he played host, verbally offering up the fridge contents until I settled on a beer. Courteously, he popped the top from the bottle before handing it over. After selecting the same for himself, he took a swig and set it aside long enough to fill a water bowl for Rusty. Bending, he set it on a shiny tiled floor, and straightened, leaning a hip against the cherry wood cabinets.

Quickly, I averted my eyes, but I’d looked long enough to find his backside as pleasing as his front.

“Thanks again. About Rusty. Probably shouldn’t have brought him on tour, but I did. And it would kill me if something happened to him.”

Genuinely impressed by his attachment to his pet, I smiled as I sipped, and his eyes seemed to hone in on my throat as I swallowed.

“So, are you here with someone? At the fest?”

“My friend. A guy tipped her the tickets at the casino where we work.” Switching my drink into the other hand, I pressed cooled fingers against the back of my neck as I joked, “But she deserted me for the first junk this side of the fence.”

Only the barest husky chuckle followed that answer, and I wished I could take it back. Had selling Liv out as a groupie made me look like one?

“What kind of music do you listen to?”

“Everything.” I lifted a casual shoulder. My tastes ranged from country, to pop, to rock.

“Not everything,” he volleyed back. When I shot him a look, trying to decipher that answer, he expanded, “Obviously not mine…” Again, that sweet, yet sardonic smile, which was already becoming addicting.

Rusty lapped up at least half of the bowl and then sprang onto the cushy, leather, bench-style couch. Swinging my eyes, from the pup to its master, I was again wowed by this man’s looks, and the charisma exuding with his every breath.

Just a few weeks ago, I had learned to hate tattoos. Yet now, as my eyes ran over the ink decorating both arms, I saw not hurtful memories, only beautiful art. The inside of his left forearm depicted a guitar neck faded into his wrist. Sheet music bars spiraled around biceps and triceps, and I wondered what the song was. He took another sip, and the movement of his arm broke my fixation.

Remembering he had asked a question, I had to think a moment to remember what it was. “Well, I listen mostly to rock. But I’ve never heard of these bands,” I alluded to the festival. “They’re harder than my normal listen.”

“So you seriously never heard of mine until today?”

Was that such an oddity?
Who was this guy? Was he in a band of such importance that this really was weird for me not to know him?

Shaking my head, I explained, “My friend mentioned Jackal as one of the bands she wanted to…”
to fuck…
“…to meet…” Quickly, I changed the subject and asked if he had played his set yet.

Now, he was the one to shake his head, “It’s two hours or so from now. I’m just chillaxing. Trying to get in the mindset, you know?” I found myself nodding, as if I knew, and he held up the beer with yet another engaging grin. “Best cure for stage fright.”

“Stage fright?” Dubiously, I doubted this claim, while my eyes were riveted to the way the bottle touched his lips, and the swallow that convulsed his Adam’s apple.

My lips tingled, and I realized I was envisioning the feel of that sexy bump beneath them. Suddenly, I was unsettled at the effect he was having on me. The way my hormones were raging out of my control, the way I felt fourteen again. Taking a long sip, I forced a relaxed smile.

“I guess you find that funny too.” A slight grin quirked the corner of his lips, and his gaze held mine in a challenge.

“Who wouldn’t?” Defensiveness coated my words, and determination kept my gaze on his face. “A musician afraid to perform…”

“It’s not uncommon.”

Although he sounded slightly rebuffed, I still couldn’t seem to stop debating my position. “Well, if I were afraid of dogs,” Here, I pointedly glanced at Rusty, and the pup’s ears flattened against his head, “I wouldn’t be a veterinarian…”

“No?” Dark brows arched mockingly, and the gleam in his eyes was amused, no longer offended. “Not even if you put a Band-Aid on a lost puppy, and some guy saw and decided you were great with Band-Aids? Then, the guy offered to you a quarter of a million dollars to take care of a whole litter of puppies?” Rusty’s ears perked when his master glanced his way.

The comparison obviously alluded to performing and record contracts. Not lost was the pun of ‘band aids.” Eying him with a new respect, I wondered, “Is that how it happened with you?”

Shaking his head, he paused for another sip of his beer, before teasing, “No, I would never put a Band-Aid on a puppy. Impractical with all that fur…”

Normally, I was not an eye roller, but I felt the unconscious action, and saw the answering gleam in the depths of his dark eyes. How easily I had relaxed, as if he were a familiar friend, yet at the same time, every neuron transmitted awareness of this man.

Jack was turning me on, simply by standing, more than I had been affected by Kel in the midst of so much more. An override was occurring. My words and actions were governed by libido and impulses, instead of logic and instinct. He remained silent, assessing my next sip as closely as I had been watching his.

Relaxing into the sweet spell settling around us, I whispered, “So, the best cure for stage fright? Is this?” And I tilted the bottle for an extra sensuous sip.

I hadn’t so brazenly flirted with anyone except Kel since college, but every womanly instinct inside me dialed up several notches.

Dark eyes welded with mine, conveying instinctive and primal understanding, male to female.

“Well, maybe not the best-best…” His voice deepened a few decibels, and the husky whisper was possibly the most sensual sound ever to reach my ears.

“What’s the best?” My inquiry rode more on a breath, than a whisper.

With my fiancé, I had made the first move hundreds of times, and with college hookups a few times when extremely inebriated. Now, despite this guy being a stranger and me being relatively sober, I trailed my fingers down bare skin, from the art just above the first row of pecs, to the still open fly.

Struggling for a casualness I couldn’t feel, I tipped the bottle for another sip and wanted so much more than the swallow—not for a favor, or because he was famous. Simply because an intimate connection with him became something I needed. Even if it only came down to my knees on the cool marble floor.

His bottle clinked as reaching behind me, he deposited it on the granite counter top. Next, he used one long tan finger to hook a strand of my hair, pulling it over my shoulder.

Automatically, my body leaned into his as he closed the two steps between our toes. My heart pounded hard, racing with the knowledge that I was about to be kissed by him… this man who had awakened lusts of a nature I had never felt—ever.

The anticipation when his head dipped sent the blood roaring through my veins.

His lips angled against mine, testing with a frictional brush, and then his tongue was swiping in a way that stole my breath. After a teasing pull with his teeth, he deepened the kiss, and my tongue eagerly mingled with his.

There was not a way to pinpoint what was different about this kiss from any other I had ever had, but it was incomparable.

Hot and sweet, it kept me hoping he would never stop.

When he did, I couldn’t care after all, because this luscious attention had moved. The touch of his lips singed the side of my neck, and a shiver screamed down my spine as his attentiveness continued to my throat and trailed to the other side.

His fingers splayed over the ribs beneath my arms, and his thumbs lazily traced their sensitive targets making me wish the thin barrier of my bra and shirt nonexistent. I could feel my breasts straining to his touch, the nipples peaked to attention.

Resting my forehead on his shoulder, I pressed closer, putting my lips to the skin of his chest. Deeply, I breathed in his showered scent and tried not to worry that I had sweated for the better part of the day. My hands flattened on his chest, greedy for the feel of his skin, then encircled around to the corded muscles of his back. With the addition of his tongue to these searing kisses, my knees gave out, and I clasped his torso for support.

A groan left my lips, and after a moment, he suspended this delicious torture. His hands roved and roamed. When I was able to do more than hang on, I took a taste of the tan chest that had tantalized my senses from first sight.

This caused him to pause as I continued, and without the distraction of what he was doing, I gave myself over to what I was doing. With a slight push to separate us, his fingers fiddled with the hem of the stretchy tank top I wore.

“Marissa?”

My ears savored the sound of my name in that deep timbered drawl, and then my muddled mind comprehended he was waiting for permission in one form or another.

Pushing at his hands, I yanked at the shirt myself, and the air conditioner cooled my fevered skin as the scrap of material fell to the floor. His fingers immediately inflamed my body again as they slid here and there, appreciatively pausing on curves and contours. Guitar callused fingers caught on smooth silk. Impatient with the lacy triangles hindering his new targets, his fingers dipped beneath the red fabric of my bra where they caressed and teased with toying tugs until crazed, I unclasped the garment hoping his wandering mouth would move in that direction.

My feet left the floor, and I found myself perched on the counter while he gratified that longing. Circling a sensitive nipple with his tongue, he ended that tease with his teeth, tugging it beyond his lips, into his hot mouth. His lips closed around it, and the next suckling tug had me gulping back a moan. The tip of his tongue teased as he released and sucked again. The shaggy strands of his hair were silky against my chin, and the pads of my fingers pressed into his scalp unconsciously holding him to me.

The playlist had ended, and the quietness was broken only by the soft sensual sounds of what he was doing, the barely restrained whimpers escaping my throat, and the clatter of my sunglasses to the countertop as they slipped from my head.

My gaze fell on Rusty, finding the animal watching intently. Blocking out the bizarre image, I pressed my eyelids closed, but the enhanced sensation from doing so, and the next swipe of his tongue, down the valley between my breasts, caused my head to loll on my neck and my eyes to fall open to the track lighting on the ceiling.

His mouth wandered to the other breast, lavishing it with equal attention. With no bra to hinder, his lips, tongue and teeth generously lingered with tickling swirls and laps of liquid fire. Tugs and nips that tightened my grip– each pulling at some current connected to the fires flaming my innermost core, and pulling stifled moans past my lips.

This sensory overload came to a gradual end, his thumb brushing one of the damp tips, then my moist lips. His head leaned to mine as he stared into my eyes. His look was heated but with each passing second, he seemed to be banking the embers. I felt a crushing weight. Not the physical one I craved of his body against mine, but a mentally crushing letdown when I saw the resignation in his look.

“Don’t be mad…” The breath of his whisper brushed my face.

Mad?
Was there a word for this ugly spectrum of emotions suddenly churning and charring my insides? I wanted to scream in frustration and cry in shame. He was famous. I was a regular person— not a hot groupie. Had I really thought someone like him would waste even a quickie on me?

Maybe it wasn’t me.
I fought my old self-esteem issues.
He did have a show in two hours… Sports players didn’t have sex right before the game, right? Maybe rock stars didn’t expend the energy right before a show… Idiot. He's some sort of rock star, he likely has a groupie getting him off during the show…

Extracting an electronic tablet from a drawer just beyond us, he laid it on the counter top. Prideful, I blinked away the ache behind my eyelids to peer as he prompted my attention to the paragraphs on the screen. My peripheral vision perceived a large box of foil packets in the same drawer.

“I have to do this…” His halting explanation seemed regretful. “And there's no right time or way… Believe me…”