Lowdown and Lush Read online

  The Lush Series (Rock Star Contemporary Romance)

  A Lush Triangle (Lush Prequel Novella)

  A Lush Betrayal (Lush No. 1)

  For the Love of a Lush (Lush No. 2)

  Lowdown and Lush (Lush No. 3)

  A Lush Reunion (Lush No. 4) 2015

  The Hiding From Love Series (New Adult Contemporary Romance)

  Camouflaged (Hiding From Love #0.5)

  Hidden (Hiding From Love #1)

  Concealed (Hiding From Love #2)

  Buried (Hiding From Love #3)

  The Bittersweet Chronicles (YA/NA/Adult Contemporary Romance Novella series)

  Pax (Book One) December 2014

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  For all who suffer. Never give up hope.

  Mike

  I HAVE my head buried between the blonde’s thighs when I hear the redhead whining.

  “Baby, why don’t you give her a rest? I’ll take care of you better than she ever could.”

  The blonde continues moaning as I lap my tongue up her center and debate whether I want to fuck her or not.

  “Well,” I say as I come up for air and look behind me at the redhead, who’s lounging spread-eagle on the chaise lounge, “I can do two things at once, babe. Come on over here and show me what you got.”

  Forty minutes and a few group orgasms later, I’m crashed out on the sofa in the living room of the hotel suite while the girls are sleeping it off on the king-sized bed. I lie bathed in the flickering light of the television, listening to the sounds of cars and music from the Dallas street outside. My skin itches and my head is throbbing, and as much as I wish it were from too much booze, it’s not.

  I’ve been at this for weeks—an entire summer actually. And no matter how many women or how many times they blow me, fuck me, suck me, or just generally give my dick a big old workout, the agitation I have never leaves. It’s a constant, like some sort of wicked, unforgiving wetsuit wrapped around my body, slowly squeezing the life out of me.

  If I lie very still and quiet, I swear I can feel her—the source of all my fucking problems. She’s checked into a room two floors above me, all nice and snug in her bed, alone, the way I like to envision her—golden hair spread across her pillow, alabaster skin glowing in the moonlight that slips through the curtains of her window, her luscious tits rising and falling to the slow rhythm of her sleeping breath.

  Fuck. I punch the pillow I’m using and turn my back to the TV. It’s playing some old black-and-white Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie. Over the last few months, I’ve developed a fondness for the old, classic Hollywood productions. Tracy and Hepburn have been two of my favorites ever since Leanne Silva, my boss’s wife, told me about their story. How they fell in love even though he was old enough to be her father and married to boot.

  See, Tracy was a dog, man. A complete and utter dog. He cheated on his old lady all the time, and for whatever fucked-up reason, she put up with it. But that’s not why I like his story. What I like is that this beautiful, young thing—Katharine Hepburn—came along, and even though he was old, dirty, and married, she loved him. She loved him so much that she put up with all his baggage and stuck with him for the next twenty years or so until the day he died.

  If Tracy hadn’t already been fucking around like a damn cat in heat, I wouldn’t have thought much of Hepburn, but the fact is, she didn’t break up his marriage. That had died a torturous death years before she’d come along. What Hepburn did was finally give the old guy an unconditional love. She never asked him to divorce his wife since he was Catholic. She never wanted him to be someone or something he wasn’t. She was smart and gorgeous and unabashedly in love. If some beautiful, young thing could ever look past all my crap—my baggage, my history, my flaws—and love me like Hepburn loved Tracy, I’d be the happiest guy on the planet.

  But the gorgeous woman I’d want to do that for me won’t because I won’t let her. She can’t ruin her life with a guy like me when she has the world waiting to give itself to her on a silver platter.

  So I lie in my hotel room two floors beneath her and wish for a day that’ll never come and a dream that’ll never happen with a woman who’ll never know just how deeply I feel about her.

  AT FIVE A.M., the concierge and I start our little routine. I’ve been performing in Dallas or Austin nearly every weekend for the last ten weeks, and I always stay in the same hotels, so I’ve developed a rapport with the concierge staff. In other words, I grease the dudes’ palms so they’ll take care of what I need. What I need in this case is the two playmates from the night before whisked away before Jenny wakes up. Not that she has any standing to be pissed if I have had company, but I would never want her to see this side of me—the side that knows I’m fucking pond scum and acts accordingly.

  After we present the girls with breakfast in bed to butter them up, a town car waits for them under the hotel’s porte cochere ready to take them for a day of shopping. Then it delivers them to wherever the hell they live. These little escapades cost me a bit of cash, but honestly, I have so damn much that I never even notice.

  By six forty-five, I’ve gotten rid of my companions and showered them off myself so I can head to the hotel’s gym. I spend the next hour and a half trying to work the pond scum out of me—at least temporarily—so that I can go see my gorgeous girl and start our day together.

  Pushing my body to its limits in the gym is how I stand to live with myself. See, there is something deep inside me that I got from my mother. Not to sound like a fucking drama queen, but I’m pretty damned tainted., and I’ve always expected to end up just like Loretta did—dead on the floor of a bathroom in a pool of my own blood. So, until then, I’ve made myself a promise—to get every drop I can out of life. I’ve fucked more women than most men would in three lifetimes. I’ve played my music for the whole world. I’ve spent weeks intoxicated, days in bed, months in foreign countries. And I enjoyed every single minute of it until the night I saw Joss Jamison fucking his best friend’s girl.

  Joss was the singer in our band, Lush. I played a pretty fucking wicked guitar, Walsh played drums, and Colin was our bassist. For most of my life, it was Joss, Walsh, and me. I was the third wheel. But for the most part, I didn’t mind. What Joss and Walsh had was pretty fucking real. They were as close to being brothers as two guys with different sets of parents could be. But I was the next best friend, and the three of us spent I don’t even know how many hours getting into trouble. First, with our moms. Then, when we got older, with teachers, girls, and the occasional overzealous police officer.

  We formed Lush when we were seniors in high school. I had started playing guitar during our junior year, and one night while we were all hanging out in Joss’s garage, stoned out of our heads while I fucked around trying to play Free Bird, Joss just said, “Let’s form a band.” So we did. Once we realized we would need a bassist, we put up flyers around school and found Colin. It turned out that he was a perfect fit for the band and our group, evening up the numbers so that we didn’t have a third wheel anymore, just a well-balanced, smooth-riding machine.

  Things were fine with the band and the four of us for a long time after high school. We got to be good musicians, discovered that Joss had a real knack for songwriting, and got along as well as any four twenty-something guys could.

  Eventually, we started to get noticed. We played all the big clubs in and around Portland, and we got picked up by our manager, Dave. As the years went by, though, one of us was losing himself, and the rest of us either didn’t want to notice or were too young and stupid to understand what was happening.

  Walsh is the best guy you could ever meet. He’s easygoing, sunny tempered, and
as loyal as they come. He and his wife, Tammy, have been together since they were fourteen. Tammy’s a piece of work, but Walsh loves her, and I figure that’s all that matters. She’s a hell of a music manager too, and I’m grateful for the help she gave Lush and the help she’s given Jenny these last few months too.

  But after high school, while Lush was growing, Walsh was too. He was growing a serious addiction to alcohol. It all exploded two years ago on our first big solo tour. We were crisscrossing the country, playing medium-sized venues, on our own tour bus, headlining over local opening acts. The business side of things was going great, but Walsh and his drinking were becoming a bigger and bigger problem.

  Tammy and Joss tried everything they could to keep him under control, but he was impossible. If you gave him any downtime or freedom, he’d head straight to the nearest bottle. When things finally came to a head in the now infamous gas station incident, Tammy checked him into a rehab facility about an hour north of Portland and we ended the tour.

  If I’d had the ability to read the future, I’d have known that Walsh’s addiction was the beginning of the end of everything I loved. The band, the guys, the music. But at the time, I was as oblivious to the dangers as everyone else. When I finally found Joss and Tammy in bed together, it was too late. The damage was done, even though it took another year for the sick truth to come out.

  I shake my head as I do another pull-up. As much as I try not to, I still have visions of that moment. The sense of betrayal I felt. The disgust as I heard them in the bedroom. The sinking sensation that everything I’d relied on since I was sixteen years old had just exploded in my face—exactly like it all had before. There’s nothing quite like having history repeat itself, and not for the first time, I wonder why I have this darkness inside me that leads me to these places and causes those around me to do such horrible things.

  I’ve just finished my last rep when I hear the door to the fitness room open. I look up into the mirror I’m facing and there she is—the single best thing that’s happened to me since I found Joss and Tammy that night. Hell, since I found Loretta and him. I look at the curtain of golden hair that falls down from the ponytail at the back of her head and the tight tank top that stretches across her perfectly round, firm breasts. Her big, bright-blue eyes meet mine in the mirror and I see the corners of her pink lips turn up as she sees me. God, she’s so beautiful that it steals my breath away. I turn and step toward her.

  “Hi, gorgeous,” I say as I place my hand on the smooth skin of her arm. “How’d you sleep?”

  Jenny

  SOME DAYS I wake up and I’m amazed by my life. For my first twenty-four years I was on a predictable track. A road planned for me by my parents. It led me to go to Texas State University at Waco, get a teaching degree and come back to my hometown where I got a job teaching kindergarten. It led me to sing in the choir at my daddy’s church, date the assistant pastor, and eat dinner with my parents every Sunday and Thursday nights.

  I’m not sure when the change began. As much as my parents would like to blame it on Mike Owens, I realize it was growing long before I met him. Something inside of me knew that the path I was on wasn’t the right one. I had music in my soul, it was crying to come out, and along with it were these ideas—ideas about who I could be, how I wanted to live, and what was right and wrong in the world.

  Then I met Michael, and all my ideas became possible. A new road appeared, and every part of me rejoiced in a wholly different way. Michael Owens, guitarist for Lush walked into a tiny, run down, country bar and told me I could have anything I wanted and everything I’d ever dreamed. It’s a heady sensation to be plucked from obscurity, to have the whole world opened to you when you’ve spent twenty-four years hearing about what you can’t do rather than what you can.

  It’s no small wonder I fell in love with the man who gave me that high.

  I’m watching that man now as he works out. It’s one of my favorite times of the day. I usually track him down in the hotel gym first thing in the morning just so I can see this sight. He’s big—like, massive—his muscles straining out of whatever shirt he might be wearing, and just plain straining when he’s not wearing a shirt like today. He’s covered in tattoos, tribal patterns swirling over his shoulders and down his pecs all the way to that incredible ‘v’ that leads south alongside his perfect six-pack.

  My daddy and brother are men of God, the mind, and philosophy. They’re handsome men, but in a completely different way than Mike. Mike is sex, pure and simple. He oozes it from his pores, whispers it from his lips. All it takes is one heated look from him and I’m a goner, panties wet, short of breath, warm from head to toe.

  The only problem is he doesn’t want me back. For some reason, Michael has put me on a pedestal so high that not even he’s allowed to reach for it. He thinks I’m this perfect, innocent, girl made of glass that will shatter if he gets too close. And I am a virgin, but I’m far from perfect or innocent, and I sure as heck won’t shatter from the likes of him. In fact, I might just be more than he can handle if he ever gives me a chance.

  Every day that we’re together I crave his touch, burn inside when I look at him, and dream of what he would feel like doing bad things to me. But the man who blew apart my world, opened windows to my soul, and freed my heart would rather spend his Friday and Saturday nights screwing trash he picks up at the bars we play in.

  So, I get this part of him—the protective-best-friend part. The do-anything-for-me, worship-me-from-afar part, and while I wouldn’t trade that part for all the tea in China, I would also do most anything to get the part those trashy women do. I want all of Michael—the good, the bad, the outrageously sexy. He’s brilliant, talented, unpredictable, and hotter than an afternoon in a Texas oilfield. What woman wouldn’t want that?

  “How’d you sleep?” he asks in that delicious, low voice of his.

  “Like a baby,” I answer, shivering from the brief touch he places on my arm. “Are you done already?”

  “I’ve lifted. I’ll stay with you if you want to run,” he answers.

  I smile and we both climb up on treadmills. We’re in perfect sync with this routine now. We’ve been touring all summer, alternating between Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio. I like my teaching job back home in my little town two hours south of Dallas, but I’ve always wanted to sing. I love music more than just about anything,, although Michael’s becoming a close second.

  As I settle into a comfortable pace on the treadmill, I think back to the night I met Michael. I was doing an open-mic gig at the local bar in my hometown. I sang a couple of country standards, playing along on my guitar. I can get by, but I’ll never be a great guitar player. Little did I know that one of the world’s best guitarists was sitting at the small, sticky table a few feet away.

  After the show, Michael introduced himself. He thought that, since I sing country music, I wouldn’t know who he was, but you’d have to have been living under a rock the last few years not to know the lead guitarist of Lush. After I regained the power of speech, I talked to him and learned that he was in town to help out his friend Walsh, the drummer from Lush. Walsh has been through some hard times, and he was living out at the Double A ranch, trying to stay sober and get over his then-ex, Tammy. Michael was living out at the Double A too, working on the ranch and helping out his friend.

  I remember thinking how generous he was to leave his whole life behind just to help a friend. I didn’t realize then that generous is Michael’s middle name. Most people would never see it. They’d be turned off by his exterior, his snarky remarks, his tough-guy looks. But make no mistake—Michael Owens is one of the most generous souls you’ll ever encounter.

  After that first meeting, we started getting together at my little house on Saturday mornings to play music. He was so gentle with me, teaching me new things on the guitar, helping me find my style and voice. After a few weeks of working with him, my music was a hundred times better. Then he started talking about how he wanted to h
elp me record an actual album. I was like a pig in mud I was so happy.

  Now, six months later, Walsh and Tammy have worked out all their differences—to the point that they’re married with a baby on the way. They like Texas enough that they bought a house in Dallas and they split their time between here and Portland. Tammy is my manager while Michael and Walsh play in my band—for the summer, anyway. I know they’re just taking a break and having fun for a few weeks, but they’ve launched me like nothing else could have.

  The summer is winding down, my tour will finish in a few more weeks, I’ll have to go back to my teaching job, Walsh and Tammy will be staying in Portland for the fall to have the baby, and Michael hasn’t told me his plans. We keep up this dance, pretending all of this will never change, and he keeps me at a distance. Maybe he really doesn’t want me. Maybe I’m just too dull for him. But the closer we get to the end of the tour, the more frantic I feel. I don’t want him to leave my life, I don’t want to lose the freedom and the possibility that he brings me. I don’t want to find a new best friend. I just want Michael.

  “So, I talked to a real estate agent yesterday,” he says, not even breathing hard as he runs full out next to me. “She has three houses for me to look at today.”

  “You’re going to buy a house here in Dallas?” I ask, doubting. Michael has a tendency to do spontaneous things. They rarely mean much.

  “Hell yeah I’m going to buy a house here,” he answers, shooting me a look like I’m crazy.

  “And do what with it? Tammy and Walsh will be in Portland all fall. The tour will be over. You going to sit around in your mansion in Dallas by yourself?”

  “Sunshine.” That’s his nickname for me. He says I’m all that’s light and good, while he’s everything dark and bad. I’d be happy to go dark for him—if he’d just let me. “I’m going to be in Dallas plenty, and so are you.”