Page 131 of Dirty Rock

I let him go at once and took a step back, watching as his body crumbled against the wooden panels behind him. His breaths were heavy, and his eyes were wild as he looked up at me.

“So, this is it?” he gasped. “The rugged rock star went and got himself all cleaned up?”

I huffed out a sarcastic laugh and shook my head. “There’s nothing clean about me. I’d tell you to ask Jules, but you so much as glance at her with narrowed eyes without my permission from now on, and you’ll be on your arse before you can blink.”

With a stretch of my neck, I straightened out the shoulders of my grey T-shirt, and I began to walk away.

“Not gonna have this conversation again, bro!” I called over my shoulder. “Make sure you’ve learnt how to apologise to pretty ladies before you show your face again.”

When I made it back to the tables and booths near the front of the bus, several pairs of eyes were staring back at me. Few were amused. A couple were stunned. And then there were hers.

Sitting there between the guys, Julia looked like a queen who’d just been saved from the clutches of a dragon by her king.

“Anyone else got a problem with Julia and me screwing?”

Everyone who wasn’t Julia shook their heads and stayed quiet.

“Wonderful. Now… who’s up for some fucking poker?”

Chapter Forty-Five

The Encore! Festival in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, always felt oddly like we were coming home. As we drove through the centre of the city, I looked up at the murky sky from the window I was resting against, and I wondered if there would ever be a day when I’d arrive here to sunshine.

“Raining again,” Hawk grumbled as he grabbed hold of his beer.

“The rain is just another prop for me to work with on stage,” I assured him.

“And you do it so well,” Julia’s voice cut through the noise, dragging my attention to her.

Her eyes were heated and narrowed as she stared at me for just a heartbeat too long before she looked down at something she’d written in a little black notebook and smirked to herself.

Defending her against Dicky had gone down well.

I huffed out a silent laugh and looked back out of the window at the gloomy view. The bus turned a corner before Edinburgh castle came into view, and it didn’t take long for the sight of the big vehicle we were in to start drawing attention. Girls cheered on the side of the streets. Some tried to wave us down, while others looked up at the blacked-out windows like they could see us.

“Hawk, do you remember the first time we saw women standing beside our tour bus like this, paying us attention?”

He whistled, low and long. “Cardiff?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “That woman who threw herself in front of the bus, made the driver slam his brakes on, and had us all launching forward until we nearly broke our front teeth?”

“What a time it was to be alive.”

Hawk glanced out at the girls running down the busy street, chasing after our monster bus. “And look at us now.”

“Yeah. Look at us.”

“You okay?

“Sure.” I nodded, casting a glance at Julia.

Before her, this life had been everything to me. Even up until a few weeks ago, it had been everything. The idea of not being here, in the middle of this, would have tortured me to the point of having to reach for a bag of something, or at least a joint. I hadn’t realised I’d had some kind of anxiety about losing that dream until a new dream had come along.

Now, all I could think about was that fucking blue house on that freezing cold beachfront. That raging fire in that old English country pub as we sat there in the quiet of our lives, sipping wine and sharing stories. All I could wish for was her yellow house, not far from my blue, and the way her crisp, white, pure cotton sheets felt against my back as I held her thighs and watched her riding me from above.

“Despite what everyone says, you can have it all, you know, Rhett,” Hawk said in a whisper as he leaned in close to me. “If anyone can switch up the rules, it was always gonna be you.”

Before I could respond, he’d patted me on the shoulder and made his way up from the table to move to the back of the bus.

I was staring out of the window when Julia slid into his place, the two of us alone at this end of the bus as the rest occupied themselves at the back. She reached up to cup my cheeks in her hands and press her sweet lips to mine.

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