Bad Boy Romance: Nick (Romantic Suspense Alpha Male Romance) (New Adult Rock Star Contemporary Short Stories) (Hard Rock Star Series Book 2) by Jade Allen

to send him pictures of us together is exactly the kind of
person who’d send the same pictures to a bunch of other people.”
    “So you come clean with it,” I suggested. “Make it your next
article on the site. Talk about the ridiculousness of having a relationship on
the road.” I gripped her so tightly I knew it was probably more than a little
uncomfortable for Olivia, but I couldn’t make myself let go of her. “If you
don’t freak out over this and you handle it like it doesn’t matter, then it
won’t matter.”
    “Just…just let me be for a little while, Nick,” she said.
She sounded exhausted—so thoroughly exhausted that my grip loosened without me
even thinking about it. “I need to cry over this and try and get…get myself
together, and I can’t do that if you’re insisting that everything is going to
be fine and dandy and fucking wonderful. I need to—I need to think. And I can’t
think if you’re right here next to me.”
    “I’ll be quiet,” I said lowly. “I’ll just lie here, and you
can cry all over me, and when we get to the venue I’ll change my shirt and no
one will have to know.” I glanced towards the curtain. “Well, no one other than
the guys and the crew on the bus.”
    “Just leave me alone for a little while,” Olivia said.
“I—I’ll talk to you about all this later when I’ve figured out what I want to
do.” I wanted to argue the point; I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to
just leave her alone. I wasn’t going to let it end like this—and I could tell
she wanted it to end. When she did talk to me later, she was going to argue for
us to be over. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I kissed her forehead and let
go of her, and then I slipped out of the bunk and climbed down along the wall,
and went into the lounge.
    “What happened?” I threw myself onto a couch and shook my
head.
    “Someone sent pictures of us to her editor,” I said as
quietly as possible. “Her editor’s considering taking her off the assignment.”
    “So we say that we won’t work with anyone else,” Alex
suggested. “I mean what are they going to do? Risk making a bigger scandal out
of this by having to explain the cancelation?”
    “She’s afraid it’s going to ruin her career.” I sighed.
“Fuck, I need a beer.” I needed more than that. I stood up on unsteady feet and
went back to the bunks. I found my vapor pen and the little tiny jar of hash
wax; at one point in its life it had been a container of lip balm or something.
I went back into the lounge and Dan handed me an open beer. I put a dab of
brown, sticky hash on the atomizer of my vape and took a quick hit, holding the
tingling vapor in my lungs for as long as I dared. I exhaled and took a sip of
my beer.
    “Take it slow,” Jules suggested from the table where he and
Dan were playing Battleship. “You don’t want to go into the show blasted out of
your mind.” I shrugged.
    “She’s going to end it,” I said quietly. I lit a cigarette
and blew the smoke out of my lungs in favor of another hit of the hash. “The
fuck does it matter if I play bad for one night over it?”
    “That’s some bullshit,” Alex said, scowling at me. “You’ve
never, ever let any of the rest of us have the excuse of breaking up with
somebody for playing bad. You don’t get it either.”
    “I’m not going to fuck the show over,” I said. “I just…” I
shook my head. “I just want to get stoned enough to leave her alone. If I don’t
then I’m going to keep trying to talk to her and just make things worse.” I
took another hit and then set the vape aside, starting on my cigarette in
earnest. I knew better than to get wasted before it was even two in the
afternoon. “I just thought—for like, the first fucking time in my life—that I’d
found something I wanted to really keep. And then this shit happens.” I looked
at each of the other guys in the band in turn. “If I ever find out who did this
to her, I’m