He was willing to take the hit, give her the reassurance she needed.
"Let me do my job, David," Thea said. "I need to do that right now."
It took a lot to make David truly angry, but at that instant something snapped. His shocked disbelief at Naomi's actions and his fear of losing Thea smoldered into anger so deep that he lost it. "That's how much you trust me?" he said, seeing red. "Not even enough to give me a shot to explain? Fuck that, Thea! I can't spend my life trying to prove myself to you!"
"David--"
"You want to do your job? Go, do it. I can't take this shit." He threw the phone at the wall so hard the screen splintered, then he just sat there, trembling.
All this time, everything they'd become to one another, and she chose to believe a random stranger's accusations over him. She'd made a judgment and found him guilty without so much as a single question about his guilt or innocence. That was what hurt the worst--Thea hadn't even given him a chance, as if she'd been waiting for him to screw up, waiting for him to prove that she'd been right about musicians all along.
Maybe... maybe it was time he accepted that he could never convince Thea he was a man in whom she could put her faith. The thought tore out his heart. He loved her, would lay the world at her feet if she asked, and she couldn't give him this much?
A cursory knock before Abe popped his head through the door David hadn't bothered to lock. "Hey, man, I heard a noise. You okay?"
"No." He told the other man about Naomi's claim but didn't mention Thea. He couldn't say her name right now, couldn't even think about her if he was to function. She'd stomped on his heart as if it were a worthless token.
"Shit." He shoved both hands through his hair. "I have to call my folks." This would devastate them--they'd opened their home to Naomi, and now the girl was about to smear their name, turning them into pariahs in the neighborhood they loved.
Abe folded his arms, the new piercing in his eyebrow catching the light. David and Fox had gone with him when he'd had it done a couple of days back. He'd pretended to whimper at the sight of the piercing needle while the two of them laughed and asked him if he needed his blankie.
That day seemed a lifetime ago now, David's life having shifted brutally on its axis in the past minutes. It felt as if he was looking down a narrow, dark tunnel with no end.
"This girl's looking to shake you down." Abe's heavy scowl grew darker. "Don't buckle under the pressure. You know the suits are going to tell you to settle if it looks to drag on. Don't do it."
"I fucking won't. I told them to tell Naomi that until we have the results of a paternity test, she's getting exactly zero dollars." David didn't care if Naomi decided to badmouth him all over the media, not as long as the people who knew him believed the truth.
Except it appeared he'd already lost one person he'd thought would stick. Thea had been loyal to her bastard of an ex to the end, but clearly she'd never given David that part of herself. He'd been a love-blind idiot, fooling himself that the sexy, talented, beautiful girl who held his heart wanted him for keeps.
Teeth clenched, he went to pick up his phone. It refused to turn on. "Broken." He dropped it on the bed when he'd much rather have thrown it at the wall again. "Can I borrow yours?" He didn't trust the hotel lines, not with something so sensitive.
"Sure, yeah." Abe passed it over. "You want me to tell the others?"
"Yeah, thanks." They had to know in case this blew up into a tabloid shitstorm.
Getting up as the door closed behind Abe, David splashed cold water on his face, wiped it off with rough motions, then called his parents.
Six hours after his world had imploded, David went onstage and played out his rage and his anger on the drums. Fox, Abe, and Noah had banded around him in unspoken support, altering the set so he could bang out the hard rock pieces until his arms quivered and he could handle the ballads that required a gentler touch.
Despite their adamant belief in him, he was in no mood to be with anyone. Leaving straight after the concert rather than sticking around to sign autographs or grab a drink, he went to his hotel room intending to strip off and get into workout gear so he could go for a run. He was sweaty from the concert, his muscles aching, but his body burned with rage-fueled energy.
When someone knocked on the door just after he'd peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and kicked off his boots, he wrenched it open, intending to tell whoever it was to fuck off... and found himself face-to-face with the last person he'd expected to see.
Eyes glittering and body clad in a white sheath dress, her hair in the elegant twist that drove him crazy, and cherry-red stilettos on her feet, Thea shoved past him into the room. He slammed the door shut and locked it for good measure. If they were going to have this out, they'd have it out here and now.
"What?" he snarled, more angry, more hurt than he'd ever been in his life. "Come to get my side of it in case you need to put out a statement as part of your job?"
Throwing her purse on one of the armchairs in the living area of the suite, she strode over and shoved at his chest. It didn't move him even an inch--Thea might be tall, but she was also slender and nowhere near as strong as him. But the contact had a physical effect all right, the same effect she always had on him. As if she was meant to be his, as if she was his. Teeth grinding down as his jaw clenched, he fought the urge to touch her, waiting to hear what she had to say.
"How long have you known me?" she demanded, answering her own question before he could say anything--not that he was certain he was rational enough to answer. "Long enough to know I work things out by focusing on what needs to be done right then! You've seen me do--"
Grabbing her by the wrists, he hauled her against him. "So believing in me is something you need to work through?" He could hardly breathe. "I guess that answers my question about trust."
"No, it doesn't." Her eyes were molten with fury. "I'd found out only minutes before your call, spent that time making sure the media didn't have a hold of the allegations, that I didn't need to spin into damage-control mode."
"Damage control." He bit off the words. "Nice to know you were so emotionally distraught."
"I couldn't let myself be Thea who's in a relationship with you!" It came out a yell. "I had to be Thea, your publicist." Cool, calm, rational, that was who she'd been at the instant he'd called, who she'd needed to be to protect him. "You couldn't give me a minute to think, to switch gears?"
"Fuck it, Thea. You shouldn't need to think!"
"Yeah? How would you react if you got a call telling you I'd walked into a hotel room hand-in-hand with Eric?"
He staggered as if he'd been kicked. "You'd do that to me over some bullshit claim?"
"No! I was making a point." Chest heaving, Thea tried to hold on to her fury, but the stunned hurt in David's eyes wounded her until it was difficult to remember the reason she'd said what she had. "But there for a second, you believed I would. Didn't you?"
"No!" It was a growl of sound. "I just didn't expect you to say something like that."
"I didn't expect to hear that a teenage girl was saying you'd made her pregnant!" Her breath came fast and shallow, her blood hot. "I shut down when I'm shocked or hurt," she said. "That's what I do, David. You know that, too!"
His fingers flexed on her wrists. "Why were you hurt?" he asked, his voice raw. "Why didn't you just know it was bullshit?"
"I did, you idiot!" she said, kicking at him, she was so damn frustrated. "I just needed that minute to breathe, to think." When she had, every cell in her body had rejected the idea that David would seduce a young girl, then abandon her. Neither possibility even remotely fit the man she'd come to know in the years since they'd met. He just wouldn't do anything so dishonorable.
David maneuvered her so her back was pressed to the door, finally releasing her wrists to slap his hands palms-down on either side of her. "I don't want you to need that minute." Harsh words, his jaw a brutal line. "I don't want you to have to think even that much. I want you
to trust me so deep and true it's in your blood."
"Do you see where I am now, David?"
He frowned. "What?"
"I'm in your hotel room, which happens to be in the wrong state from where I should be, getting ready to handle any media fallout. I cut myself off from the world for the hours it took to fly here."
His eyebrows drew together. "You put us above work."
Yes, she had. But that wasn't the point. Shoving her hands into his hair, she held on tight, her gaze locked to his. "I came to you," she whispered, her throat gritty and eyes hot. "Even though the rational, logical part of me said I should cut my losses, that you were only doing what musicians do, I came to you."
She pulled his hair when he would've spoken, anger apparent in the flattening of his lips. "I came because I knew it was all a lie. I knew it so deep that none of the rational reasons mattered." Emotion a knot in her throat, she swallowed. "So you damn well give me my minute until I don't need it anymore, until the scars inside me are healed over completely!"
David's entire body trembled as the fury and force of Thea's words slammed through him. "How long?" It came out a rasp.
"Stubborn."
"I can't handle it, Thea," he admitted, stripping himself bare. "Even that minute. I fucking love you too much." His biceps clenched, his abdomen taut as he waited for her to take that minute that so wounded him, to think about what to say, how to respond.
"I fucking love you, too," she said on the heels of his words and hauled his stunned face to hers for one hell of a kiss. "And could you please try to be a little more romantic next time?"
The fist that had gripped his heart, squeezing until it bled, eased its pitiless hold at her bad-tempered demand. "Say it again," he whispered on a convulsive shudder. "I've been waiting forever."
"I love you." She punctuated each word with a kiss. "I'm also infuriated with you." More kisses. "If you ever hang up on me again after yelling at me, I will--"
He swallowed her words in an openmouthed kiss that was pure sex, one hand thrust into her hair. The twist unraveled under his roughness, liquid silk over his hands. Thea loved him; she'd said it without hesitation, without even a split second's delay after his own declaration.
The woman he adored loved him.
She'd been kicked hard with the news of Naomi's claim. He could see that now the haze of wounded anger had passed, see that she'd needed to catch her breath. As he had when she'd spoken about going into a hotel room with her ex.
"Don't you ever say anything like that about your ex again," he said as he pulled up the skirt of her dress to expose her panties. "Don't, Thea."
"I won't," she promised, her breath hot against him, their lips a hairsbreadth apart. "I'm so sorry, baby. It just came out."
"Me, too." Pulling at her panties, he got them halfway down her thighs. "I shouldn't have bitten your head off."
Making hotly feminine movements, she got the bit of lace and string she called panties the rest of the way down and stepped out of them. He hitched her up on his hips the next instant, having undone his jeans and shoved both the denim and his underwear down. Her long legs locked around him. Able to feel the damp heat of her against his cock, he went to thrust, froze, every muscle in his body at breaking point.
"Fuck. Condom." He wanted to be skin to skin with her, wanted to mark her in the most primitive way, but he would not take what she didn't want to give.
"Do I need to worry about anything?" she asked, kissing and nibbling at his throat, her hands possessive on his shoulders, his nape.
"No."
"Neither do you."
Fingers digging into her butt as he understood that she'd not only accepted his word without that stupid minute she seemed to think she needed, she'd offered him an intimacy so intoxicating he'd shared it with no other woman. Never wanted to.
"I won't last." They were the last coherent words he said before he shoved into her in a single hard thrust.
Her scream was in his mouth and then it was only the slap of their bodies, one against the other, the wet, slick sound of his cock moving in her, her body liquid for him, their breaths gasped-in amidst hungry kisses.
"David, David, David!" She clamped down on his cock on another scream, orgasming so hard that she took him with her.
Chapter 14
They ended up naked in bed afterward, and he ended up in her again after an interval of a few short minutes, his need for her a huge thing inside him. She moaned and held him close with her amazing legs around his body and her hands on his sweat-slick arms, her internal tissues rippling around him.
"I don't think I can move after that orgasm." A throaty moan.
"Just lie back and let me love you," he said, stroking in and out of her in a slow, deep rhythm that made her skin shimmer and her breath catch, the taut, bitable mounds of her breasts topped by pebbled nipples. "You're wet with both of us and it's so hot, you have no idea."
"You feel amazing in me." Throat arching as she leaned up to lick at him with erotic little flicks of her tongue, she said, "Can you keep doing that forever?"
"Maybe if you weren't so fucking sexy." He closed his hand over one pretty breast and bent to kiss her.
It was a long, slow ride this time. He watched her go over again, his beautiful Thea, and then he pushed deep and pulsed wet inside her as she held him with feminine possessiveness, her lips kissing and caressing.
She continued to pet him afterward. Sinking into it after flipping them over so his weight wasn't crushing her, he luxuriated in the softness of her fingers on his chest, the feathery brush of her hair, the damp heat of her mouth when she kissed around the flat disks of his nipples, then the firm strength of her teeth as she took one small nub between her teeth and tugged.
His hand clenched in her hair. "I never realized how much I'd like that." No other woman had ever spent this kind of time on him--he hadn't missed it then, but he'd miss it like hell if Thea ever stopped.
Her chuckle husky, she pressed a kiss to his breastbone before giving his other nipple the same treatment. Shivering, the response one he couldn't control, he stroked his hand down her spine. She licked over the tiny bite before shifting lower and sucking on his skin.
"I love the way you taste." It was a purr.
Drawing in a deep breath, she blew it out over the skin she'd just sucked.
His well-sated cock twitched. "That's..." Words fading into a groan when she moved her mouth to suck on a spot on his hip that had him shuddering, he pulled at her hair. "Better stop that if you don't want round three."
She smiled against him, looked up, eyes sparkling. "That's not a very good threat."
His heart ached. "You're incredible, you know that?" Everything he'd ever wanted, every dream he hadn't realized he had.
Prowling up over his body, she nuzzled her nose against his. "I'm sorry I hurt you." Soft, husky words. "I didn't mean to." No shields in her expression, no barriers between them. "I trust you, David. In every way."
"I know." He cupped the side of her face. "I'm sorry you had to hear the news while you were alone and I wasn't there to hold you."
Love shining in her eyes, Thea kissed him slow and sweet before saying, "We have to talk."
His gut tightened, shoulders going stiff, but he nodded. "I honestly have no idea why Naomi would do this," he said. "I never had much contact with her beyond seeing her at my folks' house when she visited my brother, and she seemed like a nice girl." He'd been racking his brain to figure out why she'd put this on him, had come up blank. "As far as I know, she's not even a Schoolboy Choir fan. Zeke never asked for an extra ticket for her like he does for his other friends."
Thea could see David's frustration, feel his anger, but she couldn't permit that to distract her, not when this could strike a devastating blow to his reputation. Many people would say it didn't matter--the public expected rock stars to break the rules, would continue to buy his music. But it mattered to David, and he mattered to her.
David wo
uld be cleared by the paternity test, but by then, the damage would've been done, with some people always believing the lies. He was strong, would deal with it, but his parents called that neighborhood home. The innuendo would destroy their peace and happiness--yet Thea knew in her gut that the Riveras would be the first to tell David to stand his ground.
So would Thea.
He deserved better than to be blackmailed into an implied acceptance of wrongdoing when he was in the right. "Do you know anything about Naomi beyond her friendship with your brother?"
Folding one arm under his head, the other around her, David frowned. "Only reason I registered her at all was because I knew Zeke had a thing for her; she came across as sweet, maybe a little introverted. Other than that..." He paused, then said, "She used to wear a small gold cross around her neck. My mom wears one, too, that's why I remember it. I'm pretty sure she came to their place after mass at least once while I was there, so I think she must be Catholic."
Thea began to get a glimpse of the fear and avarice that might be driving this deception. "Catholic girl, possibly with a strict family"--a fact she'd check--"gets pregnant by a boyfriend, and when she can't hide it anymore, she throws the blame on you."
"Figuring no one would dispute her claim since I'm a degenerate, immoral musician." Grim words. "Thea, she wants people to believe I fucked a child."
"I'm pretty sure part of it is fear," Thea said, stroking back his hair. "But money's just as big a motive. She's asking for a massive whack as child support--and she came in with a hotshot lawyer."
"If she thinks I'll roll over and throw money at her to shut her up, she's in for a rude surprise." Anger thrummed under his skin, but Thea could see it was a cold anger now, David's fury having iced over.
"I think she's probably already received that message." Thea felt at once sorry for the girl and blindingly angry with her for so cavalierly playing with the life of a good man. "There has to be someone else pushing her to do this--I can't see the girl you described coming up with this on her own."