How (Not) to Fall in Love with Rockstars: When Fangirls Lie

While waiting for A Royal Heartbreak to come out, you might want to check out my next book, to be released next week.  This is #2 of my Pussketeer books. Fans of the Billionaires series will be happy to know that you'll see lots of Constantijin and Yanna in the book.

For the blurb----

Sapphire “Saffi” March used to be known as an eccentric genius, the girl who had made a laughingstock of her illustrious family. But she’s reinvented herself since then. Now a post-graduate honor student, Saffi is determined to be a dutiful daughter, with no one in her world ever supposed to know she’s also the most diehard fangirl of Sweden’s #1 Sex God.
It’s her greatest secret, and the times she watches the sex god sing and dance are the only times she could just breathe…and be herself.

Handsome like a classical statue but earthy and sexy like a pagan god, Staffan Aehrenthal is the most wildly successful rockstar that ever came on stage. He should be celebrating being on top of his world, but a woman’s betrayal had Staffan forging a path to self-destruction instead.

Life no longer meant anything – until serendipity introduced him to a beautiful and funny girl with an adorably unique fascination with fishes.

When their worlds collide on one fateful weekend, Saffi is disguised as a gum-chewing hardcore groupie while Staffan pretends he hasn’t been trailing after her all over the Internet.

 It’s a recipe for the most hilarious and heartbreaking of disasters because when fangirls lie, the craziest things can happen – like a rockstar falling in love.

A part of the excerpt below was first seen in I Heart Books.

Sapphire “Saffi” March tumbled out of her bed in her haste to get to the phone. It had to be him. It just had to be. She didn’t have any close friends, had never gone out on a date, and none of her family would ever have considered calling her at this hour of the night.

After all, an eccentric bookworm like her had no reason to be up this late. No one would have reason to expect that she was the most diehard of all fangirls and that her locker had a pin-up of Staffan Aehrenthal, hidden behind the evolutionary chart of ichthyology she had taped to her locker door.

Oh, please, it just had to be him.

Saffi lost her footing as she got hold of her phone, falling flat on her face as she pressed the green button to answer the call. “Suffering sardines!” The words escaped her as she bit back a groan of pain, her chin connecting with the floor in a small thump.

On the other end of the line, Staffan sputtered in disbelief when instead of ‘hello’ he heard two words he had never imagined he would hear in his entire life.

Suffering sardines?

Perhaps he had dialed the wrong number? But---did sardines actually suffer? When they were canned perhaps?

Saffi quickly stuck the phone to her ear, hoping he had not put it down yet. “H-hello?”

He had probably imagined it, Staffan thought. He decided to put his half-empty glass of whiskey away, placing it back on the glass cabinet hidden cleverly behind one of the limousine’s paneled doors. Nothing good would come out from chatting with a fan while drunk.

“Is this---” He glanced at his iPad to confirm the name. “Saffi March?”

Saffi swooned.

That voice. Oh dear, THAT VOICE. How many times had she dreamt of Staffan Aehrenthal saying her name? It was pointless to count. It was that many.

Wondering where he could be as he talked to her on the phone, she tried to recall the schedule of his tour. Fangirls knew their favorite stars’ schedule the same way sports buffs could recite the entire season’s schedule of games.

Tonight, he would probably on his way to JFK Airport since Staffan Aehrenthal was well-known as a man of habit. And when it came to working while on tour, there were quite a number of those habits that were, well, notorious.

Supposedly, Staffan always “hand-selected” which girls got a backstage pass.

Supposedly, Staffan’s definition of stress relief after a concert involved getting naked.

Supposedly, Staffan needed stress relief more often than a thirsty man needed to drink water.

Mmmm…could she be his stress relief on the phone?

She blushed at the thought just as Staffan said, “Hello?”

Fluttering flounder!

She had actually zoned out on Sweden’s #1 Sex God!

Staffan choked, shooting up on his seat, so amazed that he actually put the phone away from his ear to stare at it in amazement. This time, he hadn’t been wrong. This girl was…weird. Funny as hell but she was still weird. Who the fuck used goddamn species of fish as exclamations of surprise?

“Sorry, sir, I mean, Mr. Aehrenthal.” She wanted to kick herself several times the moment the words went out of her mouth. Playful piranhas! Hadn’t she been rehearsing for this call the entire month? Hadn’t she firmly told herself everyday that she would not act like Emily Post’s protégé with him?

Staffan Aehrenthal likes his women slutty. The former groupies Saffi was friends with online had told her that, too!

At the mention of his last name, the ennui resting so heavily on his shoulders fell off like a winter coat he no longer needed.

This girl had broken rule #1 for fans: she had not acted coy. She had admitted knowing who he was.

It was refreshing to say the least. It was interesting, too, enough for him to sit up and take notice, enough to make him forget that most women in the world were only good for fucking.

He said huskily, “Hello, Saffi March.”

THAT VOICE sent shivers down her spine. Saffi slowly covered the mouthpiece of the phone.

And then she squealed, like a baby, and like the excited fangirl she was.

Staffan stopped speaking. The sudden loss of any sound at all from the other end was familiar to him. He knew that Saffi had covered the mouthpiece, probably to…scream? Hug herself? It almost made Staffan smile, but fortunately he held it back in time.

He was Staffan fucking Aehrenthal, infamous for his cruel tongue and foul-mouthed ways. He was the type to smirk, sneer, and snarl. But one thing he did not goddamn do was smile.

The moment he heard her lift her hand off the mouthpiece, he drawled out, “I’m guessing you know why I called?”

Busted.

“Yes,” she admitted sheepishly.

God, that voice was too fucking cute, mostly because none of the women he had dated in recent years had ever sounded naturally sheepish. A thought occurred to him. What the hell did this Saffi March look like anyway?

“Happy birthday, Saffi.” Even as he murmured the words, Staffan was already clicking her name on the iPad screen. A new page loaded, which included her profile picture.

Fuck was the first thought that came to mind when he saw her. Just one glance at her photo, and his sexual drought was over, and now he was struggling to keep at bay the lust that flooded his senses.

Staffan literally wanted to take Saffi March with his cock, see her melting around him, feel her warmth surrounding him as he made her his.

In the photo, she appeared unbelievably young with her face fresh from makeup except for the shimmery pink gloss on her lovely bow-shaped lips. If not for the fact that she had also listed herself as a post-graduate student in her final year, Staffan would have thought she was still a teenager. And God knew that although he was many things, he was no pedophile.

Saffi March was the most feminine-looking thing Staffan had ever seen in his life. She had on an Alice in Wonderland costume. The cerulean silk ribbon on her head was an exquisite contrast with her jet-black hair and almost-as-dark eyes, and as his eyes moved down, his gaze lingered on the delightful cleavage that the tight top of her dress revealed. A lightning bolt of desire struck his body, his cock springing up in attention.

Staffan reluctantly put the iPad down when Saffi spoke again. Fuck, he was so horny he had an embarrassing feeling he just might jack himself off later on while staring at Saffi’s photo.

“Thanks, Mr. Aehrenthal,” she stammered. She wished she had the guts to call him Staffan, like she did in her dreams, but in reality it was just too impossible to do.

This time Staffan couldn’t stop his lips from twitching.

Lately, the women he had banged like to call him that. Mr. Aehrenthal. It irritated him to no end, and when he had asked Yanna – the only woman he considered his friend nowadays – about it, Yanna had laughingly told him it was the trend now, something that some kind of book with lots of fifties in it had supposedly started.

According to a giggling Yanna, being called “Mr. Whatever” was supposed to be incredibly sexy, but as far as Staffan was concerned, it just made him feel like a dirty old man fucking a Lolita wannabe.

“Mr. Aehrenthal?” Saffi prodded uneasily when the silence between them lengthened.

His cock swelled even more at the sound of his last name on her lips. He had never been called “Mr. Aehrenthal” so earnestly, without any attempt on seduction, and yet somehow it sounded sexy as hell.

Saffi March’s light, lilting voice was so angelic and sweet it made Staffan imagine tossing her Alice in Wonderland skirt up and showing her how it felt to be tumbled. By him.

He moved on his seat, his pants feeling unbelievably tight. That did it. To hell if it was going to make him appear like a fucking pervert. He would definitely jack off tonight while looking at Saffi’s unbelievably enticing photo.

“Is there something wrong?”

Staffan started to assure her that there wasn’t any problem when a warning beep sounded, reminding him that his phone’s battery was about to die on him any second.

Frustration seared him. “My phone’s about to die.” He paused, expecting her to protest, to do what all the girls he had previously called did just to make him stay on the phone longer. But she didn’t. That confused him, which he didn’t like at all, making Staffan speak more sharply than usual as he asked, “Do you want to say anything else before I hang up?”

Saffi’s silent response meant more than any words could say, her hurt traveling through the phone line that whipped him with guilt.

Shit. Now he knew why the girl wasn’t saying anything. It was because she didn’t believe him, and it was like karma biting him in the ass. It had been his standard response to cut his call short with the other girls. Yet now that Staffan didn’t want the call to end, it had to, and she didn’t believe him.

Fuck karma.

“Saffi.” Saying the name out loud made him pause. It seemed as if his world had been altered with it, and the change was eternally binding. It was like fucking serendipity, literally---the kind that his cock sensed. “I’m---”

Saffi did not want to hear false apologies from Staffan, the thought of it not sitting well with her for some strange reason. Humiliation colored her cheeks, making her privately thankful that she was only having an ordinary call with Staffan instead of one that involved cameras and videos.

Mentally squaring her shoulders, she decided to take his words by face value anyway---because that was what a true fangirl would do: accept that famous personalities were humans, too, and they had off days like ordinary humans had.

She interrupted him quickly, “I, umm, do have something to say.”

Staffan told himself not to expect too much. Even though Saffi March had so far proven different from all his pre-conceived notions of women who were after his fame, fortune, and fucking, in the end she would still be like the rest. She would still have an agenda, would want him to---

“Please be happy, Mr. Aehrenthal.”

Staffan stiffened.

Saffi said with nervous determination, “I love how you dance. I love how you sing. I love your lyrics, and I just think…it would be such a waste if it’s true that you’ve been…”

Staffan’s heart started to beat fast. Then he told himself that she wouldn’t say it. Of course she wouldn’t because at the end of the day, she was his fucking fan, she worshipped the fucking ground he walked on, and she would never risk antagonizing him even if---

Saffi closed her eyes. “I just hope you’d realize how much you mean to your fans, Mr. Aehrenthal,” she whispered. “I just hope you’d stop…doing the…stuff you’ve been doing recently because we really don’t want to lose you. You have so much to give.”

He should have been incensed. She was a fucking nobody, and he was Sweden’s #1 somebody, the #1 on Billboard charts, and in everything else.

He should have been creeped out. Was she a fucking stalker or what? How the fuck did she know that he had been drinking every night and taking the craziest risks that his insurance company had terminated its contract with him?

He should slam the phone down, but he didn’t.  

And he wasn’t mad.

Staffan wasn’t even creeped out, not when the earnestness in her angelic voice made him remember the old days, back when he used to be in her shoes once, and he, too, had been one of the first to know what was happening with the singers he had idolized. In fact, it was because he had been such a great fan of another rock legend that he had found his mentor – and eventually his calling.

His iPhone made one last final beep.

Staffan said quietly, “Thanks.”

But it was too late.