“No.” I held up a hand, blocking my view of his semi. “But it’s hard to, you know, take you seriously when you’re naked.” That wasn’t it, exactly. More like it was hard to keep my mind on anything but his smooth, golden skin, his hard pecs, his sculpted thighs, and whatever was going on behind my raised hand.
“Fine. Let’s smoke a joint and hash it out.” He bounced off the bed.
“I don’t want to hash it out, Jesse. I wanna go back to sleep, like a sane person.”
But he was already stepping into his jeans, drawing them up over his sculpted ass as he headed for the door, completely ignoring my protests.
“Jesse...?”
CHAPTER 24
JESSE
Half an hour later, Katie was devouring a giant breakfast sandwich with two fried eggs and triple cheese. I’d already wolfed mine down. Raf had smoked us up while the other guys grabbed our breakfast and we were on the road again. We were about half an hour from our destination, which meant I had about fifteen minutes to get Katie to tell me what the fuck was going on with her art, and fifteen for a quickie.
I could work with that.
“That is the most amazing… most mellowest… yet potent weed I’ve ever…” Katie said between bites. She was sitting cross-legged in her cut-offs, her tits bare beneath her thin tank top, her smooth, pale skin looking slightly sun-kissed.
I mellowed out against the pillows in my jeans, idly playing my guitar. “Cool. Now tell me why you don’t want to be an artist.”
I serenaded her while she thought about that, bits ofDirty Like Meand Eric Clapton’sLaylaand I didn’t even know what else, just some fragments that had been bouncing around in my head and might turn into a new song.
Finally, she said, “I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re crazy talented and you obviously love doing it. You’re always drawing in that book. So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. Haven’t you ever dreamed of making a living off the thing you love doing?”
“Of course.”
“So what happened to that dream?”
She shrugged. “Life happened. I used to draw like a fiend. And I painted all through my teens. Pretty much since I was about ten years old and I realized drawings and paintings weren’t just things on walls or in books, they were something I could do.”
Damn. She painted too? I’d pay money to see a Katie Bloom original. And not just because she had a sweet ass and perfect, lickable tits.
“And?” I prompted.
“And I hung out with a bunch of skater kids and some of them were into street art so I got into that.”
“Street art? You mean graffiti?”
“Yeah. You really want to see my work, there are remnants of it all over Vancouver. I can tell you where to go.”
“I will,” I said.
She shook her head, brushing that off like it wasn’t even worth pretending to believe. “I just kinda got lost along the way, you know? I think it started when I got arrested.”
My hands stilled on the guitar. “You what?”
“I got arrested.”
“Sweet Katie Bloom? Mug shots and everything?”
She scowled at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been arrested, Mr. Badass Rock Star.”
