The Trials of Guinevere DeGrance (Legendary Rock Star #5) Read online

  “Come join us, man,” blared through the microphone in Tristan’s encouraging timbre. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. The muscles needed for laughter had definitely not been felt or used in months. It was infectious and I laughed harder. Sweat rolled down my side and I took the first step while releasing a deep breath.

  Here I go, I thought, as I placed one foot in front of the other and walked forward, back into the limelight.

  I stared in utter disbelief. It could not be him. He looked…exactly the same. Not a scratch. Not a scrape. Not a hole in his heart. He looked exactly as he had all those months ago with dark wavy, unruly hair over matching dark eyes that looked hooded on his best days and dangerous on others. He had power over women and he knew it. The Chivalrous Lover had been his nickname, and he earned that rightfully by his generous lovemaking skills. I was one more girl added to that list. I thought I’d be the end of it, but watching him on stage, seeing his presence as natural as the moon lighting the night, I sensed how wrong I was. Arturo King still held the power to be a lover: gentle, patient, and kind, but to other women.

  The screams of desire were almost orgasmic. The euphoria of seeing him alive, standing, and singing was driving women mad. Actually, it was making me mad. My heart went from a slow patter to a full gallop as it sprinted inside my chest. A nervous energy took over my body, and if I didn’t move in some manner, I was afraid I’d combust. I ran for the stairs, skipped the elevator, and huffed down three flights of emergency steps. I wouldn’t have been able to take the containment of the elevator box. I was ready to explode.

  I flung open the door to the pit. It was a heavy, fire retardant door, made to liken the walls around it. It wasn’t quite as secretive as my father intended, but it did require a passcode to enter into the private sanctuary. The space was respected, and few ever attempted to break through the barrier. The dim light of the hall behind me must have attracted his glare as Arturo King’s eyes found mine in the doorway. A small beacon of light beamed through the darkness of the throbbing bodies. I again had the sensation of the audience being a living, thriving organism. It moved as one while Arturo sang a famous song.

  I walked slowly toward that breathing, squirming crowd. Like an amoeba, it would only take seconds before I was consumed into the body and became part of it. Ironically, the crowd parted instead. My presence gave off a vibe to separate, without anyone even looking in my direction. A path was slowly clearing, and I progressed forward like I was floating. My body moved without my control. His voice tugged me to him, but I despised the pull. The song’s words slowly registered in my mind.

  He recognized me.

  It had been so long.

  Hearts fade.

  The lyrics rolled together for me. I didn’t care what he was saying; I only cared to get to him. Then what? As if my mind stilled my body, I stopped. I would go no further. He must come to me. My heart raced while my feet stalled. The air around me buzzed. There was a perimeter of emptiness surrounding me as people in the crowd stepped back. A circle had been drawn around me, but I was not in a protective bubble.

  Slowly, my eyes registered that Arturo King actually had not gone unscratched or unscathed. His right hand removed from his pocket, as if to meet the left, gripping the microphone before him. The microphone was almost an extension of his body, he once told me, as was his guitar. When his hands touched either, they became one with him. Unfortunately, there was no right hand to grasp the metal before him. My own hand covered my mouth as I stared in horror at the dismembered man before me. Arturo King was missing his right hand.

  It took several minutes for me to recover, and by then, Arturo stood before me. His left hand reached out for my loose hair, and pushed it back from my cheeks. His thumb caressed my face, and I instinctively leaned into his touch.

  Oh, Arturo, my brain sighed, but my mouth remained shut. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to feel. The touch of his skin on mine sent every electron and neuron within me into overload. My mind went numb. My body lurched forward as I reached out and embraced him in my relief that he was alive. His body was warm against mine as I nuzzled into his neck. His arms wrapped around me and the palm of his left hand covered my back. The right side lay heavy against me. Anger returned to me. It filled me slowly from my ankles to my abdomen. It sluggishly sloshed upward like a cup being quickly made full. I pulled back and before I could blink, Arturo’s lips were on mine.

  I’d like to think I would recognize them. Lips that caressed mine tenderly. Lips that covered every inch of my body in delicate strokes of love. Lips that sang and spoke cautious, meaningful professions of love. But I didn’t recognize these lips against mine. Hard and cold, the kiss was forced, or rather, the kiss was forceful. Arturo King was a powerful kisser, demanding and vanquishing, but this…this was not a conquering. This was not surrender. This was plunder and rape. He was pillaging from me, stealing what he could with anger and distrust.

  How dare he? I thought, as I pulled my mouth back so quickly we made an exaggerated popping sound between us. My eyes hardly met his before my hand connected with his stubbly face. The crack of the flat of my palm against the chiseled edge of his cheek was audible, as if it echoed through the great hall and vibrated off the walls. That was hardly possible, but the intensity of the sound filled my ears like an explosion and then dissipated like a slow release of air.

  We glared at each other, breathing heavily in one another’s face. My heart filled with love and hatred so intense at the same moment, I thought I’d crack in half. The hurt of his betrayal to stay away from me was severe. It stabbed at the hollowness of me. While it should have gone right through the emptiness inside me, the pain filled me to bursting.

  I spun quickly and ran for the private hallway, reaching the elevator to find Tristan Lyons waiting while he banged on the button to raise the lift.

  “I’m not letting you see her,” I exhaled in exaggeration, practically spitting the words at him. My breaths came quickly as if I’d run a marathon. I felt like I had the energy to do so, and at the same time, I was completely spent.

  “Let me up there,” Tristan demanded.

  “No,” I bit, reaching around him to type in a code. “Don’t you dare follow me.”

  When the doors opened, I entered and turned quickly within the box. Firey beams of hate and hurt narrowed my eyes at Tristan, as I sensed the presence of Arturo in the archway of the door to our private sanctuary.

  “Leave us alone,” I hissed, as the elevator doors slowly closed, cutting them both off to me.

  “Leave us alone,” I muttered again inside the silence of the lifting elevator. “You’re good at that,” I breathed quietly.

  Stunned into silence, I smiled slowly shaking my head at Tristan Lyons. My Guinie Girl certainly had a slap. I could hardly imagine if she tried to punch me. My reflexes were normally quick, but with the loss of my right hand, my dominant hand, I wasn’t as fast as I used to be. In fact, I wasn’t many things I used to be.

  I could no longer write or type. That was rectified through the use of one hand on the computer or texting. I was getting stronger at using my left hand for those mundane things we take for granted. Cutting tough food was still not possible. Lifting something that required two hands wasn’t happening. Writing free hand was out. Chicken scratches, at best, were the result of using my left hand to sign anything. My handwriting looked like a four-year-old’s.

  The thing I missed the most – my guitar. I could no longer play. With only one hand to hold the neck, there was no use for the instrument. With no fingers to stroke the chords, there could be no sound. The loss of my hand was the loss of my soul. An instrument in and of itself, it was the key to playing my beloved guitars, which I needed to propel my sound. I was empty without my body part and further depleted without my guitar. The initial depression ran so deep; I didn’t even notice the failure of my heart. It forgot to beat. The steady rhythm needed to keep me alive almost quit, and so did my desire to love.<
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  I’d missed Guinevere with every inch of my body, once I could recover the feeling in it. It took months to regain a semblance of the physical without pain: surgery to reset bones, infection from improper sets, amputation as a result. I didn’t have a will to live without her present, and yet I didn’t have the desire to see her either. With one loss, comes more loss, I convinced myself.

  I sighed heavily as I waited for Tristan to walk over to me.

  “She got you good, didn’t she?” He laughed without humor, patting my shoulder.

  “That she did,” I muttered. She had me good – heart and soul – but I’d lost her.

  “Drink,” Tristan stated. It wasn’t even a question. I’d drown myself in it often, while I worked my way back here. I could afford to sink into it further as I was no longer certain why I returned.

  I woke with the worst of headaches that came solely from drinking with Tristan Lyons. I’d swear on good days he was a fish. He breathed liquor instead of air. The evening before I was convinced of it, as he drowned his despair in his selected flavor of the night – scotch. I couldn’t keep up with him. Out of practice at the fast paced lifestyle, I deferred the liquid fire once I felt my body growing too warm and my heart cracking at Tristan’s pleas.

  “What the fuck am I going to do?” he had moaned and my sentiments joined his.

  “She’s having my baby, but I don’t even know where she is,” he slurred.

  “Why the fuck are women so…so impossible,” he sighed heavily then took another pull straight from the bottle.

  We had returned to his place on shaky legs after a few celebratory rounds at the bar. The overall enthusiasm at my return was overwhelming. Again out of practice at being in the limelight, I was hesitant and reserved as wellwishers patted me and women tried to hug me. It was awkward all around, as their eyes shifted to the stump at the end of my arm, while they tried to draw me into an embrace. The looks were a mix of pity and trepidation. Could the stump hurt them? Did it frighten them? It wasn’t a disease. It wasn’t contagious. A body part of theirs would not fall off just by touching me. My anger rose at times, and I worked hard to suppress it. This had been part of my therapy. I needed to work around what others did or said and be confident in myself.

  I’d been too angry at first to get where I needed to be. No longer feeling whole, I cursed everyone and everything. I cursed the media, the paparazzi, and the chaos to take a photo. Then I swore an oath of hatred as love had been the cause for the motorcycle race, in the first place. If we had not been trying to save a girl, we wouldn’t have been chased. It was all for naught, though. Whether intentional or not, I had to recognize I could not get my hand back. I had to accept that and decide where I would go from that point of discovery.

  Would I have left with Perkins? Would I have helped him save the girl? In a heartbeat, the answer was, Yes, I would. With that realization, I began to see that nothing could have changed my current consequences, save a stupid photographer. My initial action would have been the same. There was no way to predict the results.

  So, there we were, drinking away Tristan’s sorrow in his apartment. His home was considered modest by him, but it was rather nice. A sprawling living room with a bar in the corner, his place had been host to our annual Boxing Day celebration the past Christmas. I had not been here that day. Present in body outside the building, I was not in the right frame of mind to enter inside. I knew then that Guinevere was in here, and I couldn’t face her. I didn’t understand women any more than Tristan, I recalled from that night.

  My legs lie outstretched and my head tilted back as I stared blankly at his ceiling. He was in a vaguely similar position; only his eyes were closed as he dangled the bottle between his fingers.

  “She didn’t love him, and yet, I’m not convinced she loved me. I mean, she returned to him time and time again,” Tristan growled. I didn’t know much of the tale of Tristan and Ireland as he called her. Isolde Ireland was a current supermodel, renowned as well, by being the daughter of the famous classical beauty, Isa, and future inheritor of Trinity Modeling. She was going to be a powerful lady one day, but I sensed none of that mattered to my friend beside me.

  “I mean, why the hell do women return to men who can only hurt them?”

  I was beginning to ask those kinds of questions myself. I had hurt Guinie. I knew I had. I was wrong to think she would easily return to me, but nothing prepared me for that slap. I’d played the scenario of our reunion a hundred ways. I’d told myself not to get my hopes up, as I had been gone too long. But to slap me, in front of the crowd, after kissing me like her life depended on it, was a vision I had not foreseen. Actually, I had tried to kiss her like my life depended on it, but something was off. The kiss wasn’t right. Her mouth did not mold to mine like it had before. We would blend together in the past, but hers did not melt with me. It was hard and distant, like she, as if she…I sat up straighter with my thoughts. As if she didn’t want me to kiss her, ever again. Sensing that Tristan was waiting for an answer, I spoke.

  “You’ll get her back,” I said to the open space before me.

  “So will you,” he said quietly. I turned in his direction to see him roll his head to face me. Dark green eyes met mine and spoke the same language as my heart. He wasn’t convinced of his words anymore than me. I snorted in response.

  “She loves you still. She loves you more,” Tristan said tenderly, his eyes half-mast, his words slurred a bit.

  “More than what?” I bit.

  His eyes opened wider and he rolled his head back and forth on the edge of the chair cushion.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Not my story, man,” Tristan breathed. “Not my story.”

  “Arturo?” I whispered, my voice catching in my throat as I stared at him. My heart leapt at the déjà vu of our situation. Slowly rising from an oversized leather chair in my father’s office, Arturo stood before me. Kaye Sirs, the band’s manager, braced himself on the armrest of the opposite chair. My father was standing near the door while I entered. We were practically placed in the same locations as the first time I officially met Arturo King in this office. The time my father suggested…

  “I don’t believe I could recommend a walk for the two of you?” Leo DeGrance questioned in a sly tone.

  “No,” I laughed quietly without humor. “No, I don’t think a walk through the park will help today, Dad.” When I was first officially introduced to Arturo, my father had made this very suggestion. His cure all for melancholy: a walk in Central Park was his solution for moments of sadness, or when he hadn’t spent much time with me, and he was trying to make up for it. It was his way of pushing me toward Arturo a year ago. He had his ulterior motives that I was not aware of at that time.

  I glanced briefly at Arturo, whose crooked smile at my father’s teasing request had slipped to a straight line and then a twisting of the lips. I’d seen that look before when he struggled with what he wanted to say. I’d also seen the look in his eyes, that dangerous beam of darkness that glared back at me. His temper was smoldering beneath his skin. I almost laughed to think I could see it rising within him like a thermometer. Then my breath caught.

  He released his lips and smiled ever so slowly at me. Taking his time to let his lips curl as his eyes roamed my body. He was unbuttoning my shirt with the look in his eyes. When he reached my waist, I practically felt the release of the button on my jeans. My lower body leapt so hard, I almost fell over. The surge was powerful between my legs, and I instinctively squeezed my thighs. His eyes opened slightly wider as he noticed my motion. I tried to remain brave, stood taller, and released the clamp of my legs. His mouth dropped open and I noticed the flare of his nostrils as he took a breath. A peek of tongue crossed his lips and I was lost.

  My body quaked. The heaviness in my breasts was unbearable against the thin fabric of my bra. The pulse between my thighs beat deep. I was more conscious of it than the rhythm of my heart, which was increasing with each caress
of his eyes. He swept down my legs and back up to my center quickly. The rush of that glance increased the throbbing ache, and a trickle of release alerted me to my own dampness below. My chest rose and fell as I licked my lips. My mouth was excessively dry compared to other body parts. His dark eyes stared at my mouth briefly before they met my gaze. For a moment, I imagined I saw his desperation for me. His desire. Then it passed. He looked away.

  “No, Dad,” I repeated. “I have practice anyway.”

  “You’re still with the 4Gs?” Arturo’s voice startled me, which was ridiculous as I was hyperaware of his presence. It was the fact that those were the first words he’d spoken to me. The night before at The Round Table, we hadn’t said a word to one another. He approached me. He touched me. He kissed me, with that awful kiss that still bothered my lips. I licked them again and a spark flared in Arturo’s eyes. He blinked and it was gone again.

  “Yes.” Not the most intelligent word or response, but the only answer I had for him. I played the cello. A classical instrument by trade, I always dreamed of playing for the Boston Philharmonic Symphony. Instead, I’d ended up securing a position with the 4Gs: a string quartet of women who rocked out those strings in modern song. I almost laughed and wanted to remind Arturo that he was the reason I had the gig. My mind briefly flashed through my mates: Lace Cardaugh; her sister, Allora, whom I replaced while she was on maternity leave; Enid Kelly; and Trinity Donovan. Those women had become a huge support for me after Arturo disappeared. I felt a kindred spirit with two of them as I joined their ranks, those who had slept with Arturo King. Trinity was not one of those two and her continued hatred of him only rose higher as her disapproval of his disappearance reached epic proportions. Shaken by my thoughts, and anything else intelligible to say, I spun on my flat heels and exited my father’s office.