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That the place was this amazing and this popular made me proud of the boy who had once been my favorite person in the world.
“Lucy!”
I turned when I heard a girl calling my name to find Jenna Stevenson stumbling across the room toward us. My mouth fell open when I saw Jenna for the first time in months. I guess you could say she was kind of like a cousin to me, considering how close our families were. Jenna’s brothers were my dad’s bandmates in Demon’s Wings but it was a little more complicated than that.
The last time I had seen Jenna she’d just came back from Italy where she had been spending a semester studying abroad. She’d looked beautiful, healthy. I hadn’t really given her so much as a fleeting thought since I’d last seen her and no one had really mentioned her to me. So this Jenna, the one drunkenly making her way toward me, was a very big surprise.
Her long dark hair was hanging in a tangled mess around her thin shoulders and her makeup was smeared under her bloodshot blue-gray eyes. She had a glass of champagne in one hand, but the contents kept spilling as she walked and she barely had half a glass by the time she reached us.
When her thin arms wrapped around me I nearly gagged at the smell of something bitter on her breath that had nothing to do with what she was drinking. Jenna was high as a kite. If any of her siblings could see her right that moment I was sure that she would be put on a plane back to her parents by morning. Even though she was twenty-two years old, her brothers supported her while she lived her dream of being an artist.
“Damn, babe, you look hot,” Jenna gushed as she stepped back. Her eyes roamed me from top to bottom and I knew that if she had been sober she definitely wouldn’t have been checking me out. Jenna was one hundred percent a lesbian, but she had never come on to me before.
I did a little eyeing of my own, taking in her barely-there dress that didn’t quite cover what needed covering. She wore five-inch heels that in no way helped her drunkenness as she stumbled back a step or two. And her makeup was something new. Jenna had never been what you’d say a girly girl; makeup was not something she had ever been comfortable putting on. A little liner, some gloss and she had always been ready to go. Now? Her face looked like a clown’s makeup bag had thrown up all over her beautiful face.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Jenna said before taking a gulp from her glass. “Harris has been in a bad mood for weeks now. Did you two have a fight?”
“I haven’t seen him to have fought with him, Jenna.” I reached out to steady her when she bumped into a group of people heading toward the bar. When they glared at her over their shoulders I saw that one was the new ‘it’ guy in the latest tween movie and the other two were his co-stars. “Let’s sit down, Jen.” I turned to Kin who was eyeing Jenna like she had three heads. “Do you see a free couch or anything?”
“Wow, who’s this?” Jenna asked, turning her eyes on Kin for the first time. “Hi, I’m Jenna.”
“This is Kin,” I introduced when Kin just kept staring at her.
“Like Barbie and Ken?” Jenna snorted out a laugh at her own joke as I half carried her to the closest couch. As soon as we reached it I pushed her onto it and she flopped down ungracefully, not even bothering to adjust her dress as she swallowed the rest of her drink. At least she had on underwear, which was made overly obvious from the way she let her legs hang open. Great.
“Wow, she’s a barrel of laughs. Are we going to have to babysit her all night?” Kin grumbled as she looked down at Jenna.
“No way,” I assured her.
I knew that Jenna and Harris had been sharing an apartment since they had started college. Which made me wonder if this was something that he was a part of? If Jenna was this high did Harris help her get this way? And if so, did that mean he was into drugs too?
My heart clenched at the possibility even as my anger started to boil. I was not going to deal with this kind of crap. No way. I’d seen what drugs could do to you, what it could turn you into. I wanted no part of it.
Glancing around, I spotted Marcus watching us closely. I nodded at him and he came over, a dark frown on his face. “Problems?”
“Yeah. As soon as I get Harris over here to deal with her, we’re leaving.”
Chapter 3
Harris
I glared at the guy sitting on the other side of my desk. His short, dark blond hair was carelessly styled and the scruff from two days’ worth of beard made him look like he didn’t give a damn about his appearance. I knew that he didn’t, but that didn’t seem to matter to the hordes of girls who flocked to him. Maybe it was that fucking voice of his that I likened to my dad’s bandmate, Axton Cage. Maybe it was those blue eyes that always seemed to be thoughtful. I didn’t know, didn’t give a shit. At the moment I didn’t give two fucks about anything.
It wasn’t that I was pissed at him. I was pissed at everything lately.
It was all her fault.
Had our friendship meant so little to her that she couldn’t even stop by for ten goddamn minutes to see what I’d accomplished on my own? What I’d broken my back crea
ting with no help from my rock star father other than the trust fund he’d set up for me when I was five? She knew how important First Bass was to me, and she couldn’t even return an email?
“Dude, are you planning on telling me what the hell I’ve done or you just gonna sit there and give me the stare of death?” Jace St. Charles grumbled as he shifted in his seat.
I rubbed a hand over my face¸ forcing myself to focus on the here and now and not Lucy Thornton or the way she was twisting my insides into knots. “Sorry, bro. I’m just moody.”
“Yeah, I can see that. You haven’t been diving into the coke like Jenna, have you?” Jace gave me a disgusted glare, leaning forward to look at my eyes a little closer.
I scowled. Jenna had gotten into the whole drug scene recently when she’d met her new girlfriend. Now her diet was comprised of coke and booze. I was worried about her, but I had little room to judge. I’d spent a few months on that fast track to hell when I was seventeen. I just needed to keep a closer eye on my friend and roommate. If she didn’t slow down, then I would have to tell her sister, Natalie. That Natalie was also my stepmother only made the whole thing that much trickier if I had to go that direction.
