Read My Rock #5 (The Rock Star Romance Series - Book #5) for Free Online Page A

He’s got eyes for you,
Elly.”
    “We’re just friends, Mom.” My mind flashed to the
hot sex we’d just had.
    “I can see how he looks at you. You should give it a
chance.” She was sincere.
    I smiled. “Bye, Mom. I love you.”
    She smiled and patted my face with her hand. “I love
you, too,” she said.

 
    CHAPTER
NINE
    TRISTAN
    It was round ten; just me and Ethan were left. I was
sitting up on stage listening to him sing Truly,
Madly, Deeply by Savage Garden. He was doing a damned good job of it, too.
He had upped the tempo of the chorus and given it a whole new sound. Bastard! I
was a nervous wreck before he sang; afterwards, I was so nervous that I was
afraid my voice would shake when I opened my mouth to sing.
    I was trying to think of something else, anything
else. My mind went back to Elly and me having sex in the dressing room after
her concert. That was fun. She was most definitely the hottest piece of ass
that I’d ever had. I counted myself lucky that she remembered me from that
stupid boy band and sought me out that night. Doubly lucky, I guess, because
she’d talked me into getting sober. Then there was giving me a place to stay.
Shit, I was going to have to think about something else; it was sounding too
much like a relationship.
    I thought about what I was going to do with a million
bucks. The first thing would obviously be to get a place to stay. I had no idea
where I was going from there, so I wasn’t going to buy a house or anything
permanent like that. The thought of being tied to anything made me feel like I
couldn’t breathe. I would rent an apartment. A much nicer one than the piece of
shit I’d gotten evicted from, maybe one by the beach. I loved the beach; it’s
the one place that I felt at peace when everything else around me went to shit.
Yeah, that’s what I’d do; I’d rent a place over on Venice Beach…or maybe
Huntington.
    Maybe I’d get a car, too, after we got back off out
tour. I was looking forward to that—getting the hell out of that fucking city.
They call it the city of angels. Sometimes I wondered if that really means the
city of the angel of death. It would suck the life right out of you if you let
it.
    I realized I got caught up in my thoughts and Ethan
had stopped singing. Everyone was clapping and cheering. They loved him. Shit. I
didn’t want him to suck, but I was hoping he wouldn’t do quite so well. I
wanted to leave there and be able to tell myself it was in the bag. After his
performance, I was going to have to sweat it out until Thursday, no matter how
well I did.
    The judges all loved him, too. I listened as they
told him so and when they talked about how close the contest was going to be.
They said it was anyone’s contest. My stomach twisted up tighter than it
already was. Ethan smiled at me as he took his seat and I honestly tried to
smile back, but it probably came out looking like a grimace. I stepped up to
the microphone and willed the butterflies in my stomach to go away. I felt
light-headed and in a moment of doubt I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do it.
I actually thought about conceding defeat right there.
    I closed my eyes for just a second, to get my
bearings, and then I looked out at the audience and I saw Elly’s face. She
looked like she had confidence in me. She saw me looking out at her and she
smiled. I pictured what she looked like when we had sex. Her hair would be in
her face, all wet from sweat and sticking to her forehead and her cheeks would
be all flushed—she was so sexy. I had to stop there or I’d have a hard-on in
front of millions of people. That made me laugh in my head and I suddenly felt
better…calmer.
    I was doing a country song. It was by Brad Paisley
and called Don’t take the Girl . The
pianist had tried to talk me out of it. That day when we practiced he said, “It’s
a really popular song, Tristan. If you change it up too much people might not
like it.”
    “Then fuck ‘em,” I said.
    The