Free Wild Child (Rock Royalty #6) by Christie Ridgway Page A

on a slow smolder, and by the time he’d finished nursing his beer he’d barely resisted throwing the bottle against the nearest wall.
    The kind of behavior that he’d learned at his daddy’s knee and witnessed in his daddy’s band’s compound. The kind of behavior he’d sworn never to replicate. The kind of behavior that stemmed from emotional excess and volatility of temperament that he’d escaped…and never wanted to see in himself.
    But his hot-blooded reaction wasn’t something he should take out on her. “Look, Ash—”
    “Goodbye, Brody,” she called over her shoulder. “And please don’t come back.”
    He gritted his teeth. That wasn’t how this was going to work. Walking away wasn’t going to get her out of his head any more than staying away had.
    “Look,” he began again, taking long strides to catch up with her. “Let us help you with the repairs and renovation. You won’t have to see me. I’ll just feel…better if I can do this for you.”
    Hearing her say yes would soothe his current vicious mood and, he hoped, give him a fighting chance of forgetting her in the future.
    She came to an abrupt stop, so abrupt he had to grab her shoulders to prevent himself from plowing over her.
    “What the…” He took in the sight in front of him, and rage flared in his belly. “… hell ?”
    The trailer—which had been dilapidated to begin with—was now trash. Trashed, actually. In the meager light spread by the spared bulb by the front door, he could see that windows were shattered, the door had been kicked in, and broken crockery littered the steps. What looked like her bed linens had been thrown outside where they sat in the muddy clearing, a sad, sodden pile.
    That earlier urge to toss a beer bottle was nothing compared to this fiery need to uproot the nearest tree and heave it over his head in The Incredible Hulk-like style.
    “You stay here,” Brody ordered Ash, and was unsurprised when she didn’t follow his command. He shot her a look. “If you want to do something, call 911.”
    Instead of complying with that one, either, she stayed at his heels as he leaped up the steps and crossed the trailer’s threshold, his phone’s flashlight beam providing illumination. If he’d thought anyone was still around he would have bodily carried her away from the scene of the crime. But it was apparent the perpetrators were gone, leaving in their wake petty destruction.
    He found and flipped a switch in the kitchen. The new light illuminated food strewn over the floor. In the living area he noted that the small loveseat had been upended and the floor lamp beside it broken.
    He heard Ash sniff. “I think they peed in here.”
    His hands fisted, but he clamped down on his anger.
    “I think you’re right.”
    A quick perusal showed that the tiny bathroom had not been passed over. The towel bar was wrenched from the wall and “BITCH” was written on the mirror with red lipstick. Before Ash could see that, he steered her out of the hallway and back toward the living room.
    “I’m guessing it was those delinquents who tried getting into Satan’s tonight. We need to get someone from the Sheriff’s Department out here.”
    Ash’s shoulders slumped.
    “Can it wait?” She stood near the urine-soaked sofa and, in a weary gesture, pushed her hood off her head. Her gilt-blonde hair glowed phantom-like in the meager light. “Can’t I take care of that tomorrow?”
    Brody hesitated.
    “Maybe,” he said, fiddling with the door to see if it would shut. The jamb had been damaged. “But—”
    “I’m just so tired,” she said in a worn-out voice. “There’s nothing in here I care about. It was only a place to sleep, close to the roadhouse.”
    Christ.
    He took in her blank expression and the odd detached air about her. The woman had clearly hit her exhaustion point. It stoked the fire inside him, causing it to roar higher, triggering another violent urge to break heads and punch walls. The