Beautiful Shadows

by Scarlett Rush

Genres: Erotic & Steamy Romance

Synopsis

It?s to be the ride of their lives: a chance to join heavy metal giants Thunderhed on the European leg of their world tour. It is to be done the old-fashioned way too ? all sex, drugs, and rock?n?roll. For pleasure-addict Sindee it is the chance to get her big break and live out her hedonistic vision of absolute indulgence. But she is unaware that Cas Casanove, one of the biggest rock stars on the planet, thinks that she might well be the girl of his dreams. He is a fighter and a rebel, a charismatic titan who nobody would suspect of having a softer side ? until Sindee comes along. He could be perfect ? if only the woman on his arm was not his wife. Sindee?s fried Willow is there to photograph all of her sexual shenanigans for a tell-all diary, and they are polar opposites in matters of the flesh. Will her wild side be drawn out at last on their debaucherous world tour, or will she convince her friend that love should triumph over lust?

Release date: January 12, 2015

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 205

Sample

Chapter One

Gothic Angels

To think that I have a kick to the head to thank for my current position. I am primarily a designer of clothes by trade, although I do a bit of painting on the side – portraits and landscapes that is, not walls and ceilings. None of this should be too surprising when you consider that I studied Art and Design at college. At age 15, I thought I was set to become a world-renowned taekwondo-ist. Not a taekwondo-er, note. I was at a level where competing abroad in the juniors was becoming a distinct possibility. I rather fancied the prospect, even if it did mean a life of wearing what amounted to a stiff pyjama suit, and having one’s hair always tied back tightly and unflatteringly, with perhaps a few stray strands plastered to your sweaty, ruddy, puffed-out cheeks. Still, there is something intrinsically adrenaline pumping and even romantic about booting people willy-nilly while having Korean barked at you.

Then one day, stupidly, my trainer came to the party minus his head protector, and with a rather too exuberant jumping reverse hook kick, I managed to break my big toe upon his jaw, thus rendering myself inactive for weeks. My recovery might have been speedier if I hadn’t declared myself fit enough, if not for fighting then certainly for partying, and worn a particularly challenging shoe on a night out. Indeed the footwear failed to rise to the challenge of getting me to the bottom of a flight of stairs in one piece, and I was back to square one. I hadn’t intentionally hung up my dobok but other things just got in the way.

During my incapacitation I looked to my art as a means to escape tedious hours normally spent fighting. I used to do a lot of pencil sketches, primarily of female forms. In truth it became something of an obsession. Having been caught doing this once or twice I contrived a hasty cover story, claiming it was for my clothing designs, explaining that you had to understand the female figure perfectly before you put one’s garments upon it. Quite why I needed such intricate fanny detail remained unexplained. So, anyway, I then took to overlaying coloured clothing designs over my pencil nudes almost as an excuse to keep drawing them. After a while the clothing bit started to take over and I decided it was clearly where my future lay. If it hadn’t been for my trainer’s selfish decision not to wear protective garments I would still be wearing thick white pyjamas to this day and I’d probably be the proud owner of a shiny gold Olympic medal or two.

During my last year at college I was doing work experience for a small freelance design team in the city, and that is where fate visited the incomparable Elowen upon me. She was a little older than I, infinitely more awesome, and exquisitely feminine in a way that had me rapidly and permanently consigning any of those remaining tomboyish tendencies of mine straight to the rubbish bin. Her speciality was fetish-wear, particularly in rubber and latex. She had carved out a particular niche, being the go-to designer music video producers called on when they wanted their nubile singers or dancers to look beyond outstanding. Nothing she created was ever less than stunning. See her outfits and you saw her very spirit.

I wasn’t prepared for love. I had been kicked in the chest a fair few times but I had never known anything there like this impact. I felt like one of those Mexican cliff divers, leaping hundreds of feet down into the blue waters of Acapulco, except that I was plummeting into a sea of infatuation. Spectacular and breath-stopping it most certainly was, but no matter how expert the entry, it was always going to hurt – and by golly it did. She was a lithe Goth firecracker, all jet-black hair and make-up and tattoos. My goodness – those tattoos! All down her arms; a stunning Japanese scene in red and black down her side to her hip; Audrey Hepburn above Beatrice Dalle on her right shoulder blade and Bardot as a young, sleek brunette on her left. It was like her body was alive. The pièce de résistance was the tiny, ever-so intricate black scorpion on the top of her left cheek, just diagonally down from her eye. The memory alone of this still has my belly fluttering.

That diminutive arachnid remains the most dazzling, most effecting two centimetres of artwork I have yet to see. Each look quadrupled my pulse within a second and it didn’t stop there. I can’t say what it did to me down below but phrases like “desperate tingling” and “urgent saturation” wouldn’t be overstatements. She was the only one ever to tie my tongue or pull the rug from beneath my feet. She opened my eyes to possibilities, and to myself. In essence she created me. She injected excitement and passion and daring into everything. From the time I first set eyes on her, she was all I could see. I don’t think I can truthfully profess to being a lesbian but I can’t say I’ve ever “got” a member of the male sex the way I got her.

‘Because of your looks no man will ever be able to be normal around you,’ she once told me. ‘Most will think you out of their league and simply stay away. Others will be all macho and brash and nasty, thinking you there to conquer. Others may fawn and flatter, but they will doubtless be slurring due to alcohol by the time they pluck up the courage. Almost none of them will ever be able to see past your beauty. It wouldn’t even register to them if you were the greatest living artist; their instincts wouldn’t let them focus beyond your looks.’

Of course I clung to every word she said. She was the sexiest living creature and a genius of design to boot, so why wouldn’t I? I might have got away with it if she hadn’t fancied me right back. I reminded her of a young Marissa Tomei, or so she told me – an actress she seemed to have a particular crush upon. Indeed my then girlfriend remains the only person I know to have openly confessed to getting off to the film My Cousin Vinny. I never could fully see the resemblance, as flattering as it was. I have more rump for sure. I certainly have the raven hair, since, as I have been reliably informed, I am “one quarter Mediterranean”, although no one has told me which quarter of me it is, nor indeed which part of the Med. I think it has something to do with a scandalous holiday taken by Grandma, before Grandpa was around.

There is a scene in that aforementioned movie in which Ms Tomei’s character appears wearing one hell of a catsuit, perhaps fashioned from stretch Lycra. It is original to say the least. The background of dark blue is overlaid in a large floral design in whites, pinks, oranges, all colours. It zips right to the throat but has a cut-away at the back, revealing a large oval of her flawless creamy-white skin. She teams it with a pair of high-heeled ankle boots in black. It is not your standard everyday attire, except for that character. Elowen counted it as the sexiest two minutes of any film she had seen.

As a treat to her, I recreated my own version and surprised her by modelling it on the catwalk during a small private showing for some industry people. In the crowd was one Sindee Liscious, at that time just starting out on the road to being noticed by those who mattered. She gushed almost literally over the outfit and ordered versions to wear on stage, and thus I became acquainted with my current employer. That outfit of mine might have been the direct cause of me being here today, but really it was always down to Elowen. She was simply one of a kind. I remember a posh model at a party once remarking upon her scorpion tattoo.

‘It might look sexy now,’ said the model, ‘but do you think it will look quite so good when you are 60?’

‘Sixty?’ replied my incredulous lover, quick as a flash. ‘I’ve absolutely no intention of living beyond 40!’

She didn’t actually succeed in getting past 26, and I haven’t found it possible to get too close to anyone else since.

I kept up a business relationship of sorts with Sindee over those next impossible months. I think she was often looking out for me, trying to keep me busy and focussed when I was set adrift. The freelance design team took me on, to continue the work I had started, but I found it difficult to do it with the same heart and soul as before. Sindee, meanwhile, had got her big break and was about to be propelled into the spotlight. She commissioned me to do some outfits for the upcoming tour and I found the impetus to do it by resurrecting some of the designs Elowen and I had worked on together. Top of the tree was a catsuit in shiny red latex, the back with a cut-out in the shape of flames, the front having a built-in plastic appendage at the groin – Elowen’s idea – smooth and curving like an erection but with a tip not like a man’s but pointed, like a devil’s tail.

Sindee declared it the most fabulous garment ever seen and me a genius. She got all gooey over me. I was sat there besides her having modelled the devil suit and she had her hand around the groin appendage, stroking it up and down. She was grinning at me and saying how beautiful and talented I was and then she had her big idea. Remembering that I had taken a few snaps during one of our catwalk shows she declared me a photographer. She wanted one on tour with her, to be beside her at all times, since this was likely to be the most incredible, debauched adventure she would ever embark upon and she wanted pictorial evidence of her sexy shenanigans, since she thought she might be too drunk and too high to remember most of it. I was to be her Official Fucktographer, as she put it. If she was going to bed some of the biggest names in rock, she wanted something solid as a reminder.

‘I want you to create a photo album of my sexual exploits, with a bit of writing thrown in to give some context,’ she told me. ‘I want you to capture every cool guy and hot bitch I end up with in all their naked glory. I don’t want any kiss-and-tells crawling out the woodwork with faces or tales I can’t recall. It’s my story so I want to be the one doing all the telling. It will be a fabulous and indisputable account of how I played and partied and screwed my way around the continent, with you there to gather the evidence. It will be the most famous sex journal ever. We’ll call it Rock Chicks and Cock Pics and when the tour is over we will publish it together and become millionaires off the royalties.’

She thought it a brilliant idea although I told her there might be some legal issues over the book being made available to the public. I think I pointed out that some famous guys might object to having a gooseberry present to snap shots of their erection just prior to them putting it inside her, but then I’d never been on a rock tour before. I might have suggested that she would have better memories if she moderated the booze and drugs, but I wasn’t then aware that rock stars did everything to the max simply because they could. It was compulsory. She wasn’t listening to me anyway. She said she would siphon off some of the tour budget to pay me, although essentially my “wages” were just payment of bed and board; a free trip around Europe and beyond, all inclusive. If I could prove to her that I had more pressing projects at home that I needed to take care of then I could stay behind. If not, I had to go with her. I had to admit that I hadn’t.

‘Pack your bags then, baby,’ she said with a huge grin, ‘because you’re coming with me to heaven.’ 

Chapter Two

Love Song

As I sit on the tour bus driving through another anonymous night, studying the frame I captured only a couple of hours ago, I witness more evidence of what is fast becoming an incontrovertible truth: that this road-trip adventure of debauched promiscuity might rather unexpectedly be turning into a tale of love. Sure, one has to peer close through the haze of hormones and drugs and frivolous lust to see it. It wasn’t immediately obvious but the camera helped me focus. Suddenly there it was in the way she looked at him when she thought no one was watching. It was there in his eyes when they were together but apart, in the way her breath caught when he walked into the room.

I thought they were just two hotties who naturally wanted to jump each other’s bones, but now it seems their feelings have reared up and got all serious. Once you notice, you see it in every little thing between them. The frisson is there for sure. You have to blot out all the lewdness, the noise and the craziness that surrounds this way of life, but in the middle is them, growing closer, more vital to each other by the day. Suddenly the attraction has gone way beyond lust. It is a shame then that he is married to someone else. That someone is right there in the photo I’m looking at, clinging to her famous rock star husband for dear life. But the picture has captured his very thoughts, and they are not of her.

I might have considered the thing between Sindee and this man to be little more than playground lust, since Thunderhed only joined up with the Coliseum All Stars/Death in Venus tour a fortnight ago and this shouldn’t have be long enough for any hearts to be lost, especially with the little contact there has been between the two of them and the fact that Mrs Thunderhed was so often on the scene. However, just a couple of days ago I became privy to information that told of a longer history between the two – one Sindee herself is still unaware of. I got these truths from the horse’s mouth, from Thunderhed’s manager, no less. He spilled these spicy beans when I was stuck in a hotel lift with him after Nils Spacey of Coliseum All Stars found the fuse box down in the kitchen and switched most of them to off because a flickering fluorescent tube was freaking him out.

I think perhaps the manager thought there might be some naughty action on the cards, what with us stuck all alone in that lift, and with me being all young and feisty and sultry and him being a sprightly late-forties and chunky and moustachioed. Maybe he thought that making me his confidante made him suddenly more attractive; that sharing these secrets might somehow magnetise my body to his, or at least have me thinking I shouldn’t dodge any lustful lunges coming my way. However, I am probably the only one on this tour who doesn’t think that every opportunity, however unlikely, had to be converted into a sexual extravaganza just for the fuck of it. Thus once the information was extracted, I promptly sat down to ponder it, leaning against the lift wall with knees drawn up under my chin, which pretty much put the tin hat on any saucy advances he might have had in mind.

The tale he told me of Sindee and the Rock Star was this: Once upon a time in California, more than quarter of a century ago now, a child was born, named Jimi Casanove. His father was a U.S. Marine right up to the point he was shot dead outside a bar by a man he had earlier brawled with. His mother was a stoner who sometimes worked at a local radio station. Jimi grew up tough and wayward, passed around from relation to relation when his mother couldn’t deal with him. He got kicked out of every school. He was big and angry, and arrogant in a way that people who believe the world to be against them can be. He was a natural-born fighter who wanted to come out on top. Jail might have been beckoning but since he had been given a rock star name, he decided instead to join his cousin’s band as the singer.

That cousin was a decent guitarist with some nifty riffs that he’d turned into half a dozen good songs. He was all about the music. He was very much grunge-inspired and although quite heavy the band had a sombre feel. They had a decent local following of serious, boot-faced, check-shirted, near-suicidal teens. In short, the whole set up had all the charisma of a root vegetable. The newly-named “Cas” Casanove was all about showmanship. He couldn’t even conceive of being in a band without all the associated glamour. He wanted booze and drugs and bitches on tap, or what was the point? He didn’t want grunge; he wanted good old fashioned rock and roll – and not the darker, sinister thrash metal, but the type that harked back to the days of Rock Gods and Rock Excess.

The band, having let him in, weren’t powerful enough to stop him. They shed a drummer for being too ugly. Cas, who still knew little about musicality, hand-picked a new one. Hair was ordered to be grown even longer. Drab clothes were burnt while tighter, harder, more ridiculous outfits were assembled. Cas himself often took to the stage in a shirt of chain mail, along with leather pants, thigh-high leather boots, and a large metal cod-piece. If nothing else it must have been hot as hell under it all. One time he did a show in just the boots and cod-piece. Another time he did it in just the boots and mail shirt, and got arrested for indecency. Whatever, the check-shirt brigade were left behind and the fast-growing new audiences were louder, happier, and far prettier.

Their shows were once described as “camp theatricals versus violence”. Cas was boundless and untameable on stage and he could do and say and wear whatever he wanted because he could always punch his way through any of the negativity coming at him. One time he poured vodka all over his microphone stand, set fire to it, and javelined it into the audience. In doing so he got an electric shock off the mic lead and shorted out half the theatre. When the lighting guys restored power he was still there, spark out on his back upon the stage. To the delight of the cheering crowd he resurrected himself, staggered around for a bit, and then grabbed a new mic and continued exactly where he’d left off. Sometimes you have to die to make your name. Other times just nearly dying is good enough.

The crucial thing was they had a guy that could write good songs and a front-man who proved to be not only larger than life but a pretty good rock singer too. The rest of the band quickly saw the attraction of this new fame, immersed themselves into it, and Thunderhed were born. They already had a reputation for excess before they had even released their first record. This only increased their following. One effect of the rock biz is that the more mad, bad, and dangerous to know you are, the more people crave to be a part of it. If you can create a whirlwind, you will soon discover that those around find it almost impossible to run from you. They want to be sucked in.

On the back of a mini Stateside tour, plus some handy phone-shot footage that went viral of a huge bar fight the band got mixed up in, their first album debuted at home in the top ten and climbed to the heady heights of number three. The footage in question shows a glass-lobbing, Wild West-style brawl, the highlight being when Cas is seen brandishing a table above his head, ready to hurl it, when some sneaky bugger comes up behind him and thwacks him across the arse with a chair. Cas doesn’t even budge. He carefully sets the table down, turns around, and lays the guy out with one punch. All the comments below this clip include the word “legend”.

Their second album, Valhalla Calling, went platinum at home and across the world. If ever you wonder why these rock groups carry on with this life-endangering cocktail of work and excess of pleasure then be assured that once an ego is set rolling it is very hard to stop. Success is the heaviest of addictions, the hardest to break. Excess is the proof of success. Any sign that the bandwagon is still rolling is thus to be celebrated. It can never be tired of, even if the excess is killing you. An example: after a gig in Toronto there was a huge all-night party at the band hotel. Come morning, bodies littered the suite. The air was flammable with booze fumes and bloodstreams were still dangerously loaded with narcotics. The casual visitor might reasonably assume a bomb had gone off. Sometime around ten a mobile phone began to ring. Sheen, the Thunderhed drummer, apparently dead on the bed, somehow got this phone to his ear and grunted into it. He then raised himself from the waist, as film vampires in coffins do, broke into a massive grin, chucked his phone straight out the window and yelled:

‘We’ve just gone plat in Belgium, baby!’

Two minutes later room service had delivered a case of champagne and a tray of glasses, and it all began again. The show must inevitably go on until something dreadful stops it.

With album number three about to break they were already too big to do much other than stadium gigs and festivals. They practically lived on the road, performing and churning out material while the going was good. None of them even owned a house. Any roots laid were rented and temporary. All of them were seemingly rich but none really knew how much so. They rarely carried money since most things were put on tabs and a record company accountant quietly followed them around, paying the bills and off-setting everything against record sales. Those heaps of high-grade cocaine that used to appear as if by magic, there to dive into and all apparently free, those top-class escort girls and hired porn stars at the parties, they were all being added to the record company’s tab that the band would have to pay.

Some of their naivety might have worn off by then but the novelty hadn’t. Drink and dirty girls were still definitely at the top of the Casanove list, especially porn stars. My, how he loved porn! Those girls were his favourites. Screens on the tour bus always had some showing. One day, while driving through Germany, he was watching a scene from a certain adult film, and he clapped eyes upon the lady of his dreams. She was only in two scenes but he was smitten. All he knew of her was her screen name, Sindee Pink, and, judging by the accent when she cooed ‘fuck me, you sexy stud’, she might well be British.

Instantly he got the tour manager onto the job of trying to track her down. He did the best he could from inside the tour bus and with a non-stop schedule, but eventually farmed it out to his nephew who was looking after a Welsh rock band on their tour of Northern Europe. No news was forthcoming. No searches of the name yielded any more information or details of other works the actress had been in. The trail went cold. It cut up old Cas, t. . .