TAKE ME WITH YOU (Take Me #2)

1 Grant I’d never given much thought to falling in love. For someone like me, it seemed an impossibility. Why dwell on something that would never happen? I had no interest in chicks for more than what they could give me in one night. f**k ‘em and then show ‘em the door. There were always clinger groupies, who claimed to love me. But they loved what I could offer them. s*x. A one-night stand. A story to tell their friends about how they slept with a rocker. With Grant McDermott. I was a name. A symbol. Nothing more. My eyes slid over to the blonde sleeping in my bed. I brushed a strand of hair out of her mouth and pressed a kiss to her lips. That was before Ari. “Grant?” she whispered in her sleep. My name on her lips was better than a thousand one-night stands. I’d almost lost her to a whole lot of stupidity. Some groupie slut, Kristin, had come on to me at the ski lodge where my band, ContraBand, was playing the Poconos music festival. And by come on to me, I meant she had stripped down naked in my room and ambushed me thinking I’d f**k her desperate ass. Ari had walked in and all hell had broken loose. After a month of miscommunication over Christmas break, we’d reconnected on the shore at my uncle’s beachside pizza place, Duffie’s, after New Year’s. The past two weeks we’d pretended that nothing had happened, but I knew something was brewing behind her big blue eyes. “Yeah, Princess?” I said, sliding my body against hers. My hand ran over the dip in her waist and down to the curve of her tight ass. I tugged her closer to me, rocking her against my d**k. “Mmm,” she groaned. Her eyes fluttered open. “Again?” Her voice held groggy disbelief. Ari really didn’t believe me when I said my appetite was insatiable. I could f**k her all day long, and it wouldn’t be enough. I’d still want more. s*x had been my escape for too long for me to ignore the pull now that the same person was frequenting my bed. “Again,” I agreed. I rolled her onto her back and kissed my way down her front—between her breasts, over her soft stomach that made her self-conscious from my attention, to her hip bones that peeked out from her cotton underwear, and down between her legs. My breath came out hot and urgent as I blew on her through the material. She whimpered and writhed in my grasp. “Grant…Grant.” Her words were a moan, an encouragement. My fingers hooked under the elastic and pulled them off. She stiffened beneath me and pushed herself up to the top of the bed. I reached for her, but she shook her head. “I have class.” Ari looked at the comforter, the desk, my cherry red guitar—anywhere but at me. “Not for an hour.” “I need to shower and change.” “I can take you,” I insisted. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, as she slid off the bed and shrugged on her jeans. “Don’t you have to work at the recording studio today?” I’d gotten a job working at a studio in Trenton when I’d wanted to show Ari that I was serious about something other than music. Her dad was a CEO of a bank in Boston, and I’d never seen money like that before. I couldn’t give her that, but I wanted to. “Yeah. Later.” I wanted to throw her down on the bed and f**k her until she stopped suggesting ways to keep us apart. But I couldn’t finesse my way into that. At least not with Ari. She would call me on my bullshit. “Okay. Well I’ll see you after work then,” she said, sidestepping the issue. She threw her cardigan back on, tossed my old man’s dog tags over her head that I’d given to her last semester when I’d asked her to be my girlfriend, gave me a peck on the lips, and then dashed out of the room. I crashed back into bed and stared up at the blank ceiling. I didn’t f*****g understand what had just happened. I had my f*****g girlfriend back. We were f*****g together all the f*****g time. And yet I felt like the p***y getting ditched after a one-night stand.