G.o.d, he was huge. I knew it from our airplane encounter, but now I could fully appreciate it, standing tall and proud and heavy in the soft light streaming in through the window. I spread myself with my fingers and began to give my c.l.i.t the quick, tight circles I knew would bring me to climax in a few minutes.

Kent's long-fingered hand began to stroke his c.o.c.k.

Make that less than a minute.

Our breathing began to match up, pulsing in time with our frantic ministrations. My core tightened as I watched Kent stroke his shaft, and his glittering eyes raked over my naked body. I twisted and turned, my feet finding the mattress and pushing up into my hand. I bit my lip, tiny moans escaping from my throat as I fondled my b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Jesus, Rebecca," Kent said. "Jesus, Jesus..."

I forced myself to turn and watch him as his hips started thrusting into his fist. Beneath the thin white cotton of his undershirt his perfectly sculpted abs contracted and relaxed as he fell into the rhythm of pleasure. Gleaming beads of prec.u.m escaped his c.o.c.k, making the soft head gleam in the dimness as he swirled his palm over the glans. I wondered if it tasted as good as it looked-dark and sweet and thick.

The sad thought-that this might be the last time we could do something like this together-flashed in and out of my mind like lightning. It was weird. I didn't know Kent. It was all hormones and stress and desperation between us, a way to relieve pressure, but I couldn't help but think that there could have been something more there. At the very least, the s.e.x would have been molten hot. I wanted it badly. So, so badly.

But I couldn't. He was right. We had jobs to do, we were now boss and employee, and now he sat across the room, a thousand miles away, stroking his c.o.c.k and watching me play with my c.u.n.t, feeling each other only in our imaginations.

How big would he be in me? Would he touch all the secret parts, the sweet, soft places that ached for him? Would he be quick, or take his time? Would his hips twist, would he grind against my c.l.i.t, would the bulbous head of his c.o.c.k pull and plunge in completely, or would he move in tight, quick thrusts? Would he, could he, what would his body feel like, all whip-cord muscles and rough, calloused fingers, teeth and tongue and hard and thick and oh- My o.r.g.a.s.m came suddenly, swiftly, wrapping around me like a vise, and I arched hard into my hand. My palm flattened against my mound of its own accord, rubbing and sliding, almost frictionless with the slick juices of my core, and the tiny, strangled sound that escaped my throat reached across the room and jerked Kent over the edge with me.

"s.h.i.t-!" It came out as a hiss, a hard, sharp thing, cutting through me like a knife, and I turned my head just in time to see white spurts of c.u.m leap out of his c.o.c.k. They flew through the air, up across his granite-hard abdomen, spattering over the wifebeater he wore, and his head was thrown back with release. The column of his throat bulged with his Adam's apple, and the low moan he made reverberated through the entire room, quivering and dancing over my skin.

The pleasure receded, leaving me exhausted and limp upon the bed. In his armchair, Kent sagged, clearly just as spent, but as our breathing slowed down our mutual knowledge that this was now over crept in, crowding out the aftershocks. I didn't know what to say. Thanks for the laughs?

Finally he stood up, readjusting his clothing until he was mostly-presentable. I sat up and reached down the bed, pulling the covers around me. I wanted him to kiss me for some reason, but he didn't. He just stared at me for a long moment, his face unreadable in the dark.

"Good night, Rebecca," he said at last. "I'll see you in the morning. Get some sleep, it's going to be a fight."

I swallowed and nodded. "Yeah. Okay. Good night."

He left.

I didn't sleep at all.

Chapter Eight.

I'm going to kill him.

The thought floated across my brain, sweet and serene, and it wasn't the first time it had happened today. One month after getting hired to babysit Carter Hudson and I was starting to have homicidal ideations. I tried to push the thought away as soon as it came to me, but it was kind of hard when Carter was sitting right next to me with a s.h.i.t-eating grin on his face and taking nips from a bottle beneath the table.

We were sitting at one of LAs nicer sushi restaurants, and while I appreciated a good volcano roll, Carter was trying my patience.

He turned again and took a nip of the bottle and I finally figured out what kind of bottle it was.

"Is that... are you drinking cough syrup?" I hissed behind my menu.

Slipping the bottle back under the table, he turned and grinned at me. "Sizzurp, Mrs. Girlfriend. I am drinking sizzurp. You need to get the lingo right."

"You need to stop drinking cough syrup!" I was trying to keep my voice down but it was hard when all I could think about was grabbing my chopsticks and stabbing them into his eyes.

This was par for the course with Carter. Get him out, doing something nice and normal and not full of drugs or drinking, and his first reaction was to undermine it. It had been going on for a month and I was starting to see why my own mother had gone considerably grayer during our teenage years.

"Sizzurp," he corrected. "I need to stop drinking sizzurp." Carter gave me a lazy smile.

I'm going to kill him, I thought again.

Sizzurp. That was cough syrup with codeine, right? Wasn't there some rapper who'd been sipping the sizzurp recently and ended up in the hospital with seizures? That was no bueno. No bueno at all.

I snapped my menu down and pretended to peruse it, but I watched Carter from the corner of my eye. Codeine. That meant he'd be getting a little lazy. Any second now...

The moment he reached for his gla.s.s of water, my hand darted under the table and s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle out of his hand.

"Hey!"

"Shut up," I said. "The last thing I need is for you to end up in the hospital."

He slumped in his chair and glowered at me. I knew someone was probably taking pictures of us right now and they'd go running to the tabloids telling the world that we were having lover's problems. Well good. I hoped they did. Maybe the death threats would stop.

Not real death threats, but you know. The crazy fangirl death threats that certain people seemed to think were appropriate to post on the internet. I'd had to shut my Facebook down the second day the news was out that Carter Hudson had a girlfriend, and my email was still getting spammed by girls who hated me for getting between them and their precious Carter. Ha! If only they knew. Being Carter's girlfriend was the worst job I had ever had. I pride myself on sticking to jobs as long as I can, but right now I was thinking of quitting. Killing Carter counted as quitting, right?

I stuffed the cough syrup into my purse and made a mental note to figure out where he had gotten it. I mean... come on. I was with him practically twenty four-seven, and still he managed to somehow undermine my every attempt to help him. Shape up! I wanted to scream, but even though he irritated me to no end, I knew it wouldn't do any good. I couldn't yell at him for the same reason I couldn't yell at a toddler. He honestly just didn't seem to know any better.

The waitress came by and took our orders, and within a minute there was food sitting in front of us. That, at least, was a perk of babysitting a celebrity. No one ignored me now.

Then Carter reached out and plucked a piece of sushi from the plate with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.

Oh. My. G.o.d.

"Were you born in a barn?" I hissed.

"You mean like Jesus?" he asked.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

"You're not Jesus. And you'd better not say you're bigger than Jesus."

Carter laughed. "Well duh," he said. "I don't want to get shot."

"Just eat," I told him.

But he had that sly little grin on his face again, and I knew he was going to do something that I was going to regret.

Picking up another piece of sushi in his fingers, he held it out to me. "Now sweetie," he said, "would you like a piece?"

I clenched my teeth but managed a smile. I should be the one getting acting roles. "Of course, darling."

Dutifully I opened my mouth and he placed the roll on my tongue. I pulled back and closed my lips around it.

"Aww," he said. "Not even a little finger-suck for the paparazzi?" Sucking fingers was his new thing he kept trying to get me to do. He said it was s.e.xy and that a real girlfriend would be all over his guitarist fingers.

Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. "Nope," I said. "One make-out session a week is the agreement, remember?"

"A little tongue on my fingers doesn't count." His grin was huge and his eyes twinkled at me. He loved to tease me like this, acting as if I were just like every other girl who wanted to get into his pants. Judging by how many girls I'd found out he'd been with in the past year since their first alb.u.m shot up the charts, he was a walking STD. That wasn't s.e.xy. Neither was his teasing. He was like a little brother, and just like a little brother I wanted to tattle on him to dad so badly.

"Stop trying to get me to suck on your fingers or I'll tell Kent," I said.

"G.o.d, you are no fun," Carter said. He pulled a face and grabbed another piece of sushi, the largest of the bunch, and shoving it into his mouth. I hoped he choked on it, and then felt bad.

Sullenly I wielded my chopsticks at our motley a.s.sortment of dead fish and in short order we had demolished the whole array.

"I'm still hungry," Carter said as he swallowed the last piece of sushi.

"We're going to be late for rehearsal. Sweetie."

"Right. Of course. Darling."

Carter was going to make a good actor, I could tell, because while he smiled at me and kept his voice loving, his eyes broadcasted murder.

Made two of us.

I paid the bill with the credit card Kent had given me-Carter was no longer allowed to have unlimited access to his bank account, and he also had no car and no license. Kent had locked his license away somewhere and I had the only keys to the car. Carter had tried seducing them out of me, but it had been a no go. It almost seemed like I was the first woman he'd never been able to manipulate into giving him whatever he wanted.

And while I had to admit the measures Kent had taken seemed like they were what was needed, I could tell they weren't working. All they did was make Carter chafe even further, and he acted out in ways that were quite frankly dangerous. Sipping sizzurp was definitely not a healthy response to being forced to get up at a decent hour and eating more than a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary for breakfast.

I sighed as I signed a large tip to our waitress, and Carter and I both stood. He helped me out of my chair, and I gave him a dazzling smile for the cameras, but the tension underneath our interaction was palpable.

Holding hands, we left the restaurant and got into the car, helpfully brought to us by a valet. The moment we were inside it, behind the safety of the tinted windows, Carter's smiling facade dropped.

"This is driving me crazy, Rebecca," he said. He said the same thing every day, sometimes more than once, and like always I had no idea what to tell him.

"Kent calls the shots," I said. "That's all I can tell you."

Carter made a frustrated noise and threw himself back into the car seat and crossed his arms, fuming. I felt bad for him. I really did. In between fantasies of killing him, that is.

Something was going to have to give, soon, and I hoped it wasn't me. I'd barely earned two paychecks-incredible, jaw-dropping paychecks-but like Mom always said, no job was worth your health.

I should call her, I thought. Since my explosion across the LA music scene I'd spoken with her several times-after she got the full update from Rose, of course-and her only reaction was to compliment the new hair color Kent had forced me to get: a rich chestnut brown in lieu of my previous purple and blonde. I didn't want to complain to her about my new job, but her advice would have been invaluable.

Thinking about Mom made me think about home, and thinking about home made me homesick. Absently I gunned the car through LA traffic. It wasn't as nice as Kent's car, but it had enough torque for me to drive like an a.s.shole to let off some steam. Try to cut me off? Take this, s.h.i.thead.

We arrived at the rehearsal studio in fine form, which meant on time, in one piece, and mostly sober. It was happening more and more lately and the progress should have felt good, but given how miserable Carter clearly was, the victory was hollow.

We entered the rehearsal room to find Kent and Manny already there. For a pothead, Manny was surprisingly punctual. Kent, for his part, seemed to spend all his spare time at the studio practicing, so his presence wasn't a surprise. Sonya hadn't arrived yet, which was also not a surprise-since Carter had been forcefully pried out of his wild-child role, she had happily taken up the mantel, skipping around LA with her entourage in a state of perpetual tipsiness. She was usually late.

As we walked through the door, Manny looked up from his drum sticks-idly twirling them around like batons in his fingers-and gave us a smile and nod. Kent didn't bother to look up at all.

Well. Fine with me. Since that first night on the job, I could count the number of times he'd spoken to me outside of a business context on one knee.

That didn't mean he didn't eye-f.u.c.k me every time no one was looking.

Unfortunately there were too many people in the rehearsal room, so he kept his gaze fixed on his ba.s.s as he fiddled with the pegs.

Carter turned to me and flashed me a fake smile. "Time for rehearsal, babe," he said, then leaned in and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

I will say this for Carter: at least he never acted like I was beneath him. Another prima donna would have thrown a fit being paired up with me, but Carter seemed not to have realized that just because we were fake girlfriend and boyfriend he didn't have to treat me any nicer than a post-show groupie. He took the Mrs. Girlfriend thing pretty seriously, in fact, especially given that he hated my reason for hanging around him. He was very sweet, in his own way.

I turned toward the ladder that led up to the loft and hiked my messenger bag up my shoulder, preparing to climb, when Kent's voice cut through the air.

"Rebecca. Stay down here. I have an announcement to make."

Oh. That...didn't sound good? Or did it? It was impossible to tell because Kent was still scowling at his ba.s.s, and given his recent range of emotion went from 'moody' all the way to 'grumpy' it was sometimes hard to gauge where he was coming from.

Glancing at Carter, who shrugged, I sighed. "Okay." I let my messenger bag drop and leaned against the wall, waiting for Sonya to arrive.

Thankfully she came waltzing in just a few minutes later. "Sorry I'm late," she said breezily. "I was clear across town when I realized it was almost one o'clock and I was drinking so I had to-"

"And now it is one thirty," Kent said, cutting her off with a glare.

Her mouth snapped shut and she gave him a rival glare, but she was just too lovely to pull it off. Admitting defeat, she stomped off to her keyboard and flopped down in her chair.

"I have an announcement," Kent said again, "so don't put your headphones on yet.

Sonya paused in the middle of raising her headphones to her ears and turned and glared at him again, but Kent ignored her. Setting down his ba.s.s, he stood, turned and faced the rest of the room, and crossed his arms. His eyes met mine for a brief moment and I had to clench my teeth to keep from sighing.

My G.o.d, he's hot, I thought. One month later and I still l.u.s.ted after him, even though he wouldn't speak to me. It was the eyef.u.c.king. He kept stringing me along with it. It was like middle school all over again.

Then his eyes left mine and I could breathe again. Somewhat.

He swept his gaze over the rest of the band. "I'm happy to announce that the label is giving us another video." He didn't look happy about it, but he never looked happy about anything. What tipped me off was the rest of the rehearsal room giving up a huge groan in unison.

"Nooooo," Sonya said, as though she'd just been stabbed with an ice pick.

"We just did one last month," Manny said, which surprised me. Manny never complained about anything.

Carter just threw himself into his chair and sagged, looking as though he was about to be dragged through a pool of boiling oil.

Kent didn't look any happier about it. "Yes, one last video shoot," he said, "and you are all going to work hard on it, no slacking off like last time. This is for publicity, because we need to be working on our next alb.u.m. We needed to be working on it last month, but someone-" He shot Carter a glare. "-couldn't be a.s.sed to make an effort and get to writing."

"I wasn't inspired," Carter said.

"That's bulls.h.i.t," Kent told him. "There's no such thing. There's only hard work and laziness, and you were being lazy. You seem in a better place now, so I want six new songs by the end of shooting."

Carter's head snapped up. "Six?" he said incredulously.