Rock Kiss 03 Rock Redemption(32)

The only possible freedom was the final one.

Noah sang softly as he strummed the guitar, fully conscious that this song could be seen as a suicide note. It wasn’t and never would be. He might’ve fucked up when drunk out of his skull, but he’d never consciously chosen death. That meant little though, not if he was holing up in motel rooms and shoving poison into his veins. The choice might not be a conscious one, but it was still a choice.

Like the choice he made at eleven that night when the nightmares became too loud, the demons too vicious. It was painfully easy to find women who wanted to screw him. At least the pitiless god who’d given him this life had also given him looks that made women gravitate toward him. He picked up a starlet who had lips plumped up with filler and breasts taut with silicone, and he fucked her against the brick wall behind a club after she gave him head.

When they were done, she called him “baby” and slipped him her number. He didn’t even know her name until he glanced at the little piece of paper. Waiting until she was back in the club, he scrunched up the note paper and threw it in the dumpster not far down the alley. Then he walked down the street and toward another bar bursting at the seams.

There was a line, one he could’ve easily circumvented, his face so well known that he didn’t have to introduce himself to the bouncers. But he didn’t even have to go that far. Two giggling brunettes in skintight minidresses waved at him, and when he smiled and crooked a finger, they squealed and ran over. He walked them back to his car, drove them to his place—the place to which he’d never once invited Kit.

He didn’t take them into the house, however, but into the little guesthouse his architect had talked him into. There was nothing of him in the guesthouse. It might as well have been a hotel room. But it had beds. He picked one—and then he spent the next three hours fucking both brunettes.

It didn’t silence the screams in his head, but for the moments that he was this base, rutting creature, he wasn’t Noah any longer, and if he wasn’t Noah any longer, then he didn’t have to be that scared little boy either. He just became nothing. Empty.

Afterward, he slapped one of the brunettes on the butt and said, “I’ve called you a car.”

She gave him big, hurt eyes. “You’re kicking us out?”

“You knew the deal.” The hurt was well-practiced. “If you wanted the white picket fence, you wouldn’t have come home with me.” Noah’s reputation left no room for misconceptions or false hopes; he’d never made any effort to hide his activities and proclivities.

The brunette got up with a sniff while her companion leaned over and tried to kiss Noah. “No kissing,” he snapped, hauling her back with a hand fisted in her hair. He didn’t know why he’d made that stupid rule—it wasn’t as if it changed anything, but his heart insisted on thinking that it did, that he could keep part of himself pristine.

Clean.

What a load of bullshit. And yet he still couldn’t make himself kiss any woman on the mouth. He sometimes wondered what people would say if they knew Noah St. John, Bad Boy of Rock and King of the One-Night Stand, had never been kissed. “That’s the car,” he said to the women when there was a buzz on his phone.

Getting out of bed, he pulled on his jeans and then walked them to the door, because now that he’d managed to drain himself to numb emptiness, he wanted to sleep. He had to sleep. If he missed this window, he might not sleep again for days.

He hauled open the door. “Thanks for a nice time, ladies,” he said, because he wasn’t a total bastard. Not all the time anyway.

Pouts disappeared, replaced by sultry smiles. Placing one hand each on his chest, they leaned in as a unit. “Thanks, Noah. Anytime you want a good time, call us.”

Her friend took out a phone. “Mind if I take a photo of us together?”

Noah knew that photo would end up online or in the papers. Where before he wouldn’t have given a shit, now that Kit was back in his life, even if only as a friend, he found himself shaking his head. “No souvenirs.” He smiled, using it like the tool it was. “Be good and I might use those numbers you left by the bed.”

They giggled and waved before getting into the damn car at last.

Eyes so heavy he could barely keep them open, he nonetheless managed to get himself to the house, collapsing into bed thirty seconds after he entered the front door, his mind blanking out.

When he woke, dawn was pink on the horizon. A glance at the clock on the bedside table told him two and a half hours had passed.

A good night’s sleep.




Two days after the picnic with Noah, Kit walked out of a meeting with the director and the writer of Last Flight with a spring in her step. Their new project—still in the planning stages—sounded remarkable, and she was more than ready to be attached on the understanding that they’d negotiate a contract once Terrence and Jade got the financing sorted.