Page 189 of Love, Rekindled

“Really.” She set the donut down, her stomach executing a series of flips. Nervous ones, but not the type that made her want to run. Not the type she’d experienced before. These were hotter, fuller, curious. “How do you feel…instead?”

“I have hunger.” His dark gaze swung up, gluing her to the plush leather seat. “I don’t know if it can be fed like yours.”

What was going on here? Lita felt almost hypnotized, lured in by his rasping, cultured voice. She recognized interest and arousal in men, had it directed at her often, but this? This was utter famishment. He reminded her of a vampire who’d been in hiding from the sun, unable to hunt. And now a deer lay before him, vital and tempting, life flowing through its veins. She was the deer.

Man. How crazy were her thoughts right now? The lack of food must have gone to her head. After the trouble she’d just escaped, she shouldn’t care what went on under another man’s surface. Shouldn’t allow this odd, instantaneous attachment to take hold.

The fuller her stomach became, though, the more her thoughts cleared. The more of James she saw. His interest in her, as he watched her mouth chew, was almost as thick as the leash around his neck, keeping him in place. If the lights in the room weren’t so dim, she could probably make it out. Strain bracketed his masculine mouth and he appeared to be swallowing golf balls down the column of his powerful throat. One…after…another.

“How did you get so hungry?” James asked, his tone suggesting he was reclining back onto a bed of nails.

Lita rejected the outside ugliness from entering the room. “I could ask you the same thing.” Her legs were steady as she stood and rounded the table, compelled by some force she couldn’t deny. Maybe it was his clear attempt to restrain himself, to fight the attraction so obvious between them. She stopped beside James, but he stayed still as stone. “I’m full. What happens now?”

His eyelids drooped, fist mashing against his forehead. “Go.”

That single, tortured word caught her in the chest. God, he was holding back somuch.What would happen when it roared out?

Why was she trembling with the need to find out?

There was danger lurking beneath this man’s surface. Also known as the last thing a homeless girl wanting to turn her luck around needed.

Too bad danger was the only thing that had ever made her feel alive.

Lita walked past James to the lamp and flipped off the gentle light before returning to his tense figure, sliding between his outstretched legs…and opening the robe. “Feed yourself.”

The air crackled as James stood slowly, so slowly, rising to his full height. When Lita glimpsed his changed expression, she realized that—at her invitation—a change had snapped through him like a cracking whip, despite the way he rose without hurry. The vampire’s dirt nap had officially ended and the invisible leash was no more. Power rippled over his beautiful body as it pressed close, a hand finding her hip inside the robe, squeezing, his mouth sliding against her ear.

His breath went choppy after issuing a single unexpected command.

“Crawl.”

* * *

Lita hada blister on her ankle. It rubbed and rubbed against the back of her red Converse, growing angrier and bloodier by the hour. All it would take to fix the injury was a Band-Aid, but she didn’t have time for that shit. Didn’t have time to take her shoe off, remove the protective strip from its paper packaging and apply it. Performing such a practical task wouldn’t make sense when the world around her had been painted different colors, and normal, everyday activities proved impossible. Sleep wasn’t happening and the act of procuring food seemed like a monumental effort just to feel sick afterward, so she simply walked. Walked and walked around Los Angeles with headphones covering her ears, the star of her own depressing music montage.

Empty didn’t begin to explain the sensation beneath her bones. She felt…dead. In a way, shewas. This life, the band, had all been orchestrated by James. Their conversation the morning after they met was still vivid in her memory. Crystal clear and sparkling like drinking glasses fresh from a dishwasher. James had asked her, “What do youdo, Lita?” And she’d answered, “I drum.”

That was all it took. He’d found a lead singer and a bass player within two weeks, throwing them together inside rented studio space, and thus, Old News was born. James’s life prior to that time was still a mystery to her. To everyone. If what he’d said before leaving was true, his every action over the last four years had been in the interest of helping her. Out of guilt? Kindness? Lita didn’t know. But none of it seemed real without him standing at her back, watching her from behind dark sunglasses.

Holy, holy shit, shemissedhim. Okay, they’d had their fair share of squabbles and arguments.Morethan their fair share. But there’d been some incredible moments wedged in there. Like the time the tour bus had blown a fan belt in Mexico and they’d shared a six-pack on the roof, staring at the sky and waiting for help to arrive. Or the time she’d convinced him to walk out on stage and sing the encore with Old News, which he’d started with a scowl on his face, but ended up smiling.

Dammit.The way he’d left was unfair andstupid, and she wanted to rage at him. Fine, he’d been right about one thing. Lita hadn’t understood the intensity of his needs. He’d blindsided her with the force and sharp quality of them. They were complicated and dark. But her response had been…light. The blinding, white light of an atomic blast. She’dlikedJames holding her down and saying those frightening words into her hair. Liked the abrasive tone of his voice, liked her strength running out, little by little, until she could only submit. That almost unbearable lift in her stomach, the glorious clearing of her mind…she’d been chasing that feeling by causing trouble for so long, never quite achieving it.

He’d left before she could get a handle on her runaway desires, what they meant, how to voice them. If he’d just given her a minute, she would have begged for more. Would have reassured him that the trust between them was still intact and nothing could damage it. Nothing except him leaving. Leaving her to this existence he’d created and managed from behind the scenes, but neglected to leave the instructions behind.

James wasn’t even home, so they couldn’t properly have it out. His old Mustang wasn’t in the driveway of his house in Santa Monica. Hadn’t been for three days. He’d vanished. And part of her worried that starving nineteen-year-old girl had fabricated his existence in the first place. After all, who gave up their own life in exchange for some scrawny, homeless girl’s success? No person she’d met before him, that was for damn sure. Her own parents hadn’t been in the picture since she turned sixteen, having moved down to Mexico with the settlement they’d received when Lita’s mother broke her ankle on a public bus. After that, she’d floated, living with friends until meeting her one and only boyfriend.

Shaking off the uncomfortable memory of howthatunhealthy relationship came to a close, Lita turned her focus to step one in tracking down James. And shewouldtrack his sexy backside down, even if it were just to give him hell. But she hoped it would end in more. It had to.

Sarge Purcell was the lead singer of Old News and the closest thing resembling a friend to James. Which is why Lita was stomping up the driveway of his newly purchased beach house at eight o’clock in the morning. If anyone knew where their manager had gone, it would be Sarge. She felt a tad guilty for interrupting his first official week in Los Angeles since returning from New Jersey with his girlfriend, Jasmine, but hey. Desperate times.

Lita rapped on the fogged glass front door and waited. The sound of crashing waves from behind the house should have been soothing, but they only sounded like bombs going off in her ears, exacerbating the headache pumping behind her eyes for days without pause.Just focus on this one thing.

The lead singer opened the door in a pair of gray boxer briefs, but Lita didn’t even blink. When you’ve lived on a tour bus with someone, modesty goes extinct with a quickness. Sarge’s hair was finger-raked and haphazard as usual, but Lita had a feeling it was Jasmine’s fingers that had been doing the raking. Lita’s theory was confirmed when Jasmine stumbled through the living room behind Sarge, wearing nothing but a white sheet.

“Hey, Jasmine,” Lita called, but her voice came out sounding thready, since she hadn’t spoken since…when? Since James left? “Sorry to have interrupted the sexing.”

Sarge grinned, displaying the reason his face ended up on countless magazine covers. “Ah, it’s fine. You’d be interrupting that no matter when you showed up.”

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