Page 98 of Volatile

Aspen laughed. “Average King behavior.”

EPILOGUE

Aspen

“Are you ready to go back on tour?” Royal asked as I stood over my empty suitcase.

“No, not really, but I want to.” I cast him a coy side-eye over my shoulder.

I’d been mostly staying in his apartment for the month off, giving Kingsley the space in ours with Lis. Which meant I have clothes all over the place and packing seemed daunting.

“I want to plan a vacation for after,” Royal said after a pause.

My head snapped up. “You want to go back, don’t you?”

“Yes, but on the other side of the island. The vacation side. The privacy and alone time—”

I cut him off. “You don’t have to convince me.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, taking a seat on the edge of his bed. “I know we usually do a lot of shit when we are on vacation. Or travel.” By doing a lot of stuff, he meant party and travel and general rockstar shit.

I turned full on, stepping around my suitcase to stand in front of him. “We’ve done a lot of what everyone else asked of us. I don’t have any places I want to travel to. We’ve done them together. And that’s not to say I won’t always want to go some place private, but right now, while this is still so fresh and new and making its rounds through the press, I know I’ll be exhausted after the tour. We are going to be watched like hawks while we are out for the next five months and then what, we try to get another album out of Kingsley while he’s happy? I can’t fucking imagine. I want space from them and you to myself.”

The more I spoke, the more his smile widened. “I want all those things, and that’s exactly what I was thinking. I like your brother, but I want to make sure we can carve out time for just us. I don’t want to spend our entire life with them on top of us.”

I nodded. “Me either. I love my brother and he’s my other best friend, but we do need us time.”

He set his hands on my hips. “I’ll have Levi book it. I want a private bungalow again, but this time I want it on the mountain, not the water.”

I rolled my eyes. “How are you going to go back to the ocean and not go in it?”

He lifted his shoulders in another shrug. “Guess much like I did last time we were there, and I’m sure about avoiding any of that poisonous tide shit or getting eaten by a shark.”

I pulled out my phone. “No one has died in Tahiti in fifty years by shark.” I turned my phone around to show him.

He didn’t look at it, keeping his gaze locked on mine. “I won’t be the first.”

I flipped my phone and kept reading. “Only six confirmed bites in nearly five hundred years. I think you’re safe.”

“I’ll be safe from shore.”

“There aren’t even any big sharks that could do real damage!”

He trailed his fingers up the back of my thighs, sending a shiver down my spine. “Have you come up with more costumes for the show?”

I hadn’t expected him to change the subject so drastically. “Some of them.”

“Do they involve lots of skirts?”

“Some.” A lot of them involved pushing him to drag me off stage to fuck me by the end of our set, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I didn’t want him to have time to mentally prepare.

“I had an idea.”

My brows lifted. “Do tell.”

“I was thinking similar to the green one, only instead of schoolgirl, I was thinking pencil, tight and short.”

“Do you mean like business woman tight and with a suit jacket?” I’d done something like that last time around.

---