The Rocker who Cherishes Me
Copyright 2014 Terri Anne Browning
Written by Anne Henson
First Edition
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of these publications may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the Author. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
This is a work of fiction intended for MATURE audiences. Recommended for readers 17 and older due to strong language and sexual situations.
Edited by Lorelei Logsdon
Cover Photo by Shauna Kruse, Models Sean Smith and Rachel Kyburz
Photography by Michael Meadows at Michael Meadows Studio
Models: Matthew Maguire and Carolina Kenney
Cover and Formatting by ShoutLines Design
To my ‘girls’ who always keep me sane when the characters in my head don’t want to give me peace.
There are people in everyone’s lives that you couldn’t live without. I am lucky enough to have friends and loved ones that are my rock, my shoulder to cry on, or bitch to, or any number of crazy things. Mike Browning, Jennie Wurtzburger, and Felicity “Flick” Boulton I love you three more than words could ever describe.
A huge thank you to my BETA readers, who always help me make these books all the better for your enjoyment. Without them I would truly be lost. They talk me down from imaginary ledges that I want to jump off of when my characters won’t go where I want them to.
The biggest thank you is for YOU, my amazing fans. You have helped me reach a dream I never thought would be possible. I could never show you enough how much you are loved and appreciated by me.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgment
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Epilogue
Playlist
A Teaser from The Rocker who Shatters Me
Other Books by Terri
Contact the Author
Natalie
One Year Ago
The concert had been over hours ago, but the band still had another thirty minutes of meeting fans. I tried not to let my irritation at the ten women and five men still standing in line show on my face as I continued to do my job.
I just wanted everyone to leave, so that I could wrap this night up and go out with Devlin. That wasn’t asking too much, was it? To get to spend a little time with my boyfriend, doing what normal couples do rather than having to share him with his fans? Well, I didn’t think it was asking very much.
For the last few days we hadn’t even had a few minutes alone, and it was about to drive me crazy. I couldn’t even kiss the man I loved without having someone pop up on us on the bus, or climb into bed with him at night without something coming up to keep me out of his arms.
I was starting to think that fate didn’t want me and Dev together. But that was ridiculous. It had taken us a long time to get to the place we are now, with us loving each other rather than fighting our feelings. I was happy, and there wasn’t anything on the planet that would keep me from being with Devlin Cutter.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I stopped and my eyes sought out the man in question. He was sitting down at his table while the fans made their way from Axton’s, then to Wroth’s, Zander’s, Liam’s and ending at his. He was smiling up at some guy who was talking a mile a minute. That smile was one of my favorite sights in the world, the way his aquamarine eyes crinkled at the edges and his three-day-old beard hid the dimples that I was such a sucker for. His even, white teeth stood out against his dark tan complexion and made me want to kiss him to see if he still tasted like the toothpaste he’d used before taking the stage earlier that night. My heart melted along with another part of my anatomy when I saw that smile.
“It’s weird that one of my best friend’s sister is dating my dad,” Harris complained as he stopped beside me.
I turned to frown down at him, trying to figure out if he was teasing me or if he was serious. He’d always found something to tease me about over the last few years. He was good friends with my little sister, Jenna, and I’d always had a soft spot for Harris despite the fact that I’d seemed to always be in love with his father from the moment I’d laid eyes on him. But this was a serious matter. If he really thought that it was weird that I was dating his dad, then I wanted to deal with it now.
Harris grinned up at me, reminding me so much of his father that it was hard not to love this kid as if he were my own. Yeah, now that was the weird part. I was twenty-two years old to his fifteen. That was extremely weird to me. “Relax, Nat. I’m just messing with you. I think it’s kind of cool that you are with Dad. He’s smiled a lot more in the last few weeks than I’ve seen him smile in a long time.”
Relief washed over me and I punched him in the arm. “You are such a punk, you know that?”
“Yeah. You tell me that on a daily basis. But you love me anyway.”
“Sadly enough, that’s true.” I punched him again and forced my attention back to the job at hand. I still had things to do so that I could leave when Devlin was finished. “I’ve got stuff to do; wanna help me?”
“You mean work when I could go back to the hotel, order room service and watch newly released movies?” Harris raised a brow at me like I was crazy for even asking such a question. “Yeah, sure, why not? I can help you out, earn brownie points with your sister, and make my dad think that I’m a good kid all at once.”
“Brownie points with Jenna?” I questioned as I led him back toward the stage the band had performed on earlier that night. “Why would you need to earn—?” I broke off when I realized why he would want to. “My sister will never like you like that, Harris.” There were plenty of reasons why I didn’t think that Harris and my sister would be anything other than friends. But the major one was the only one that I needed to know that Harris was wasting his time on Jenna.
My sister had realized when she was fourteen that she wasn’t into guys. Plain and simple. Of course, I was the only one who knew that little piece of information, because Jenna thought our mother would freak out at having a lesbian for a daughter. Jenna wasn’t wrong. Stella Stevenson would probably disown her youngest daughter if she ever found out about her gender preference.
Our mother was a total bitch like that. I hadn’t always thought that way, of course. When you’re a kid you don’t notice the things adults would about someone. It had taken Jenna, however, to open my eyes to our parent’s small-minded bitchiness. When Jenna had run away to find our brothers because she was tired of our mother putting Drake down when Jenna would watch America’s Rocker every week and gush that one of the judges was her brother, I’d seriously opened my eyes.
It was then that I’d realized that my brothers had never been the bad guys, and had their reasons for not wanting a relationship with my dad or me when their own mother had died. It had all been my mother’s doing, and I couldn’t blame Drake and Shane for turning their backs on my dad and me when my mother had forced our dad to turn his back on them when they had needed him so desperately.
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With Harris helping me, it still took more than forty minutes to finish up all the after-show things that needed my attention so that I wouldn’t be as busy the next night. When we were finally finished, I gave the fifteen-year-old a hug and told him to head on back to the hotel. Harris yawned and nodded. “I’m beat. Have fun with Dad.” He grinned, flashing those damn dimples of his that were identical to his father’s and, with a wink, left.
Laughing, I watched him walk away before I shook my head and lowered my gaze back to the list I had in my hands, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I was so lost in thought, my eyes critical on the long list in front of me, that I didn’t hear footsteps until a pair of strong arms wrapped around my waist from behind.
Devlin nuzzled my hair aside with his nose and placed an open-mouthed kiss against the sensitive flesh just under my left ear. “Miss me?”
The mere sound of his deep voice made me shiver and I rocked my hips back against him, delighted at the feel of his hardness growing against my ass. “More than you will ever know,” I assured him as I dropped my clipboard on the ground without caring if I’d finished everything on the list or not. Turning in his arms, I wrapped my own around his neck, letting my eyes drink in the sight of his beautiful face before brushing my lips over his in a teasingly soft kiss.
Just as I knew he would, Devlin made a low grumbling sound deep in his chest, almost like he was purring, and unwrapped his arms from my waist so that his hands could tangle in my long hair. His fingers locked my head into place so that he could take control of the kiss and devour my mouth in a kiss that left me aching for him in a way no one ever had before.
When he finally lifted his head, just an inch or two so that he could brush his lips over the tip of my nose, I was breathing hard and rubbing my lower body against his hard-on. “You ready to go?”
After that kiss I was more than ready, and going to some club where we would be surrounded with countless strangers for a few hours was definitely not what I wanted to be doing. “Can’t we just go back to our hotel room and make love?” I murmured, placing my hands on his chest and tracing little hearts over each male nipple through the material of his OtherWorld T-shirt.
Devlin raised a brow at my request. “What happened to the whining girl who left my bed this morning, complaining about me never taking her out?”
If he hadn’t been smiling I might have slapped his face. I hated it when he teased me like that. But I could tease him, too. “I’m a woman, Dev, not a girl. Your woman,” I murmured in a breathy whisper as I stood on tiptoe so that my kiss-dampened lips could brush over his ear, making him tremble just like I had earlier. “And your woman has every right to change her mind a thousand times before she finally decides to settle on what she really wants. And what your woman wants right now is for you to take her back to your room and let her suck your dick.”
With a muttered curse, Devlin picked me up and tossed me over his shoulder. One big hand swatted across my ass, making a loud smacking sound as he hurried for the closest exit. “You are an evil little bitch, you know that, Nat?”
I propped my head up on my hand so that I didn’t get dizzy from the way he was carrying me. “So you’ve told me a hundred times before. But you like it.”
“No, babe. I fucking love it.” He was practically sprinting as he headed toward a row of taxies waiting in front of the civic center, his long legs eating up the distance in no time. I heard a door open and then he dropped me onto the bench seat before climbing in after me. But instead of the address of our hotel, he gave the name of the club he’d mentioned over lunch earlier that day.
“Dev,” I whined, wanting to just go back to our room and have him sink deep into me for the rest of the night.
With a deep chuckle he wrapped his arms around me again and pulled me against his side. “Nat,” he mocked me. “Relax. We’ll have more than enough time for that later. Right now I want to take my woman out and show her off at the club. Just like you begged me to this morning.” His lips captured mine and his tongue snuck out, licking my bottom lip until I opened for him.
We were still kissing when the taxi pulled to a stop in front of a club with a line of people all the way down the block. The driver cleared his throat loudly and Devlin grumbled something against my lips before finally lifting his head and tossing a hundred-dollar bill at the man. “Keep the change,” he bit out as he opened the door and pulled me out behind him.
Once we were on the sidewalk, Devlin stopped and kissed me again. His long, raven black hair fell forward, shielding us from the crowd that was lined up behind us. His hands wrapped around my neck, telling me that he didn’t want me going anywhere anytime soon. Didn’t he know that I would never be the first to step back? I loved him more than anything or anyone on the planet. He was the reason I woke up every morning with a smile on my face, the reason I hadn’t already lost my mind on this tour.
How long we stood there getting lost in our kiss I couldn’t honestly say. When he finally lifted his head, his aquamarine eyes were dark with passion and he was smiling. “Later,” he promised.
I licked my lips, sighing when I tasted him there. “Yeah, later.”
Laughing, he grasped my hand and entwined our fingers, pulling me toward the front of the line where two huge bouncers stood with headsets sticking from their ears and a clipboard. The first guy frowned at Devlin but the second stepped forward and shook his hand. “Welcome back, Mr. Cutter.”
“Thanks, man.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out something before seamlessly passing it over to the other man. Another hundred or two, I was sure. Would I ever get over the fact that I was now surrounded by money? Sure, I hadn’t grown up poor, but we sure as hell hadn’t been rich by anyone’s standards. Devlin didn’t carry anything less than a ten-dollar bill in his wallet. If he got fives or ones back, he just gave them away. Normally it was as a tip to whatever service worker who had handed his change back to him.
The man’s eyes drifted over to me and he smirked when he took in my kiss-swollen lips. I shot him a glare and then the finger, making Devlin laugh as he stepped around the two bouncers and into the club, much to the loud protesting of the people still in line. I knew that look well. I’d gotten it more than once over the last few weeks. People knew who Devlin was, and they had never—not ever—seen him with the same chick more than once. When they looked at me they assumed I was just Devlin’s piece of ass for the night and would be discarded come morning.
And that was when I got to do the smirking because I knew that I was going to be in my rocker’s bed the next night and the night after and the night after that. He had promised me that our relationship was something special to him. That what we had would last because he cared about me.
Sure, it hadn’t been a declaration of love, but it had been good enough for me. We’d only been dating for a few weeks now, and I wasn’t in a rush. We had the rest of our lives to say those three little words to each other. It wasn’t like I was expecting him to suddenly spit it out and drop to his knees begging me to marry him.
Devlin had made it more than clear long before we’d even gotten together that he didn’t believe in marriage. I figured that unless something major changed with his way of thinking, then we wouldn’t be tying any knots. I was okay with that, though. I didn’t need a ring and a piece of paper to tell me that Devlin was mine any more than he did.
Marriage didn’t automatically make things better, in my opinion. It didn’t give your relationship superpowers and kept you or your spouse from cheating or doing something else just as stupid. It just showed the outside world that you were that committed to that person—at least for the moment. Divorce was a get-out-of-jail-free card and you could move on to the next relationship.
Inside the club we moved straight for the bar. Devlin ordered a beer for himself and a glass of my favorite wine for me. I loved that I didn’t have to tell him what I wanted. He knew me well and always thought about what I wanted or needed, in a
nd out of bed.
When the drinks were placed in front of us I reached for my glass but Devlin shook his head and lifted it to his lips. With his eyes locked on mine he took a small sip before offering the glass to me. My panties dampened even more than they already were as I turned the glass so that I could put my lips where his had just been. As I took my first sip, his eyes darkened and he mouthed a curse before swallowing half his beer in one gulp.
Laughing, I took another drink of my wine and grabbed his hand. I didn’t need alcohol tonight. I just needed him. “Dance with me?”
With another swallow, the bottle of Samuel Adams was empty and he followed me onto the dance floor. For the next hour I wrapped myself around Devlin and let myself go to the beat of the music. I’d always loved to dance, but with Devlin holding me close even through the fast songs, it was an exhilarating experience.
As we danced he kissed me from time to time, but never more than a brush of his lips over mine. We both knew that if we kissed like we both wanted, that we would end up in a bathroom stall, and Devlin would hate himself afterwards. I would hate both of us too. The two times that we had done something like that he’d been pissed at himself for days afterwards because he respected me more than that.
I’d felt pretty dirty myself.
Sweating like crazy, I finally let him lead me from the dance floor to rehydrate. We sat at the bar while he drank another beer and I sipped at my water. I curled my fingers around the ends of his hair. My own hair was a light brown, with a few natural blond highlights. It wasn’t as long as his, but there weren’t very many people who did have hair as long and healthy as his. He loved my hair just as much as I loved his. When we were in bed, lying beside each other, he would lift a few locks of my hair and kiss them as reverently as if he were kissing my skin when we made love.