Hard Rider

My big damn hero.

Not that he didn’t have a few scars to show for it. But damn, didn’t we all? Nobody ever came out unscathed from a fire. Whether that was a metaphor for life or the real damn thing, the outcome was the same.

Those first few nights back at Gunner’s house had been rough on us both. I kept waking up from nightmares of Connor sneaking in and setting us on fire while we slept. Or sometimes he was just this monster made of fire, and he was chasing me down the hall, but the hallway never ended and I would just scream and scream and scream.

Sometimes I even woke up screaming. Sometimes Gunner woke up ready for a fight. Even though our waking minds both knew he was in jail—and that whether he stayed in that cell or they moved him to a psych facility, there was no chance of him ever getting out—that didn’t stop us from suffering through the terror he’d left in his wake as soon as we closed our eyes.

Those were the nights Gunner took me the hardest, trying to fuck away the memories haunting us both.

So knowing that my stepbrother was weighed down by what we’d been through was no surprise to me. We all carried around our own burdens.

Today, though, that load was gonna get a little lighter. We were embarking on an adventure, a road trip through all fifty states. We’d camp out under the stars. We’d stay in pet-friendly hotels. We’d see the sights and all the landmarks. He’d promised me we’d even stay at a few haunted places and try to catch some ghosts.

We were finally going to have that family trip we’d always wanted. Always deserved. Except we were adults now, and the nature of our family had become...

Different.

And it was getting larger… My hand swept over my belly, feeling the swelling that had begun to show. There was no way to be sure this early, but I already knew we were going to have a son.

Gunner leaned over to me and swept my hair past my shoulder with his fingers. When I looked at him he cupped my cheek and smiled. “You got two choices, baby. Are we goin’ east, or west?”

I bit my lip and tried to think of an answer, but it was hard to think of anything when my stepbrother was looking at me like that. Of course, he wasn’t really my stepbrother now. Our parents were gone. There were no laws that said we couldn’t get married. Nobody would even know unless we told them.

Nothing was set in stone. We weren’t making any commitments or decisions. This trip was about fun, about living, about getting to know each other as friends and lovers. This was our chance to get the hell away from the consequences for a while and just be us. And I was gonna relish every damn moment of it.

I’d spent too long running from my stepbrother. Now, I was gonna run with him.

I looked up at the sky outside the windshield.

“Las Vegas,” I said with a smile. “That’s the direction I wanna go in.”

Gunner grinned. “Might take us a while to get there, baby, but you got it.” He brushed his thumb past my lips. “Sin City,” he mused. “Something tell me we’ll fit right in.”

“As long as I’m with you, we can go anywhere. Do anything.” I kissed his hand. “Wherever we are, if I wake up next to you, that place is home.”

Gunner pulled me toward him, pressing our foreheads together. “You’re goddamn right.”

We shared a kiss, one of many we’d indulged in these past few months, but one unlike any other I’d known. This was a kiss of unbridled passion, of liberation, of freedom. The first kiss of our new lives together. The start of a journey. The start of something new.

I closed my eyes and let Gunner’s desire engulf me. When he pulled away, I could feel his lips had left mine scorched.

“I love you, Tanya,” he whispered to me. I could tell by the pounding of his pulse that he’d never said those words to anyone. Not like he said them to me.

My heart swelled. I cupped his face in my hands. It felt so good to feel his skin beneath both of them now that I’d gotten my bandages off. “I love you too,” I told him.

We kissed again, harder this time, high on our confessions and the thought of new beginnings. But then Jax barked, reminding us that we were idling on the side of the road that split before us, one side taking us east, the other west across the country.

“Las Vegas,” Gunner chuckled, adjusting his shades. He put the Mustang into gear. “Maybe we should visit one of those drive-thru chapels.”

I laughed at him. “You’re out of your mind.” But really? I wouldn’t have minded it. I had no intention of ever leaving Gunner’s side. Not when we’d finally, truly found each other.

We pulled onto the highway that would lead us to parts unknown, our hands entwined over the gear shift, just a car full of suitcases, the world’s worst guard dog, a baby on the way, and two people madly in love.

Rock Hard

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“The truth of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.”

-David Bowie

Chapter 1

Catherine

“Come on, sweet tits, join the party!”

“What a prick!” That was my first thought.

“Holy fucking hell, he’s so much hotter in person.” That was my second.

“How am I ever supposed to remain professional with a man like him? A man that would have made Mother Theresa spread her legs and beg for forgiveness for all the forbidden sins she was about to commit.” That was the third.

Ten years. Ten years that I’d worked my ass off, hustled and bargained, slaved over a keyboard until dawn, cracked out on caffeine trying to chase a lead. I’d interviewed world leaders, gone undercover to expose sex-trafficking rings, hell once I’d even scored an interview with the Queen.

And now, here I was, on the most asinine assignment ever, in the back of a rockstar’s tour bus, forced to endure the scene in front of me. Not only that, but the most arrogant prick I’d ever met was the subject of my interview.

It didn’t matter that he was so fucking drop-dead sexy it almost hurt to look at him. The problem was, he knew it.

Liam Mercury - the biggest rock star this side of the pond. The lead singer for the Electric Horses, the biggest Brit-pop band since Oasis.

Deep in the back of his tour bus parked outside of Madison Square Garden in New York City, Liam’s lanky

limbs spilled out on a black leather couch, the table in front of him littered with empty bottles of champagne and whiskey. Sitting at his side were two of the most gorgeous women I’d ever seen. If you could call them that. They didn’t look to be any older than nineteen.

His crude greeting was hurled at me in between removing his tongue from the blonde’s mouth and shoving it into the brunette’s. I waited till he came up for air to respond.

“I’m Catherine Donovan.”

“I don’t care if you’re the fucking Queen, shimmy off those knickers and get over here!”

I shook my head. He was frightfully mistaken if he thought I was another one of his groupies. Everything about him was a cliche. Hot, spoiled, sexy, topped off with a thick British accent.

He was every teenaged girl’s dream. And every parent’s worst nightmare.

His long black hair flowed past his shoulders, his dark hooded eyes smoldering with sexuality. His slim, toned physique was familiar - it’d been splayed over every magazine cover and tabloid rag for the last ten years. He was all sinewy muscle and hard angles. His smooth skin was slathered in tattoos, engraved with skulls and screaming monsters and one very large British flag that I knew was spread across his back, even though I couldn’t see it now.

I knew lots of things about Liam Mercury. I’d spent hours googling him before my arrival. I was hoping to discover something about him that hadn’t already been reported a hundred times before. That was how I worked. I took my job seriously, even if it was something that I felt was completely superficial.

“I’m sure your manager told you to expect me —,” I began again, just as the table began moving on its own, sliding backwards until the ginger that had her head buried in his lap popped her head up - exposing his very thick, and very hard… cock.