Love Me Two Times (Rock Royalty Book 8) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Love Me Two Times

  Also Available

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Excerpt – TAKE ME TENDER

  Excerpt – MAKE HIM WILD

  Christie Ridgway’s Book List

  About the Author

  Love Me Two Times

  Rock Royalty Book 8

  By

  Christie Ridgway

  Also Available

  Light My Fire (Rock Royalty Book 1)

  Love Her Madly (Rock Royalty Book 2)

  Break on Through (Rock Royalty Book 3)

  Touch Me (Rock Royalty Book 4)

  Wishful Sinful (Rock Royalty Book 5)

  Wild Child (Rock Royalty Book 6)

  Who Do You Love (Rock Royalty Book 7)

  Love Me Two Times (Rock Royalty Book 8)

  Take Me Tender (Billionaire’s Beach Book 1)

  Take Me Forever (Billionaire’s Beach Book 2)

  Take Me Home (Billionaire’s Beach Book 3)

  The Scandal (Billionaire’s Beach Book 4)

  The Seduction (Billionaire’s Beach Book 5), Coming Soon!

  The Secret (Billionaire’s Beach Book 6), Coming Soon!

  Make Him Wild (Intoxicating Book 1)

  Make Him Want (Intoxicating Book 2)

  Make Him Stay (Intoxicating Book 3)

  LOVE ME TWO TIMES

  Years ago, Rolling Stone magazine dubbed the nine collective children of the most famous band in the world “Rock Royalty.” Now all grown up, the princes and princesses are coming back to L.A.’s Laurel Canyon to discover if love can be found among the ruins of a childhood steeped in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

  Beck Hopkins returns to L.A. with months of his memory missing. It only adds to the confusion of discovering that in his absence his brothers and friends, as commitment-averse as he (or so he thought), have all hooked up and are on the fast train to happy-ever-afters. He considers leaving town to take up his wandering ways again, but there’s this one woman he can’t get out of his mind…

  Jewel Malone has a couple of secrets, and one is that her childhood crush had been none other than Beck Hopkins. He’s even more gorgeous and sexy now that they’re both adults and their chemistry is undeniable. But when he finds out what else she’s been keeping from him will he walk away and irrevocably break her heart?

  As the first Rock Royalty wedding approaches, Beck must come to terms with his past in order to embrace a future that will at last bring him home to stay.

  LOVE ME TWO TIMES

  Published by Christie Ridgway

  © Christie Ridgway 2017

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  ISBN: 9781939286307

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Chapter 1

  Yeah, Beck Hopkins thought, you could go home again, but that didn’t mean you should.

  Being back at the compound in LA’s Laurel Canyon where he’d grown up as one of the “Rock Royalty”—the name Rolling Stone magazine gave to the nine collective children of the most famous rock band in the world—was doing shit for him.

  Except dredge up bad feelings and crappy memories.

  And not one of those from the black hole he’d been left with since the accident on the Nile River. Their kayak had busted up on the same rocks that did a number on him—sprained shoulder, broken ankle, near-fatal concussion. When some villagers hauled his carcass off the muddy shoreline, they’d presumed he was dead.

  Though he’d actually still been breathing, recovering in those most primitive of conditions might have killed him.

  That didn’t happen either, however. Now all his parts moved freely again, and the piercing headaches had diminished with time.

  Eventually, he’d remembered his name and even the days of the river journey before his hard head met the immoveable object.

  But about the months before the journey, when he was told he’d been living in LA, doing research for the article he was to write and preparing for the expedition…he had nothin’.

  Letting himself out of the cottage on the compound property—Gwen’s cottage, the groupie who had been as much a mother to the Rock Royalty as any of them could claim—Beck breathed in air laden with the scent of orange blossoms and felt the sun’s heat already penetrating the cotton of his T-shirt. Today, spring might as well be summer.

  By the start of that season he’d be long gone, on his next assignment to the wilds of Alaska with no SoCal return date even penciled in.

  Would he have retrieved those lost memories by then?

  He took the path past the monstrous modern manse he’d grown up in as Hop Hopkins’s son, along with his younger brothers Walsh and Reed. Mad Dog Maddox’s castle came next, where the youngest of the nine, Cilla, had once lived along with twins Brody and Bing. Then he came to the tennis court, pool, and pool house. A turn at the massive lodge belonging to String Bean Colson where his progeny, Ren, Payne, and Cami had come of age, led Beck into the orchard of fruit trees that climbed up a steep slope.

  Ignoring the curious bees, he made for the rear gate that, once unlocked, opened into an undeveloped section of the canyon. Rural as the place might seem, it was only a short drive down Laurel Canyon Boulevard to the two citiest of city streets—Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip. LA had always held its lies and surprises.

  Long grasses swished along the legs of his jeans until he came to a narrow path of reddish dirt that meandered across ridges, up slopes, and through ravines, skirting intertwined, long-needled cacti and the occasional scrub oak. It was a familiar childhood trek, taken when he was trying to escape the ghosts and demons lurking in the compound. Doubtlessly he’d gone on this same hike when he’d been here before heading to Africa. He took a deliberate inhale of the air, which smelled of warm greenery and clean earth. Then he closed his eyes and willed his mind to fill with the recollections that had so long eluded him.

  Once again, he got nothin’.

  On a frustrated sigh, Beck opened his eyes, and his attention caught on a rooftop just peeking through a stand of eucalyptus across another chasm.

  Slipping his new phone from his pocket, he scrolled down the contacts list. Then made a call.

  The instant greeting from the other end almost made him smile.

  “Has hell frozen over?” Ryan Hamilton, once a famous actor and now a successful producer, demanded.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The last holdout in Southern California finally has a cell phone?”

  He would have seen Beck’s name on the screen of his own device. “Yeah. And it’s even the smart kind.” He’d gone so far as to pay some kid at the store to enter the numbers he’d carried for years in a small leather notebook into his contacts list.

  “What gives?” Ryan asked.

  Beck looked toward the
roof peeking through the trees. “Can I come over?”

  There was a long pause. “You’re in LA?”

  “Rattling around the empty compound,” Beck answered. “The band is on yet another ‘final’ farewell tour.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice. Last I knew, you were supposed to be on the Nile River but you’d gone incommunicado—”

  “I’ll tell you about that.”

  Another beat of silence. “I’m not at my house in the Canyon. I’m in the mountains at Blue Arrow Lake. I…thought it best to get away for a while.”

  Oh, shit. It suddenly struck Beck that it was March, and for Ryan Hamilton, March meant trouble. Big, big trouble. He sank to his haunches and shoved his hand through his hair. “Are you all right?”

  “Hard to say.” The other man sounded weary. “It’s complicated.”

  “I shouldn’t bother you then.”

  “You could come up here.” Ryan cleared his throat. “My brother Linus is with me, but I could use another…buffer.”

  Huh? Shit. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a woman. She has a kid.”

  “What?” Everything Ryan didn’t need to deal with in March. There’s a woman. She has a kid.

  “So will you come?”

  “I would, man, I really would.” Beck swiped his hand through his hair again. “But I made a promise to Cilla to stick around for her wedding—”

  “I heard about that too. She’s marrying Ren Colson?”

  Turned out LA was as much a small town as a city. Thanks to the gossip rags, celebrity blogs, syndicated Hollywood-centric TV shows, the Rock Royalty continued to “enjoy” the spotlight.

  “And all the others who grew up at the compound are engaged or nearly so,” Beck said, still stunned by it. His connection with the rest of the Nine had always been loose, but one thing he’d known about them—or thought he’d known about them—is that they wouldn’t see themselves as being monogamous, long-term romance material any more than he was. The wild, debauched atmosphere at the compound had given them no idea of what that might look like. But the others had defied his expectations.

  “And Cilla…” She was the youngest of them, a sunny optimist, and it turned out she was damn hard to disappoint. “Well, I said I’d be here until her vows with Ren are exchanged.”

  “Huh.”

  Ryan sounded somewhere between surprised and disbelieving, which about summed up how Beck felt regarding the pledge he’d made to the younger woman. “I might have gone a little soft in the head. I…bumped it when I was on the Nile.”

  “Bumped it.”

  “Never mind,” Beck said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Please. I could use the distraction.”

  The woman and the kid, Beck remembered. Rising back to his full height, he turned and ambled along the track the way he’d come. “A few weeks in, we hit some rapids. My photographer was a half day ahead, and he made it through safely, but my guide and I ran into trouble. One minute my adrenaline was pumping as I saw the whitewater in front of us. The next thing I knew, I woke up on dirt floor in a mud hut with a mother of a headache.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And that might have been my name for all I knew. Turns out my guide ran off with all our supplies and my gear, including my identification. It took me a while to recall who the hell I was and why the hell I was there.”

  “You mean, like amnesia?”

  Exactly like amnesia. “Yeah. It took my photographer finally tracking me down for me to get proper medical attention. After that, it was rest and a study of the photographs he’d taken of our travels that finally brought back recollections of the recent past.”

  “Okay. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Being a loner by nature, Beck didn’t have a lot of friends, but he appreciated this one who could so easily detect the unspoken. “I…” Why was this so hard? He’d managed to admit the ongoing problem to the gathered Rock Royalty on the day he’d surprised them with his presence at the compound—and got a shiner for his trouble when Cami Colson’s man thought he was some Velvet Lemons fan-slash-stalker.

  “Beck?” Ryan prompted.

  “I don’t remember the months before I left on the expedition.” Saying it aloud again made unease churn in his belly.

  A moment of silence passed. “Is that such a problem?” Ryan finally asked. “I mean, you’ve remembered who you are. Isn’t that good enough?”

  How to explain it? It was as if he carried that dark hole of time behind him, a weight heavy and unbalanced, and Beck couldn’t help wondering what kind of destruction it might be wreaking.

  “And I sure as hell wish I had a way of forgetting some of my memories,” Ryan continued, his voice low.

  Beck winced, the other man’s pain was so evident. So raw. “Ryan…”

  “No, no, I get it. I can imagine it’s weirding you out.”

  “Yeah. It is weirding me out.” He’d made his way back to the compound, but instead of letting himself through the gate, he continued along the fence line. The street on which the compound was located dead-ended, but another, smaller property was tucked into the hillside at the termination of the blacktop. He could see the front of the dwelling situated on it from his vantage point, a funky rambler surrounded by shrubs, mountain laurels, and oaks. Through the branches of one he could just glimpse the brick driveway and the side of a worn-looking panel van, its rear doors open.

  The queasy feeling roiled in his gut again, and a twinge of the old headaches poked at his brain. “It just seems like there’s something important to know,” he murmured, rubbing at his temple.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  Beck continued rubbing. “That the memories are there. And that the brain—maybe—can forge a new retrieval path to them.”

  “So…what? You just wait for them to be…accessible?”

  “Looking at the photos of the Nile expedition helped me recall it. So I’m staying at the compound hoping that will trigger my recollection.”

  “Why the compound?”

  “I was living there. Before I left the country.”

  A moment of silence passed. “Uh…no, you weren’t.”

  Beck froze. “What do you mean?”

  “You were staying with me. At my Laurel Canyon house.”

  Excitement began to fizz in Beck’s blood. “I didn’t know.” He tried thinking of why he’d assumed he’d been at the compound. Something Cilla had said?

  “Do you want to move in there? I can get a set of keys to you.”

  “I don’t know.” Was that necessary? Or could he just talk to his old friend and get a sense of what he’d been doing those last few weeks? Thinking it over, he stared at the small house below. “What was I up to while I was with you? Anything I should know?”

  “It was you, Beck. We didn’t sit around doing our nails and sharing our shit.”

  He grimaced, knowing he’d probably made a lousy house guest. His loner streak was wider than a skunk’s stripe. “No slumber parties, huh?”

  “As a matter of fact, at night you were mostly…absent.”

  “Absent? What’s that mean?”

  “Sorry, pal. I didn’t comb through the pages of your diary to find out exactly where you went. I just know you were busy. You didn’t say where. Or with whom.”

  Huh. Beck pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you think…” The question drifted away as he glimpsed a figure moving outside the house below.

  A woman. Young, by the lithe lines of her figure and the graceful way she moved. Her dark hair swung past her shoulders as she walked toward the van. Beck’s temples pounded and his eyesight blurred. Out of the haze, a vision began to form. Another woman, slender too, but with hair burnished red.

  His breath caught and his heart pounded hard against his ribs. He could taste the memory on his tongue—or it was her taste…a distinct, sweet cherry. Ryan’s voice buzzed in his ear, but Beck ignored it, reaching for that recollection just hoverin
g fingertips away.

  He blinked, silently cursing as the real woman came into focus again—the dark hair and the willowy build. Then he saw her arms windmill, and she began to fall.

  Beck’s heart seized as time slowed.

  Time spooled backward.

  Another memory—one he’d never managed to forget—erupted from the pit it had dug for itself more than two decades before. Night, lit only by the fairy lights in the trees of the compound. The tiny figure running in stumble-steps away from him, shrieking with toddler glee. The low-slung car, its headlights washing over the child as she ran onto the drive. Next she was falling, tumbling, and he was screaming in his head, louder than the squeal of the brakes, louder than the shouts of people rushing toward them from a distance.

  Louder than the terrifying silence from the fallen child.

  “I’ve got to go,” Beck said into the phone now, thoughts of unremembered yesterdays and unforgettable tragedies evaporating as some primal instinct drove him down the hill. Get to that woman.

  Jewel Malone landed hard on her butt. She gasped as the jolt traveled from her tailbone up her spine to the base of her skull. The sudden pain was in no way pleasant, but more of a shock was the sight of beads, rhinestones, earring backs, pin parts and various other source materials of her jewelry business littering the driveway. The slick sole of one of her sneakers had met a scattering of faux pearls which had sent her to the ground.

  Someone had wrenched open the back doors of her van and tossed out the contents of the bins she’d stacked inside. And perhaps stolen some of her supplies or tools too?

  Between that idea and the echoing ache in her body, Jewel had a sudden urge to cry.

  No, not gonna happen, she told herself, shutting down the compulsion. Shed no tears.

  They’d been banished from her life nearly a year ago, and she wasn’t about to let them fall free ever again.

  Reaching out, she scooped up the closest pieces then gingerly got to her feet to limp over to the van, favoring her weaker leg. Swallowing past the lump in her throat, she let the contents of her palms dribble into one of the now-empty containers in back. Then, on a steadying breath, she took stock of the disarray.