Fade Into You (Shaken Dirty #3)(50)
Shaken Dirty had formed in Austin, when lifelong friends Jared Matthews, Ryder Montgomery, Wyatt Jennings, and Micah Tarrent were still in high school. Quinn Bradford was a later addition, having met them in a club after one of their shows nearly a year later. So if Wyatt had grown up in Austin with the others, as the bio claimed, what was all this talk of Springfield?
She clicked back to the tumblr, one that had nearly forty million followers and was obviously one of the most respected in the fandom. Once she did, she searched through the blogger’s list of tags, found the ones that she had basically dedicated to Wyatt.
As Poppy scrolled through them, she felt herself getting more and more confused. Because according to this blogger—Dani was her name—nothing was quite what it appeared when it came to Wyatt Jennings.
For example, he’d said in numerous interviews that he’d grown up on a farm, but then other interviews—and his official bio—talked about him growing up in Austin where there weren’t a lot of farms. In another interview, he’d mentioned that at one time his big claim to fame was that he had gone to Brad Pitt’s middle school. At the time, the interviewer had joked that soon Brad would be claiming to have gone to Wyatt’s middle school and everyone had laughed.
A quick Google search showed her that Brad Pitt had been born in Oklahoma but had moved to Springfield, Missouri, with his family when he was young…So Wyatt had spent a significant amount of time in Springfield, then. How did she not know about this? And why was his official bio disguised to make it look like that wasn’t the case?
Intrigued now, she started combing through the rest of the tags. As she did, she came up with a bunch of things that seemed to contradict the label’s official narrative regarding Wyatt. Little things like when he’d learned to play the drums. Or what musicians had influenced him growing up. Or how old he was when he’d moved out on his own.
There were bigger things, too, though. Things like whether it was his widowed mother who had raised him or his father’s sister. Or disputes on whether or not he’d ever been arrested. On whether or not he had a kid. And even, if she could believe some of the more outrageous conspiracy theories, on whether or not his name was actually even Wyatt Jennings.
Because she was curious, she also searched the other guys. Found little to no ambiguity between the official bio and what the fans held to be true about Ryder, Jared, and Quinn. So it was just Wyatt who things didn’t add up for, Wyatt whose background looked to have been professionally whitewashed, considering almost nothing appeared online about him that dated back more than five or six years. It was like he hadn’t actually existed before Shaken Dirty was signed. But some intrepid fan had actually dug up a birth certificate for him from Missouri twenty-eight years ago, so obviously that wasn’t the case.
Which only made the whole thing weirder. Not to mention setting off every trigger and trust issue she had.
She had just clicked over to another big Ryatt blog, determined to see what this blogger had to say about Wyatt, when the man himself started stirring. He groaned a little, burrowed deeper into the bed. Then flung an arm around her waist and cuddled into her.
“Do you always get up at the crack of dawn?” he asked, his voice all smoke and gravel in the early morning quiet.
“Trying to catch up on some work,” she answered. “Since I spent so much of yesterday either f*cking you or worrying about you, I’m a little behind.”
He grinned and opened one sleepy blue eye. “I thought I was your work.”
“You are, but so are the others. And since I’m not planning on sleeping with any of them, I figure I should do what I came here for and get you guys started on what you can do to maximize your social media exposure.”
“Now you sound like Jamison. She’s always after us to post more pictures or tweet more.”
“She’s totally right. You should do that. But there should be so much more to the strategy than just tweeting more. The sheer number of Tumblr and Instagram accounts devoted to you guys is seriously awe-inspiring. It’s ridiculous that you haven’t been utilizing that kind of unrestricted access to your fan base.”
He snuggled closer, pressed soft kisses to her stomach where her shirt had ridden up. His shirt, she corrected herself. She’d picked it up and shrugged into it when she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom a couple of hours before.
“So instead of waking actual me up to have more incredible sex—”
“Incredible?” She raised a brow.
He just looked back at her blandly. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating by calling it incredible, and I’m pretty sure you don’t either.”
She inclined her head, nodded for him to go on. After all, the man did have a point. It had been several hours since he’d last been inside her, yet her body still felt deliciously and wonderfully used. It was a new experience for her, one she’d never come close to feeling with another guy, and it made her nervous—especially considering everything she’d found out about him today. At the same time, though, she couldn’t help responding to him, her body completely in tune with his after the night they’d spent.
“Instead of doing that,” he continued, “you’re looking at pictures of the rock star version of my friends and me and trying to come up with better ways to promote us? How does that even make sense?”