Razing Ryker (Dissonance Book 1) Read online

  Razing Ryker

  Dissonance Series

  Book One

  By Jordanna James

  Razing Ryker

  Dissonance Series

  Book One

  By Jordanna James

  Text Copyright © 2015 Jordanna James

  All Rights Reserved

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  raze verb ˈrāz: to destroy completely: to destroy to the ground: demolish

  CHAPTER ONE

  The lights flashed in his eyes, blurring the faces until they were nothing but a mass of moving shadow, a sea of desire staring up at him expectantly. He breathed in and out evenly, pacing himself and fighting the dizzy feeling rising in his brain from the one beer that had turned into four. He wished he hadn’t drank at all, but more than that he wished he could go to sleep. Would they pay to stay and watch that? Watch him snore and drool on a pillow on the stage? Sickeningly enough, yeah, he was pretty sure a lot of them would. They wanted that much of him. Every last piece of him – even his dreams.

  Little did they know that those had been the first things to go.

  They hung on his every move. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and they swooned. He cleared his throat into the microphone and they sighed. He blinked and they nearly came. He lowered his eyes, looking down at his hands gripped loosely around the mic stand. “This is a new one,” he said roughly to the intimate audience of seventeen thousand, “but I think some of you may already know it.”

  He nodded to the band behind him and they played three chords of his newest song, Internal.

  The crowd went insane. They all knew the song. It’d been leaked from someone in his camp a week ago and since then it’d made its way through the internet via every form of social media known to man. Radio stations weren’t playing it for fear of being sued, but everyone had a copy of it. Fan videos had popped up immediately, the slow, sexy ballad being dubbed over fading images of him crudely cropped and pasted into intimate poses with strange women. Sometimes men. He heard it on car stereos all over L.A. being blasted from all directions. Just yesterday he’d been in line at a bagel shop and the woman in front of him had the chorus as her ringtone. It wasn’t even out yet and it was a hit.

  It wasn’t ever meant to get out because he hated it.

  It’d been an experiment. One he’d performed at the insistence of his label, his agent, his father, and his girlfriend. They wanted him to dip his toes in new water. Try a new angle and see if the fish would bite. So he’d done it. He’d written the kind of song he’d never set out to author and he’d given himself up to the idea of being something different.

  And he’d hated every minute of it. He recorded the song and gave it to them all to shut them up. He told them he didn’t want anything to do with it and that’d it’d never sell because it wasn’t him, and the fans wanted him. All of him. He’d been sure they’d know it was a lie the second they heard it and they’d hate it as much as he did.

  But then they’d eaten it up and he realized even the nameless, faceless throng that senselessly worshipped him and devoured every little fact about him that they could get their lips on didn’t know him at all. Maybe no one did, not anymore. Maybe not even him.

  So that night in the arena standing in front of a sold out crowd in California, he swayed with the force of too much beer in his belly, winced against too many lights in his eyes, and he sang the song he couldn’t stand. He sang it for them and he wondered if he could learn to love it. He could be this man. This figure. The sex idol they dreamed of and screamed for and maybe it would be okay.

  He reached the chorus of the song where he sang low and raw about listening to his lover’s breaths to lead him home, and three female dancers draped themselves around his body desperately. He was supposed to look each of them in the eye and turn them away, realizing they weren’t what he wanted, but instead he focused in on Lexy – on the woman he wrote the song about – and he held her close to him as he sang. He stared into her eyes and tried to make the words fit. To make them make sense and give them purpose, to somehow make them his, but he couldn’t find it. Either he was too drunk or she was too deep in the act of being on stage, but her eyes looked vacant. Suddenly he felt the same way.

  And that’s when she dropped to her knees in front of him, grabbed the front of his pants, and exposed his dick to the entire world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jace Ryker was Miley Cyrus but with balls. Or at least bigger balls, so everyone assumed. He had grown up as a Disney icon, the star of his own show at seven, moving on to movies, sold out concerts, and worldwide tours by the time he was twelve. He sang at the White House for the President’s daughter on her birthday when he was sixteen. Gossip was she slipped him her number but the great Jace Ryker had never called. He was too busy dating Disney starlets and rock legend Rod Melbourne’s supermodel daughter. By the time he was twenty-three, he was on the cover of People Magazine being celebrated as one of the sexiest men alive. It ran on the shelves right next to the slightly blurry cover of Gab Weekly where he was seen with an unidentified, scantily clothed woman under his arm, either a joint or a hand rolled cigarette hanging from his lips, and the undeniable shape of a flask protruding from the back pocket of his jeans. The headline screamed drug, alcohol, and women troubles for the young star.

  His years as a Disney sweetheart were officially over.

  Greer had seen the first troubled cover in the supermarket when she was dropping off cans she’d collected for the bottle return money. She was twenty-one at the time, but her childhood crush on the adorable boy with the golden voice and the floppy brown hair had never completely gone away. It stayed with her, irrational and necessary, the way the love for a boy at camp never totally leaves you, even though you never see him again. You’ll forget his face and his name, but his hold on you will last forever because it’s unresolved. It’s eternal and insane, but immortalized in your memory. That was what Jace Ryker was for Greer – immortal. A piece of her childhood she had no interest in letting go of.

  He looked different now. Gone were the long tresses and the sweet smile. It was more of a knowing smirk now. His hair was darker, cropped short and always spiked at the top. His tall frame had filled out with lean muscle that was stalked more adamantly than the newborn prince of England. People love babies, but they love naked bodies more. Slim, tight, tan, muscled bodies with a gorgeous face on top like a cherry on a sundae. That was Jace to a T. He was beautiful and alluring, his appeal growing with every album of heartbreaking ballads and intoxicating dance beats. He was a rock star and a bad boy.

  He was Greer’s first love. Her first time.

&nb
sp; She’d never admit it to anyone – because why would a person ever offer up the information? – but the first time she’d ever masturbated had been to a poster of Jace Ryker pulled straight out of Tiger Beat when she was fifteen. The magazine had been a birthday gift from Cameron, her self-appointed older brother and protector. They were living on the streets at the time, shacked up with a group of other New York runaways and orphans sharing a space in an abandoned warehouse. Greer was one of only three girls in the group but Cameron had made sure she was safe and untouched. He’d hung her a curtain around where she slept and changed and he laid outside of it every night. He made it clear she was untouchable and for that she’d be forever grateful. She was almost as grateful for the magazine with the poster of her dream guy inside. At the time, Jace was seventeen and living on the other side of the moon as far as Greer was concerned, but the smirk was in full affect. He knew by then what he did to women. The affect he had on people in general.

  He stared at her from where she had him propped on her pillow, her nervous hand in her underwear and her heart in her throat as she sang his songs from his latest CD quietly in her corner. His eyes held her tightly, brown and rich like chocolate, and she roamed her fingertips over the slickness building in her slit. She’d never felt anything like it before. It felt wrong somehow. Like she should be embarrassed or ashamed, but she wasn’t. She locked eyes with the image of Jace and his look told her it was okay. It was good. He told her she was safe and beautiful.

  She stared at his mouth and licked her own lips, thinking of his hot breath like mint on her tongue. She imagined his hands on her arms, on her hips, his fingers digging into her soft flesh and pulling her close to him. In her mind, he kissed her slow and deep, and it was so much better than the way Jeremy Thompson had kissed her last Christmas at the shelter she’d gone to for dinner. It had so much more weight. More meaning.

  Greer imagined Jace singing to her softly in her ear as she formed the words for him. Her lips parted as her breath caught and a moan slipped and tripped out over her tongue, disrupting the song. She swirled her finger through the center of her body, delved inside, and broke apart with Jace’s name on her lips. As she trembled in the unfamiliar aftermath, she let him sing her nearly to sleep. Softly. Slowly. Smiling.

  That was the first time Jace Ryker made Greer come.

  It would not be the last.

  “Did you see the latest headlines?” Bryce whispered, nudging her side and handing her his phone. “Mickey Mouse is dropping like he’s hot. Or I guess his girlfriend is.”

  Greer frowned as she looked at the grainy image on Bryce’s phone. The sunlight pouring in from the dance studio’s floor to ceiling windows made it hard to see, but she could make out the unmistakable outline of a man on stage, haloed by the bright lights behind him. “What am I looking at?” she asked, confused. There was nothing special about the picture.

  Bryce sighed in annoyance, yanked his phone from her hands, and swiped his fingers across the screen. “There. I zoomed in, though it isn’t hard to find.”

  “I don’t get what—Oh my God!” Greer shouted, her mouth dropping.

  Heads turned all over the studio, the entire company looking at her to find out what the commotion was. Greer ignored them, but her cheeks flushed red with embarrassment at her outburst. And at what she was looking at.

  “Is that his…” she began, but couldn’t finish.

  Bryce finished for her. “His cock? Yeah. That’s it. Full Monty! Happened last night at his concert.”

  “You guys talking about Jace Ryker?” Cameron called from across the room.

  “Yep. I was just showing Greer the goods.”

  Greer thrust the phone back into Bryce’s hands, feeling like she had just been caught flipping through a Playboy. “Please. You were ogling.”

  “I was,” he replied shamelessly. “And I wanted to share that magical moment with you. Did you enjoy it?”

  “No.”

  “Me too.”

  Cameron shook his head, coming over to sit beside them against the windows. “I feel bad for the guy.”

  “Why?” Bryce demanded. “Did you not see the picture?”

  “I don’t care if the guy is hung, he still got his junk whipped out in front of the entire world against his will.”

  Cameron had a problem with free will. More specifically, Cameron had a problem with free will being taken from a person. The room was filled with cast members who had spent every day with Cameron for the last year and a half, but only Greer knew that about him. Only Greer understood why.

  Bryce snorted. “Please. They’re already calling it a wardrobe malfunction. It was an accident the way Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nip slip was an accident. They did it for publicity because he’s changing his image. The new sexy song, all of the bad boy pics surfacing with drugs and alcohol and random women. He’s trying to cash in on that whole rock star persona.”

  “That’s not the way I read it. Sounded to me like his girlfriend was high and molested him on stage. This on top of the other shit the guy has going on with no new album on the horizon, it could seriously hurt his career.”

  “He’s done a new album every couple of years since he was eight,” Greer protested, feeling oddly defensive of the stranger. “Maybe it’s about time he took a break. He’s what? Twenty-three and he’s already won like five Grammy’s?”

  “That’s past work, though,” Cameron argued. “He hasn’t done anything lately but tour and party. Maybe he’s dried up creatively.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t wish it on the guy, but it’s possible. It sucks, but he’s dealing with the same thing we do here on Broadway. If you lose momentum, you disappear. Getting to the top is the easy part. It’s staying there that’s the bitch.”

  “We’re doing pretty well so far. Have you read the reviews for Rendezvous yet?”

  Cameron shook his head, glancing out the window. “You know I never read them.”

  “I told you they’re good,” she protested.

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t like to know.”

  “And good isn’t great,” Bryce pointed out, standing to stretch his arms up high over his head. “We’re not selling out.”

  “You can’t sell out every night.”

  “Heartstrung is. Shoot the Messenger is.”

  “Surrendered is,” Cameron muttered.

  Bryce and Greer paused, not sure what to say to that.

  They’d opened Rendezvous on Broadway just three weeks ago but they’d run through smaller theaters for over a year before making the leap. During that time the leads had been played by Cameron and Eve, a beautiful blond with a massive voice, a ballerina’s body, and a heart of stone. She and Cameron had dated pretty much the entire run, their chemistry on and off stage palpable. It’d played no small part in the success of Rendezvous’ run, but before they’d gotten serious about the leap to Broadway she’d bailed; wooed away by the producer of the long running show Surrendered. No one had seen it coming and yet somehow they weren’t surprised.

  No one but Cameron. He was devastated. She had not only broken her contract with Rendezvous, she’d broken things off with Cameron as well. All in the same breath in front of everyone. It’d been a sore spot for him ever since they’d made it to Broadway with him at the helm and Eve’s understudy, Anna, taking her place. The chemistry was gone but the show was solid. They’d made it to the majestic Thorpe Theater without Eve and even though they had to share the street with her, things had been going good.

  Good but not great.

  “We’ll get there,” Greer replied buoyantly. “Like I said, the reviews are strong.”

  Bryce looked at her pointedly. “I don’t know that ‘strong’ is the right—“

  “They’re strong,” she interrupted firmly.

  He put up his hands in surrender.

  “Where’s John?” Cameron muttered, scanning the street below them. “He gets on all of us if we take too long peeing a
nd he can’t be bothered showing up to emergency rehearsals on time?”

  “He’s the director. He can do what he wants,” Bryce reminded him dryly.

  “Apparently what he wants is to jerk us around and waste our time,” Mia, a redhead from the ensemble, muttered from where she was lying on the floor behind them.

  Greer snorted. “No, what he’s probably doing is some hopeful from the wings who—“

  The door to the studio swung open and the hard snap of high heels on the wood floor echoed through the room. Everyone fell silent, all eyes immediately focusing to the front where Meredith, their show’s producer, took up camp at the desk facing them all. Some people rose to their feet slowly. Others slunk farther into the room’s shadows.

  “What were you saying, Greer?” Bryce prodded quietly, nudging her with his foot.

  “Shhh,” she hissed, her body frozen in place. “Shut up.”

  “You’re not scared of the big bad bitch, are you?”

  “Keep your voice down. She can hear everything. Like a dog.”

  “Or a bitch.”

  Cameron covered his snicker with a cough.

  John walked in moments behind Meredith. She ignored him as he ran his hands through his perpetually disheveled dark hair and yanked on the lapels of his expensive sport coat. He looked angry – not unusual for him – and anyone who didn’t rise when Meredith came in took to their feet now.

  “From the top!” he shouted, not looking to see if everyone was there. Not even bothering to check if anyone was at the piano. “We’ve got some timing issues after the intermission. We’re going to solve them immediately. Anna!”

  The short girl with the flaxen hair stepped forward. “Yes, Mr. Willis?”

  “I don’t want to do a full dress today, but watch your wardrobe change between acts three and four.” He sat down hard, looking her over blandly. “While I don’t mind catching sight of your nipples, some members of our audience might. Take the stage fully dressed or don’t take it at all. Got it?”