Author: Olivia Cunning

“Maybe if he has something to look forward to, he can quit the drugs,” Jace said.

Eric nodded. “I agree.”

Sed lay back on the weight bench and wrapped his large hands around the bar, flexing his fingers to find a good grip. “Doubtful.”

“Think about it,” Eric urged.

“I know he’s your best friend, Eric, but the guy is bad news,” Sed growled, lifting the weighted bar up and down as if he was at war with it.

Eric’s brow furrowed. “He’s not my best friend. He uses me. I know that. Jace is my best friend.”

Jace’s heart thudded until he realized Eric was teasing him again. The stupid follow-up joke never came.

Sed made a sound of exertion, and Jace helped him lift the weight bar onto its stand. Sed sat up and wiped his sweaty face on a towel.

“I don’t know. We’ll see what Brian and Trey think. As far as I’m concerned, Jon doesn’t deserve another chance.”

“I need to talk to him,” Eric said. He hopped out the back of the truck.

Sed stood and picked up a twenty-five-pound dumbbell. He handed it to Jace. “Get to work. We need you back. Soon.”

***

Loud arguing on the opposite side of the tour bus drew Aggie from her thoughts. She climbed from the log where she’d been sitting and watching a squirrel bury nuts beneath the leaf litter. She brushed her hands off on her jeans and went to investigate. Eric had Jon cornered against the bus.

“How could you do something so stupid again?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jon said.

“Sed told me about the crack pipe, Jon. You promised me. You begged and begged me to give you a second chance with the band. Said no more drugs. Reminded me how much I owed you, until I finally relented and promised the first time an opening presented itself, I’d get you in. How the hell was I supposed to know Jace would get himself shot, and I’d have to keep that promise?”

“Why are you jumping my ass? Chill. Sed won’t catch me using again. I’ll be more careful.”

Eric growled in frustration. “You just don’t get it. I promised Sed you were clean. I vouched for you, knowing Sed would hold me accountable for every stupid thing you do. I even alienated Jace to get you here, and you do this?” Eric shoved Jon against the bus with both hands.

Jon shoved him back. “Don’t act all holier than thou, Eric. Do you really think this temporary stint makes us square? You still owe me.”

“You think I don’t realize that?”

“Then get the fuck off my case.”

“How did you get Jace to ask us to keep you on? Did you threaten him?”

Jon laughed. “Do you really think I could threaten Jace? He doesn’t take shit from anyone but the four of you. I had Aggie ask. I knew he couldn’t say no to her. She has him wrapped around her finger.”

Aggie took a hesitant step forward. Gravel crunched beneath her shoes. Both men turned to look at her. “That nice guy routine last night was all an act, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Just shut up,” Jon said.

Eric cuffed him on the side of the head. “You know what? Just get the fuck away from me. I can’t stand to look at you.”

A taxi turned into the roadside. It drew to a stop beside them. Brian opened the door and tugged a beautiful thirty-something woman from the backseat as he climbed from the car. She wore a classy, plum-colored skirt suit and matching stilettos. What had probably been a neat, twist hairstyle was all mussed up as if someone had been raking his fingers through it. The woman couldn’t keep her eyes, mouth, or hands off the lead guitarist, and he couldn’t stop smiling.

“Myrna,” Brian said breathlessly, “this is Jace’s girlfriend, Aggie, and that guy is Jon. You’ve heard a bit about him.”

Her pretty hazel gaze touched briefly on Aggie and Jon before returning to the reason she’d flown to Canada. “Nice to meet you both,” she said. “I hate to be rude, but if I don’t ride The Beast in the next five minutes, I’m going to die.”

Brian laughed and tugged her toward the bus steps. “Now we wouldn’t want that, sweetheart. Eric, would you mind paying the driver and getting Myrna’s luggage from the trunk?” He said this without taking his eyes off his wife.

“I suppose,” Eric said with a knowing grin.

The couple disappeared into the bus.

“Hi, Myrna!” Jessica said inside the bus. “How have you been?”

“We’ll catch up later, Jess.”

A moment later Jessica stumbled down the stairs, a blush staining her cheeks. “They made it as far as the sofa,” she murmured.

“Oh hell yes,” Eric said and entered the bus with Myrna’s suitcase in hand. He didn’t return. No doubt, he found a new couple to watch.

“So what do we do now?” Aggie asked.

“Looks like we’ve been banished to the pigsty bus.” Jessica shuddered and rubbed her hands over her bare arms. Southern California girls did not have wardrobes suitable for Canadian autumns.

Sed and Jace came around the equipment truck, their bodies slick with sweat. Both looked entirely fuckable. Aggie wasn’t the only one to notice. Jessica produced a sound somewhere between a growl and a purr.

“Why are you two standing out here by yourselves?” Sed asked, drawing Jessica against his body and doing something to her ear that made her shiver with something other than cold.

Aggie glanced around. They were by themselves. Jon had apparently slinked off somewhere again. Someone slammed the back door of the equipment truck. “We’ll see you in Montreal,” the roadie, Travis, called before climbing in the cab and pulling out of the roadside stop. A moment later, the pigsty bus followed, leaving them to stand there in the chill.

“Brian and Myrna have commandeered the living area of the bus,” Jessica said. She traced a bead of sweat down the side of Sed’s neck with one finger until it disappeared into the low neckline of his white tank top.

“Does that mean the bedroom is available?” Sed said in a low growl.

Eric poked his head out of the open bus door. “Aggie, Brian wants to see you.”

Aggie’s brow knitted with confusion. She touched a hand to the center of her chest. “Me?”

“I think you’ve been volunteered for one of Myrna’s sexual exploration experiments.”

Chapter 37

Aggie climbed the bus steps and found Brian and Myrna breathless on the sofa, still fully clothed, looking simultaneously hungry and satisfied. Myrna was straddling Brian’s lap, her skirt hiked up around her waist, his cock buried inside her. He was whispering, “I love you,” into her ear repeatedly.

“Eric said you wanted to see me,” Aggie said.

“Do you do couples?” Myrna asked.

Aggie’s hackles rose. “Do I do couples?”

“She doesn’t mean it like that,” Brian said, dropping a tender kiss on his wife’s temple. “She means do you instruct couples on the proper way to, you know… do what you do?”

Oh!

Oh, yeah…

Every nerve in Aggie’s body shifted into high alert as Mistress V clamored to be set free. She loved working with couples. Teaching them. Helping them explore their dark sensuality together. It was her favorite thing to do in the dungeon. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible here. “There really isn’t the space to do this properly, especially when the bus is in motion,” she said. “When we get back home, I’ll invite you over for some couple’s therapy.”

“And us too?” Sed asked from the front of the bus. Jessica’s head snapped up to stare at him in surprise. He wrapped an arm around her as the bus started forward and eased onto the highway.

“Sure,” Aggie said. “I love to see big, tough guys beg for mercy.”

“And I get to watch, right?” Eric said.

“And they’ll all practice their techniques on me, right?” Jace murmured.

Aggie chuckled. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Jace nodded eagerly.

“We should go into business together, sweetheart. We’d have quite the partnership. I’d get to boss a bunch of dommes around, which is so much more fun than watching men crawl around at my boots. You’d get all the pain you could ever want. We’d be in seventh heaven.”

He stroked her hair from her cheek tenderly. “I’m already there.”

“Hey guys!” Dave shouted from the driver’s seat. “It’s snowing.”

Aggie had never seen snow fall.

She rushed to the front of the bus to stare at the gray sky. Large, fluffy snowflakes flew toward the wide windshield, accumulating on the wipers and slowly painting the desolate landscape white.

“It’s beautiful!” she said, watching the flakes zoom toward them. “It looks like we’re traveling in space at warp speed.”

“Are we going to make it to Montreal on time, Dave?” Sed asked as his brow furrowed with concern.

Coming to stand behind her, Jace wrapped both arms around Aggie’s waist and rested his chin on her shoulder to watch the snow through the windshield. She covered his hands with hers and relaxed against him. A few weeks ago, he never would have embraced her in front of the guys. He’d grown so much since she’d forced her way into his life, but not half as much as she had.

Dave’s attention drifted to his speedometer. “We should. Do you want me to push the pedal to the metal?”

“Are the roads slick?”

“Not yet,” Dave said.

“Better safe than sorry,” Eric called from the dining area. He leaned against the counter and pulled his lucky rabbit’s foot out of his pocket to rub it with his thumbs. He kissed it seven times for good measure.

“What the fuck is that?” Myrna yelled.

Aggie could hear her even through the closed bedroom door, where she and her husband had disappeared to continue catching up. Brian said something in response to his wife that Aggie couldn’t make out, but he sounded apologetic.

The bedroom door burst open. “Eric Sticks, I’m going to fucking kick your ass,” Myrna bellowed. She had lost her jacket and blouse but didn’t seem to care that everyone on the bus could see her bra.

Eric grabbed Jessica, who had been kneeling in a captain’s chair snow-gazing along the side of the bus. Eric used her as his human shield. “What did I do, Myrna?”

“How could you? On his ass, Eric. Brian has a fucking kitten riding on a unicorn permanently etched on his ass!”

Huh? Aggie glanced from one band member to the next, having no idea what they were laughing about.

“Hey, the rainbow background was Jace’s idea,” Eric said.

Myrna went after Eric with a paddle. She struck him twice before he managed to escape.

“I have one too,” Trey said.

He shucked his jeans and presented his bare ass to the bus occupants. A vibrantly bright and colorful tattoo of a fluffy calico kitten riding a galloping, majestic unicorn adorned a third of Trey’s left ass cheek. A rainbow and wispy, white clouds surrounded the mythical creature. Little girls would be ashamed to have that feminine monstrosity on their lunch boxes. Why would a guy have that tattooed on his ass? Correction—two guys.

Aggie joined the laughter. Clutching his abdomen with both arms, tears pouring from his eyes, Sed was lying on the floor, rolling back and forth in the aisle as he laughed. Myrna paused and ran a hand over Trey’s flank as she inspected the “artwork” that matched her husband’s.

“Son of a bitch! You inflicted Trey with that grotesque thing too? I’m going to kick your ass twice, Eric Sticks.”

“It’s not my fault. They lost the bet,” Eric shouted. Trapped in the corner between the bathroom and bedroom, he tried to catch the end of Myrna’s paddle as she struck his thigh.