Sweet Seduction Serenade Read Online Free PDF Page B

you'd never have yourself.
    The next three days were much of the same. Waking to Dad's latest accident in bed, washing, cleaning, making sure he kept his food down and took his meds, while ignoring his gripes and constant dissatisfaction at having had a daughter who wasn't as good as his son. Twenty-eight rusted out oil cans, thirty-three shoe boxes of nuts, bolts, screws and washers, five broken down lawnmowers, three broken weed trimmers, and sixteen petrol containers most of which were leaking, causing fumes to hang in the air in the shed. The last making it essential to call in an appropriate disposal service, once I'd placed the contents of the shed - which included all of the over three hundred full boxes of Lipton Tea, but not the cats, the SPCA had taken care of those for an exorbitant fee - in the middle of the back lawn.
    Evenings had consisted of practice runs at Sweet Seduction after Dad had conked out in bed, which was becoming earlier and earlier with each passing day. I felt a multitude of conflicting emotions leaving him each night. What if he passed away while I wasn't there? What if he woke up and tried to get out of bed and ended up on the floor with a broken hip, no one to hear him cry out in pain? What if his morning explosions became evening explosions and he had to wallow in his own mess until I came home at midnight or there about?
    It was hard leaving him, but for three months he'd had a routine that never altered. For the first two I'd waited and waited for a sign that things would change. The last month, I'd been sneaking out and coming home to a sound asleep father, snug in his clean bed.
    The guys in the band new my Dad was sick, but not how bad. Their answer to my mental moments of letting them see my worry, was that I needed to have a life. I wanted to tell them that my life would go on once he died, but until then, as his daughter, it was my duty to live my life around him .
    But I needed music. I needed Country. Being home and in the same house as my father was driving me insane. It was worse than when I was a kid and I'd escape my mother's antics every night after dark. It was ten times worse than that. I prayed to God that He'd understand my selfish motives, that He'd forgive me my moment of recklessness, leaving a dying man to fend for himself at night for three hours.
    Every time I opened the door to the flat after returning from Sweet Seduction my stomach would be tied in guilty knots. And every time so far he was sound asleep and perfectly OK.
    The performances at Sweet Seduction had been my haven. The band my dream come true. We had a blast. Sometimes with Gen or Kelly present, sometimes Jane or Karla or another Sweet Seduction guy named Lucas. Often Adam's mates were there, but for some reason not him. Twice Gen's brother Jason turned up, but on both occasions he seemed more interested in a dark haired movie-star woman, than us. And not once Nick, Gen's fiancé and my sexy-but-no-good ghost from the past.
    For that I was thankful and also annoyingly hurt. I was such a horrible memory from his past that he couldn't even watch me perform. I deserved nothing better. One night of passion in his arms did not make me special. Nick would have had his fair few of those. I was nothing new or memorable.
    He on the other hand was. Try as I might to not think of that night, seeing him again and knowing he was Gen's and never could be mine, brought it all back in vivid technicolour, surround sound imagery in my mind. The way his soft, talented fingers felt against my skin. How his short dark hair, cut like he belonged in the military, was impossible to ignore, my hands finding their way into the strands without any conscious thought. How his ice-blue eyes held mine while he moved so slowly, so seductively inside me. Those eyes burning themselves inside my brain. For years afterwards, his were the eyes I saw when I closed mine whilst in someone else's arms.
    Hell, if I was honest, for years