Rush

Pandemic Sorrow Series- Book 2

By Stevie J. Cole

Synopsis

All books in the Pandemic Sorrow Series can be read as stand alones.

WARNING: This book contains explicit language and sexual situations. This book is intended for a mature audience.

It’s my job to play music, to make girls wet, and then to screw a select few of them. I’m a professional rocker. I’m rich, I’m famous, I’m one lucky son-of-a-bitch. I have everything – except control.

The industry owns me. And the only thing I have a minuscule grain of control with is women, but not that dominate, tie you up and gag you kind of control. No, I want to govern how I make them feel. I need them to feel like a goddess while I’m in them, and I love being able to control the fact that they’ll never really have me. Love is complicated. It is bullshit. And even if I thought I needed it, the rules of being a rocker won’t allow it.

Sex is all I need.

I don’t need love.

But for some reason I want her. For some reason I can’t get her out of my mind. And lately, every time I’m with any girl besides her it feels wrong.

I can practically have any woman I want, but I can’t have her. She’s off limits because she’s part of that industry that owns my ass.

Sex was all I had.

And sometimes I thought maybe love was all I needed…with her.

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Lis’ Review

“Funny that when you can’t have the one thing you really want, you’ll bury that desire in anything else that can grant your mind – your heart – some type of distraction. I was addicted to being needed…”

Rush Wilder is the bass player for Pandemic Sorrow, THE hottest rock band out there. It doesn’t take long to realize Rush is a sleaze of the highest magnitude. And his outlook on it is very interesting. He tells you straight out, echoing his manager’s mantra, that it’s his JOB as a rock god to make music, screw fans, and do drugs. And there are plenty of examples of that in this book to make you see just how seriously he’s taken this to heart. The good thing about this story is that Rush is not totally one dimensional – he thinks, he feels, he questions. Even though Pandemic Sorrow is at the top of the celebrity game, things are beginning to unravel like the threads of an unfinished garment. Rush picks at those threads until his world almost crumbles away completely, but in doing so, he makes himself whole.

Jules has been the tour manager for Pandemic Sorrow for six years, putting up with all the sex, drugs and general nastiness of life on the road. She gave into Rush.. finally, once, and has regretted it ever since. She pushes him away, scared to trust because she knows exactly what he’s like. But she only sees the outside. Rush explains it this way: “It was fu*&ing torture having to be around her all the time, knowing damn well I couldn’t have her the way I wanted. Sometimes I thought that was where the problem lay, in that tiny detail. I wanted something I couldn’t have so I tried finding it anywhere I could.” As Rush and Jules begin to realize their attraction is something that can’t be denied, other things begin to come apart in their world. Both of them begin to question what’s happening around them but feel helpless to do anything about it. They’ve lost control and it’s only when reality smacks them both in the face, again and again, each time getting more and more serious until it’s life and death times two, that they face the emotions that are locked away behind the walls they’ve both erected to cope with life in the rock and roll world.

This series has one of the baddest villains I’ve read in a long time. James Cooper is the band’s record label manager and promoter. He is evil incarnate, destroying the lives of four individuals for the glory of the band and the money it makes him. He manipulates and twists reality to suit his own purpose, Each time he makes an appearance in the book I almost expected him to have red eyes and demon horns with the smell of sulpher coming off his body. Rush bucks him at every possible turn, chafing under the rules and control this man exerts over him and Jules, but it’s never enough to get in a few punches. When a chance comes to finally break loose a little from the noose around their necks, the guys think they’ve finally won a small victory over James. But the man is like a hydra, cut off one head and another grows in its place, more evil than the first. So we know he’ll be back and we can only imagine the depths of depravity he will sink to in the next book.

It would be so easy to start reading this book and get caught up in the sex and drugs and see nothing else. Because there is a lot of it. The characterization of the band members and the crazy things they do is over the top, but there’s a reason and a damn good story behind it all. It’s important to really delve into Rush’s thought processes throughout the book, because there’s so much more to him than what he likes to show the world. Yes, he’s bought into the rock god persona, but we get to see the man behind all that as he grows to realize what it is that he needs. He sums it up this way: “Looking back I think life has ways of humbling you. It has its moments that knock your feet out from under you, suck the breath out of you, and force you to realize what’s important. …. when you find that person that makes all other aspirations in your life seem meaningless, you can’t let them get away.” And therein lies the key to all that is Rush Wilder.

 

 

The Pandemic Series

 

Jag

Pandemic Sorrow Series- Book 1

By Stevie J. Cole

Synopsis

WARNING: This novel contains explicit language, sexual situations, and is the story of an addict. This material is intended for a mature audience.

“My name’s Jag Steele. I’m the lead singer and guitarist to the band Pandemic Sorrow, and I have a drug problem. Well, I mean it’s not really a problem – unless you count the fact that I almost made my heart explode from all the blow I shoved up my nose a few weeks back…”

That was my introduction during my first stint in rehab. I’m messed up. If you asked anybody who I am there’s a list they will go down: Famous, rock star, legend, drug addict, womanizing man-whore, but if you asked me, I wouldn’t have the first idea of what to say, because I don’t know who Jag Steele is. Really, I’m living every other damn person’s dream, and all I want is reality.

Roxy Slade, that girl was my reality. My brutally flawed and beautifully broken reality. And she hated everything I stood for. To her I was just one of “those guys”, and she’d rather be buried alive with poisonous snakes than give someone like me a piece of toilet paper to wipe their ass with. Brutal. Life. Is. Brutal. And it is just a giant pain, which is why I chase after anything to make it numb, anything that can fill this void. I just want anything that can make me not feel. I just don’t want to feel.

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Author Bio:

I have been a fallen angel, a vampire, a confused twenty-something year old struggling through a crappy job, a jealous and deranged x-lover of a damned soul, and currently I’m an internationally sought after rock star with a slight addiction problem. All thanks to the characters I have written.

I enjoy the escape writing allows, and fully enjoy weaving a tale and creating crazy characters. When I’m not writing I am cuddling with my two sweet little girls and listening to my husband play his guitar (swoon). Some trivial fact about me would be: I love the color pink, I adore sloths, and I have a thing for British accents. My biggest fear is completely irrational, but I can’t help it. The thought of the pending zombie apocalypse absolutely creeps me out.I honestly can not imagine a more horrifying way to be blotted out of existence than by the hand of a decaying, oozing corpse with festering gums and clicking teeth. Ugh. That just gave me chills.

I hope if you read my books you will enjoy them and will be sucked into the little world I have created with words. After all, writing is the most amazing magic trick in the universe because it allows the reader to crawl inside the mind of the author. If you really think about that … it’s kind of disturbing.

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