Rock Courtship Rock Courtship (Rock Kiss #1.5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

he went down to the hotel gym and exhausted himself to the point that he could fall asleep. The next night, he, Fox, Noah, and Abe hit a club to celebrate Abe’s birthday, and he stayed out late enough that his body kicked him into sleep when he sacked out on the bed.
    He spent the following night writing lyrics, greeted the dawn with gritty eyes and a pounding head before getting on a flight back to Auckland, New Zealand. It was where the band had chosen to stay for a few more weeks while they recuperated from a tough year. However, instead of going to the waterfront apartments in the city that were theirs for the duration, he and Abe decided to head to a nearby island where the band had booked out a small hotel.
    That night, he went for a swim in the freezing-fucking-water.
    He’d tried it once before, survived. That had been before the temperature plunged.
    Abe saw him dive in, yelled out that he was a lunatic, and had a whiskey waiting for him when he got back. Throwing it down in a single gulp, David grabbed a towel and rubbed his hair and body dry while the alcohol set fire to his chilled insides. “Remind me not to do that again.” His teeth threatened to chatter. “I think my nuts froze and fell off.”
    Abe snorted, his dark skin gleaming under the porch light. “If they had, you wouldn’t still have that look in your eye.” Leaning his outdoor chair back against the wall, his feet up on the railing, the keyboard player said, “You have to get laid, man.”
    “What are you? My social secretary?”
    “Way you’re going, you need one.”
    Not answering, David went into the house to get into dry clothes. When he returned to the porch, Abe poured him another drink. “Just say the word if you want to hit the clubs. I’ll be your wingman.”
    Sitting out on the porch under a carpet of glittering stars long after Abe hauled his ass to bed, David thought of the only woman with whom he wanted to get naked and sweaty and dirty, and wondered what she was doing… whether she’d spared him a thought at all.
    T hea stared at the maddening, brain-eating, energy-sucking, demon-spawn of a memo she’d been working on for four days. It was stealing her sleep, invading her dreams, making her question her grasp of the English language, and the entire thing was David’s fault.
    “Thea Alice!” Her mother’s petite figure stopped in front of her. Lily had her hands on her hips, the scowling look on her face one Thea knew all too well. “I thought you said you weren’t working this trip.” The words were spoken in Balinese.
    Thea replied in the same language. “I’m not, Mama.”
    “ Oh? ” Lily looked pointedly at the laptop Thea had snuck out into the sprawling back garden and set up on a wooden table her father had built when Thea had been a child. Settling on the equally weathered wooden seat beside it, Thea had figured she’d be safe from discovery—her mother’s garden was a beautiful jungle.
    Saucer-sized hibiscus flowers in yellow and red, orange and pink, as well as astonishing hybrids with hearts of fire and gold, bloomed in glorious abandon. Brilliant purple bougainvillea poured over and through the crosshatched frame above the table while a frangipani tree stood next to it, its fragrant flowers hanging heavy and lush within touching distance. Unable to resist, Thea had picked a creamy bloom and tucked it behind her left ear.
    A few feet from the other side of the table stood a banana palm with green bananas hanging from it in two firm bunches, next to it a papaya tree with its fruit starting to ripen to a pale yellow-orange, and behind them both a large and luxuriantly green mango tree devoid of fruit this time of the year. Then there were the myriad flowering plants she couldn’t identify, some exotics, others experimental hybrids. Thea’s mom, a dynamo with tiny, competent hands and fierce, dark eyes, was a self-taught horticulturist.
    Lily might not have a degree to her name or fancy letters