JAX: A Rockstar Stepbrother Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

booked this time weeks ago, before any of this bullshit happened. So now I had to be a goddamn professional, even though I felt like I was ready to crawl out of my skin.
    The bleary-eyed tech—I think his name was “Raven” or “Crow,” or something like that—whatever his name was, he flicked on his mic, and his gruff, whiskey-soaked voice came through my monitor. "Okay Jax, were ready for you."
    I nodded. The guitar track that I had laid down last week came blaring in through my mic and I began counting the beats. As I counted, the words that I had written last night played over and over in my head. One good thing about insomnia: it gives you time to write.
    Annie was watching me from the booth, leaning against Nails. Two blonde chicks that followed me here giggled as I made eye contact with them. But my eye went right to the bottle of Jack. I held up my hand. "Can you start again please?" I asked the monitor.
    Blackbird sighed and grumbled a bit, but dutifully rewound the track. I took a quick nip from the open bottle. These words… the feelings I put down… writing it down was supposed to get rid of the pain, not make it worse. But singing it forced me to feel it all over again, and that was a bad thing. It took another long pull as the guitar track wailed in my ears. Then I opened my mouth to sing.
    I was a disaster.
    "Can we start again please?" I grunted into the mic, feeling the beads of sweat starting to form along my forehead. Annie leaned forward, her lips twisted into that snarl I knew so well. I was disappointing her, wasting her time, and money. I could already see the tabloid headline now: "Jaxson Blue, Flash in the Pan, Wasted Son of Rock Royalty in Studio Disaster." It would be yet another scandal, just like the one I started back when I was eighteen and broken hearted over losing Liliana.
    Scandal seemed to follow me.
    But then again, my very birth was a scandal. Why stop there?
    When Annie got pregnant with me, it dominated the tabloids. In a fit of masochism, I had looked them up one day when I was thirteen, pimply, and desperate to find out who my real father was. I spent well into the morning combing through the archives, searching story after story, but never coming any closer to finding out who my dad was. As I searched, I snuck sips from the vodka bottle I had found in the unlocked liquor cabinet, so that by the time Annie came home, I was completely drunk.
    "Who the hell is he?" I slurred, slamming into the hallway and blocking her path.
    Nails was with her—this was one of those times they were on again, rather than off again. He made this growling noise that I'll never forget, but Annie held up her hand.
    "You're drunk," she said this as a statement of fact, like being drunk at thirteen was no big deal.
    "Who the hell is he?" I demanded again. Her face swam in front of me, and I blinked a bunch of times. Nails made a disgusted noise, and I realized he thought I was crying. Then I wanted to punch something.
    "Who is who?" Annie said.
    "You know who! My father, you slut!" The minute the words left my lips I regretted them, but I was too drunkenly pigheaded to apologize like I should have.
    I watched Annie's face go white, her nostrils pinch together. I waited for her to scream at me.
    Instead she slapped me full across the face. I was already unsteady from the vodka, and the force of her blow knocked me into a pathetic heap on the hallway floor.
    Then Annie Blue, my mother, the woman who was supposed to love me more than anything else, stepped right over me, leaving me there to sputter and rage as she and her lover walked back to her bedroom, ignoring me completely. And that was the last time I ever asked about my father.
    "Then what did you do?" Lily's chocolate eyes were as wide as saucers as she listened to me. Having her this close, having her hang on every word like this was the biggest fucking ego boost I'd ever had. Sure I was a cocky thing at seventeen, but Liliana Nesbit made me feel