Taking the Lead (Secrets of a Rock Star #1) Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF CECILIA TAN

  SLOW SATISFACTION

  “Cecilia Tan has a way to seduce you into her stories … you can’t put her books down because she’s that great a storyteller.”

  —RakesofRomance.com

  “Slow Satisfaction is everything I expected it to be. The perfect closing of the curtains to a story that had a fantastic ending.”

  —SinfulReads.com

  “This couple always finds new and interesting ways to raise the heat index.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  SLOW SEDUCTION

  “The sex scenes here are once again as hot as they are imaginative.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “5 stars! Slow Seduction was a tasty treat to say the least. I cannot wait to get my hands on book three. If you are looking for erotica, stop whatever you are doing and get this book.”

  —DivasDailyBookblog.wordpress.com

  SLOW SURRENDER

  “4½ stars! This is the BDSM novel all the other millionaire dom heroes want to star in. Tan takes an overused trope and turns it into a dreamy, erotic fantasy that draws the reader down the rabbit hole along with Karina. The sex scenes are lush and erotic … Readers will be clamoring for the next book in the series.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Move over, EL James. Cecilia Tan’s Slow Surrender is sinfully sweet and sublimely erotic. As with sipping a superb single-malt scotch served neat, you’ll savor the slow burn as it builds to a deliciously unanticipated … climax.”

  —Hope Tarr, award-winning author

  “Loved, loved Slow Surrender and am waiting on pins and needles for book two … another brilliant outing from Cecilia Tan … her characters are full of life and emotion, and so believable. Definitely a keeper!”

  —NightOwlReviews.com

  “If you are a fan of the billionaire dom, you should not miss Slow Surrender. Cecilia Tan weaves a compelling and red-hot tale that will have readers eager for more.”

  —RomanceNovelNews.com

  ALSO BY CECILIA TAN

  Slow Surrender

  Slow Seduction

  Slow Satisfaction

  * * *

  Black Feathers

  Daron’s Guitar Chronicles

  The Hot Streak

  The Incubus and the Angel

  Mind Games

  The Poet and the Prophecy

  The Prince’s Boy

  The Siren and the Sword

  Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords

  The Tower and the Tears

  The Velderet

  White Flames

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the Novels of Cecilia Tan

  Also by Cecilia Tan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  One: Overture

  Two: Short Fuse

  Three: If This Car’s Rockin’ (Don’t Come Knockin’)

  Four: Razor Sharp

  Five: Don’t Look Away

  Six: Step by Step by Step

  Seven: Gravitate

  Eight: Knockout

  Nine: Siren Song

  Ten: Everybody Wants, Everybody Needs

  Eleven: Hold Fast

  Twelve: Rock the World

  Thirteen: Windowpane

  Fourteen: Break It Down

  Fifteen: High Tide, Low Tide

  Sixteen: Kidnap My Heart

  Epilogue

  A Preview of Wild Licks

  Taking the Lead

  A Secrets of a Rock Star novel

  Cecilia Tan

  Copyright

  PIATKUS

  First published in the US in 2016 by Forever Romance,

  an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Piatkus

  Copyright © 2016 by Cecilia Tan

  Excerpt from Wild Licks copyright © 2016 by Cecilia Tan

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-349-40832-3

  Piatkus

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.piatkus.co.uk

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book wouldn’t exist without the enthusiasm and encouragement of my agent, Lori Perkins, my editor Megha Parekh, and the whole team at Forever/Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, including Marissa, Leah, Elizabeth, Latoya, and everyone. You’re the best!

  Thank you to my beta readers Angela, Chris K., Corey, Leela, JaNean, and Melanie, and to all the various cheerleaders, kibbitzers, and innocent bystanders on Twitter who watched me fuss with band names, story locations, and other minutiae. Twitter “co-workers,” you know who you are. See you at the virtual water cooler.

  Almost this entire book was written in four coffee shops in a half-mile stretch of Mass. Ave. So thank you to Pedro at Tisan Coffee, the crew at Simon’s and Bourbon Coffee, and the late-night folks at the Shepard Post Starbucks. (The exception was the chapter I wrote at the Epcot Center Starbucks, to take a vacation from my vacation.) Tea-fueled writing binges win.

  I would also like to thank everyone at RT Magazine/RT Booklovers, RWA, Georgia Romance Writers, Authors After Dark, and the New England Chapter of RWA for being warm and welcoming.

  But as always, longest and loudest praise for my family: corwin, my partner of twenty-four years, and my parents. You’ve always believed in me.

  PROLOGUE

  RICKI

  The sex toy catalog was glossy, tasteful, full of subtle typefaces and swaths of cool, corporate gray. If you didn’t look closely you might think it was advertising office furniture, not vibrators and color-coordinated bondage accessories. I flipped it closed on the blotter of my desk and pushed it toward my sister, Gwen.

  “Do we have it in the budget?” was my only question to her.

  Gwen silently mouthed the word “Jaded!” at me, before actually speaking. “Seriously, Ricki? Could you stop thinking like an MBA for half a second? You didn’t even get past the dildos to the leather section. There’s a whole selection of handmade whips and floggers—”

  “I don’t care if they’re made of organically sourced fair trade yak hide,” I said, waving my hand as if dispelling a cloud of smoke. “Sex toys are sex toys. Is it in the budget?”

  “Yes, it’s in the budget,” she said sullenly, settling back in her chair. Her eyes darted around my office. I’d tried to neaten up the place since taking it over after my grandfather’s death, but two months later there were still vestiges of his eccentric taste. I hadn’t figured out what to do with the seven-foot-high carved wooden statue of an eagle, for example. And I’d kept his massive oak desk, as big as a dining table.

  I liked the desk. I leaned back in my own chair, kicked off my heels, and put my stockin
ged feet up onto it. “Don’t sulk, Gwen.”

  “You know it’s a good idea,” she said defensively. “Kresley Palmer’s daughter almost discovered his vibrator collection in the back of his car. Plus we’ll reduce liability by maintaining and cleaning them ourselves—”

  “Didn’t you just say it was in the budget? Buy all the sex toys you want, Gwen. It’s a great idea. Maybe look into installing private lockers, too.” Providing our members with everything they needed on site so they didn’t have to transport incriminating implements made good sense.

  What didn’t make as much sense, though I tried not to dwell on it, was the fact that the two twenty-something granddaughters of one of Hollywood’s richest moguls were running a secret sex dungeon in the family mansion. But our grandfather Raymond “Cy” Hamilton had left some very odd requirements in his will. Some I could almost understand, like the one that said if I wanted to work for the family corporation—the former Coast to Coast Pictures, now simply known as CTC—I had to work somewhere else for at least three years. I would even have understood if the will had said to destroy all evidence of the dungeon and never speak of it again. But no. The price of our inheritance: keep the tradition alive.

  “Your mouth is saying yes but your attitude is no,” Gwen said, her slim blond eyebrows drawn together with concern. “You don’t look thrilled.”

  “It’s not my job to be thrilled.” My feet ached and I pulled one toward me to rub it. “Honestly. What’s the point of running a secret BDSM club if I don’t have a slaveboy to give foot rubs?”

  Gwen’s thin smile was sly. “That could be arranged, you know—”

  “I was joking!” I put my feet down quickly. “Seriously, Gwen. Equipment, employee safety, that’s all you. Administration, membership, that’s me. You do the hands-on stuff; I do the back-office stuff. Isn’t that what we agreed?”

  “Yes.” She sighed.

  “So quit trying to get me to be more involved in your side of it. I’m not interested.”

  “You just seem like you’re not having much fun,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure why Gwen thought running a secret sex club should be fun. To me it was a sword hanging over our heads, a PR nightmare waiting to happen. If it was “fun,” Grandpa Cy wouldn’t have felt the need to include it as a requirement for our inheritance. Why should something that was founded to jazz up my grandparents’ marriage be relevant to my life? Our parents had even met at one of the club parties, when our mother had been an aspiring actress and our father had been bent on proving he was a chip off the old block. If only Dad had inherited Grandpa Cy’s business sense instead of his taste in sex.

  I’m sure most people didn’t know as much about their parents’ sex lives as we did. Then again, most people’s family legacy wasn’t a secret dungeon in their mansion. Though I supposed in a way that wasn’t any worse than the legacy we already carried—of our mother’s death when we were young. I preferred not to think about that if I could help it.

  “Look, Gwen. I have plenty of fun—” I started to assure her, but then the old intercom speaker on the desk buzzed and the voice of my assistant Paul cut me off.

  “Grammy time, Ms. Hamilton. Five minutes until the stylist gets here,” he said. “Her car just cleared the main security gate. And Jamison says wardrobe is finished with your friend Sakura.”

  I hopped to my feet with a frustrated groan. We’d spent so much time talking about sex toys that I hadn’t had a chance to bring up the issue I’d actually wanted to discuss with Gwen. The rest of the day and night was packed: first the Grammy Awards ceremony, maybe a quick stop at a party at Blue Star Entertainment, and then the after-party here at the mansion. Not that kind of party: a normal Hollywood glitterati affair. Maybe tonight I’d finally buttonhole David Meyers on that proposal about a new division of Blue Star. I wasn’t above waiting until my boss was full of champagne to approach him. Gwen and I would have to talk tomorrow after the staff had cleaned up and we had the house to ourselves again.

  “See?” I said. “I get to have fun. Grammy Awards.”

  Gwen gave me a skeptical look. “Yep. You look over the moon about it.” She swept up the catalog. “I’ll be watching on TV with a bowl of popcorn and get into my party dress later.”

  Her plan sounded like more fun than mine, but I wasn’t about to admit that. The intercom speaker buzzed again.

  “Um,” came Paul’s voice, somewhat tentative this time. “Code Blue.”

  That was our warning that our father, the titular Hamilton patriarch, was on the premises. Why was everything in my life a ticking time bomb of a PR disaster? Which would be worse, I thought angrily, the press getting a hold of Dad on one of his drunken rants or them finding out about the bondage equipment filling the basement? Worst-case scenario: them finding out about the dungeon during one of his drunken rants … My head started to hurt as Gwen and I looked at each other in slight alarm. “I thought Dad was in St. Maarten.”

  “So did I.”

  She hopped to her feet. “You go get dressed. I’ll handle him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She shooed me out of the office with brisk motions of her hands. “Go, go, go. He’s probably half-pickled already anyway. With any luck he’ll be unconscious before the first guest gets here. Don’t worry, Ricki.”

  Don’t worry, don’t worry. Why were people always telling me not to worry? All it did was make me worry more. What were the chances Dad even realized it was Grammy night? The staff was adept at handling him. Gwen was right. They’d either find him a bottle or a woman to keep him busy—or both. That had been the usual state of affairs for most of our lives and was a large part of the reason Grandpa Cy had passed the managing of the estate directly into Gwen’s and my hands instead of our father’s. How many years would I have to walk this tightrope before I could start living the life I really wanted to, running a film division of CTC? Right then I wanted to go upstairs and curl up with a good book, but it was my job to go out and put on a good public face, to make myself into a player in this industry, so that when they looked at me they didn’t see poor Cy Hamilton’s half-orphaned granddaughter or the mistress of the most notorious kinky secret in Hollywood.

  I’d have to worry about Dad later. Right now at the top of my to-do list was fitting into a designer ball gown. Deep breath, Ricki. You can do this.

  AXEL

  Grammy night. I suppose I should have paused to reflect what a significant moment in my career was happening, but I was too busy arguing with my manager. Nothing like having a snitty row with your manager while your stylist is trying to work on you. I put my phone on speaker and laid it down next to the huge, lit mirror facing me so that I wouldn’t be holding the thing to my ear while Tashonda worked on my hair.

  “Christina,” I told her, “you’re on speaker phone now.”

  “Axel, if you think that’s going to keep me from cursing in front of Tashonda you are so wrong.” Her voice was tinny but perfectly understandable. “Hey, Tashonda—how’s it going?”

  “It’s going fine.” Tashonda worked the spray bottle and teased my hair with her fingers, trying to achieve the perfect “messily tousled” look. She had already streaked me with blond highlights. I sighed. I didn’t get into the rock-and-roll business because I liked to be primped and fussed over. “I’m thinking of putting rhinestones on the ends of his eyebrows, though; what do you think?”

  “Fuck no,” I said, but Christina practically screamed, “Ah! That’s fantastic! Axel, you’ll have the diamond stud in your ear, right? And the cuff links?”

  Ugh. These women. “Yes, ma’am,” I said in my best “good boy” voice. I already felt like a poodle in a rhinestone collar and I guess I was going to look like one, too. But as Christina had pointed out many times, my fans were women, the ones who bought the front row seats and the VIP packages and had made the album go platinum: women. And as she constantly reminded me: she was a woman and knew what women went crazy for. I was pretty sure I had
a good handle on what drove women crazy myself, but, well, she hadn’t steered me wrong yet. “I’m not sure the diamonds say ‘edgy-sexy,’ you know.”

  “But they do say posh. And I think we need more posh if we’re going to get that UK record company bidding on the rights to the next record. Tashonda, you’re making him look cream-in-your-pants stunning but just a touch disreputable, right? We’re so done with the ragamuffin look.”

  “Yep. I’m cleaning him up nice—you’re going to love the blond—but I’m leaving a little beard stubble,” the stylist said. “That’s what you want, right? Your memo said to upscale his usual ‘bad boy’ look.”

  Christina didn’t wait to hear any more before she barreled on. “Exactly. This is edgy-sexy phase two, from bad boy to playboy, okay? Back to what I was saying. Axel, I don’t like this date you’re bringing tonight. This is a big spotlight.”

  “And I told you, it’s too late to change it. You know how fussy they are at these awards ceremonies? Security on Buckingham Palace isn’t half as tight. Plus I think Sakura spent her entire month’s income on a dress. Chris, I’m not jilting her even if you’ve got Scarlett Johansson lined up.”

  “But Axel—”

  “No buts, Chris. I know this is all about image—”

  “It’s the Grammy Awards! There will be a billion photos of you and her! There are rumors about her, you know.”

  I closed my eyes while Tashonda held her palm against my forehead and hairsprayed my forelock. I guess the “wet look” was back. When I could breathe again, I said, “Come on, Chris, those rumors should just go along with the whole edgy-sexy image to begin with, right?” If she only knew …

  “Not that kind of bad, though! Are you paying her to go to this?”

  “No, I’m not paying her! We’re friends, Chris. I’m allowed to have friends. And I’m allowed to choose my friends. The day I’m not is the day I’m walking away.” Right. Like I could walk away from a platinum-selling rock band and musical career. I was bluffing, but one had to draw the line somewhere.