LIMELIGHT LOVE: A Small Town Rock Star Romance Read online

  A SMALL TOWN ROCK STAR ROMANCE NOVEL

  A FIRST EDITION

  BY

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  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  This book is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious and any similarity to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidence.

  Published By Cordelia Blanc

  Copyright © 2016 Cordelia Blanc

  Cover by Honey Hut Design Services

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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  DEDICATION

  To my Honey.

  The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect, so hard to earn, so easily burned in the fullness of time. A garden to nurture and protect. It's a measure of a life. The treasure of a life is a measure of love and respect, the way you live, the gifts that you give in the fullness of time. It's the only return that you expect.

  —NEIL ELLWOOD PEART

  LIMELIGHT LOVE

  A SMALL TOWN ROCK STAR ROMANCE NOVEL

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The man was painfully familiar but Lily Parker just couldn’t place him. All day, Lily stared at him whenever he wasn’t looking, tortured by that lingering familiarity. An old friend maybe? Someone she went to school with? His name was printed on every single moving box: Fred Stein. Fred Who? Lily didn’t know any Fred Anything. But still, the man’s face teased Lily to no end.

  It wasn’t until the movers unloaded the final box from the final truck, and Lily checked the final item off of the Parker Family Movers’ checklist, that the man’s name lit up in her mind—

  Aaron Brown. Rock legend. Every teen girl and gay teen boy’s fantasy. He was number six on People’s Choice’s Sexiest Celebrities of 1999. That same year, his face was on the cover of Time Magazine, and the headline read: “America’s Heartthrob, Aaron Brown.” Every woman in the civilized world wanted to kiss his beautiful, clean-shaved face. But now, it wasn’t 1999. It was 2016.

  And the Aaron Brown that stood before Lily Parker—or Fred Stein, according to his many moving boxes—was no clean-shaven heartthrob. That Time Magazine issue was now over a decade old. The Aaron Brown that stood before Lily Parker had dark bags under his eyes, an unkempt beard that reached up past his cheekbones, and the kind of scowl you only see on the angry old men who mumble profanities about younger generations under their breath.

  But there was no mistaking it. Every girl who grew up in the 90s knew those eyes. And every non-deaf human in the Western Hemisphere knew that voice—his singing voice, anyway. The voice he used with Lily Parker and rest of the employees of Parker Family Movers was less distinguishable, masked in mumbling and low grumbling.

  None of the movers—not one of the six men who worked for Lily’s father, the owner of Parker Family Movers—seemed to recognize Aaron. Who could blame them? His name hadn’t been mentioned in over ten years, since he dropped off the face of the earth and stopped putting out new music. Occasionally, the local radio station played one of Aaron’s songs. Usually only on Throwback Thursdays, and usually only his most popular song, a catchy tune called Gunpowder Girls.

  Growing up, Lily was able to sing along to every word of Gunpowder Girls—as well as every other song on Aaron’s five album discography. As she stared at Aaron, who was now scowling at one of the movers smoking a cigarette on his back deck, those very lyrics came rushing back to her.

  Before she could leave for the day, Lily needed Aaron to sign a couple of forms. Throughout the day, she’d spoken with him well over a dozen times, but now that she knew that he wasn’t really Fred Stein, she was overwhelmed with anxiety—the same way she felt the last time she saw him face-to-face, fifteen years before, after a concert in Chicago. Lily’s mom drove three hours to take a thirteen year-old Lily to that concert, and waited two hours after the show for Lily to get an autograph. Teenaged Lily was a stuttering mess when her turn finally came. “G—Great show,” she managed to say. The young, fresh-faced Aaron—hardly even an adult himself—smiled. “Thank you so much. What’s your name?”

  As Aaron looked into the young Lily’s eyes, she froze. Her heart melted, her brain turned to mush. Her mother had to answer for her.

  “Lily Parker,” her mother said. “L-I-L-Y-P-A-R-K-E-R.”

  The interaction was brief but it replayed in Lily’s memory one thousand times throughout her teenaged years.

  And now, fifteen years later, she needed another signature from Aaron. Except this time, she needed it spelt out ‘Fred Stein.’

  Lily approached Aaron. “Excuse me, Mr Stein” she said, grabbing Aaron’s attention. Aaron turned and looked into Lily’s eyes.

  “What?” he said. Unlike in their first encounter, fifteen years earlier, Aaron did not smile.

  Lily was silent for a moment as her mind drew a long blank. “All the boxes are inside. I just need your autograph to sign off for the day.”

  Aaron’s eyes narrowed. “My what?” he asked.

  “I mean—your signature. I need your signature. Your John Hancock, Mr Stein.”

  Aaron hesitated a moment, apprehensively holding his eye-contact, holding his scowl. He took the clipboard from Lily and signed off, grumbling something incoherent under his breath, likely an insult, judging by the way he dismissively shook his head.

  “Thank you, Mr Stein,” Lily said. She couldn’t help the little smile that slipped, feeling like she was in on some exclusive inside joke.

  Aaron shook his head again and walked away, disappearing down the hallway of his new home, a large cabin-style house on the outskirts of Burns Bog, Illinois, the town in which Lily was born and raised and currently resided.

  “We’ll be back on Monday to unload everything, Mr Stein!” Lily called out.

  Aaron re-emerged in the hallway. “What?” he said.

  “I said, we’ll be back on Monday to unload everything for you.”

  “Monday? What about tomorrow? You’re a moving company for Christsakes, you don’t work on weekends?”

  Parker Family Moving usually worked weekends, but that weekend was an exception. It was Super Bowl weekend and Burns Bog native, Danny Fitzpatrick, was playing in th
e big game. That weekend, the little American town, with its little population of one thousand, had more events planned than San Francisco, where the Super Bowl was being played. No one in Burns Bog had plans to work.

  The nearby movers became silent, all feeling the wave of awkward tension as it filled the room. Lily froze. To the movers, it was just some grumpy rich guy. Unlike Lily, they didn’t know Fred Stein was actually Aaron Brown. Unlike Lily, they weren’t teenaged girls in the 90s. And they really did not want to work on Super Bowl weekend, but they knew Lily—their boss’s daughter—had the power to make them.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time Lily screwed them over, either. Two years earlier, on Christmas Eve, Lily had everybody called into work after a client tugged too hard on her heart strings. The client wanted to surprise his fiancée with a new house, and he wanted it to be all set up for the big reveal. How could Lily say no? It was so sweet, and it would only take a few hours of everyone’s time… Or who could forget the Thanksgiving Day fiasco, when Lily ordered the movers to unload an eight bedroom house, because the homeowner, a wealthy old man, refused to stay at the nearby Save-a-Penny Motel—Burns Bog’s only lodging. In Lily’s defence, she once stayed at the Save-a-Penny Motel and the beds were extremely uncomfortable and the mattress’s built-in Magic Fingers ate two of her quarters and never worked.

  Lily stuttered. “It’s Super Bowl weekend, Mr Stein. Danny Fitzpatrick is playing, and—”

  “Danny Who?” Aaron asked.

  Lily smiled and perked up. “Danny Fitzpatrick. He’s a running back, from here—from Burns Bog.” Everyone knew Danny Fitzpatrick. You couldn’t drive fifteen seconds through Burns Bog without seeing his face, and no Burns Bog resident could go fifteen minutes without mentioning his name.

  “Never heard of him,” Aaron said. “So what? Am I paying you so I can unpack everything myself?” Aaron held his cold gaze, a scowl that seemed to seep into Lily’s soul.

  “No, sir, Mr Stein, sir. Like I said, we’ll be back on Monday and we should have everything unpacked and set up for you by Wednesday.”

  “How do I cook? My bed isn’t even set up. Do you think you maybe should have told me you didn’t work weekends before I scheduled my move on a Friday?” Aaron’s voice was becoming louder, deeper—exponentially deeper than it ever did in any of his music videos.

  Lily looked back at the movers, who stared back at her with wide eyes. Their fate was in her hands. Lily didn’t want to screw them over again, seeing as they already hated her guts. Maybe this was her chance for redemption? Maybe this was her chance to be the Girl Who Saved the Super Bowl. But Aaron was right, albeit a bit cranky; he was paying her family’s company to handle his move. Nothing was unpacked and nothing was set up. And he was, after all, Aaron Brown, her first celebrity crush.

  “Ya know, there’s the Save-a-Penny Motel, just down the road here,” Gary, one of the movers said from across the room.

  Aaron’s cold gaze finally broke away from Lily and moved to Gary, who felt its demoralizing power immediately. He looked down at his toes and added nothing else to the conversation.

  “You’re absolutely right, Mr Stein. We’ll get you all moved in this weekend, don’t worry about it one bit,” Lily said.

  The unanimous sigh of the workers crept into Lily’s ears and down towards her heart, which it clenched and crushed.

  “Thanks,” Aaron said, still without smiling. He turned and disappeared down the hallway again.

  Lily couldn’t bare to turn to face her co-workers, the people she knew she could only tell what to do because she shared a bloodline with their boss. She waited for one of them to say something—anything—but the room was silent. Altogether, the movers went outside for a smoke break, taking the non-smokers with them. Lily didn’t get an invite.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Aaron Brown had a feeling Burns Bog would be a slow town, but he didn’t realize it would be filled with a bunch of useless, backwoods rednecks, more interested in a stupid football game than their own goddamned jobs. Sadly, that’s the price you pay when you move somewhere that isn’t even on a map, where internet access is a scarce commodity. According to the guy who came to hook up Aaron’s internet (the same buck-toothed man who hooked up his cable, his gas stove, and his septic pump), Aaron was just the tenth person to get internet in Burns Bog. The man had to follow a manual to set up the internet router. He set up the surprisingly complex septic pump in minutes by memory.

  Burns Bog was the ideal place to remain off the radar, away from the tabloids and the noise of the big cities. Aaron couldn’t even go on vacation to Hawaii anymore without ending up on the cover of some trashy, check-out shelf magazine. Ten Celebrities Who Let Themselves Go!

  In Burns Bog, no one knew the name Aaron Brown. They only knew the names Danny Fitzpatrick and Ron Speck, Burns Bog’s go-to 24-hour plumber. It couldn’t be a more perfect hideout.

  Aaron quickly discovered that there was nothing to do in Burns Bog, unless you enjoyed drinking in a field, bonfires constructed from old tires, and off-roading with men who looked eerily similar to the supporting cast of Deliverance. That was fine. Aaron was happy alone, in his house—even if there were only twelve channels on the television and internet so slow, you had to know an hour in advance which website you wanted to visit, so it had enough time to load.

  Just as Aaron got settled into his chair with a hot cup of tea on his moving box-table combination, there was a knock at his door. He considered not answering. It was around dinnertime, after all, and Aaron knew that’s when the Mormons usually planned their attack. But he was still waiting on a few more deliveries, and he knew the post office wouldn’t be open on the weekend, along with the rest of the senseless town.

  He answered the door and instantly recognized Lily, standing alone. But he’d forgotten her name, so he just said, “What is it?”

  “Hello Mr Stein,” she said.

  “Hi,” Aaron replied.

  Lily was staring at him with glazed eyes, a look he was all too familiar with from his glory days, being approached by fans. He was quickly realizing it was the same look that simple folk made when struggling to string together coherent sentences.

  “Well, I kind of came here to ask you a question, Mr Stein.”

  “What? What question?” Aaron was beginning to wonder how quickly the Midwest accents would drive him insane. It wasn’t so much the accent as it was the slow-talking, the meandering, the tangents, the overall casualness in their speech, like no one had anywhere to be, and they were all just killing time to fill the void.

  “Well, so I go back to ranch, you know, where we keep the trucks and what not, and the other guys, they all pulled up, and I notice they’re all looking a little bummed out. Now, I didn’t think too much of it then, you know, I mean, like you said, we’re a moving company, and we should be working on weekends. Well anyway, I overheard them talking, back in the staffroom, that’s back in the barn behind the trucks, and I didn’t even know this, Mr Stein, but Glenn—you know Glenn, the short fellow with the bald patch on the back of his head, right here,” Lily pointed to the top of her head.

  Aaron was scratching his beard, struggling to keep up with Lily’s senseless jabbering, trying to sort the important information from the overwhelming amount of useless information. “I’m sorry, what are you on about?” he said, waving his hand in a ‘get on with it’ motion.

  Lily paused and recomposed. “Well, um, you see, Mr Stein, Glenn got to talking and it turns out his cousin is actually Danny Fitzpatrick’s mother, and Glenn’s been looking forward to the big game this weekend for quite a while, you see. And the other guys, too—they’ve all been looking forward to the game this weekend for quite some time, and I was wondering if maybe you wanted to stay at the Save-a-Penny this weekend—on me, of course. I’ll pay for your room, don’t even worry about that.”

  “The company is offering to put me up in a motel for a weekend so you can all watch a football game?”

  “N
ot the company, sir, it would be out of my pocket, but I don’t mind, really.”

  “That’s really very kind of you, but I would sooner die than stay at a place called the Save-a-Penny Motel.”

  Lily was reduced to silence once again, desperately racking her brain for a solution. She just wanted everyone to be happy. She wanted Aaron to be happy and her employees to be happy, but it was becoming painfully clear that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. “Well sir, you can stay at my house. I don’t mind staying at the Save-a-Penny myself. I’ll make sure the sheets are all clean, and I promise it’ll be very comfortable for you.”

  Aaron sighed. “My tea is getting cold,” he said, turning and receding into his new house, giving the door a light push so it would close behind him.

  Lily managed to stop the door, and she followed him into his home—certainly not something one would do in a big city like New York City or Los Angeles, but Burns Bog was a different place. People didn’t lock their doors in Burns Bog. If you needed to clean your deck, everyone knew they could head on over to Eckland’s house and feel free to take the pressure washer out from his shed—long as they brought it back in one piece, Eckland didn’t mind.

  Aaron didn’t realize Lily had followed him in. “I hope you don’t think I’m being too forward, Mr Stein,” she said.

  He jumped and spun around. “Jesus, woman, what are you doing in here?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought we were moving inside to talk. With that storm coming, it’s been getting pretty cold the last few days.”

  “We’re done talking. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Please, Mr Stein, those men really want to watch the Super Bowl game this weekend. Isn’t there anything I can do to change your mind? What if I pay for some of your move? Maybe I can even get my dad to knock a few bucks off the bill.”