Marooned with the Rock Star (A Crazily Sensual Rock Star Romance, with Humor) (3 page)

I pass a lot of people, some whom I
recognize.

“Good morning, Mrs. O’ Donnell.”

“Yes, Mr. Craig. I’ve had my breakfast. Thank
you for asking.”

“Where am I going in such a hurry, you ask,
Mrs. George? No, I don’t have diarrhea. I just have to be in the
Captain’s office.”

“Mrs. Halberd, are you all right? You look
like a little green. After I come back from the Captain’s office,
I’ll see about getting you some seasick pills.”

I finally reach the Captain’s office without
further interruptions. The embossed name outside the door reads
‘CAPT. KRAZYCEK’.

I timidly knock the door.

“Come in,” says that deep, commanding male
voice I heard over the phone.

I have not met the Captain yet. I have seen
him from afar, and he is certainly very handsome. I open the door
and enter.

The Captain is seated behind his oak-paneled
desk, which has been polished to gleam. Various paraphernalia sit
on this table – a tiny ship’s model, a complicated compass system,
documents, pens, assorted bric-bracs. The walls are filled with
more navigation equipment and charts. There are several books on
the shelves, but I can see that these are behind locked glass
cabinets so as not to allow anything to fall off while the ship
lists.

Captain Victor Krazycek is as handsome as I
remember him, though he’s a little too old for my tastes. He looks
to be in his early forties, with black hair and stormy grey eyes
which make me think of the ocean during a tempest – only that I
have never been in a tempest. (OK, he’s not old
old
by most
people’s standards, but I’m only twenty-three and he’s certainly
old enough to be my father if he had me when he was twenty.)

I can well imagine a man who looks and
carries himself the way he does to have garnered and to continue to
garner a lot of female attention. I can also well imagine him
sowing his wild oats at every port he calls. Probably a lot of
children around the world can lay claim to Captain Victor being
their father, and more probably my imagination is being carried
away by the majesty of this man before me.

I clear my throat. He looks up at me intently
with his piercing grey eyes that seem to look right through me. I
almost have to take a step back with the impact.

“Captain, uh, Victor . . . you asked to see
me?”

“Yes. You must be Ms. Hall.”

“Please call me Rebecca.” I say in a gush.
Not for flirtation purposes, mind you, but it makes me
uncomfortable to be addressed as Ms. Hall. That was what my most
hated professor, Mr. Thurston, used to call me.

How nice of you to join us today, Ms. Hall.
I trust you’ve had a good nap on your desk just now.

The Captain gestures to one of the two chairs
before his desk.

“Please, sit down.”

I seat myself with a scrape of the chair. My
pulse is racing. I suspect I am about to be admonished.

“Ms. Hall.”

“Rebecca.”

“Rebecca.” The Captain pauses to appraise me.
I know I look a little sweaty and disheveled running around in the
summer heat, and so I’m not at my best. “There has been a complaint
about you from one of my crew members.”

Yes. I was expecting this.

“I can explain,” I say. “I – ”

“How can you explain something when you don’t
even know what it is?” he chides.

Right. I must appear quite contrite, because
he chuckles.

“You’re a feisty young woman, Rebecca. Now,
on to the complaint. One of my crew members has made a complaint
about you as to what happened this morning.”

My cheeks flush. “Captain, it was very wrong
of me to lose my temper like that, I admit. But your crew member
and I go a long way back, and he did something very terrible back
then. Something I never forgave him for.”

His grey eyes dance. “So you knew Mr. Kartik
before this?”

I am nonplussed.

“Mr. Kartik?”

“Yes. Mr. Kartik was my crew member who made
the complaint about you.”

“Oh.” I guess I was expecting him to say ‘Mr.
Taylor’.

“So . . . do you know Mr. Kartik?”

“Uh, no, I don’t.”

He smiles. He must think I’m an impetuous
dope.

He says, “Mr. Kartik observed you throwing a
pail of water at Kurt Taylor, who is a guest of the state of New
York.”

“Huh?”

“You did throw water at Kurt Taylor, did you
not, Rebecca?”

“Yes, I did. And I do know who Kurt Taylor
is. I just don’t understand the part about the ‘guest’.”

He gives me a quizzical expression. “Do you
know what happened to Kurt Taylor, Rebecca?”

I frown. “No, I don’t.”

He raises his eyebrows as if to say: “Don’t
you follow the news?”

KURT

After Rebecca Hall dumped the pail of dirty
water on me, I stare at her retreating form for a whole minute,
stunned.

Until the little tyke reminds me, “Hey,
aren’t you gonna get changed? You’re dripping all over the floor.
Ewwww.”

Right. First things first.

Muttering something inaudible, I grab my mop
and the now empty pail and stalk off into the lower decks. I have
my own cabin down there which I don’t have to share with anyone
because of the predicament I’m in.

That’s right. A predicament.

It happened like this.

After years of hard work and building up my
credibility as the lead singer of Red Velvet, I decided to let
myself have a little fun. It was four years of backbreaking labor.
I had sex occasionally, but most of the time, I was just too tired
after fourteen hours of grueling work to get my pecker up. It isn’t
impotence either. I’m too young for that. It was just sheer
fatigue.

There were always plenty of women surrounding
the band whenever we were on tour. My band mates – Tyler Mason,
Steve Cousins and Alex Madison – always had plenty of chicks who
were willing to put out. They didn’t have to work as hard as I did,
having made their mark in the rock industry already. I mean, those
guys are music legends.

But now I too have made my mark. The ‘hate’
comments on our Facebook page had gone down to a hardcore group of
people who had nothing better to do. I had acquired a lot of fans
on my own as evidenced by the growing number of my unofficial fan
sites and Twitter followers, which are numbering in the
millions.

The night we were nominated for a Grammy, I
decided to celebrate.

We were in New York.

I was raking in the cash. For a boy who grew
up in a trailer park, I had never thought I would amass so much
money in my entire life. And at my age! With what I had, if I
didn’t fritter it away on sex, drugs and rock and roll, I could
retire happy.

I remember those nights when I was five years
old, and my single mother was out of work. I remember how hard she
had to forage for money to feed us and buy us clothes – all five of
us kids. I remember her making eyes at the guy who owned the used
car lot in our little town so that he would give her a job as a
temp. I also remember her sleeping with him behind his wife’s
back.

I don’t ever want to go back to that sort of
life again.

So instead of trusting myself to invest that
money, I hired a financial planner and let him handle the lot. I
allowed myself the liberty to buy a penthouse, however, and a
Lamborghini – which was something I’d always wanted.

Now I could reap the fruits of my labor.

Back to that night.

“Hey, bro,” Tyler said as he raised a bottle
of Heineken to me. We were in the dressing room. We had just
finished taping a segment with Leno. “You gay?”

“Huh?” I said.

“It’s just that we never see you with the
ladies. All we have to do is strut outside and they’ll be lining
up, bending over and grabbing their ankles. All that’s left to us
is to pull down their panties and fuck them.”

That is true, not to mention crude, though I
had never gone for that type of woman.

“I’m not gay,” I said haughtily. “In case
you’d forgotten, there was that waitress in Ibiza.”

“Yeah, which you fucked for all of ten
minutes.”

Well, I did fuck her, at least. Strange to
think that in high school, I was considered quite the stud for a
while.

“And there was that yoga instructor in
Denver,” I argued.

“Never saw you fuck her,” Steve
countered.

“I was up in the hotel room with her all
night.”

“You could have been passed out.”

I fumed. The others were grinning at me. This
was all good-natured teasing, but there was an undercurrent there
that I could detect. They were all goading me on.

You have to prove yourself to us all over
again, kid. In a different way now.

That was the trouble with being so much
younger than the guys. It was like they were a tribe. They didn’t
just accept you because you worked hard and won
American Rock
Star
on your own merit. (OK, I got second place.) You were
always the rookie, the one who drew the short straw, the new kid on
the block.

Alex got up.

“Let’s go,” he said. He was the oldest of the
band members – the one who founded Red Velvet, and therefore, the
de facto leader.

The others uncurled themselves and
followed.

Steve shot me a backward glance. “You
coming?”

“Where are we going?”

He winked. “You’ll see.”

*

After evading the fans, who had gathered
outside the studio to scream and throw panties at us, we drove off
in our black van with the tinted windows. Stan, our driver, took us
to downtown Soho, where a long line was forming outside a club.

The van avoided the queue and took us to the
back, where a man was waiting at a nondescript door.

Stan wound down the window.

“All clear?” he asked the man.

“All clear.”

Stan looked back at Alex.

“All clear, boss.”

At thirty-six years of age, Alex was still
pretty fit. He clambered to the door and beckoned to the rest of
us. “What’re you waiting for? A flashing tit invitation.”

That mightn’t be a bad idea, I thought. To be
honest, I had been coasting on adrenaline for the past four years
now, and I was feeling pretty drained. A night of relaxation with
the guys wasn’t too spooky a notion.

We went in through the back door unnoticed.
Once inside, the man who was waiting for us ushered us right
upstairs.

We entered a dimly lit room.

“VIP passes only,” the man explained.

The room was filled with divans and couches
and water beds which look really comfortable. A small bar lined
with bottles and glasses decked one corner. Several guys were
lounging around on these plush surfaces, surrounded by girls on a
ratio of one to three.

The girls were all scantily clad in
micro-bikinis and micro-thongs. Frankly, nothing was left to the
imagination. Nipples were bared. Ass cracks were revealed. Crotches
were teased. The girls were all young, pretty, smiling with white
teeth and dimpled cheeks. The unoccupied ones made a beeline to us
immediately.

“Hi there, handsome,” said a brunette who
sidled up to me. She wore a bandeau type of bikini which glowed a
bright yellow in the light. Her areolas peeked out of the bands.
She immediately draped her arms around my neck. “I saw you on
TV.”

“Yeah, you are that
American Idol
guy,” said a redhead. Her breasts were as round as apples and her
nipples were covered in green pasties in the shape of stars.

Semantics, but I wasn’t going to go into
detail.

“You’re gorgeous.”

The brunette’s hand slipped to my crotch. I
wore a sleeveless black shirt with snaps for buttons and black
tight pants, my hallmark. I supposed I must have looked pretty
good. My arms were muscled and toned from working out at the gym
with a personal trainer six times a week to get that romance book
cover look. I never looked so good in my life than when I was
working to the bone.

Tyler and Steve were watching me handle
myself. Their hands were full too . . . literally. Full of boobs
and asses.

I wasn’t sure I liked being on display, but I
had something to prove tonight.

“If you buy me a drink,” the brunette said,
“I’ll let you grope me.”

“You can buy me a drink too,” the redhead
said.

They were both all over me now. Their hands
were sliding, slipping, probing my body everywhere. I could feel a
tightness in my jeans, which were really tight to begin with.

“How much is the drink?” I asked.

“It’s on the house,” said the bartender
called, smiling.

“In that case, I’m buying,” I said.

“Great,” said the brunette.

“Great,” echoed the redhead.

They both dragged me to the bar where the
bartender plunked down three shots of Jim Beams before us.

“I don’t like Jim Beam,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be a wuss,” the brunette said. She
picked up her glass and downed her drink in one gulp. Then she held
mine up to my lips. “Drink it, baby.”

I could feel Alex’s eyes on me, judging
me.

“Sure thing,” I said. I took the glass from
her and downed the Jim Beam in one scorching swallow as well. I
ended up spluttering a little.

The girls laughed delightedly.

“Have another,” the bartender said, sliding
another three glasses towards us. It was as though they appeared by
magic.

I took another drink. My head was beginning
to spin. My mind was a cloud and I was becoming majorly
relaxed.

My arms went round both girls. They were tiny
compared to my six foot two frame. They eagerly held on to me.

The redhead licked her lips.

“Now, Kurt Taylor, how would you like to do
it? What do you say to a little public exhibitionism?”

I was surprised she even knew the term, but
then, she probably knew a lot of terms I didn’t. As a newly minted
rock star, I was pretty green around the edges when it came to the
party scene.