Rock Addiction (Rock Kiss #1)(31)

“No, it’s okay.” Her friend turned to face her, soft blonde curls escaping the knot at the nape of her neck. “I miss out on so much because I’m scared—and the thing is, I’m intelligent enough to know it. That just makes it worse.”

“You’re selling yourself short.” Molly wouldn’t allow it. “You said I was brave, but I wouldn’t have made it through high school and foster care without you.” She didn’t know how many times she’d cried in Charlotte’s arms, or turned toward her for silent moral support when the taunts threatened to break her down. “You were my rock.”

“You were mine, too.” Charlotte shook her head, her eyes full of quiet power behind the transparent shield of her glasses. “Don’t let that tough, strong, fifteen-year-old girl down, Molly. Don’t shortchange yourself like I do.”

Heart breaking for what her friend had been through, Molly turned back to face the water before she started crying. “Is it worth it,” she said when she could speak without her voice cracking, “for a single month?”

“That’s for you to decide—but I vote for breaking the bed with Mr. Kissable.” Charlotte fanned her face.

Molly burst out laughing, grateful once again for her best friend. She only wished she could help Charlotte conquer her own fears, convince her to put away the shapeless, unflattering clothes that swamped her tiny frame and let down those pretty curls. But if Molly’s rules were her security blanket, Charlotte’s clothes were hers. “Maybe you need a rock star of your own.”

“No way. I’d rather go to bed with T-Rex.”

Molly’s antennae shot up. That was the second time Charlotte had mentioned her new boss—and she’d linked him to sex, however tenuously. “What’s he look like?” she asked casually.

Scowling, her best friend shrugged. “What most carnivorous monsters look like.”

“Charlie.”

A sigh, pointed chin propped up in fine-boned hands. “The name Gabriel Bishop sound familiar?”

Molly gasped. “No?” Gabriel Bishop, known on the field as “the Bishop,” was a former pro rugby player turned corporate genius. Tall, with wide shoulders and heavily muscled, he was certifiably hot in a hard-sex-and-hard-play kind of way. “Hey! Didn’t you once say you wanted to rip off his shirt and sink your teeth into his pecs?”

Charlotte spluttered at the reminder of her cocktail-induced sigh at the TV screen during a game where Gabriel Bishop had been roped in as a guest commentator. “I swear,” she said, “you have the memory of an elephant!”

“So?” Molly waggled her eyebrows, fingers discreetly crossed and hope a bright, bright flame in her heart.

“That was before I realized he wasn’t human.” With that pert comment, her friend shifted her attention toward the restaurant section of the Viaduct. “I’m starving.”

Luck was with them and they snagged an outdoor table with an amazing view of the water, yachts and other pleasure craft berthed in neat rows in the marina. As they ate, Molly thought of everything her friend had said, everything she herself had decided about stepping out of the box in which she’d lived for so long, and sent Fox a message: Search for Patrick Buchanan and scandal.





Chapter 13


Fox narrowed his eyes at the phone screen when Molly’s name flashed up. He was still pissed at her for hanging up on him, enough that he needed to wait a bit longer—get his boiling temper down to a smolder—before he went after her and got to the bottom of this. Stubborn as he was learning his Molly could be, he hadn’t expected a capitulation.

Tapping to open the message, he frowned, then did the search. “Fuck!” He barely controlled the urge to throw his phone.

Noah, who was sitting on the steps leading down to the sandy beach, while Fox was on the porch above, stopped strumming his guitar. “Care to elaborate, oh articulate one?”

“You know how I said Molly was mine?” He dropped his legs off the railing to hit the deck. “That I planned to convince her to enter into a real relationship?”

“Tough thing to forget.”

“Yeah, well, I was an arrogant prick.” Not just then, but today, when he’d told her it wouldn’t matter if she was snapped. He’d had no f*cking idea who and what he was dealing with; what he’d just learned told him Molly was the last person in the world who’d ever want to be in a relationship with a man whose life was dogged by the prying lens of paparazzi cameras.




Checking her phone again as she entered the apartment after dropping Charlotte off at her town house, Molly felt her stomach drop at the continued lack of a return message from Fox. He was likely busy with his bandmates, she told herself, not the kind of man who’d have bothered to go immediately online to follow a cryptic message from a woman he’d known less than a week.

Or maybe he’d done the search, realized how messed up she really was, and decided to cut his losses.

A stabbing pain in her chest.

Swallowing past it to release a trembling exhale, she kicked off her shoes and wandered into the bedroom to change into flannel pajama pants and a faded gray T-shirt. That done, she shoved her feet into her silly purple slippers and, pulling her hair back into a ponytail, went into the bathroom to wash off her makeup and brush her teeth. Smoothing in some moisturizer at the end, she settled into bed and picked up a romance novel she’d been looking forward to finishing.