Nalini Singh - Rock Addiction

To this day, Molly didn’t know if his withdrawal had been driven by shame, or simply disbelief that he, Patrick Buchanan, had been caught and held to account. “My mother… it was like she couldn’t function on any level without his orders.” Molly could still remember the bewildered look in her mother’s sky-blue eyes.

“After I came home and found her passed out drunk every day for a week”—Molly’s stomach churned at the remembered smell of alcohol drenching the air—“while my father sat staring at his computer, I began opening the mail that had piled up. That’s when I saw what he’d been doing.”

“Drugs?”

“Close.” Her hands had begun to shake as she looked at the bank statements and final notices for bills. “Online gambling. He’d bankrupted us in a matter of weeks.” Worse, he hadn’t paid any of the insurance premiums since the day of his arrest, invalidating all the policies.

Fox’s voice was harsh when he spoke. “No man has the right to do that to his family.”

“I confronted him—I think part of me was hoping I’d misunderstood.” Like a child wanting to be assured the bogeyman wasn’t real. “When he stirred enough to yell at me to get the hell out, I waited for one of my mother’s sober days and showed her the papers. The way she looked at me… I broke her heart into a million pieces that day.” Molly would never forget that instant, never forget the unvarnished agony that had sent Karen Webster to the floor in a fetal curl.

Molly had begged for her mother to talk to her, said sorry a hundred times, but she’d continued to lie there, mute and fractured. “I don’t think she was ever sober again.”

“That is not on you.” A ruthless declaration as Fox turned her to face him. “Baby, you have to know that.” He crushed her against the strong planes of his chest and only then did she realize she was crying.

Wrapped tight in the protective circle of his arms, she felt so safe that she couldn’t fight the crashing wave of shattering emotion—feelings she’d hidden away for so long that she’d almost convinced herself they no longer existed. That none of it had the power to hurt her any longer.

Her nose was stuffy, her throat scratchy, and her eyes wrung dry when Fox spoke against her ear, the whiskey and sin of his voice an addiction—and that was the greatest irony of her life.

“You’re telling me this so I’ll know how bad you’re messed up?”

Molly leaned back enough to meet his gaze, the smoky green black in the darkness. “Yes.” He’d read the newspaper reports, knew what had happened next—the loss of their family home and everything else not already consumed by escalating legal costs, her parents’ deaths in a car crash on the way to a court appearance, her mother later discovered to have been five times over the legal limit.

The only miracle was that Karen Webster had taken only her husband with her, her car smashing not into another vehicle but into a concrete pylon. When it came out that there had been no skid marks on the road, the media had called it a murder-suicide. Molly wasn’t sure they were wrong.

 “I’ve worn the coat of being a well-balanced, ‘normal’ person for so long that I almost believe it myself most days,” she confessed, “but I’m not. I have stuff inside me that chokes me up until I can’t breathe. I’m really messed up.”

Fox rubbed his thumbs over her cheeks, wiping away the remnants of her tears. “I got plenty of fucked-up parts inside me, too. Yeah, they kick my ass sometimes, but I wouldn’t be me without those parts, and you wouldn’t be you.” His voice dropping, holding her captive. “That’s the Molly I want, the messed up, smart, sexy one standing right in front of me.”

Passionate and edgy and starkly romantic, his words kissed the torn-up places inside her. “This,” she said, her voice husky, “us. It’s not working.”

Molten fury, Fox’s skin pulling taut over his cheekbones. “Hell it’s not.”

“Wait.” Molly pressed her fingers to his lips. “That didn’t come out right.” She swallowed, blurted out the words that had been building inside her since the moment he asked her if she wanted to change the rules. “I don’t want a deadline.” Her heart ripping open, the exposure terrifying. “I don’t want to pretend like my mother did, that my life—our relationship—is something other than what it is.”

Fox’s heart staggered at hearing the words he’d been waiting for since the instant he’d first realized she was his. Parting his lips to speak, he suddenly became aware of a large group of energetic and giggly teens racing down to the lookout. “Shit.”

Grabbing Molly’s hand, he led her back up the rise, head angled to avoid being recognized, and drove home as fast as legally possible. This was one night he definitely did not need to be pulled over. Backing Molly against the closed door of her apartment the instant they were inside, one hand on her hip, his other arm braced over her head, he said, “Let me get this right.” His heart ricocheted inside his ribcage. “You’re saying you want us to go on for longer than a month? No limits?”

Molly nodded.

When he simply watched her, she wet her lips, spoke in a throaty whisper. “Yes. I want to change the rules.”

“You sure?” No doubts, there could be no doubts in her mind. “Because once you take that step, I won’t allow you to back away.”

“Yes.” The single word was potent with emotion. “I’m sure. I want to be with you in every way… I want to see who we’ll become together.”

A dazzling kaleidoscope exploding in his mind, Fox thrust his hand into Molly’s hair, unraveling her ponytail to fist his hand in the silky black strands. “No more hiding,” he ordered. “You’re mine, in private and in public. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” It was a thready sound, her throat moving as she swallowed. “You want the same thing?”

“Baby, I never had any intention of letting you go at the end of the month.” Fox’s words shattered everything Molly thought she knew. “You’re like the perfect song and I knew that the first night we spent together.”

The perfect song.

No one had ever said anything so beautiful to her. Already-gritty eyes burning, she said, “H…how do we do this?” Her fingers curled against his back. “Will you fly down to spend time with me after your tour is complete?”

“No half measures, not ever,” was his unbending response. “You come with me.”

Again, he’d hit her with the unexpected. “I can’t.” Breathless words, her pulse in her mouth. “My life, my friends, everything is here.”

“I’m not.”

It was a simple, absolute fact. Shaken, she gripped at him to keep herself upright. “If I choose to stay here?”

“I told you, no half measures.” His expression was brutal, all the niceties stripped away to reveal the strong, determined man at the core of him. “If you don’t come with me, what’ll we have? A few weeks a year?”

“We could make it work,” she argued, so overwhelmed by the careening speed of this that her mind scrabbled to find steady ground.

 “No.” A flat rejection. “I want to take you out to dinner. I want to walk with you down the street. I want to pretend not to be bored while you shop. I want to kiss you before I go onstage. I want you in my bed every damn night.”

Each word he spoke, it echoed her own secret desires.

“So you decide, Molly, once and for all, if you want me enough to take the chance.”

 “That’s not fair.” She adored him, but he was asking her to alter the course of her life in a way that could never be undone. “I want to be with you more than I’ve ever wanted anything—”

Kissing her without warning, his mouth hot, his tongue stroking deep, the slight abrasiveness of his callused fingertips familiar on the side of her face, he whispered, “Say that again.”

 “I can’t bear to think of being alone in this apartment again,” Molly said, her voice shaking, “of watching you leave… of hearing that you’ve found someone else. You’re mine.” A raw claim.

Fox shuddered. “Fuck, baby, I got no argument with that.” One hand continuing to cradle the side of her face, his thumb brushing over her cheekbone, he said, “Why the hesitation, then?”

The stark, unconditional honesty of the moment demanded she speak the truth. Finding another strand of courage, she gave voice to the fear that had a clawed grip on her heart. “What if we don’t last in the real world?” The pressure of the media, the constant barrage of attention, it could wear a person down to the bone. “What if I’m not strong enough?”

 “I know it’ll be hard.” Fox’s breath hot against her skin, his body a wall of muscle. “But you’ve faced hard before and kicked it to the curb.” Green eyes violent with a pride that tightened the chains around her heart. “Delaying the decision won’t make it any easier.”

“No.” The only way to know if they had what it took to make it under the unforgiving glare of the world stage or if it would smash them into jagged shards was to step into that life.

Ever since she’d been old enough to understand the poisonous nature of her parents’ relationship, Molly had promised herself she’d never make the same mistake, never become addicted to anything or anyone. Except here she was, addicted to a rock star who lived in a world that was the diametric opposite of the staid, suburban existence that had been the goal she’d set herself as a devastated and heartbroken teenager—the lights, the cameras, the intrusion, the cruelty, it was her personal nightmare.

No matter what happened, the instant she made this decision, she ended her chance of ever having an ordinary life. It hurt to think of the death of a dream she’d held on to for so long, but nothing hurt more than the thought of losing Fox. “Yes,” she said on a whisper of sound. “I’ll come with you.”

Fox’s eyes held her own, a passionate, possessive fire in their depths. “No half measures, no regrets.”

“No half measures,” she vowed, her pulse a staccato beat and her heart on her sleeve. “No regrets.”

Fox’s kiss branded her, his body imprinting on her cells.

Molly’s first impression of Fox’s home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles was of gleaming glass and shimmering blue set back against an unexpectedly green backdrop of spruces and other foliage. The light-filled modern structure, situated on a slope, was all square angles and floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a magnificent view of Santa Monica Bay in the distance, while the water from the infinity pool on the second floor fell in a cool waterfall to a lower pool.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, standing in the sunlit living room that overlooked the infinity pool. The sun beat down outside, but inside it was cool, the air-conditioning soundless. “It’s not what I expected.”

 “What?” That lean dimple appeared in his cheek. “Some messy bachelor pad?”

“Um, yes,” Molly admitted, wanting to kiss him but feeling oddly shy in this new place a literal world apart from everything she knew.

Laughing, Fox slid open the doors to the patio around the pool and tucked her to his side. His kiss was slow, the way he rubbed his nose against hers heart-catchingly sweet. “I have a cleaning service—they come in once a week unless I tell them not to. I don’t like anyone in my space when I’m working on a new song.” A playful bite to her lower lip. “I’ll make an exception for naked Molly, however.”

Scrunching up her nose at him, she said, “Can you ask them not to come this month?” She needed time to settle without having to deal with strangers. The one good thing was that she wouldn’t have to stress about work—the copy-editing certificate she’d completed last year in order to earn extra income, before her promotion at the library put that on the back burner, was now going to be part of her new life.

It would take time and a lot of hard work, but she planned to build herself a career as an independent editor and researcher with the emphasis on the latter. Never did she want Fox to think she was with him for his money—and more, she needed to be her own person, needed to be the Molly who was Fox’s perfect song. That Molly stood on her own two feet. “The house looks clean anyway,” she added.

“Whatever you want.” Fox nodded toward the kitchen area that flowed off from the large living space. “Their number’s on the fridge if you want to make the call yourself.”