Page 34 of Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit
And I’d known the moment I started wanting it that I couldn’t have it. Hell, I’d realized it before I asked her to come on stage. Deep in my head, in the shadowy part I never looked at, a voice had been muttering that I needed to leave the girl alone and get over her. Let her talk to that other guy and enjoy her time on tour.
Let go of the ridiculous crush I’d been building. Forget about tucking her into my pocket. Because I wasn’t the sort of guy who could keep a creature like Lila alive. She needed the sun and air, and I lived in the darkness of lonely hotel rooms. Worse than that; I carried shadows and heartbreak wherever I went.
Lila Potter wasn’t for me, that voice said sharply, and I needed to let her go.
Instead, I’d given in to the jealousy twisting inside me and called her up to the stage. And she’d laughed and started playing her music, and my band had gone along with her like it was all a plan, and I’d known two things at once: that I was having the best time of my life... and that it couldn’t last. Because I wouldn’t let it.
After the set, I’d left the stage without looking back and had gone right to the bar to forget about Lila Potter and what she made me feel.
So you can imagine how I felt when I stumbled onto the floor that held my hotel room, looked up, and found her standing in the hallway in a T-shirt several sizes too big for her and nothing else. Her hair was mussed and tangled, and she didn’t have a speck of makeup on her face.
She was wearing slippers.
Banging on a hotel room door.
What the hell was going on here?
I started forward on instinct, knowing only that I needed to figure out what was wrong and fix it for her, and she turned to me, her eyes large and her mouth caught in an ‘O’ of surprise.
“Lila,” I breathed. “What are you doing in the hallway? In...” I gestured toward her outfit, realizing now that it might very well be what she’d been sleeping in.
Her mouth snapped shut, and she stared at me like she’d just been caught doing something she definitely shouldn’t be doing. Then she followed my own gaze down her body. When she looked up again, a bright flush was making its way over her cheekbones.
“Um,” she started. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“So you decided to wander around the hallway in your...” I glanced down again, still not sure what to call whatever she was wearing.
Her blush deepened. “I didn’t want to wake Anna up. So yeah, I came out into the hallway. It’s so late that I didn’t think anyone would mind, and then...” She turned a hopeless look back at the door. “I didn’t bring my key,” she said ruefully. “I didn’t think it would lock behind me.”
When she glanced at me again, she looked both miserable and sort of hopeful. Like I might somehow have a key that would let her back into the room she was sharing with Anna.
Newsflash: I didn’t.
Additional newsflash: All that shit I said about forgetting her and not wanting to get close to her? All that drinking I’d done at the bar, trying to get my heart to forget she existed? Every single thought about not being allowed to have her because I was no good for anyone?
Yeah, that was all bullshit. I hadn’t meant a word of it. I mean, I had. But I was also really stupid and blind.
I wanted her to myself more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life, and I wasn’t going to let that idiot voice in my head stop me.
I moved forward and put my hands on the wall on either side of her, pinning her in. “You’re trapped out here in nothing but a big t-shirt and slippers, hoping Anna will wake up and let you back into the room?” I asked, my voice tinged with something that walked a fine line between amusement and lust. “And you’ve been banging on the door, but you don’t think anyone is going to notice you’re out here?”
“Um, yeah,” she whispered.
God, this girl. She was too sweet for this world. Too good for the likes of anyone in this life.
And I was utterly, hopelessly in love with her.
I moved toward her at the same moment she moved toward me, her arms coming around my neck and my lips claiming hers like it was meant to be. I pushed her against the wall and held her there with my body, our tongues clashing as we went right back to the place we’d found together in that meadow this afternoon. Only this wasn’t sweet and smooth like that had been. This was a fight to get closer, all teeth and nails and grinding hips. Her legs came up around my waist and I slipped my hands under her ass, then shoved her more firmly against the wall. I was so hard already I could barely stand up and she was right here, open and ready for me. She wasn’t even wearing anything under that t-shirt aside from a pair of panties.
And God, she wanted me. Her skin was on fire and her kisses were like molten lava, her body telling me in every way it could how ready it was. I pushed against her, rocking my hips mindlessly and on the verge of letting my instincts take us away. My cock blood was burning, my cock painfully hard, and all I could think about was sliding inside her and making her gasp my name.
And then I realized I was more than half-drunk and in a very public place.
The hallway of our hotel, to be exact. Right outside her room and across the hall from mine.
Oh my God, what was I doing? Lila wasn’t the kind of girl you fucked in a hotel hallway where anyone might see you. She wasn’t the sort of girl you just took without thinking about the consequences. Any other girl? Maybe.
Given my history, yes.
