It took a minute before Rule relented, but when he did his shoulders relaxed and his tattooed hands unclenched. I nodded in agreement, but the conversation was cut short because Cora flopped herself on the couch between me and Rowdy and pouted about Nash forcing her into regulation bowling shoes.

The topic was essentially dropped, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what he said, that when you cared about someone so deeply it changed you, made you into a different person. In his case, deciding that he could love Shaw, and more important, that she could love him, had turned him into a totally different guy. He was still a pain in the ass, but now he was a pain in the ass that could see beyond himself, and he was a shining example of love changing someone for the better.

I didn’t know how going from friends to something more was going to play out for me and Ayden, or that I necessarily needed to be better or worse. All I knew for sure was that she was inside me like cold drops of water next to all the burning things that had lived there for years. I was in no hurry to get her out, because something about her was cool and soothing to all the parts of me that had been on fire for far too long.

Chapter 7

I was tired when I got home. Work had been busy, which was nice because I was tired of dodging Shaw’s questions and speculative looks about my relationship, or nonrelationship, with Jet. I wasn’t ready to get into it with her—hell I wasn’t even ready to get into it with him. When Rule had shown up to get her, he had almost strong-armed me into letting him take me home. When he got distracted by Lou, I had literally ducked out the back door to take my own car home. Something weird was going on, because while Rule was normally bossy and overbearing, he usually toned it down with me because I didn’t acquiesce to him in the least.

When I was pulling out of the parking lot, I got a text from Cora telling me that I needed to park in the driveway and that they had left all the lights on for me. It was all clandestine and overly cautious, and was making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

The house was quiet when I got in the front door. Cora’s light was off. I still wasn’t sure about this new territory I was treading on with Jet, so even though his light was on under his door, I decided I needed a shower and a minute to collect my thoughts before trying to talk to him. I collected a pair of yoga pants and a stretchy tank before padding to the bathroom on silent feet.

I shared the second bathroom with Jet, and before I had started sticking my tongue down his throat I never really thought about how intimate that was. For instance, all the junk he used in his hair was scattered all over the counter, right next to all the stuff I used to smell good and look pretty. He had a collection of thick silver rings on one side of the sink and a bunch of random guitar picks in the soap dish, next to the fancy bottles of perfume I left out because I was too lazy to put them away. One of his belts with the metal studs was curled up on the back of the toilet and the skirt of my cheerleader uniform was in a discarded pile on the floor. Somehow, without even noticing it, my life had intersected his so thoroughly that it was just seamless and so easy. I liked having all my stuff mixed up with all his. It made for a more interesting mess, kind of like us.

When I was walking back to my room, I had to stop outside the door because there was music drifting from across the hall. It wasn’t the screaming, ear-bleeding, headache-inducing noise that he usually had blaring, but soft guitar and the most beautiful voice I had ever heard. I couldn’t make out the song because it didn’t sound familiar, but it was alluring enough that I threw everything on my bed and went back across the hall without any hesitation. I knocked and the guitar stopped long enough for him to tell me to come in. When I did, my breath stopped somewhere in the middle of my chest, and my heart did a slow slide all the way down to the bottom of my feet and back up to my throat.

Jet was sitting in the center of his bed, his long legs crossed at the ankles. He didn’t have a shirt on, which was already hot and distracting, and the huge black and gray tattoo that covered his entire torso looked menacing behind the acoustic guitar he was holding. It was a sight that made my breath catch and made me remember why he put every good intention I had to the test. His dark head was bent down and he was scribbling something on a notebook he had open next to him. He looked rumpled and sexy, the rock star at rest, but the things he was doing with that guitar and the way he sounded when he sang the next verse made my knees go weak. I walked across the room in a daze, unaware that he was pulling me in with his voice alone. I sank to the edge of the bed and watched him with wide eyes.

He didn’t acknowledge me until he was done, and by that time I had a film of tears in my eyes and felt that something in my soul had been touched by what this boy could do. He leaned across me and put the guitar down on the floor and shoved the notebook into a drawer of his nightstand. His dark eyes regarded me quietly and I couldn’t help but reach out and touch him. I grabbed his thigh and leaned over so that we were eye to eye.

“If you can sing like that why in the world do you get onstage and scream and yell so that no one can understand you? You’re amazing. That was so beautiful, it made my heart hurt.”

He cleared his throat and his shoulders moved up and then down. There was a lot of tattooed skin on display and even though I was used to seeing it onstage or in passing in the hall, it was pretty impressive and very distracting up close and personal, and I wanted to touch all of it. I wasn’t sure where to let my gaze land, so I decided that his midnight gaze with the gold halo was my best bet.

“It’s just music, Ayd. It all speaks to something inside us.”

“But you have a beautiful voice. You could be famous, like famous on a ridiculous level.”

He shoved his hands behind his head and leaned back, making his abs contract and flex under the ink that covered them in a drool-worthy way. My fingers itched to run along the faint trail of dark hair that poked out the top of those too-tight pants and across abs that were defined and taunt under a cover of black and gray ink.

“I could be famous on a ridiculous level singing metal or singing nursery rhymes. That’s not what I want.”

I bit my lip because he was way more complicated than I had ever given him credit for. I thought the band was just a way he killed time, a way he got validation. I had no idea he was as skilled as he was, or that he was actively avoiding being a big freaking deal.

“What do you want in the long run, Jet? Where are you going with all this? Wasting a talent like that should be criminal.”

The corner of his mouth kicked up in a grin that made my skin tingle. “As long as I can continue to write songs that are good enough to bring beautiful, dark-haired girls knocking at my door in the middle of the night, I can be happy. I’ll sing you anything you want, Ayd, if it means you keep looking at me the way you’re looking at me right now. The long run can take care of itself much later.”

I knew if I let him, he would own me. If he sang to me with that beautiful voice and played the guitar for just me, with those hands covered in heavy rings and tipped in black fingernail polish, he would just simply own me. He was already close and I was doing my best to keep him at a distance. I knew none of those things, his beautiful voice or his rumpled hair or ink-covered skin, belonged in my future, but letting that take care of itself was sounding better and better by the second. I slid my hand a little farther up his thigh and watched as little sparks shot off the golden rim of those midnight irises. He was my temptation, and had been for a long time now. Good Ayden or Bad Ayden, we both wanted him, only him.

I leaned even farther over him so that both my hands were flat on either side of his hips. We were eye to eye, and only our breath separated our mouths. No part of either of us was touching, but I could practically feel the electricity jump from his colorful skin to mine.

“Why do I feel like I’m always the one coming after you, Jet?” My voice was barely a whisper, and I saw when it hit his lips, it made them twitch. He pulled his hands out from behind his head and I felt the chill of his rings brush across my cheeks as he tunneled his fingers into the hair at my temples.

“I don’t know, Ayd.”

I probably would have had a smart remark to throw back at him, but he was pulling me across his legs and turning us so that I was on my back and he was hovering over me in all his toned and tattooed glory. I’d had his mouth on mine before so it shouldn’t be shocking, shouldn’t be startling, but there was something about being horizontal and having nothing but thin cotton pants between me and a very impressive erection that made our previous kisses seem like practice for the main event.

Before Jet, I had never been interested in guys who were decorated from head to toe, but now I wanted all the things that just made him him. That included the artwork that was imprinted everywhere and the metal hoops he had in each nipple that I could feel pressing against my own chest. I was also lucky that all that decoration came with a pair of corded pecks, tightly defined biceps, and an ass that looked better in this bed than it ever had on stage.

I couldn’t decide what to put my hands on first. It was like getting all the presents I ever wanted at one time. Jet seemed to run naturally hot and I felt like if I didn’t get to all of him at one time, he was going to melt both of us into the comforter on the bed.

I felt like I had been starving for this my entire life and now the seven-course meal that was Jet Keller was mine for the tasting and I was about to turn into a gluttonous beast. He was doing a pretty good job of making me lose track of every thought by assaulting my mouth with kisses that had more bite and more sting than I was used to. He was holding my head still, and playing a game of attack and retreat with his tongue that was making me moan. My only recourse was to slide my hands around his narrow waist and dig my fingers into the tight muscle above his ass. The pressure was enough to get him to lift his head, and when he did, I couldn’t help the dart of satisfaction that flared in me at the obsidian glimmer in his dark eyes, the gold completely obliterated by a hazy, passionate gleam. His mouth was damp and when his tongue brushed over it, my knees instinctively bent so that he was cradled right at the heart of where he needed to be.

I slid a couple of fingers under the tight edge of his pants and lifted a dark eyebrow. “How do these come off?”

He had lowered his head and was doing something amazing with his tongue on the tendon of my neck, so his reply was muttered against skin that was quivering at his lightest touch. I hooked a long leg around one of his and pressed up against the part of him that I wanted and was being denied access to. “Seriously, those pants are ridiculous. How am I supposed to get them off?”

Everything I had on was stretchy and designed for comfort and cuddling in bed. I made a face at him and he pushed up off me, and had zero trouble taking my tank top with him as he went. The look that crossed his face when he stared back at me had heat surging up my chest and into my face. I took pretty good care of myself, and I wasn’t an idiot, so I knew I was better than all right to look at. But when he looked at me, I had never felt more appreciated, more valued, more adored than I did in that minute. Something serious was going on in those dark eyes, and if I stopped to think about it, I was going to freak out and bolt for my own room. Luckily, he must have felt it brewing, because he clambered over me to climb to his feet and started working on the buckle to his belt.