Getting Played (Heart of Fame #7) (17 page)

Lips curling, he cast her a curious look. “Not to your liking, Boxhead?”

Throwing herself back against the sofa with a sigh, she rolled her eyes. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be a drama queen, but half of what they were saying was made-up shit. Nick wasn’t superstitious enough to tell you guys to stop bathing for the week leading up to his first London concert. And I know for a fact you didn’t get arrested the night before the first official Blackthorne concert in Melbourne because I was with you.”

Jax grinned. “That’s right. We were screwing like rabbits in the Royal Botanic Gardens, weren’t we? I still have the scars on my arse from that park bench.”

Nat laughed. Damn, he liked the sound of it. Hadn’t realized how much until now. She’d laughed often back when they were together. At things no one else but him seemed to find funny.

“Speaking of scars,” he said, leaning forward to snare a chocolate from the silver platter delivered by room service. “I saw your cousin’s new travel show on the Adventure Network last week in New York. Holy shit, that one on his head is a doozy.”

Nat selected her own chocolate and popped it into her mouth. “Getting brain cancer was the best thing that ever happened to Rob,” she said, right cheek full of chocolate. “Well, second best if you count meeting Emily and being cured. It definitely made him live life more. And let’s be honest, Rob Thorton was already living life to the fullest before he was diagnosed. Emily keeps telling me every time he base jumps off the side of a cliff or eats some foreign delicacy that may or may not be poisonous he mutters, ‘Screw you, death.’ She still hasn’t decided if that’s a healthy attitude or not. Being the host of a show like his only encourages him more, I think.”

Jax took the last chocolate from the platter. “I guess having a wife who’s an oncologist makes being a cancer surviving adventurer easier? Does she go with him?”

“They are inseparable.” She reached over the small space between them and plucked the chocolate from his fingers, grin wide. “It’s sickening. They’re so lovey-dovey and romantic. Last Thorton Christmas I told them to get a room when they were kissing at the dinner table.”

He laughed. “You? Squirmish over public displays of affection?”

She lifted the chocolate to her mouth. “Who’da thunk it, eh?”

Jax watched her part her lips and deposit the chocolate on her tongue. His balls tightened at the sight. His cock did the same. Shifting on the sofa, he cleared his throat. He wanted to press Nat flat to her back and make love to her. Almost as much as he wanted to keep talking with her. It was a conundrum he’d never faced before. “It’s been years since I caught up with Rob,” he said. “We crossed paths once in LA International airport. He and Joseph Hudson were heading to the Colorado Rockies to go heli-skiing. Haven’t seen him since.”

Settling back in the sofa, Nat curled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “He told me he saw you.”

An unexpected beat throbbed through Jax at the thought of Nat talking about him. He’d seen her cousin only a few months after walking out of her life and, at the sight of the tall man who bore such a family resemblance to Nat, Jax had been overcome with an ache for her so consuming he’d needed to find a seat and his breath. “What did you say when he did?” he asked, throat thick.

Nat gave him a level look. “Jaxon who?”

He winced. “Ouch.”

She let out a wry grunt. “Well, you
did
take my AC/DC album.”

He nodded. “I did.”

Silence stretched between them for a beat. He studied her, that same ache he’d experienced all those years ago in LAX welling through him now. He’d thought back then it was just a sexual ache. No one he’d slept with had come close to making him feel the way Nat had, but now…now he realized it was so much more.

An ache for everything she was and everything he was when he was with her.

Fuck, had he been in love with her back then? Had he? And he’d been too fucking dumb and egotistic and stupid and…and…caught up in his own growing fame and reputation to know it?

The weight of the daunting, terrifying thought made his head swim.

“Tell me about the new song,” she said, voice soft.

“Song?”

“The one for the movie.” She adjusted herself on the cushion, running her palm over the length of her thigh wrapped in fluffy white toweling, her gaze watching its path. “The one Nick’s replacement will sing.”

Jax frowned. She was changing the subject. Moving it away from them. Why? “It’s for the closing credits of Chris Huntley’s next movie. The sequel to
Dead Even
.”

“And it’s written?” she asked, lifting her gaze back to his face again. An ambiguous light shone in their grey depths. As if she battled confusion, just like he did.

“Music, lyrics, the lot,” he said, his heartbeat faster than it should be given the innocuous topic of conversation. “And it’s fucking good. Strings wrote the lyrics while he was in San Francisco falling in love with a woman who despised everything he was.”

Nat frowned. “Who was that?”

“Lily Pearce. His wife.”

“So everyone in Nick’s band has found love?”

“It seems so.” He forced out a choked laugh. “Except me of course.”

She laughed in return, the sound equally as strained as his. “Of course not you.”

Once again, silence strung between them, taut and heavy.

He stared at her, the air pressing on him. His heart thumped in his chest louder, wilder than any drum riff Noah could ever perform.

He parted his lips, wanting to tell her…something. Something that would make her forgive him for being such a tosser all those years ago.

Something…

“Play it for me?”

He swallowed, his mouth dry. “What?”

“The song.” She flicked a look at the baby grand piano beside the floor-to-ceiling window they’d fucked against only an hour ago. “Play it for me. It’s been a long time since I heard you play. I want to see if you’ve lost your touch in your advancing years.”

He chuckled, pushing himself from the sofa to cross to the piano. He never stayed in a hotel room unless it had a piano. It was one of his quirks, noted in more than one article about him and Nick’s band. The interesting thing was he’d never opened the lid on any of them. They just had to be in the room. Did it have anything to do with the fact he used to make love to Nat on the keys of the old piano they’d had in their rented home?

Skimming his fingers over the smooth, white keys from high C to middle G, he turned back to her. “Are you going to grade me, Teach?”

“On composition? Originality?”

He grinned. “A mark out of ten for technique?”

A light danced in her eyes. “Oh, I think we already know you’re a ten out of ten for technique, Campbell.”

His cock pulsed. He stared at her from the baby grand.

Nat’s lips curled into a slow smile. “Just play me the damn piece of music, Jax.”

Pulling a steadying breath, and fighting every urge in his body to walk back to her, take her in his arms and hold her, just hold her, he sat on the piano’s stool and placed his fingers on the appropriate keys for the song Samuel had written for
Dead Even 2
.

As always when he played the piano, a wave of pure rightness rolled over him. He’d been born to play the instrument. His parents had identified the skill at an early age and encouraged it. His mum took him to every piano concert and professional performance in their small country town she could. When he’d declared at the tender age of ten—after attending a Billy Joel concert in Sydney with his family—that he wanted to be a rock star, his parents hadn’t batted an eye. They’d sold the camper van sitting in the backyard they rarely used and bought the best electric keyboard they could afford. By the time Jax was a senior at high school, he’d already performed backing keyboards on more than one professional sessions album for various rock singers.

When Nick Blackthorne’s record producer approached Jax to perform on Nick’s second album, way back in the time of Jax’s life when all that really mattered to him was when he was going to make love to Nat again, history was made.

He loved playing a keyboard, loved it. But
tickling the ivories
as his dad called it, moved him in a way the electric instrument didn’t.

In the same way fucking a beautiful woman didn’t compare to making love to Nat. Both were highly enjoyable but one was more…right than the other.

The reflective notion stroked at the edges of his mind as he let his soul connect with the cool keys through the tips of his fingers. He closed his eyes and let the melding flow through him, saw the keys become the hammers, the hammers resting on the strings, saw the strings contained by the dampers.

He drew a slow breath, a part of him aware Nat sat and watched him, silent. Aware, for the first time that he’d spent the length of his career imagining her there every time he performed, whether on stage, in a recording studio or a rehearsal space.

Aware he’d left his heart with her, even as he’d left with her AC/DC album.

Aware, truly aware, he’d made the biggest mistake of his life letting her end the best thing of his life—them. Together.

Raw regret twisted in his soul, threaded through the music waiting to be played. Drawing another slower breath, he began to play.

The song—at this point still titled “Lily’s Song”—fell from his lips. Samuel’s tormented lyrics of aching for something beyond hope wrung his regret. Levi’s music, profound and haunting, soothed his remorse. The song was still a work in progress, Samuel tweaked the lyrics often, just as Levi reworked chords and riffs and time beats. But the bones of the piece of music were there and, in Jax’s opinion, it was one of the finest songs they’d ever created as a band.

He didn’t open his eyes. He never did when he played the piano. Instead, he gave himself over to the power of the music, the lyrics. He wasn’t a singer, but his fingers, his soul and his heart knew
exactly
how to give voice to music.

He played, the lyrics leaving him with husky rawness, his fingers finding the notes of Samuel’s guitar in the keys, of Levi’s bass, dancing to the building rhythm of Noah’s beat.

He played and lost himself—as he always did—to the beauty and rightness of making music. Of living it as it flowed from him.

And when he played the last note, as always, a part of him regretted the dying moment even as he reveled in its fading sound. Cherished it and ached for it again.

Hunched over the keys, fingers still resting on their cool surface, he listened to his soul return to his body as silence filled the void.

His heartbeat returned to its normal pace and, a soft wry laugh vibrating in the back of his throat, he straightened on the stool and opened his eyes.

Nat regarded him from the piano’s side, her cheek and chest resting on the raised lid, her eyes roaming his face, her pupils dilated. “That was incredible,” she declared on a breathless whisper. “I’d honestly forgotten how amazing you are.”

He forced a cocky grin to his lips. “Ten out ten?”

For an answer, she slid between the keyboard and the stool and straddled his thighs.

Wild heat poured through him. Pooled in his groin, his soul. He gazed up at her, the warmth of her pussy nestled against his jeans-clad arousal. His heart quickened, his balls ached. He reached up and parted the loose V formed by her robe, smoothing his palms across the velvet skin on her chest and shoulders until the garment fell from her arms to the keyboard. A discordant collection of faint notes sounded in the air, a soundtrack to their past he remembered well.

She drew a slow breath, lashes shuttering her eyes for a moment before she looked down at him again.

Desire burned in her gaze. Undeniable and fathomless.

Staring into that inferno, Jax skimmed his hands over the curve of her hips, the subtle dip of her waist and up the curve of her ribcage until his palms grazed over her full, heavy breasts. Her nipples puckered instantly at the slight caress. Her belly hitched.

Sliding one hand behind her back, he held her motionless as he feathered his other hand over each breast, charting the exquisite perfection of each swell of heavenly flesh and its rock-hard, dusky-pink tip.

She made a soft noise of pleasured surrender. Rolled her hips. Arched her back. The move drew her nipple closer to his lips and he took it in his mouth and sucked without hesitation.

“Oh, yes,” she moaned, writhing on his lap. Her elbow, or maybe it was her robe again, played new notes on the piano. The sound danced on the silence, at once delicate and a testament to their passion.

He suckled her nipple harder into his mouth, moving his palm at the small of her back lower until he cupped her arse cheek. With a gentle squeeze, he pulled her closer to his erection, needing to feel her heat on his engorged length.

She arched farther, raking a hand through his hair as she ground herself to his trapped cock.

Growling, he scored a line of nipping kisses across her chest to her other nipple, feasting on it even as he shifted on the stool, desperate to be inside her.

Once again, random notes sounded, treble and bass. More forceful and louder this time. Nat’s palms, anchoring her to the piano as he worshipped her breasts. She moaned and rolled her hips so her pussy stroked his dick through the taut denim of his jeans. “I love…” she panted. “Oh Christ, I love…”