Never Trust a Rockstar Read online

  NEVER TRUST A ROCKSTAR

  (The NEVER TRUST Series, Book 1)

  SARAH DARLINGTON

  NEVER TRUST A ROCKSTAR

  Copyright © 2019 Sarah Darlington

  Cover Design by Alora Kate

  Editing by Kamaryn Kretz

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, and events portrayed in this book are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced throughout this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ~ 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 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 14 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 15 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 16 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 17 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 18 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 19 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 20 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 21 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 22 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 23 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 24 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 25 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 26 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 27 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 28 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 29 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 30 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 31 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 32 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 33 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 34 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 35 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 36 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 37 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 38 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 39 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 40 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 41 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 42 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 43 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 44 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 45 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 46 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 47 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 48 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 49 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 50 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 51 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 52 ~

  ~ EPILOGUE ~

  ~ BONUS CHAPTERS ~

  PREORDER: NEVER KISS A ROCKSTAR

  ~ CHAPTER 1 ~

  ~ CHAPTER 2 ~

  ~ ALSO BY SARAH DARLINGTON ~

  ~ ABOUT THE AUTHOR ~

  ~ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ~

  ~ NEVER TRUST A ROCKSTAR Playlist ~

  To Gram.

  ~ CHAPTER 1 ~

  EMMA

  To say I had a crush was an understatement. ‘Crush’ was putting it lightly. Obsession... a little closer. I followed his Twitter and Instagram daily. Hourly, even. He never posted very frequently, but I didn’t want to miss a thing. Was it weird to feel so connected to someone who didn’t even know I existed?

  Yes. The answer was yes.

  Then again, maybe my celebrity crush was just a defense mechanism. A way of protecting myself. An avoidance tactic against the monotony of my average life.

  “Kid, you look rough.” Luce, my aunt, my mom’s younger sister, nudged my shoulder as we arrived at our first house of the day. It was Saturday and that meant the next few hours were going to be Hell on Earth. “You were doing it again, weren’t you?” she asked as she keyed in the code to unlock the lower level door.

  She meant my late-night stalking. Falling into the void of Instagram. I shrugged, not wanting to admit the truth. Because, lately, the more serious things got with my boyfriend Nick the more I found myself falling in love with Ollie Mills.

  Ollie Mills was a god.

  Nick, a mere mortal.

  “Since your mom is sick, we are going to have to split her normal duties and work twice as hard to finish in time,” Luce started as she lugged our heavy-ass vacuum inside and toward the stairs.

  I followed her. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  I’d been doing this every Saturday and Sunday since age fourteen. I knew the routine.

  “So, I need your head in the game today,” Luce continued, “no daydreaming, just working.”

  I laughed because this wasn’t rocket science, this was cleaning fucking bathrooms and changing dirty sheets. “Stop lecturing me, Luce,” I groaned, “I know what needs to be done.” It was normally my mom’s job to lecture. My aunt was the young one, the fun one, the one on my side. Luce was only five years older than me. But since my mom hadn’t been able to work lately, it was as if Luce suddenly felt the need to be disciplinarian. Instead of arguing more, I grabbed the enormous bag of clean sheets and started for the first bedroom I needed to flip.

  We lived in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. In Kill Devil Hills—a beach town. And in the summer months, tourists came to our area of coastal islands by the thousands. The shore was dotted with house after amazing house. Families would rent these giant homes by the week. That meant on Saturday and Sunday between the hours of eleven—when last week’s family departed, and four—when next week’s family arrived, maid services were in very high demand. Over the next five hours, we’d be cleaning five different giant homes. Without my mom here, it would be that much harder. There was no room for error because we had to be finished in those five short hours.

  It was a bitch.

  I was a toilet-scrubbing and sheet-changing machine. This was my life. Well, my weekend life. So, yeah, it was only natural for a twenty-two-year-old to fantasize about how exciting life might be with a Rockstar like Ollie Mills instead.

  It got me through the day.

  Five hours later, I was exhausted and slightly emotional. Holding it all in. I didn’t know how much more of this repetition I could take. Would I still be doing the same thing at Luce’s age? My mom’s age? All signs pointed to yes.

  Luce drove us home. We didn’t speak on the way. I had nothing to say. I felt trapped. Nick and I were supposed to see each other again tonight. The thought of seeing him didn’t help my disposition like it should have.

  Wasn’t a boyfriend supposed to help take the pressure off everything?

  Normally, if something felt off for me in a relationship, Luce would be the first person to tell me to go with my gut and break it off. But lately, I’d been getting the opposite impression from her. She wanted me to stay with this guy this time. She thought he was the one for me. I trusted her opinion—it was the only reason I was still giving Nick a chance.

  “You know, I wasn’t going to tell you about this,” Luce sighed as she cut the engine to the car we shared. Great. Here it comes. I stared straight ahead at the sunflower-yellow siding of our tiny home. Don’t cry today, I warned myself. Anytime Luce and I had a serious conversation, it always ended in lots of tears on my end.

  “With everything happening with your mom, I just didn’t want to get your hopes up.” She squeezed her fingers around the steering wheel, making the leather squeak. The internal temperature in the car started to rise as we lingered, the sun beat down on us through the windows. “But... you know that charity company—Omaze? Where you can donate money for an entry to win an experience, or whatever?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d never heard of Omaze. “No.”

  “Well, there’s one going on right now with Ollie Mills. With the whole Sunset R
evival band, actually. It’s a chance to be Ollie’s date and join the band at some gala. The deadline to enter is today. I just...I didn’t want to tell you I entered you and get your hopes up. I think Nick is a nice guy. You should be focusing on that relationship. But I know how much you like Ollie Mills and, well—”

  Holy crap! The fan girl inside me started to scream.

  A chance to go on a date with Ollie Mills? How come I hadn’t heard about this? Why hadn’t he tweeted this? I could barely breathe, let alone think straight. My hands shook as I slipped my phone from my pocket. Luce kept talking, but my ears were now ringing so loudly that I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  A quick google search—and sure enough.

  Be Ollie Mills’ Date for the Night in Nashville

  Join Ollie Mills as his date, along with the other Mills brothers of Sunset Revival, at the Christopher Scott Gala this September. Get treated like a princess. Ride with Ollie in a horse-drawn carriage, warm up with a special whiskey tasting (if you want!) and sit together at the gala! Get flown out to Nashville and put up in a 4-Star hotel! Get to know this Rockstar on a personal level. And don’t be shy, take as many selfies as you want to show off your experience of a lifetime to all your friends!

  Wow. Was this for real? My heart slammed inside my chest. Sweat trickled down my forehead. No freaking way! “You didn’t want to tell me?” I muttered. Part of me wanted to be mad at her, but the rest of me was too giddy with excitement to care. Hope bubbled inside me like a shaken-up soda can, ready to explode. A tiny squeal even left my lips. One more minute and I’d be in full-on freak-out mode. I tried to contain my enthusiasm since Luce seemed the opposite of enthused.

  “See—this is exactly why I hesitated to tell you.” She pushed open her door. “You’re obsessed. You’re in love with him. Why is it so easy for you to love a stranger and so hard for you to love Nick?”

  Nick? Who gave a flying fuck about Nick right this second?

  “If you’re so in love with Nick, why don’t you date him?” I yelled after her as she exited the car. She rolled her eyes and left me for the house. I sat for a minute alone in the car. I knew it was childish to shout that at Luce. But frankly, right this moment, with the possibility of meeting Ollie Mills swirling around in my head, I didn’t care about anything else.

  ~ CHAPTER 2 ~

  CALEB

  You know I’m not one to sit here and bitch and complain

  But even after the years, I’m still scarred by that night in the rain

  So I smile and I grin and continue on just the same

  All the while, the holes deep in my soul always remain

  With a groan, I stopped writing. I crumpled the piece of paper that contained what had to be the most generic lyrics I’d ever written, and I tossed it across the room for the recycle bin. But Ollie, who’d been using the bathroom in my hotel room, came out with perfect timing.

  He caught my paper mid-air.

  “They suck,” I warned as he began unfolding the paper.

  His lips silently moved over each word, as if he were trying to imagine them in song. Nothing I wrote these days ever felt good enough. At least, not on the same level as the stuff I wrote in the early days of our band. The truth was—I wasn’t scarred by that night in the rain anymore. I was purposely trying to scratch at old wounds, hoping that by doing so it might open an artistic vein and better lyrics would flow out of me.

  But I felt nothing. Nothing worth writing about anyway.

  “Hmmm,” Ollie concluded by the end.

  I let out a forced laugh. “Yeah, I know. It’s pure bullshit.”

  “It’s not that bad. A good hook and it could have potential.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m keeping this and I’m showing Luke.” He pocketed my work. “Unless you’d rather the maid dig through your trash and sell it on eBay.”

  He had a point.

  “Now come on. Let’s get this selection thing with the Omaze people over with. Cross your fingers that whoever wins this thing is halfway attractive and doesn’t order off the senior menu.”

  Our publicist set this up. My little brother—he was the heartthrob of our group. Women dropped at his feet. Which happened to be damn perfect for the rest of us. Don’t get me wrong, I was certain there were no less than ten amazing women waiting in the downstairs lobby of this hotel, probably tipped off by the paparazzi, who would jump into bed with me at a moment’s notice. Or Luke. Or even Dani if she wanted that. But Ollie—for him, they’d rip each other’s hair out and claw each other to death just to have the chance to be near him. I was thankful it was him and not me that they’d all grown so fanatic over.

  That meant this ‘win a date’ thing had to be with Ollie. In two months’ time, we’d raised a quarter of a million dollars for St. Jude’s. It floored me that so many of our fans were willing to spend that kind of money for one little date with my brother.

  I followed Ollie down the hallway to our publicist Michelle’s room. Luke was already inside. He sat on the suite’s pea-green velvet couch, his expression stoic as he waited, surely wanting to get this over with as fast as possible and get on with rehearsals for tomorrow’s concert. He was the oldest of us, twenty-seven, but he acted like he was eight-seven most days.

  Michelle had her iPad out, video conferencing someone. “They’re just contacting the winner now. We’ll connect through the video chat. Ya’ll will say a quick congratulations to the winner. And that will be that. I’ll cut the conversation off after about sixty seconds.”

  “Where’s Dani?” I didn’t want my cousin to miss this. She hated being left out of anything band related. But time and time again it always seemed she was the last to show.

  “I haven’t seen her all morning,” Luke answered dryly.

  “And we are live in three, two, one—”

  Without much more warning, Michelle’s iPad connected with whomever the grand winner of the contest was.

  A woman. Short cropped blonde hair. Pretty. A flower tattoo on her neck.

  “Damn,” Ollie said.

  She had his full attention.

  He pushed his way to the front of the screen. “Hey baby, it’s Ollie and Sunset Revival. We’re calling because you won the date with me.” He paused, giving her a moment to respond. “So… congrats.”

  “Shit,” was her only word.

  I waited for the usual high-pitched girl screaming to follow, but it didn’t. She stared back at us with an impatient, annoyed look on her face.

  “Don’t get too excited now, baby,” Ollie told her, winking.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not excited at all—baby,” she shot sharply back at him.

  Ollie wasn’t used to women rejecting him. As if her words had been a slap across the face, he sat straight down beside Luke on the couch.

  “I’m actually not the winner,” the woman clarified. “I entered my niece. Which now I’m realizing was a colossal mistake.”

  “Oh,” Michelle jumped into the conversation, “you’re not Emma Winchester.”

  “No, that’s my niece.”

  Michelle went into worried publicist mode. “Is your niece over eighteen? Because the contest rules clearly state—”

  “Yes, she’s twenty-two. I only answered because she’s at work and left her phone at home. I can relay all the information to her. She’s going to be ecstatic.”

  “Okay. Well then, stay on the line and we can talk through all the details. The Sunset Revival have a rehearsal to get to, so we’ll say goodbye to them now.”

  “Wait. Ollie? Where did you go?” the woman asked.

  Ollie stood back up. “Hey.” He prodded himself back into her view, perhaps a little less confident than before.

  “If you are anything less than a gentleman to my niece, I will personally hunt you down and gut you. She’s a good girl. She’s in a good relationship. If you fuck that up for her in any way, I will hurt you. Consider this your warning. I know your reputation. And I have
connections. Don’t doubt me.”

  “Okkkaaay,” Michelle jumped in. “Let’s wrap this up. No need for death threats. Actually, miss, um, why don’t I call you back in five.”

  Michelle ended the video chat. The smile left her face with the push of a button. “Great. She seems insane. We can’t deal with anymore insane fans. Not after what happened with that fan in Idaho.”

  “She seemed like the opposite of a fan,” I commented.

  “Which is worse,” Michelle said. “They’re the craziest. The anti-fans.”

  I had to agree. This woman wasn’t even happy her niece had won.

  “Nope.” Ollie ran his hands through his dark hair and over his face. “Nope. I am so fucking turned on by Neck Tattoo Girl right now.” He paced the room. “Michelle, get her a seat at the gala too. And plane tickets and whatever else. I’ll pay for it. I want to meet that woman in person.”

  He went for the door to leave the room.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded. “We have to get to rehearsals next.”

  “I need to get some pent-up energy out first.” He meant get laid. “That woman was hellfire. I need to meet her. But for now, I need to forget her.”

  I groaned as he left, shooting Luke a look. Luke gave me nothing in return. He was just on autopilot most days. Meanwhile, Ollie was off fucking whatever moved again. Story of his life. Dani was God knows where. So once again, everything fell on me. I was the glue holding our band together—holding our family together.

  ~ CHAPTER 3 ~

  EMMA

  “You won.”

  It was Friday afternoon and the start of my shift at Chancy’s Claw, a local seafood restaurant. Rhett, another bartender, was in the middle of teaching me how to bartend. I’d been waitressing here for almost six months now. They were finally, finally, letting me do this. The money would be double what I’d been making before.

  Luce suddenly walked in, standing by the counter hollering at me above the noise. She’d been a bartender at Chancy’s Claw for almost ten years. She had gotten me this job—then she’d convinced Rhett to let me move from the floor to where I was today, even though I was less senior than some of the other waitresses who wanted this spot. Summer was coming to an end. Once fall came, tourism would drop drastically. Our weekend maid gig would become non-existent. So I planned to learn fast and hopefully make a little more money while the weather was still warm.