The Rocker That Needs Me (The Rocker...) (2 page)

Drake

I woke with the taste of stale Jack Daniels on my tongue, my head pounding and fighting the urge to vomit.

Yeah, my typical morning!

Nothing special about that or the nightmares that still lingered in my mind. They were what made me run for the bathroom. I barely made it before I started retching and emptied my dinner from the night before into the toilet.

I was brushing my teeth when Emmie waddled into my connecting bathroom and glared at me. Apparently she was still mad at me, and I still had no clue why. Damn pregnancy hormones!

“Grab a shower. You’re helping Jesse move Layla and her sisters into the guest house today.”

I groaned. “Emmie, my head is about to split open.”

“How is that different from any other day?” she called over her shoulder as she left the bathroom. “Hurry up. Jesse is leaving soon.”

Muttering a curse, I stepped into the shower. Thirty minutes later, I was riding shotgun in a rental with Jesse. He knew my head was killing me, and he didn’t talk much because of it. I rested my head against the back of the seat and prayed that the day would pass quickly. All I wanted was some Jack and a bed.

The apartment duplex Jesse pulled up in front of wasn’t the most seedy place I had ever seen, but it wasn’t the nicest either. We weren’t exactly in gang territory, but it was obvious that this wasn’t the safest of neighborhoods. I was kind of glad that Layla was moving into the guest house after seeing this place. I liked her and wanted her somewhere safer.

The sun was bright and I regretted not wearing my sunglasses as I climbed the stairs to the second floor behind Jesse. He knocked and the door opened.

“Jesse, hey,” Layla’s raspy voice greeted the drummer.

I stood there in the glaring sun and watched them devour each other with their eyes. Yeah, there wasn’t anything going on there! “Sometime today, Jesse. Stop eye fucking the chick and let’s get this show started, man.” Layla’s cheeks flushed, and she stepped back to let us into the apartment. “I wasn’t expecting you guys to help me.”

I dropped down on a couch that reminded me of the one my mom had loved so much when I was a kid. This one was probably as old as I was.

“Neither were we,” I muttered.

“What Drake means is that he is here under duress. This is his punishment for pissing Emmie off last night,” Jesse informed her.

“I still don’t understand what I did,” I grumbled. “One minute she’s all smiles and the next she’s screaming at me.” I shook my head and my long hair fell in my face. “I hate pregnancy hormones. Cannot wait for that demon child to get out of her!” I wanted my sweet little Emmie back.

Okay, she wasn’t sweet, but she was ours, and I wouldn’t trade her for anyone else. But lately she wasn’t the same girl that the guys and I had practically raised. She had been taken over by the spawn growing in her belly.

Layla laughed and it was a sweet sound. “That isn’t going to help,” she assured me. “After the baby is born, she’s going to be worse. Take my word for it, sweetie. Postpartum is worse than the mood swings she’s having now.”

“Ah, hell,” Jesse muttered at the same time I did.

“Hey, Layla, did you already pack the bathroom? I need…” My head snapped around at the sound of that voice, and I was sure that my heart stopped in my chest when I met the whiskey colored eyes of an angel. Her long, midnight black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her brown-amber eyes were huge in her beautiful face. She had plump lips that were almost bee stung and a nose that was tipped at the end. The angel was tall, her waist long and slender, but she had curves that made my body ache to hold her against me.

This angel was young; I would say no more than twenty-one…Layla introduced the angel. “Lana, this is Jesse and that’s Drake. Guys, this is my
seventeen
year old sister, Lana.”

Seventeen. Seventeen. SEVENTEEN!

Seven-fucking-teen!

The number bounced around in my already throbbing head, and I thought I was going to go mad from it. No! Not seventeen. She had to be older. I couldn’t be attracted in a seventeen year old girl.

“It’s nice to meet you, Lana,” Jesse said as he stared at the angel.

I was fascinated by the pretty pink that flooded her cheeks. “Yeah, you too,” she murmured and glanced at her sister. “Layla, can you help me with something in the bathroom?”

The sisters left us alone in the living room, and Jesse dropped down on the sofa beside of me. “Dude, you look pale.”

I wasn’t surprised. I think I had actually felt the color drain from my face when Layla had said the word
seventeen
. I felt sick to my stomach for an entirely different reason than the ones that I had woken up to.

“Are you really demons?”

I turned my head to find a little girl with long, curly, dark hair standing a few feet from the sofa. She had big dark eyes and a cute little button nose, and just like Emmie had all those years ago, this little girl sucked me in. I couldn’t help smiling at her. “No, sweetheart. I’m not really a demon.” All though some people had likened me to one a few times. The public eye thought I was some hard-ass with no heart or soul. Mostly, they were right. Unless you counted Emmie and my band brothers, I had no love and no compassion for anyone.

“What’s your name?” The little girl asked.

“I’m Drake,” I told her. “He’s Jesse.”

Her dark eyes took us both in as if she were assessing us both. Then, with a trust that only the young and innocent had, she climbed onto my lap. “I’m Lucy. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Drake.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you too, Lucy.”

For the next five minutes, she asked a hundred questions about the house she was going to be living in. Before Jesse or I could attempt to answer, she threw another one at us. Within the first minute, I knew that her favorite word was
awesome
. She wanted to build a sandcastle but had never been to the beach. Before I could really think about it, I offered to teach her.

Layla came out of the bedroom with a smile on her face. “Not today, Lucy,” she told the girl. “We have a lot to do today, baby.”

“Tomorrow?” she asked.

I was already nodding my head. It sounded like fun the more I thought about it. Fuck, I don’t think I had ever made a sandcastle either, but I wanted to make one with Lucy. “Tomorrow. It’s a date, okay?”

Her eyes grew wide. “Promise?”

I smiled. “Promise. Now, let’s get you ladies moved.”

Lana

I knew who Demon’s Wings were. Layla was a big fan of their music, but I would have known about them even if she wasn’t. They were an incredible rock band, and even I liked some of their songs, which was saying a lot because my tastes leaned toward musicians like Michael Bublé.

Lately, the band had been in the tabloids, which wasn’t typical of them. They mostly kept a low profile, but the front man, Nikolas Armstrong, was going to be a father, and that was a big deal in the music world. He had knocked up the band’s surrogate sister and caused heads to turn all around the world. The tabloids had made a killing off the story for months now, but it had died down for the most part. I figured that when that baby was born the band would be hounded yet again.

The baby story was the first real news about the band in a few years or so. The last time they had made tabloid news it was because of Drake Stevenson. The man was reported to be some psycho who had thrown a doctor through a window. The picture of the bad-ass rocker glaring at the photographer, who had dared to take his picture, had shown a man that looked beyond wild and dangerous. I guess you could understand my shock at finding that same guy standing in what had been my living room for the past two years. I was nervous at first, especially when he looked at me and I felt as if he was looking straight to my soul. But even though he scared the crap out of me, I was sure that my heart was racing for reasons other than fear.

Damn, that man was sexy! You could even go as far as saying that he was beautiful. His face was all hard lines and angles, but each angle looked as if the Gods themselves had sculpted each line. Adonis, the God of beauty and desire, had nothing on Drake Stevenson, and with just one look, my breath felt like it was trapped in my lungs.

What shocked me more was that over the next few hours I found myself no longer afraid of him. He went out of his way to make Lucy laugh. Every time I picked up something heavy, he quickly took it away from me and carried it to the truck himself. Drake the rock star might be a total prick, but apparently Drake the man was a gentleman.

I felt as if there was an invisible force pushing me toward him. Normally, I would have put on the E-brake fast. Rock stars were bad news. I had grown up with one after another warming my mother’s bed. I had seen firsthand how they treated people, and it wasn’t pretty. But for some reason I felt like Drake and Jesse were different.

Just as I felt that Shane and Nik were different when I met them later that day as they helped us unload the moving truck. They were all really nice, and I felt comfortable around them all. And Emmie? She reminded me of Layla a little. Someone who didn’t let anyone walk all over her, who didn’t let the world pull her down.

By the end of the day, I found myself crushing on Drake. It was crazy. He was thirty one, and I was seventeen. Sure, rockers dated younger women all the time, but I wasn’t going to be some rocker’s Priscilla to his Elvis. Nope, not going to happen!

Sunday was my homework day. I normally didn’t mind doing homework. Layla was a hard-ass about getting good grades, and it came easy for me. I studied hard and took extra classes. Since I had been living with Layla and I no longer had to spend so much time taking care of Lucy—something I had done from the day she was born up until our loser mother had died—I started taking the extra credit classes my high school offered. The classes were basic general studies classes for college, and at the end of this term I would have enough college credits to qualify as a sophomore when I actually started college.

Monday, I drove to school by myself for the first time. Layla was awesome. She was letting me drive her old Corolla so I didn’t have to transfer schools. It wasn’t that I would miss my friends; I spent so much time at school either studying or participating in the mandatory sports program—I had chosen track because I sucked at team sports—I didn’t have any friends. Not one.

Of course not having friends made it hard at school sometimes. None of the girls liked me because they either:
A
- thought I was a stuck up bitch because I refused to let them suck me into the everyday drama that tended to be a teenage girls life; or
B
- they thought I wanted their man. My answer was always
C
. I didn’t have time for anyone’s drama but my own, and I wouldn’t touch their boyfriends if they paid me. Not having friends had given me time to observe the goings-on of others around me, and I had discovered that most of the
boyfriends
that I was accused of
wanting
were total tools and were getting more side action than their girlfriends realized.

The day before, Layla had bought two new phones. She had given Lucy her old one in case of emergencies, but I got my own, along with an unlimited text plan to go with the internet and call plan. Of course I had given my number to Drake. I wasn’t sure how it had happened, but we had ended up texting back and forward until after midnight last night. And today, even though I knew he was supposed to be in the studio working on new material with the other guys of Demon’s Wings, we had been texting regularly.

During English he sent me a funny picture of his brother goofing off at lunch. Because I hadn’t been expecting it, I didn’t think to control my snort of laughter while my teacher was giving a boring lecture on the importance of a strong introduction to an essay. I hadn’t been paying attention because I had already taken college English 101 and passed it with an A. The only reason I was even in the guy’s class was because I had to have it to graduate.

“Miss Daniels, is there something you would like to share with the class?” The jerk asked in a nasally voice that always grates down my spine. Mr. Mills was in his late twenties with a Justin Bieber haircut, and most of the girls in the school squealed like the little girls they were when they found out they would have him for English. I wasn’t one of his fans and hadn’t made a secret of it
—ever. Of course I felt like he didn’t like me and was always trying to single me out in embarrassing ways.

I slipped my phone between my book and notebook to hide it from the teacher. “No, Mr. Mills,” I assured him.

“Then perhaps you would like to tell us the best way to start a Compare/Contrast introduction.” His smirk told me he thought I couldn’t give him a good enough answer to satisfy him.

He was a little more pissy toward me than usual by the end of the class, after my five minute explanation for his question. When the bell rang, I was more than happy to grab my things and get out of the way. I ducked into the girls’ room before heading to my last class of the day and texted Drake back.

You made me LOL in English! Prick teacher hates me.

Within seconds Drake texted me back.
Fuck! Sorry, Angel!