“No.” Kit knew she should keep her distance, but that wasn’t who she was when it came to people she cared about—and hell, that was the wrong direction to take. She couldn’t care about Noah, not that much. But she did. Despite everything, she did, and it was tearing her apart. “Bad news?”
Blowing out a breath, he turned on the music.
Kit kept her silence though frustration churned inside her. He’d always done this with certain questions. Just ignored them. Back when they’d been close, she’d excused it as him not wanting to talk about things that were too personal. Only later had she realized that she didn’t really know much about Noah beyond his current life. Except for the odd comment about his troubled relationship with his parents, his entire past had been a no-go zone.
As a result, she wasn’t expecting him to speak, was startled when he did.
“It was my father.”
Kit took in his rigid shoulders, the hand gripping the steering wheel with bruising force. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing. I’ve been ordered to show my face at some charity gala they’re sponsoring not this Saturday but the next.”
Kit frowned. “You don’t do anything you don’t want to do, Noah.” Anyone who’d had even limited contact with him knew that.
“Yeah, well, he brought my aunt Margaret into it. Aside from Emily, she’s the only person with an actual heart in my family, and she’s the head of the charity.”
He had mentioned his aunt once when Kit complimented him on a shirt he was wearing. He’d said it was from his aunt—she couldn’t remember why they hadn’t spoken more about it, but then Noah was very good at distracting her, intentionally or not. “So you’ll go?”
His hand tightened further on the steering wheel. “Yeah. Fuck.” Exhaling loudly, he seemed to consciously flex his fingers before curving them around the leather again. “I don’t suppose you want to subject yourself to a couple of hours of social torture?”
Kit froze.
“Shit, sorry.” Noah shoved a hand through his hair. “Forget that. No need to ruin your Saturday night too.”
There it was, the out she needed. But she also saw the angry tension in his body, and she remembered the syringe and the motel room and her terror at the thought that she might lose him forever. “I’ll go,” she said before her mind could override her heart. “The idea of rocking a glam gown will motivate me to move during my sessions with Steve.”
Kit liked to eat, but given her profession, that meant she had to stick to a strict exercise regimen—including a two-hour session booked for later today. But even though she’d been known to call her trainer Macho Steve, the Evil Personal Trainer, she generally enjoyed the workouts. “Plus my being snapped at a big event will make my publicist happy.”
Noah’s responding glance was unexpectedly grim. “How about if you get caught being my date? What’s Thea going to say to that?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been photographed with the band so much no one takes any hookup rumors seriously anymore.” That wasn’t quite true, but her PR person could spin it that way.
Thank God Thea had decided to take Kit on as a client. Thea hadn’t really had the time, not with handling Schoolboy Choir and a few legacy clients, but when she saw Kit beginning to drown under the deluge of publicity after Last Flight, she’d stepped in.
“You sure?” Noah returned his attention to the road, his shoulders no longer as stiff, his jawline relaxing. “It won’t be fun.”
Kit’s heart tried to read hopeful, romantic things in Noah’s response to the idea of her company. She shut it down with teeth-clenched will. “That’s what friends are for.”
Chapter 10
Noah fell asleep at three that morning, was awake by six. As far as nights went, it hadn’t been a bad one. He’d slept deeply from start to finish. After showering and shaving, he pulled on a pair of jeans so ragged he found new tears in them daily, grabbed a mug of coffee and his guitar, and went to sit by the pool.
Though he’d meant to work on new material, he started to play the song about a sparrow caught in a net, its wings broken, who somehow found the strength to fly free. Kit saw hope in that song, saw courage. Noah didn’t have the heart to tell her it was about death. Because that sparrow with his broken wings would never be able to fly. He’d fall to the earth, lie bleeding until he breathed his last breath.
The only possible freedom was the final one.
Noah sang softly as he strummed the guitar, fully conscious that this song could be seen as a suicide note. It wasn’t and never would be. He might’ve fucked up when drunk out of his skull, but he’d never consciously chosen death. That meant little though, not if he was holing up in motel rooms and shoving poison into his veins. The choice might not be a conscious one, but it was still a choice.
Like the choice he made at eleven that night when the nightmares became too loud, the demons too vicious. It was painfully easy to find women who wanted to screw him. At least the pitiless god who’d given him this life had also given him looks that made women gravitate toward him. He picked up a starlet who had lips plumped up with filler and breasts taut with silicone, and he fucked her against the brick wall behind a club after she gave him head.
When they were done, she called him “baby” and slipped him her number. He didn’t even know her name until he glanced at the little piece of paper. Waiting until she was back in the club, he scrunched up the note paper and threw it in the dumpster not far down the alley. Then he walked down the street and toward another bar bursting at the seams.
There was a line, one he could’ve easily circumvented, his face so well known that he didn’t have to introduce himself to the bouncers. But he didn’t even have to go that far. Two giggling brunettes in skintight minidresses waved at him, and when he smiled and crooked a finger, they squealed and ran over. He walked them back to his car, drove them to his place—the place to which he’d never once invited Kit.
He didn’t take them into the house, however, but into the little guesthouse his architect had talked him into. There was nothing of him in the guesthouse. It might as well have been a hotel room. But it had beds. He picked one—and then he spent the next three hours fucking both brunettes.
It didn’t silence the screams in his head, but for the moments that he was this base, rutting creature, he wasn’t Noah any longer, and if he wasn’t Noah any longer, then he didn’t have to be that scared little boy either. He just became nothing. Empty.
Afterward, he slapped one of the brunettes on the butt and said, “I’ve called you a car.”
She gave him big, hurt eyes. “You’re kicking us out?”
“You knew the deal.” The hurt was well-practiced. “If you wanted the white picket fence, you wouldn’t have come home with me.” Noah’s reputation left no room for misconceptions or false hopes; he’d never made any effort to hide his activities and proclivities.
The brunette got up with a sniff while her companion leaned over and tried to kiss Noah. “No kissing,” he snapped, hauling her back with a hand fisted in her hair. He didn’t know why he’d made that stupid rule—it wasn’t as if it changed anything, but his heart insisted on thinking that it did, that he could keep part of himself pristine.
Clean.
What a load of bullshit. And yet he still couldn’t make himself kiss any woman on the mouth. He sometimes wondered what people would say if they knew Noah St. John, Bad Boy of Rock and King of the One-Night Stand, had never been kissed. “That’s the car,” he said to the women when there was a buzz on his phone.