The copper valley bro co.., p.36
The Copper Valley Bro Code Series: Volume 1, page 36
It’s unlike any party I’ve ever been to with famous people, because nobody mentions movie roles, agents, managers, endorsement deals, or gossip rags. Mostly. Davis does pull up a seat at the end of the table and fist-bumps Levi for having another number one hit on the Billboard charts.
But that’s it before the talk turns to last night’s baseball game.
“Nice job shoving that funnel cake in Beck’s face,” Levi tells me. “We’ve all wanted to do it a time or two.”
“She had to seize the moment,” Tripp says. “Especially since the Fireballs probably won’t last another season.”
“Wait, what?” I ask.
He hands Emma a plate of mashed up chicken, vegetables, and couscous. “It’s like management is trying to make them lose so Copper Valley will kick them out. They need new owners.”
He slides a look at Levi, who ducks his head, but I don’t miss the other looks going around the table. Between Beck and Davis. The Rivers brothers. June and Tripp.
Even Charlie’s stopped clicking away at her phone, like she’s supposed to be taking notes, or maybe she’s mentally filing them away.
These people can talk without saying a word.
A chill slinks down my spine, because that’s tight. Not blood tight. Family tight.
And I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a conversation that I’m not supposed to know exists.
“Oh, for goodness sakes, boys, get your elbows off the table,” Mrs. Ryder says, breaking up the silent conversation that wasn’t really a conversation, and I surreptitiously remove mine as well. But when she beams at me, I get the feeling I could leap onto the table and do the MC Hammer dance naked and she’d think I was still just utterly perfect. “Sarah, where did you say you went to college? It’ll be so nice for Ellie to have someone to talk to about work. Not that Wyatt doesn’t listen, of course, but it’s hard for her to make girlfriends sometimes. People always want to talk to her about Beck, and they never stop to get to know her first.”
I can’t decide if I want to cry or hug her, because she clearly gets it. What it’s like to be liked for who you’re related to instead of who you are.
“Mom, Ellie’s been in two weddings in the last year,” Beck points out.
“But not for female engineers.”
“She smells fresh blood,” Levi tells me, hitching his chin toward Mrs. Ryder while I blink away the sting in my eyes. “Since Ellie’s basically committing incest with marrying Wyatt—”
“Oh, stop.” She points a fork at him. “They are not related.”
“It would be like her marrying me,” Davis says. “And Ellie’s my sister too.”
Everyone stops and looks at him, then a wave of laughter rolls through the open rooms. The amusement is so thick, it’s practically lifting a level of atmospheric pressure. I feel ten pounds lighter, which is something of a relief after the weird tension about the baseball thing and my sudden attack of feelings about inherently realizing that I can trust every single person in this room.
It’s weird. But good. No one here cares who my parents are. They don’t care how awkward I was in high school and before. They’re not angling for anything. And they have each other’s backs, and they’ve adopted me too.
“So Wyatt’s in no danger of losing Ellie to Davis?” I ask Levi.
“None of us are, and to Davis least of all. She used to babysit him.”
“She did not,” June says. “She was too young.” She turns to me. “Don’t listen to anything any of these guys tell you. They’re complete looneys. All of them.”
“Like you can talk,” one of her brothers says.
“They all have good hearts,” Mrs. Ryder insists.
Beck kisses his mom’s hair. “Because we had you.”
“Awwwww,” everyone intones, like they’re making fun of him, but I don’t miss the smiles coming from all of them.
Like they agree, but they have to give Beck shit as a matter of routine.
Emma joins in by squealing and throwing a handful of couscous all over the table, and later I’ll contemplate why Beck has a high chair in his penthouse, but I’m already a wee bit too attached.
Especially with how weirdly normal this entire meal feels, despite all these people basically being strangers to me.
Until the great blow-out of this morning, anyway. I guess touching a man’s kid’s poop lends itself to fast friendships.
“Whoa, hey, where’s the tea?” Beck asks.
“They don’t make it by the gallon,” Charlie tells him. “You’re out of luck.”
He’s already eaten two plates full of food, and he’s piling sesame shortbread cookies and the honey-coated chebakia onto another, but he’s so crestfallen at the lack of tea that I take pity on him. “I have a teapot at home. And fresh mint. Just need some gunpowder tea.”
Beck beams at me, and it feels more genuine than it should. “All that and she has the Serenity you’ve been looking for, Levi.”
All eyes are suddenly on me, and another hush falls over the room, but this one’s reverent.
“You have the Serenity?” Levi breathes.
My face is getting hot, and I know I’m going blotchy. “It’s not for sale.”
“Of fu—udging course it’s not,” he mutters. “Can I touch it? Just…just once?”
“Don’t let him have it without getting something out of it for yourself,” Tripp says. “He’s such a spoiled brat.”
Beck’s grinning. “You want to touch it, you’re gonna have to do something stupid while you’re in town to get the paps off Sarah’s street.”
“Says the king of stupid distractions,” Levi fires back with a grin.
“You don’t get to negotiate with my ship,” I inform Beck. “It’s my ship. And he’ll have to get through my father first.”
“I know,” Beck says with an evil grin. “I’m gonna be the one hiding in the bushes taking video when that happens.”
“Cash says your dad’s cool,” June says cautiously.
“That’s because he’s not Cash’s dad,” I say.
“I’ll put your giraffe on my video screen in my next ten concerts,” Levi offers.
“Oh, fine, sure, bring out the big guns,” Beck says. “Dude. Any rock star can offer her that. And you should do it anyway to save the giraffes. For the rest of the whole year. Get that baby giraffe up there too.”
“I’ll hijack all the national news signals and broadcast anything you want about the giraffes if I can take a picture with the Serenity,” Davis says.
I laugh, but I stop when I realize I’m the only one. “Wait, you’re serious?”
“It’s the fucking Serenity.”
“I meant about hijacking—” I start, but James interrupts me.
“The fucking Serenity!” he cries.
Tripp gives Davis the you’re going to die in your sleep look, and this time, everyone cracks up.
They’re one big, happy, crazy family.
And I have this weird feeling that if I’d grown up with them, I might like people as much as Beck does too.
22
Beck
Sarah’s ass looks amazing in my sweatpants.
I think. The shirt’s covering the pants, but the shirt’s also hugging her curves right there, and yep, definitely amazing.
She sways side-to-side while she stares out the window at the wide expanse of Reynolds Park below. The zoo’s on the far side. I could take her over there. Get her a private viewing of Persephone.
Hell, she could probably get her own private viewing.
But if I offer, she’ll stop the swaying, and I’ll have to stop watching her ass.
I shift uncomfortably on the couch, where I’m pretending to check my email and text messages on my phone, because my pants are getting tight.
“I should really be at work,” she says.
Guilt creeps up next to me and shoves a cream pie in my face. And not the good kind with real whipped cream either. This one has fake banana flavoring in it, and I don’t like it. “Can you work remotely? Ellie does that sometimes when I make the news and people talk too much to her about it.”
“I can, but I don’t want to.” She turns away, and I manage to look away from her ass before she catches me watching.
Tripp left so the kids could nap. The Riverses all had to go back to work. So did Mom. And Levi and Davis took off for a public appearance for Levi that’ll end with both of them at a bar, where I can’t go, because I’m grounded. Charlie said so when she left to go work alone downstairs.
Leave this building and I’ll quit.
So it’s just me and Sarah.
“What do you want to do?” I ask. “We could sneak into the zoo. Or head out to my place in Shipwreck. Ellie beat my high score on Frogger a year ago, and I need to work on getting it back.”
She bites her lower lip and stares at me.
“Or, yeah, we could make out,” I agree, and it’s odd how easily it comes out, and how much I mean it, because I could see letting this woman all the way in.
I let people in all the time. I don’t care if they take my stuff. I’m usually okay with taking photos, always with signing shit. But I don’t let them have me. Not the parts that count.
Her cheeks erupt in a splotchy flush. “I was thinking about working on my blog.”
“Making out, blogging, it’s all the same.” I’m such a dumbass. “All of it revs my engine. You need a compu—oh. Right. Never mind.”
And now I’m a dumbass who’s not making any sense and who’s getting a little more turned on because she’s staring at me like I belong in a mental institution.
A mental institution for attractive sex gods—I swear, she’s into me right now—but still a mental institution.
“I was gonna offer mine, but I spilled coffee all over it this morning,” I tell her lamely.
“I have a computer downstairs in my car.”
“Oh.”
Her brows furrow. “Do you spill coffee on your electronics often?”
“Only when I need to get out of a video conference.”
“If anyone else said that to me, I wouldn’t believe them.”
I grin. “Look at us, getting to know each other so well.”
She crosses to sit at the other end of the couch with me and pulls her knees up to her chest, which I can’t see at all under that shirt she’s swimming in. She’s not petite—more like average, with healthy curves to her everywhere—but I got the Ryder shoulders, which makes fitting through doorframes and buying normal shirts hard sometimes, and also makes my shirt way too huge on her.
“I’m not totally opposed to the making out idea, but you’d probably ultimately be a disappointment,” she tells me, and all thoughts of clothes leap out the window and go flying to the ground forty-some stories below.
“Only one way to find out,” I say, scooting to the middle of the couch and tossing my phone across the room.
She holds up a hand. “I said not totally. There’s a large margin of error in there for how opposed I actually am.”
“Okay. Hit me with the problem, and I’ll fix it.”
“It’s you.”
“Me? I’m not a problem. I’m fucking fantastic at making out.”
“My mother told me once—when I was entirely too young to hear it—that the reason she and my dad worked was that he checked his Hollywood ego at the bedroom door, and knew he had to work for it if he wanted to see her naked frequently.”
I open my mouth, then close it, because there’s literally nothing good that anyone can say about someone else’s parents in the bedroom.
“So,” she continues in the awkward silence that’s weirdly doing nothing to relieve the pressure in my cock, “here we have me, with a few very satisfying lovers in my past, and you, happy to claim that you’re very good at making out.”
And now I’m getting pissed.
And it’s still doing nothing to help the swelling in my pants.
The good swelling, I mean. I don’t have anything I need to see my doctor for.
Also, I’m almost positive she’s baiting me on purpose, and that she’s having fun watching me squirm, and that she wants me to toss her over my shoulder and carry her to my bedroom and make her scream my name.
Except I’m only at almost, and I’ve already fucked up enough in the past week where Sarah’s concerned.
“Satisfying lovers,” I repeat.
Or possibly sneer.
“The double O is not a myth.”
Fucking fuck. “And you think I can’t give you a double O.”
“I have no idea, but you have several strikes against you.”
“Are you pulling the scientific experiment card here, or baseball analogies?”
She’s not getting any less red, but she’s also pushing through it, and there’s a hint of a grin teasing her lips. “People are complex. You said it yourself. So why can’t I be both?”
“I am so fucking turned on and pissed right now, and I don’t know how that happened.”
“I’m not trying to insult you,” she assures me. “Merely…express my misgivings. Especially given the temporary nature of our need for contact. But since you brought up making out, I thought I’d be honest with you.”
“Can you say it in that growly voice your dad uses? That might help the boner situation. If we’re being honest here.”
She sucks in a smile, cheeks still bright with the outline of flames. “Have you ever given a woman a double orgasm?”
“I—” I can’t find the rest of the syllables for a sentence, because fuck. Global warming is happening right here in my penthouse. I gulp hard, then I make myself look her straight in the eye, and prepare to confess more than I’ve ever confessed to a living soul, which is mildly terrifying, but still not enough to alleviate the boner. “I don’t have as much experience as my career might make it look like I should.”
“You’re a virgin?”
“No. But I don’t—look, the thing about being famous is that sometimes, women want to sleep with you, but they don’t care about anything other than the fact that they’re sleeping with oooh, Beck Ryder! And I’m not—that’s not—I’m more than just a dick with a lot of cash and a pretty face. So I’m picky. Very picky. And more often than not, that means I’m in a dry spell.”
“You get lonely,” she says quietly.
Like she gets it, despite the fact that she clearly has more experience than I do with bumping uglies.
And I never would’ve used that word, but— “Yeah.”
“I broke up with my last boyfriend because I didn’t want him to know who my parents were.”
“Did he—never mind.”
She smiles sadly. “Yes. But what was the point if I wouldn’t let him in here?” She taps her head, then her heart. “Or here, I guess.”
I reach over and squeeze her hand, because it’s there, and because I know a thing or two about keeping people out. I know a thing or two about not knowing if someone likes me, or if they like who they think I am.
It’s why I’m so fucking glad for everyone from home. I might not have someone warming my bed every night, but I have family. My family, who won’t accuse me of fathering kids that aren’t mine—and it fucking sucks, by the way, because I would love kids someday—or try to take advantage of me because they don’t care about the heart under the body.
She squeezes my hand back, and with Sarah, I don’t know if it means thank you or let’s arm wrestle and I’ll kick your ass, but I like her hand in mine.
Soft, but strong.
So comfortable.
And so easy to just sit here. Without saying anything. With a woman I never should’ve met, but who’s quickly becoming one of my favorite people, even when she makes me squirm.
Probably because it’s a rare breed of people willing to make me squirm, and who also understand how hard it is to trust people on an intimate level.
“You could teach me,” I offer. “I’m not too humble to admit I could learn a few new tricks.”
She laughs and pulls herself up off the couch. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe?” That’s disappointing.
I like her. I trust her. I want to make out with her.
She glances back at the windows, at the world outside. “Okay, that’s not you. It’s me. I have trust issues.”
“I’d be worried about you if you didn’t.” Especially growing up under the celebrity microscope. “Want to know a secret?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“I have trust issues too.”
She studies me closely, then nods. “That’s probably good for you.”
“Yeah, but it’s not good for getting any experience at giving a woman a double O.”
She tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, but she can’t hide a small smile and a subtle blush. Like maybe that was harder for her to say than I can comprehend, and I just scored points for my own honesty.
“I’m going to get my computer,” she says. “Did Charlie say there’s office space one floor down?”
Dammit. “Yeah. Let me see if your clothes are dry yet, and I’ll show you.”
But I’m not giving up.
Because I like her.
And I can’t tell you the last time I liked a woman. Not like this. Is it scary? Yeah.
But worth it?
I hope so.
So slow and steady it is.
Until our contract’s up.
And then I don’t know what I’ll do, but I have time.
I’ll figure it out.
Unless I fuck something else up in the meantime.
23
Sarah
I’ve barely finished a blog post about an upcoming meteor shower when Beck knocks on the office door.
Not that I’m surprised.
He doesn’t seem like he does well when he’s alone. And I don’t mind, because he’s remarkably easy to talk to.
About anything.
“Hey. You hungry?”
I push my computer back and just look at him.
Which isn’t a hardship, honestly. He gets more attractive with every little twist to his personality. If I weren’t biased against gorgeous men with thick dark hair and movie star blue eyes and easy grins and perfectly formed bodies—yes, including the ape arms—I’d probably call him hot.
