Page 4 of Tattoos and Heartbreak
I’d spent too many years being the rebel to suddenly become a good boy.
Besides, I didn’tlikegood boys.
A chorus of giggles right outside my door shook me out of that thought, and my scowl deepened. Who the hell was that? They didn’t sound like they could be more than teenagers, and if security had let a bunch of teenagers up here to knock on my door and bother me for autographs, I was going to kill someone.
I stalked to the door and jerked it open.
And then caught the girl that fell right into my room.
When she looked up, I caught my breath. Enormous green eyes. Dark red hair, and the most perfectly white skin I’d ever seen, covered with a smattering freckles. Sunshine was practically bleeding out of her pores, and I had the fleeting thought that she could have been the poster girl for the word ‘wholesome.’ I didn’t know how old she actually was—young, for sure—but one look at her and I’d already forgotten all about being mad at security for letting girls up to my door.
Because she was also the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. All laughter and freckles and flushed cheeks and…
Something so pure that it made my heart squeeze so hard it hurt.
LILA
“Rivers Shine.”
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself, my voice a hoarse whisper, and I realized in that moment that my hands were clenched into the front of his shirt, my body pressed against him like…
Like…
“Oh my God.”
I scuttled backwards so quickly that I ran right into Anna, who had fallen through the door behind me.
Look, we weren’t, like, leaning against his door on purpose. We weren’t spying. Truthfully I hadn’t even known it was his door. We’d arrived earlier in the afternoon and had found our room, dumped our bags, and then gone out for dinner and drinks. By the time we left the bar where we’d landed, we’d had more of the latter and not enough of the former, and getting back up the stairs in the tiny hotel had been a challenge that had resulted in us falling out of the stairwell and into a fit of giggles.
Which had then progressed as we staggered down the hall.
We’d leaned against the wall—and the door—laughing at how stupid we were being, and then that door had opened, I’d fallen forward, and had looked up to see…
Oh. My. God.
I looked up again, trying to get my brain to clear up and start paying attention. Because that was definitely Rivers Shine in front of me, all dark, floppy hair and tattoos and moody eyes. His cheekbones were even sharper in person, the scruff on his chin outlining the angle of his jaw. But his lips were fuller than I’d realized, and they looked way too kissable.
My God in heaven, where the fuck had that come from? Why was I thinking about kissing the man who was currently scowling at me like I’d just interrupted some sort of important something?
Oh God. Goddy God, did he have a girl in here? Had we walked right in on something?
My eyes flitted from him to the rest of the room, taking in a space scattered with leather jackets, boots, whiskey bottles, and several guitars.
But no girls.
“Um, hey?”
The quiet phrase brought my eyes right back to Rivers and I saw that the scowl had changed to some sort of shy smile, like he was somehow embarrassed at us having caught us in his room. And I wouldn’t have believed it, but that smile freed me from whatever had grabbed me and stopped my brain up to this point.
And I remembered that I’d just barged into his room—on accident—and that I should probably at least apologize.
“Hey,” I said softly. I stuck out my hand. “Lila Potter. Sorry we… I mean we weren’t just out there leaning on your door or something. And even if we were, it would only be because we had too much to drink at dinner and—”
“We were just going to our room,” Anna said with a sharp look at me. She grabbed my arm and pulled me back toward the door. “Sorry, Rivers. We didn’t mean to interrupt.”
To my shock, he also put a hand on my arm. “Wait. You don’t have to go. I mean, you’re already here and everything. You already got into the room.”
Anna’s face went from embarrassed to deeply judgmental, like she suspected Rivers had the worst possible motivation for asking us to stay in his room, and I jerked my arm away from her. She could be such a bitch. It wasn’t like he’d asked us to stay for some sort of human sacrifice or something. He’d just said we were already here and that we didn’t have to go, and I was guessing there was actually a pretty good reason for that. All you had to do was look at the guy to see he was hungry for a friend. He looked sad in a way I’d never experienced, a shadow moving behind his eyes that definitely hadn’t shown up in any of the pictures I’d ever seen of him.
