Page 35 of Jealous God
“I’ve been looking after it,” I tried again. “I wouldn’t break it or anything. Is it yours? I just assumed when Tate—”
Jax’s hands came around to grip my shoulders. “When Tate was doing what? Fucking you? Is that why it’s here? Because he sure as hell wouldn’t just give it to you. He knows how important that damn thing is to me.”
Ripping myself out of grasp, I hurried over to the offending instrument and held it out at arm’s length for him to take. “If I had known it was important or expensive or whatever, I wouldn’t have said yes.”
“Yes.” Jax was vibrating with his anger now. “Said fucking yes? Just how many people have you saidyesto on this tour, Elodie? Am I just the latest in a long line?” Without another word, he turned on his heel and stalked away. His footsteps were loud in the quiet. I watched him go, heading towards the door.
Out of everything I had been expecting when he had picked me up and carried me inside, this sudden jealous outburst wasn’t even in my top ten. He had been so sweet all day. At times, even too sweet.
I bristled as the meaning of his words filtered into my brain. Fucking asshole thought I was sleeping with Tate and God knows who else. That’s why he was acting the way he was. He was fucking jealous. The almighty Jax was having a serious case of the green-eyed monster.
I wanted to scream at him, to call him out for having such a shallow opinion of me. But something stopped me.
“Tate let me borrow it because I was trying to learn how to play,” I said quietly.
Jax paused. He was already halfway out of the door. Slowly, he turned. His eyes searched my face in the darkened bus. “He lent it to you.” One step back up and he turned to face me. “You were learning to play.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, and even that small sound seemed to travel. Outside, the crew were still packing up the buses, but the noise seemed far away. It was like we were in our own little protective bubble.
“You’re not sleeping with him?”
“Not sleeping with anyone but you, Jax.”
“I’m not sleeping with anyone else either,” he answered, even though I hadn’t actually asked him. “Why didn’t you ask me to teach you if you wanted to learn?”
A blush crept up my throat and spread across my cheeks. “I’m not particularly good,” I admitted. “And we weren’t exactly friendly.” That was the truth. It was strange that he would think I would ask him to teach me when up until recently we could barely say two civil words to each other.
Jax took two steps forwards, coming towards me, and I watched him come from beneath my lashes. There was something possessively masculine about the way he walked towards me, like a stalking predator. I had been around alpha males my entire life, but none of them made my heart slam against my ribcage like Jax did. He physically took my breath away.
“Will you play something for me?” Another step and then another. A few more steps and he would be in front of me again. I held my breath, so he wouldn’t see the sudden rapid rise and fall of my breasts.
“No.” Shaking my head, I met his eyes. “You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t laugh. I will teach you, though.” One of his beringed hands closed around my hip, drawing me out of the small bedroom and flush against his hard chest. “I wasn’t lying when I said I haven’t touched another woman on this tour.” His eyes bored down into mine. “I don’t plan to either. Whilst we are on this tour, there’s only you.”
“On this tour, I am only with you,” I whispered up into his stupidly handsome face. “Just you.”
There was only a little while left of the tour. In five days we’d be in Miami and then less than a week later, it would all be over if my calculations were right. It wasn't a huge amount of time to be in a relationship with a rockstar, so why did it feel like I had just sold my soul?
* * *
Lyingnext to Jax would take some getting used to. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get used to it. Not if whatever was happening between us had an expiry date. In a way, it felt wrong to put an end date on something that had just started, but I understood his reasoning for it. It wasn’t like we moved in the same circles. When this tour was over, when Erik didn’t need me to babysit Dion any longer and he could check himself into rehab or whatever the plan was, Jax and I wouldn’t even see each other.
Different cities, different lives, different worlds.
So, yeah, I got it.
“What are you thinking about, Elodie?” Jax lazily traced his finger down my spine, and I sighed with happiness. I murmured a non-committal response that made no sense to either of us. “Nothing, huh?” He settled himself down onto the bed next to me and continued to trace a line of fire up and down my naked back. My skin was still sweaty from the horizontal workout we had just finished, and there was no friction of skin against skin.
I smiled against my arm. Had I said nothing? I was pretty sure I hadn’t said anything coherent at all.
“You’re thinking about something. You get this little line between your eyebrows when you start to overthink.” As if to prove his point, he pressed his lips to my head.
“Do i?” It was kind of sweet that he knew my facial expressions already, but it shouldn’t have been surprising. We had lived together on a damn bus for weeks. Jax might have acted like he didn’t like me back then, but he had obviously been noticing.
“Yes, so tell me.”
“I was thinking about us.” I sighed heavily. “About this thing that’s happening between us.”
