Nalini Singh - Rock Addiction

“No, it’s okay.” Her friend turned to face her, soft blonde curls escaping the knot at the nape of her neck. “I miss out on so much because I’m scared—and the thing is, I’m intelligent enough to know it. That just makes it worse.”

“You’re selling yourself short.” Molly wouldn’t allow it. “You said I was brave, but I wouldn’t have made it through high school and foster care without you.” She didn’t know how many times she’d cried in Charlotte’s arms, or turned toward her for silent moral support when the taunts threatened to break her down. “You were my rock.”

“You were mine, too.” Charlotte shook her head, her eyes full of quiet power behind the transparent shield of her glasses. “Don’t let that tough, strong, fifteen-year-old girl down, Molly. Don’t shortchange yourself like I do.”

Heart breaking for what her friend had been through, Molly turned back to face the water before she started crying. “Is it worth it,” she said when she could speak without her voice cracking, “for a single month?”

“That’s for you to decide—but I vote for breaking the bed with Mr. Kissable.” Charlotte fanned her face.

Molly burst out laughing, grateful once again for her best friend. She only wished she could help Charlotte conquer her own fears, convince her to put away the shapeless, unflattering clothes that swamped her tiny frame and let down those pretty curls. But if Molly’s rules were her security blanket, Charlotte’s clothes were hers. “Maybe you need a rock star of your own.”

“No way. I’d rather go to bed with T-Rex.”

Molly’s antennae shot up. That was the second time Charlotte had mentioned her new boss—and she’d linked him to sex, however tenuously. “What’s he look like?” she asked casually.

Scowling, her best friend shrugged. “What most carnivorous monsters look like.”

“Charlie.”

A sigh, pointed chin propped up in fine-boned hands. “The name Gabriel Bishop sound familiar?”

Molly gasped. “No?” Gabriel Bishop, known on the field as “the Bishop,” was a former pro rugby player turned corporate genius. Tall, with wide shoulders and heavily muscled, he was certifiably hot in a hard-sex-and-hard-play kind of way. “Hey! Didn’t you once say you wanted to rip off his shirt and sink your teeth into his pecs?”

Charlotte spluttered at the reminder of her cocktail-induced sigh at the TV screen during a game where Gabriel Bishop had been roped in as a guest commentator. “I swear,” she said, “you have the memory of an elephant!”

“So?” Molly waggled her eyebrows, fingers discreetly crossed and hope a bright, bright flame in her heart.

“That was before I realized he wasn’t human.” With that pert comment, her friend shifted her attention toward the restaurant section of the Viaduct. “I’m starving.”

Luck was with them and they snagged an outdoor table with an amazing view of the water, yachts and other pleasure craft berthed in neat rows in the marina. As they ate, Molly thought of everything her friend had said, everything she herself had decided about stepping out of the box in which she’d lived for so long, and sent Fox a message: Search for Patrick Buchanan and scandal.

Fox narrowed his eyes at the phone screen when Molly’s name flashed up. He was still pissed at her for hanging up on him, enough that he needed to wait a bit longer—get his boiling temper down to a smolder—before he went after her and got to the bottom of this. Stubborn as he was learning his Molly could be, he hadn’t expected a capitulation.

Tapping to open the message, he frowned, then did the search. “Fuck!” He barely controlled the urge to throw his phone.

Noah, who was sitting on the steps leading down to the sandy beach, while Fox was on the porch above, stopped strumming his guitar. “Care to elaborate, oh articulate one?”

“You know how I said Molly was mine?” He dropped his legs off the railing to hit the deck. “That I planned to convince her to enter into a real relationship?”

“Tough thing to forget.”

“Yeah, well, I was an arrogant prick.” Not just then, but today, when he’d told her it wouldn’t matter if she was snapped. He’d had no fucking idea who and what he was dealing with; what he’d just learned told him Molly was the last person in the world who’d ever want to be in a relationship with a man whose life was dogged by the prying lens of paparazzi cameras.

Checking her phone again as she entered the apartment after dropping Charlotte off at her town house, Molly felt her stomach drop at the continued lack of a return message from Fox. He was likely busy with his bandmates, she told herself, not the kind of man who’d have bothered to go immediately online to follow a cryptic message from a woman he’d known less than a week.

Or maybe he’d done the search, realized how messed up she really was, and decided to cut his losses.

A stabbing pain in her chest.

Swallowing past it to release a trembling exhale, she kicked off her shoes and wandered into the bedroom to change into flannel pajama pants and a faded gray T-shirt. That done, she shoved her feet into her silly purple slippers and, pulling her hair back into a ponytail, went into the bathroom to wash off her makeup and brush her teeth. Smoothing in some moisturizer at the end, she settled into bed and picked up a romance novel she’d been looking forward to finishing.

She’d forgotten she’d stopped right before a love scene.

Her breath caught, her mind seeing not the words on the page, but the erotic scenes that had taken place in this bed a day past. This was why she hadn’t wanted to get involved with a man like Fox—that addictive gene in her body had kicked into high gear where he was concerned, until she could smell him all around her. Impossible, since she’d changed the sheets while he was in the shower this morning.

Blood hot at the reminder of why she’d changed the sheets, she looked back down at the novel, determined to read on. Five minutes and one incomprehensible paragraph later, she put the book on the bedside table and got up to make a cup of chamomile tea. She’d just taken the tea from the pantry when there was a knock on the door.

Jumping, she froze.

The short, hard knock came again, and this time, she moved, padding over to the security peephole to see a rock star on her doorstep. Her throat dried up.

“Molly.” Quiet, sexy, a little rough. “Open up.”

Heart slamming against her ribs, she looked down at her pajamas, thought about her washed-clean face… and realized none of it mattered. Not when she’d just given him the key to her greatest vulnerability.

She unlocked and opened the door.

Fox, his arms braced above the doorjamb, his white T-shirt taut against his biceps, said, “I had to steal a boat for you.”

Toes curling in her slippers even as she stood there feeling exposed, raw, she somehow managed to say, “According to a certain celebrity magazine, you’re worth a cool kazillion or two—you probably bought the boat.”

 “Noah wouldn’t be too happy. He’s become attached to the thing.” A dawning smile, but his eyes were serious. “Let me in.”

Realizing she’d been blocking the doorway, Molly stepped back and Fox came in, pushing the door shut behind him and flicking the deadbolt. The sound was loud in the silence, seemed to signal an intent to stay that had her stomach in knots.

“You look good enough to eat,” Fox murmured, his hands going to her hips.

She found her own against the firm warmth of his chest.

Fingers brushing the side of her breast through the soft fabric of her T-shirt, he ran one hand up over the skin bared by the scoop neck to close his fingers around her throat. “I got your message.”

Feeling vulnerable in a way that had nothing to do with the fact he was bigger and stronger, she looked away. “Did you do the search?”

“I’m sorry, baby.” Rubbing his thumb over her jaw, he tugged back her head with the hand not around her throat and bent to take her lips. “Open, Molly.” When she obeyed, he kissed her with an unhidden male hunger and a harsh tenderness that stole another piece of her.

Lost, she rose on tiptoe and linked her hands behind his neck, her taut, aching breasts crushed against his chest. He groaned and squeezed her neck a fraction, just enough to get her notice.

“Fox?”

“I want you in my lap.” Nipping at her lower lip, the ring rubbing over the kiss-swollen flesh, he drew her not into the bedroom but to the sofa.

Sprawling there, he crooked a finger. Molly really, really wanted to find that arrogant, but the sight of him aroused and ready for her made her breath catch, her body melt. Kicking off the slippers, she straddled him, and because he was her own personal piece of insanity, leaned in to tug on the ring that had led her into trouble in the first place.

His lips curved, and the painful happiness inside her grew bigger, threatening to crush her ribs outward.

“Kiss me, Molly.”

It was one demand he’d never have to make twice. Burying her hands in the thick silk of his hair, she indulged herself in the taste of Fox, having missed him until it hurt.

Pleasure thick in his veins, Fox ended the kiss on a soft suck of sound and looked into brown eyes that held a pained vulnerability. He felt something tear inside him, the need to take care of her a violent craving. “Come here.” Kissing her with all the tenderness he had in him, he brushed his hands up and under her T-shirt to caress the lush cream of her skin.

Touch by touch, kiss by kiss, he gentled her, seduced her, the raw sexual possessiveness he always felt when it came to Molly tempered by a vicious protectiveness. By the time he pulled off her T-shirt, she was liquid honey around him.

Easing her down onto the sofa on her back, he bared her lower half then rose to strip, conscious of the way she watched him.

“You’re so beautiful.” It was a husky feminine whisper as he came down on top of her.

Fox drew up her thigh and, pausing only to check she was ready for him, pushed into the welcoming heat of her body. He needed to be inside her, needed to reclaim her. Molly gasped, her neatly cut nails digging into his arms and her thighs wrapping around him.

God, she felt good, felt like his. Pulling her hands off his arms to place them on either side of her head, he wove his fingers with her own, their eyes locked as he rode her slow and deep; Molly moved with him, sensual and natural and fucking perfect.

Fox had done plenty of debauched things in the twenty-seven years he’d been on this earth, had treated sex as a bodily need, found pleasure before… but this… “Look at me, baby,” he demanded when her lashes fluttered down, her body an erotic song below his own.

Deep brown eyes met his own. “Fox.”

His name was the last word either one of them spoke as they rocked together to a pleasure that was a passionate kiss that engulfed both their bodies. And through it all, they held the eye contact, their hands clasped.

It was the most starkly intimate moment of Fox’s life.

“How was dinner?” Molly asked a long time later, cradled against Fox’s chest.

He’d sat back up after his breathing evened out and taken her with him, her legs on either side of his and her head on his shoulder. It was an unquestionably sexual position with both of them nude, but this felt affectionate… as the sex had felt like so much more. Now, from the way Fox was running his hand slowly over her back, it was clear he was pleasing himself as much as he was pleasing her. That did things to her she didn’t want to accept, didn’t want to think about.

“Bullshitted with the guys,” he said in answer, the vibration of his voice against her another small but potent intimacy. “Played some music. It was good.”

Molly went to speak, closed her mouth, afraid she’d break this moment. The way Fox had touched her, possessed her; the way he’d held her gaze to the very end; the way he’d so gently kissed her cheeks, her nose, her closed eyelids after the pleasure caught them both in its relentless current; it was more than she’d ever expected. Warm and strong and protective around her, he was everything, everything she’d never dared dream of. Why did he have to be from a world she could never survive?

Throat thick, she pressed a kiss to his collarbone, staying tucked up against him. “Thank you for stealing Noah’s boat.” For coming to her.