Girls Who Play Guitars

•big hair, big pants•

~HOTEL LOBBY, BRISBANE~

"I need to talk to you." Brenin stood in front of Ellie dressed in his trendy, highly expensive, coordinated black jeans and casual jacket, clutching a roll of faxes. He slapped a roll of faxes against his palm, his expression flat.

Ellie sat in the plush hotel lobby with her boots resting on the glass coffee table. She had been tapping her pen on her notebook for at least thirty minutes, trying to force some kind of inspiration as she waited for their taxi to take them to the airport. But the weight of what Ash had done and the way Kim had been so quiet and disengaged from her the previous night pressed down on her thoughts.

Ellie dropped her feet and closed the book shut, slid her pen inside its cover. "This looks serious. Do we need Meg and Kim? I think they're still upstairs packing."

Exactly as Ellie predicted, Meg reverted to her normal self as soon as she jumped out of bed and vowed never to go near James again. And while Meg gave Ellie sly looks and little grins and tried to talk about Glue while they had their breakfast, Kim had been quiet, hidden behind her sunglasses, not engaging in the banter.

Brenin shook his head. "This is between you and me." He sat in the armchair next to her and passed across the bundle of rolled up faxes. "And, so it seems, someone called ... Ash Miller."

Ellie's stomach dropped as she peered at the coiled paper, then back at Brenin.

Brenin pointed at the faxes, mouth set in a firm line.

Ellie rested her notebook on her knees and unfurled the thin paper with shaking fingers. It was a bunch of photocopied newspaper articles. As she scanned through, her fingers trembled as she skimmed the words and images. The biggest tabloid papers in the U.K. and Australia were all reporting one thing and one thing only.

"Holy shit."

"You could say that."

~Secret's Out: Ellie's First Love Tells All~

In an exclusive interview, the swoonable Ash Miller, a 22-year-old ex-surfer from South African's coastal city of Durban, revealed he is sexy singer/guitarist Ellie Devine's first love and that he still owns the van she lost her virginity in.

Speaking from Brisbane, Australia, Ash told Tattler he met Devine when he was an eighteen-year-old surf bum travelling around the country. Miller said he spent a raunchy weekend in his Kombi van in Port Lagan with the rock-and-roll hottie where they 'smoked pot, made love and spoke about the meaning of life'.

'It was a week after Ellie's sixteenth birthday,' Miller recalls. 'She was a schoolgirl with no tattoos, big hair and big pants. I had a surfboard, a wetsuit and a Kombi van. And that was all she seemed to need that weekend.'

Miller believes the blonde bombshell—who Miller remembers as serious dark-haired beauty with an underlying sense of humour—seemed to be looking for love. 'She was really naïve about that sort of thing, so it was lucky I was there to be her guide. But she wasn't naïve about music. She told me she wanted to write music that changed the world. I know now that I was the inspiration she needed to write such powerful songs.'

According to Miller, the feisty but reclusive Devine, celebrating her twenty-first birthday this week, was happy to catch up in his van for a canoodle for old time's sake when she returned to Australia with her band Slider after a two-year hiatus. On tour with U.K. British indie pop sensation Glue, the usually guarded Devine surprisingly chose to leave the tantalising prince of pop Daniel Armstrong well alone to snuggle up with her old flame instead.