His pupils jet-black against vivid green, he nodded. “I get it, and baby, if anything does happen, I will be there for you.” Words potent with a raw emotion she couldn’t identify. “Don’t shut me out.”
All at once, she remembered an article she’d read about Fox, back when he’d simply been a darkly beautiful rock star she’d sighed over from afar. “You never knew your father.” She knew she was crossing another line, but Molly had realized she didn’t know how to compartmentalize sex and emotion.
Fox was no longer just that fantasy rock star; he was a man whose touch made her ignite and whose smile made her breath catch in her chest. He could cook a single fancy dish that he’d promised to make her the next time they had a night together, was talented, had a temper, and a fascination with fast cars. All those pieces and so much more made up the person he was… a person who’d begun to matter to her in a way that could have no happy ending.
“I promise I’ll tell you if it happens.” She was the one who brushed back his hair this time, suckled a soft, sweet kiss from his lips. “I’m sorry if I brought up bad memories.”
A crooked smile, his fingers spreading on her lower back. “What am I going to do with you, Molly Webster?” Running his hand up her spine, then back down, he surprised her by adding, “My mom was drugged out of her mind at the time I was conceived, couldn’t have picked the guy out of a lineup, and she certainly wasn’t ready for a kid. She dumped me with my grandparents the week after I was born.”
Her heart broke; she knew what it was like to be abandoned by your parents, but she’d been a teenager at the time, not a defenseless child. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be—I loved living with Gramps and Grammy.” Deep warmth in his tone. “I grew up digging in the garden, even had my own plot. My best harvest was seven carrots when I was six.”
Fascinated at this glimpse into his childhood, she hugged the moment to her heart. “What did you do with them?”
“I made my grandmother put carrots in the soup, and we also had to have them in our sandwiches.”
“Sandwiches?”
“Absolutely. Carrot and cheese sandwiches.”
Unable to resist that grin, she traced his lips with a fingertip, laughed when he pretended to bite. “How did your grandparents cope with an active little boy?”
“By tiring me out until I couldn’t cause trouble.”
As the night softened and went still around them, he told her stories of being allowed to go wild on his kid-sized skateboard while his grandparents watched over him, of playing stickball with the neighborhood kids, of cooking with his grandmother and learning carpentry with his grandfather.
It sounded like an idyllic childhood, but there was something beneath, a dark pulse of anger. Molly wanted to ask about it, wanted to learn every piece of him, but knew instinctively that it would be too profound an intimacy. She didn’t want to put him in the position of having to push her back, of fracturing the painful beauty of this instant when it was only Molly and Fox talking to one another.
No past that had altered the course of her life. No present where he lived in a world in which Molly simply couldn’t survive. No future where he’d be only a heartbreaking memory.
Keeping her silence and stifling her hunger to know this complex, talented man both in and out of bed, she fell asleep to the rhythm of his voice, only to wake to the unadulterated demand of his kiss.
Going back to work on Tuesday felt like stepping into a different world. She and Fox had spent the whole of Monday together as well, the day a lazy, playful one.
Her rock star had no inhibitions in bed and coaxed the same openness from her. “That’s it, baby,” he’d say, encouraging her to taste, to explore, to indulge and be indulged, his voice a finely honed instrument of which she couldn’t get enough.
“Earth to Molly.”
Molly jerked when a slender hand waved in front of her face. “What? Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Her colleague laughed. “Must’ve been some weekend—you were on another planet.”
Flushing guiltily, Molly reined in her wayward thoughts and focused on work. Three hours passed before she checked her phone—a deliberate act of willpower on her part—to find a message from Fox inviting her to the island hotel Schoolboy Choir had booked out, for a casual dinner with “the boys.”
Just meat on the grill, forget the greens, he’d added. And Noah lost a bet with Abe, so he’s making his (in)famous passion fruit cheesecake.
Molly’s fingers trembled. Putting down the phone before she dropped it, she went to help at the desk as the seniors’ book club came en masse to check out their selections for the week.
It wasn’t until forty-five minutes later, while she was on her lunch break, that she picked up the phone again. She didn’t know what to say, what to do, but she did know it was dead certain at least one aggressive member of the paparazzi had to have followed Schoolboy Choir to the island. Lusted after by millions of women and idolized by as many men, Fox, Noah, Abe, and David were too good for business to leave alone.
Wanting to be wrong, to be proven needlessly paranoid, she opened a browser window on her phone and input a news search for the band’s name. It took a split second for the search engine to show her several images of the villa-style hotel Schoolboy Choir had booked, as well as a couple of shots of two of the band members—Abe and Noah—throwing a football around on the beach.