Hard as Rock (The Rock Star's Seduction 3)

“Whatever. The point is, he’s gonna flip his fuckin’ lid – you KNOW that, right?”

“That’s why he’s never going to find out,” Ryan said.

An ominous feeling came over me. Not just because what we were doing was innocent… not just because lying by omission felt like we were covering something up…

…but because Ryan’s last statement sounded like famous last words.

29

Two days passed after we talked to Riley – and suddenly Derek stopped.

Stopped texting me.

Stopped calling me.

Completely.

It was devastating.

He had been driving me absolutely insane since I let him know that I was okay. Text after text, voicemail after voicemail, swinging from anguish to rage to self-pity to pleading – sometimes within the same message.

When he wasn’t infuriating me, he was breaking my heart. During his constant stream of recriminations and lovelorn pleading, I almost broke down a couple of times and nearly gave in, but then I would remember Riley’s words:

Did he cheat on you?… Then he’s Douchebag Numero Uno, and don’t you forget it.

She helped me stay strong.

Then, suddenly, all the messages stopped. Dead. I wondered if he had been hurt – maybe

he

was in the hospital, or lying in a ditch somewhere – but then I figured it made more sense that this was some sort of new tactic, some reverse psychology ploy to get me to text him.

Or maybe he’d lost his phone.

Or maybe he’d just forgotten to plug it in.

Or maybe… he had moved on.

The first option – that he was hurt – was hard to take. I actually spent a bad couple of hours worrying about him.

The second option – that he was faking – was easy enough to verify. If I didn’t hear from him by tomorrow, I could get Riley to check up on him under some pretense, like wanting to go drinking while he was in New York.

The third and fourth options, that he had lost the phone or forgotten to charge it, were possible… but I got the sense that he had been glued to the thing for the last couple of weeks. That made it unlikely he had lost it. Besides, he would just go out and buy another one (or bum one off of somebody).

As for the charging theory, he hadn’t had a problem so far. Even if he’d run it down, he could immediately plug it in and call, so that excuse didn’t hold water.

The last option – that he had moved on – was the most plausible.

And it was the one broke that my heart.

Actually, when I first thought of it, it felt more like all my insides had been torn out.

We were in a sick, twisted cycle. I knew that. He had betrayed me, so I was cold-shouldering him. Which made him obsessed with me. Suddenly he was giving me all the single-minded attention I had been craving weeks and weeks ago, when he had grown more distant. And now that he was withdrawing that attention, I was like an addict jonesing for a fix, willing to give in so he would start texting me again… just so I could feel like he still loved me.

Like I said, fucked

UP.

But it still hurt like hell to think he was gone for good.

And yet, I kept coming back to Riley’s words:

Did he cheat on you?… Then he’s Douchebag Numero Uno, and don’t you forget it.

So I didn’t text him.

I just suffered in silence and cried into my pillow, then went out to Ryan with a smile on my face.

I didn’t know at the time that none of my theories were correct.

There was a sixth option I hadn’t even considered:

A surprise attack.

30

Two nights after we talked to Riley, it was raining cats and dogs. In the two weeks I had been at the ranch, there had been occasional showers, but this was the worst I’d ever seen. This was a full-on storm like I was used to during summers in Savannah, Georgia.

We were lounging inside the house after a wonderful dinner. The lights were low, with only a single lamp in the corner as illumination. We talked and listened to the rainfall. Ryan was playing soft chords at the piano, and I was on my third glass of wine. Despite my earlier heartbreak over Derek’s radio silence, the alcohol had numbed me, and Ryan’s presence had lifted my spirits. Life was pretty good, considering.

“Are we going to be able to ride tomorrow?” I asked.

“Depends. It’s going to be messy. We might want to give it a day to dry out some – ”

Suddenly a pair of headlights flared up through the front windows of the house, casting a moving pattern of light across the wall.

I looked over at Ryan, who was frowning. Apparently we both had the same thought:

Who would come all the way out here, especially on a night like tonight?

I got my answer as soon as we heard the car door slam.

“KAITLYN!” a familiar voice bellowed.

My heart took flight and my stomach dropped through the floor, all in the same instant.

Derek.

He had found me.

“KAITLYN!” he roared again, his rumbling voice filled with agony. Like Marlon Brando yelling “Stellaaaa!” in

A Streetcar Named Desire.

Ryan stood up calmly from the piano and strode to the front door. I ran after him, but he cautioned, “Stay behind me. We don’t know what kind of state he’s in.”

From the sound of his voice, it wasn’t even remotely pleasant.

“KAITLYN!”

Ryan flicked a light switch, opened the front door, and walked out onto the porch.

I stepped right up next to him. My heart was nearly breaking my ribs, it was pounding so hard.

The rain poured down in torrents, and the water cascading off the porch roof was like a beaded curtain in front of us. The lights Ryan had turned on were floodlights; they illuminated the entire front lawn, including the dirt road that ran between the main house and the MacCruders’.

Out between the two houses was a car with its high beams on. A ‘Taxi’ sign glowed dimly on its roof, and a pale-faced little man was hunched behind the wheel.