In For Keeps / Under His Touch

“Hassle?”

“Yeah. I put in an order to have the bed switched out just before I went onstage tonight.”

Kiki laughed deliriously. Dev’s show had started at 8 p.m. in a European city, whose businesses weren’t obsessed with twenty-four-hour shopping like they were in the US. How the hell had he managed to get a new bed purchased, brought in and made up in the past three hours? He was Dev Stone, that was how, and his world was as different from hers as another planet.

But more important, he had done it just for her. It was a piece of information that caught in her chest almost painfully. This was happening too fast. It was never meant to happen at all...because it couldn’t last. She exhaled, determined to rein herself in. “I guess I shouldn’t have doubted it. I forgot that you have people for that kind of—”

Her words froze in her throat as she felt his tongue sweep across her clit. She looked down, meeting his eyes as he shoved her skirt up roughly. He gripped her hips tightly enough to inflict mild pain, but his mouth on her was so gentle it made her cry out with a feeling she couldn’t quite name. The contrast of his desperate need for her and his soft mouth—it was mind-bending.

“The sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted,” Dev whispered before he sunk his tongue all the way inside her. And then his mouth was fastened to her clit, licking and sucking her toward her third climax of the night with the strength and power of a freight train. Before she even knew what was happening, it was washing over her, taking her breath away as her whole body tensed and shook. Finally, she released with a long sigh and collapsed onto the mattress.

And yet she still wasn’t satisfied. No—she was voracious, made of pure lust, and she’d never needed anything more than she needed him.

It was insanity.

Dev stood up and tugged at his towel, dropping it to the floor. His cock was so hard it barely fell forward. “See what you do to me?”

The sight of him naked kicked her heartbeat up even further. His wet hair lay over his brow in that way she loved, highlighting his aqua eyes. His abs rippled as he braced his arms on the bed on either side of her. “Are you ready for me to fuck you?”

She thrust her chest up and spread her legs open. “Never readier.”

As Dev reached for a condom and put it on, her pulse jumped with delicious anticipation. God, he was going to make her scream—

Her mind screeched with a sobering thought. “What about that?” she asked, gesturing to the cab up front.

“Soundproof,” Dev assured her.

“A must for any horny rock star.”

“Stop calling me that,” he said, reaching for her waist.

“So you’re not horny?”

“What does it feel like to you?”

Before she knew it, he’d flipped her onto her front like a rag doll. She gasped as he pulled her hips back and filled her opening with the tip of his cock. But then he stopped, teasing her as he moved those two inches in and out of her. A fresh wave of lust gripped her like a fist. “Dev. Fuck,” she moaned.

“At your command,” he said, and with that he slammed himself into her up to the hilt. When he paused for a moment, she turned around to look at his face. It was the picture of ecstasy, driving her extreme arousal even higher. He locked his eyes onto hers, and then he leaned over her back and bit her earlobe. “Are you getting this, Kiki? How we feel together? It’s not just me, is it?”

Being filled with him was so good she could barely speak, but she tried. “No,” she managed just before he started to move. And God, how he moved. Every beautiful muscle in his torso tensed as he thrust into her mercilessly, driving himself toward what she could only imagine was his own pent-up pleasure. And she was the lucky recipient of his urgency. She dropped her chest to the bed to allow him to go deeper. “Yes!” she cried, countering his every movement with a stroke of her own.

Dev’s hands went to her shoulders, caressing them gently as he plunged into her with one final, impossibly deep thrust. She heard a low growl come out of him as he trembled behind her, lost in the climax of their passion.

At last he collapsed onto her back. “Jesus, Strawberry. How did I live without you for even one day?”

“Shit!”

The word, spat out furiously, jolted Dev awake. He bolted upright in bed, nearly banging his head on the overhead shelf. The bedside light was still on, illuminating the panic on Kiki’s face as her eyes darted around the room. Beneath them he could hear the low whine of the engine as the bus made its way steadily south toward Rome.

Dev put a hand on her arm, stroking it soothingly. “I should have warned you that it can take some getting used to. Pretty soon you’ll find that the movement will actually help you sleep.”

“It’s not that!” Kiki said, swinging her legs out of bed and reaching for her bra. “I should be on my bus!”

Dev shook his head as discouragement filled his chest. After everything that had happened yesterday, was he really back to square one with her? “I want you to stay with me. I thought that was obvious.”

“That’s not—”

“Do you need something? I have toothbrushes. Contact lens solution. Even pajamas with teddy bears on them if you want.” His eyes were on her face but hers were everywhere else, like a wild animal preparing to flee.

What’s wrong? Everything had been going so well, but maybe he’d let things go too far. Kiki had fallen asleep within minutes of their last encounter, and he’d justified not waking her by telling himself she needed the rest. He knew she was exhausted from the stupid prank he’d pulled the night before, and even if it had led her back to him, he was still feeling guilty about it. But in his heart he’d known he was being selfish—he’d just wanted to have her there beside him. To keep her in his arms where he could pretend his life was something resembling normal as long as she was with him. What was it about this woman, with her skyscraper-high walls and infuriating independence, that made him want to delve into every part of her? Not just her body, but her mind, her likes and her dislikes, her dreams and fears?

Kiki was fastening her bra and pulling the straps up over her shoulders, snap snap. “You’re kidding me, right? Have you forgotten that I’m supposed to be your employee? How do you think I’m going to feel doing the walk of shame back to my bus?” She glared at him. “You’ve never even thought about that, have you? How I’m going to look in front of everyone now. It’s fucking embarrassing, if I have to spell it out for you.”

Jesus—she was furious, and she was also right. Dev hadn’t considered for a moment how any of this would impact her life. Overtaken with a consuming need he could barely control, he’d only been thinking about his own desires—as per usual, as his brother, Alex, would have said.

“Look, Kiki, this isn’t just for right now, okay? I want you with me.” When she continued to ignore him, he grasped her chin gently and turned her face toward him. “Will you look at me, please? I want you, Strawberry. For the whole tour.” And longer, he thought, but he stopped himself. He had to keep his head sane and take this one step at a time—for both of their sakes.

“Fine,” she said, reaching for her skirt. “But I still have a job to do, and the line between work and play is looking pretty damned blurry to me right now. I can’t just—”

“So I’ll find another assistant! The last thing I want is for you to be uncomfortable. But we can find a way to make this work, okay?”

The quick tensing of her mouth told him he’d said exactly the wrong thing. “By quitting my job? I know it may not seem important to you, rock star, but this is my life! And what do you mean, make this work? This was never even supposed to happen!” She was making a lunge for her sweater when he caught her around the waist. She strained against his grip, but he refused to let go. He landed a soft kiss on her tensed shoulder blade and spoke to her softly.

“Yes, but it did,” he said, moving her hair to one side so he could kiss the back of her neck. “Kiki, listen. If you want to leave because you don’t want to be with me, you never have to set foot in this bus again. But if it’s just because of what you’re worried other people will think? Life is too short.”

“Easy for you to say when the whole world loves you,” she said hotly, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Funny, that’s what Alex always says to me. Only it’s not that simple.”

When she didn’t respond, he took her arms and gently uncrossed them, and then he slid his hands down to entwine them with hers. “When I was younger, I used to stress out a lot about my career. My mother was still alive back then, and she used to quote me this old saying, that I could please all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time. I tried going with option two because to me my fans and my managers were all the people I thought I needed. It worked for a while, until I discovered that the one person I wasn’t pleasing was maybe the most important.”

“And who was that?” Kiki asked, her voice still edgy.

“Myself.”

“Oh, yeah? So what did you do about it?”

Dev shook his head. “I’m still working on it. Money might buy me a new bed in three hours, but it doesn’t solve most problems in life that really matter.”

Kiki was silent for a moment. “So why weren’t you pleased with yourself?”

Dev took a slow breath, metering his response. He certainly wasn’t about to tell her the whole truth, but for the first time in his life, the idea of sharing his burden with someone was profoundly tempting. Not just someone—with her, the person he’d come to trust in a terrifyingly short amount of time. “I made some compromises to have the career I wanted,” he began carefully. “When I first started out, being up onstage wasn’t what I thought it would be. I’d loved performing since I was a kid. I used to put on shows for my friends—you know, get up on my bed and pretend it was my stage. When I finally got the chance in real life I thought I’d kill it, but I was scared shitless. So I turned to some calming methods I shouldn’t have.”

“You mean drugs,” Kiki clarified.

“Yes. And way too much bourbon.”

“But that was a long time ago, right? You own that stage now.”

His gut clenched. If she only knew. “Sure, but it still comes at a price. And I’ve gone through my whole life feeling like I never had license to verbalize any of it, because I knew I was the luckiest bastard alive. Most people have to starve for years before they make it big, and my dream came true at twenty. So a few years ago I started talking about it. Doing interviews that brought the image of the infallible, glamorous rock star down to earth. I wanted people to know that we have just as many problems as anyone else, they’re just a different variety. That was more important to me than public adoration.” Except that he still hadn’t admitted the worst of it, hadn’t exposed the true depth of his weakness to the world—and he never could.

“I guess that’s why you hate it when I call you that,” Kiki said. Her back was still to him, but there was a hint of a smile in her voice. “Rock star.”

“Sure, but you know what I love about you? That you know none of this about me. You haven’t read a single article or watched a single interview with Dev Stone. I don’t impress you, and that’s exactly what I need.”

She finally looked over her shoulder to meet his eyes. “Need for what?”

Too much. Too soon.

Dev kissed her shoulder one more time, scooted to the end of the bed and tugged his boxer shorts on. “You know what would be good for us?”

“You mean besides the obvious?”

He grinned, relieved to see that her sense of humor had returned. He trailed a hand up her thigh. “Don’t get me started.”

Kiki batted his hand away. “Tell me. What do we need?”

Dev grabbed a navy robe from a hook on the wall and tied it around himself. “Say you’ll stay with me tonight and I’ll tell you.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“You’re absolutely right. Will you stay?”

She hesitated a moment, and then she nodded. Relief filled his chest. He placed his hands on the bed, leaned toward her and kissed her. “What we need is our first proper date.”

She snorted. “On a tour? How do you think that’s going to happen?”

“We have tomorrow off, in case you’ve forgotten. Now, no more questions.”

Dev stood up again and made his way to the front of the bus. He was about to do something he could have done with a hundred women over the years, and yet he’d never had the urge to—and suddenly he knew exactly why. Allowing his cock or his ego to choose a woman meant the fun was over the minute the orgasm was. But with Kiki, he got the feeling it was just beginning.

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