Play Me (Love on Tour #2) (12 page)

14

The following day was lovely. Gloria and Frank were in grandparent heaven. Which meant that Sean and Baby were in parent hell. They were spending the day holed up in the Rushton’s bungalow explaining in detail exactly how they planned to raise their child.

Mike was pre-occupied with all the hard bodies on the beach. So it was easy for me sneak off with Bell. We ate a bucket of fresh shrimp, watched a cheesy movie while snuggling on the couch, and had a lot of sex.

The next morning I woke up content and horny. Bell was snuggled up against me, her long, smooth hair spread across the pillow in front of me, her ass nestled into me in all the right places.

I lay there for a long time, not moving. It had been years since I’d spent the whole night with a woman, since Rachel maybe. I didn’t have steady girlfriends. I had flings. Women didn’t stay the night. They had sex with me and left. If they stayed all night, we weren’t sleeping.

And I liked sleeping alone. In fact, until now, I had trouble sleeping unless I was alone. But having Bell’s warm little body in bed with me changed all that. I couldn’t stand the thought of not having her in my bed. And that was a real problem, one I wasn’t ready to tackle.

“Bell!” Bang, bang, bang. “Bell you in there?”

Bell shot up in the bed. “Shit! It’s Mike.”

She looked amazing, like sleep made her glow.

“Calm down.”

She looked at me with wide eyes. The knock sounded again.

“Coming,” she called. “Hide,” she said to me.

“I am not fucking hiding in the closet.”

I pulled myself out of bed, threw my jeans on, and walked toward the door.

“What are you doing?” She asked in a loud whisper.

“Put on some clothes.”

I waited until she’d wrapped herself in a fluffy white bathrobe that was about two sizes too big for her, then I opened the door.

Mike looked me up and down. He smirked.

“Get in here,” I said, pulling him into the room and shutting the door behind him.

“I should have known.”

Bell came bounding toward us. “Mike, don’t say anything, okay.”

Mike still had that stupid smirk on his face. “It’s none of my business.”

“Does that mean you won’t say anything?” Bell asked again.

“What are you doing here Mike? It’s fucking early.”

“Not really. It’s ten o’clock, man.”

“What do you want?”

“Sean and Baby are going to be gone with Gloria and Frank all day. Apparently, they want to go baby shopping, or some damn thing. Plus they want to Skype with Baby’s mom, and they have to go somewhere with wi-fi because this place is in the stone age. Anyway, the bottom line is that they asked me to entertain Bell.” He grinned. “But it looks like you have that covered, Hank.”

“Thanks for the info,” I grunted.

“Mike,” Bell said, giving him her most serious look.

He studied her for a minute, then looked at me and back to her. “Don’t worry, Bell. Like I said, it’s none of my business. Besides I told you to sleep with him. But,” he pointed his finger at me, “when Sean finds out–”

“
If
Sean finds out,” Bell said.

“When Sean finds out, I never knew a damn thing. Got it?”

“Sure. See you, Mike,” I said, opening the door and ushering him out.

Bell still looked on edge. “Hank.”

I moved to her, put my hands on her upper arms, and leaned toward her. “Sweetheart. Relax.” I kissed her softly on the lips.

“Okay.”

“What do you want to do today?”

“I wanna go parasailing.”

This surprised the hell out of me.

“Parasailing?”

“Yeah, not your thing?”

It was definitely my thing. I loved to do crazy dangerous shit. I skydived, I bungee jumped, I zip lined. When I was home I loved to surf. But I did those things alone. Sure, I usually had some people with me. But they were just buddies, they didn’t know me. They only saw the face I showed to the outside world, so in essence they were strangers. The people closest to me, just four people in the whole friggin’ world if you counted Tim, they weren’t there, so in essence I did those things alone. And now this girl had wormed her way into my life. She’d become that fifth person in the world I could be myself around. And she wanted to do the things I liked to do. She wanted to do them with me.

“Get dressed.”

****

I looked up at her, dangling from the chute, high above me, the boat, and the ocean. She was screaming her head off. But she was also smiling. She looked amazing. I kind of wished we were doing this at the same time.

I was a little worried when she insisted that I go first. I thought she might back out. I got up in the air and looked down at her, watching me, smiling, waving. And as much as I enjoyed the ride, all I wanted to do was get back down to where she was.

Then it was her turn, and she didn’t hesitate. She strapped that chute on, gave me a grin, and off she went.

The little green bikini she wore gave me a great view of her legs, her tight little stomach, and her bouncing breasts as she soared through the air. I looked over briefly at the safety guy and saw that he was enjoying the show as much as I was. I elbowed him in the ribs. He looked contrite for a second. Then he went back to staring.

When we had her safely back on the boat, she threw herself into my arms. “That was so much fun!”

“I thought you were going to have a heart attack, you were screaming so much,” I teased.

“I couldn’t help it. It was so… it was amazing!”

I barely had her out of the harness when she asked, “What are we going to do next?”

I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but it would have to wait.

“I’m gonna make a phone call. Then we’re going to eat seafood on the beach. More adventures tomorrow. I promise.”

I managed to sneak off while she was talking to the parasailing guys at the boat. I made the necessary arrangements for the following day. Then I bought us a bucket of fresh shrimp, a six-pack of high-end root beer, and a loaf of hot bread.

We’d set up on the beach away from most of the crowd. I wasn’t worrying about being seen just then anyway. I had a full belly, the sun was setting over the water in glorious tones of red and orange, and Bell was lying between my legs, her head resting on my chest. I was more content that I could ever remember being.

“What do you do when you’re home in Malibu?” she asked.

I took of a lock of her soft hair and pulled it between my fingers. It glided like ice between them and let off a little puff of soft, sweet fragrance.

“I like to surf and do a lot of adventure shit, scuba diving, zip lining, stuff like that.”

“Is your house by the beach like Sean’s?”

“Yeah, it’s about a mile down the same beach. Sometimes Sean and I run back and forth between the houses.”

“How long have you lived there?”

“Well, I’ve lived on that spot for 14 years. But I’ve had two different houses.”

She turned to look at me, her eyebrows all scrunched up. “How’s that?”

“I bought the house and the property after my first platinum album. It had belonged to some TV announcer or something. But once that house was gone, I had to rebuild, and so I rebuilt on the same property. I liked being on the beach.”

“What happened to the first house?”

“I burned it down.”

“You what?”

“I was out of rehab maybe two weeks, and I fell off the wagon. I got stupid drunk and burned my house down. Sean, who’d been the one to take me to rehab in the first place, was also the first one to show up. So I’m standing there, my house in flames. Fire trucks are pulling up and shit, and he runs toward me.”

“Runs?”

“Yeah, and I was too drunk to do anything about it, even though I knew what was about to happen.”

“What was about to happen?”

“He knocked me to the ground and punched me in the face.”

“What?!”

I laughed at her expression.

“That’s kinda how it worked. When I got all drunk and stupid Sean kicked the shit out of me and dragged me to rehab.”

“Why did he beat you up?”

“You know how they say you’re supposed to want to go to rehab?”

She nodded.

“Well, I guess that was his way of getting me to want to go. He’d hit me, and throw me down, and ask me over and over again, ‘are you gonna go, Hank? Are you gonna go?’ Until I finally said yes. Then he’d throw me in the car and drive me down there. That’s what happened that night. And it was my last stint in rehab. When I got out, I went straight to the house. I’m standing there, looking at the ash and rubble, Sean standing beside me, and he just says, ‘will it stick this time?’ And it did.”

“You haven’t had a drink since?”

“Not a drop.”

“Because of the house?”

“No, because I could have killed someone. Not me, but Mrs. Tinkley. She lives in the house next door and has a million trees and bushes and flowers and shit. She’s this sweet old lady who loves to garden and brings me cookies. She was asleep in her house. The fire spread to her trees.”

“Oh no.”

“The firemen got it out, and Sean got her out.”

“I thought he was busy beating you up.”

This was a pretty tough memory for me. I could see it so clearly and I hated that. That’s why I never talked about it.

“He threw me down and hit me and started with his speech. But I stopped and pointed at the trees. I could see them catching fire over his shoulder. I couldn’t talk, though. So I pointed. And he looked. He left me lying there on the beach, fucking drunk as a skunk and helpless, while he ran in and got Mrs. Tinkley.”

“And that’s when you woke up.”

“Yeah, that’s when I woke up.”

She stared at me for a long time. I got uncomfortable. Even though I hated this story, I didn’t mind telling it to her, but the look in her eyes made it seem too intimate.

“What do you do for fun, Bell?”

“I write. I also like to hike, swim, and go to plays. But mostly I write.”

“What kind of stuff do you write?”

She turned around and settled back against my chest. I wanted a more detailed answer than the one she’d given Tim the other night. But I didn’t get it.

“All kinds of stuff. Fiction, non-fiction, short stories.”

“And you never let anyone read it?”

“Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve had a few articles published.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and I’m thinking about writing an article about this tour.” She turned to face me again. “Would that be okay?”

I’d had so many articles written about me, I certainly didn’t mind if Bell wrote one, too. But I wasn’t going to make it easy on her.

“It depends, how do I know you’re a good writer?”

She went back to cuddling. “I’m not sure I am.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. What’s the most recent thing you had published?”

“I did a piece in a wedding magazine about Sean and Baby’s wedding.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and handed it to her.

“Find it online. It’s gotta be online, right?”

She took the phone, but hesitated. “Yeah, it’s online.”

“So find it.”

She didn’t say anything else. But she did go onto the internet and pull up the article. She tried to hand me back the phone.

“Read it to me,” I insisted.

“Um… okay.”

She took a long pause, but then she started to read.

“
How I Missed the Wedding of the Century, by Susi O’Malley. One of my best friends in the world was getting married. And this wasn’t going to be just any wedding. It was a destination wedding. The happy couple was flying an elite group of twenty-five guests to a remote location for the event. It wasn’t just any groom that my old college roommate was marrying either. It was Sean Rush. And I was invited.”

“
I remember the day I got the invitation. Like most wedding invitations, it was stuffed with other pieces of paper. Usually it’s information about where the couple is registered, or a card asking for RSVP or dinner preferences. But this one had a plane ticket in it. It fell out on my lap, a plane ticket to the Bahamas!”

“So I packed my bags, bought a new dress, and eagerly anticipated the adventure of a lifetime. Then, my beloved grandmother died. Her funeral was the same day as the wedding. I tried to reason with my parents without sounding like too big of a jerk. But I failed, and was accused of not caring about granny. So, like any good friend, I came up with a plan B.”

“I desperately wanted to be there. Yes, I wanted to be there for my friend, but let’s be honest here, I also wanted to be there for myself. So I made a call to Dani’s brother, who is one of those San Francisco tech geniuses. And Brad came through for me. He wore a tiny camera on his glasses so I could see the whole thing.”