Playing Dirty (Stargazer 2)

He let her go to navigate her own way across the tiny room packed with equipment, and up the stairs. Someone had brought in her leather bag from outside and hung it on the back of a barstool in the kitchen. She snagged it as they passed, despite the fact that Erin and Owen glared at them from a few stools down.

“What were you thinking, Q?” Owen demanded. “What if you’d needed your inhaler while you were stuck down there with no way out?”

Halfway through the den that adjoined the kitchen, Quentin turned to shout at Owen in outrage, “What if you hadn’t broken my door?” He held out one arm to Sarah, almost protectively, and waited for her to pass him. “Here,” he said quietly behind her.

Obediently she turned and mounted another staircase to a hallway and kept walking past bedrooms and bathrooms.

“This is me,” he said, stopping in a bedroom doorway behind her. “Just let me take my contacts out and we’ll talk.”

She pointed to a bathroom across the hall. “I’ll slip in here for a second and meet you there.”

He gave her the smallest nod. A troubled look crossed his face, as if he were angry with himself for not extending her that courtesy first. But now her imagination was running wild. Of all the unexpected things she thought he was and wasn’t, it was too outlandish to think he was a gentleman.

She ducked into the bathroom and checked her phone. Wendy was worried about her. Sarah texted back, “I’m okay. More soon,” then brushed her teeth and removed her makeup—the bare minimum of maintenance, because she was afraid of what Quentin might be snorting while she left him alone.

In his bedroom, she locked the door behind her, kicked off her sexy shoes, and settled in the middle of his luxuriously soft bed. Morning sunlight bathed her, and happy birds sang in the crepe myrtle outside the window. Over their chirps, from down a short corridor to the master bath, she could hear pills rattle in a bottle. Water ran. She heard no prolonged sniffs.

And then Quentin caught her off guard. He walked into the room with his shorts off, wearing only boxers printed with dog bones, plus wire-framed glasses that made him look studious. Ha. And strangely vulnerable, despite his muscular body.

He sat beside her on the bed and pulled her into his lap, with her legs straddling his waist. She was very aware that only his boxers and her pants and a wisp of panties separated her center from his na**d groin. She tamped down her mixture of excitement and alarm. It made sense for him to touch her this way if he believed they’d had sex last night—which was exactly what she wanted.

He kissed the top of her hair and said soothingly, “I’m sorry. I have a headache. Let’s start over. Tell me how you feel about the morning-after pill. I can call my car service for us, and we can go to the pharmacy right now. Actually, no, the paparazzi will follow us. We’ll figure it out, though. You tell me what you want to do.” He hugged her hard. “I’m so sorry. I’m a really bad drunk.”

She felt horribly guilty for lying to him. It was the only way she knew to shove him off balance. And she needed him off balance for the talk they were about to have. But oh, it was even worse to deceive a playboy who turned out to be a decent guy, or at least talked the talk. She didn’t like this side of Natsuko.

She looked him in the eye. “Quentin.”

He gazed back at her, green eyes sorrowful now through his glasses.

She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“I know this is an important moment and all,” he whispered finally, “but if we’re just going to stare at each other, do you mind if I lie down?” He flopped back onto the bed and pressed the palm of his hand to his temple.

“Quentin,” she started again.

“Ma’am.”

“We didn’t do it. You were asleep in five seconds.”

After a few moments of silence, he said calmly, “That’s a cold game of gotcha you’ve got going.” He sat up and said, “Excuse me while I go scrape my heart off the bathroom floor!” His hand was still pressed to his temple, shielding one eye. His other green eye pierced her.

Then he started to laugh, because he felt relieved, or because he could laugh at just about anything, it seemed. “What is the matter with you?” he asked.

“I was just trying to wake you up—”

“It worked!”

“—and give you back some of what you’ve been dishing out. You served me a big margarita glass full of bullshit last night.” She tried not to cringe at her own metaphor. Her mother would be horrified at the imagery.

Now he put down his hand and watched her with both green eyes wary. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you’re a regular heavy drinker, I’m a horse’s ass. And I’m not a horse’s ass.”

“So you drank me under the table,” he said defensively. “But like you said, you’ve been drinking with Nine Lives, who eats brimstone for lunch and brushes his teeth with Drano.”

She raised one eyebrow at him. “I’m going to give you thirty seconds to come clean with me. And then I’m going to call Manhattan Music and tell them there’s no way you can have this album completed by July first. I’m going to tell them that they should look around for a more dependable country act that can deliver as per contract.”

“Okay,” he said quickly. He grabbed her hand and stroked his thumb across her palm as he spoke. This was strange. Usually when she had the inevitable adversarial conversation with a rogue musician, the musician backed away from her emotionally, even physically. Quentin came after her, drawing her closer.

It was also strange because she usually felt revulsion at these spoiled stars and their chemical dependencies. This one definitely wasn’t revolting. She tingled at the touch of his callused thumb.

“Normally we drink some,” he said. “Not a lot. We take turns drinking at big events.”

“I’m flattered that I qualify as a big event.” She considered grilling him about Erin not drinking at all. But she was reasonably sure he didn’t know this. She asked, “Why all the subterfuge?”

He looked confused. “Subter—”

“Why the big production of pretending to be an alcoholic and acting like a dumb hick who can’t tie his own shoes? You may not be a rocket scientist, Quentin, but that song you wrote in two minutes last night while you were plastered is going to earn you several million dollars. Why put on this elaborate show for me?”

Now, finally, he drew away from her, dropping her hand and folding his big arms across his pecs. “Because the record company sent you.”

“You want Manhattan Music to think you’re redneck drunks?”

“Of course.” He lay slowly back down on the bed with the muscle control gained from a million sit-ups. Then he patted the bed. Obediently she lay on her side. Now that her surprise attack was over, she ought to move to the leather chair across the room while they had this discussion. But if he felt comfortable with her this close, she supposed she could stand it.

Finding her hand again, he used his thumb to rub and gently tug the sensitive skin between her thumb and forefinger as he explained, “The band got together about five years ago. We worked at our day jobs all week and played gigs on the weekends. We scored festivals where we knew the record company scouts would be, and we sent in demo tapes, and it wasn’t enough. We had this terrific, sexy fiddle player—”

Sarah’s stomach turned over with jealousy. But this is what she wanted: for Quentin to be in love with Erin. This was good. It was part of the plan. Let go, said Natsuko.

“—and good songs,” he continued, “and a great sound, and we still couldn’t break down the door.

“Now, let me back up and say that my granddad was a banjo player, and my grandma played guitar. They toured all the honky-tonks in the South in the 1950s. Granddad always told me playing music wasn’t enough to bring people in. He and Grandma did some grandstanding. They might never have made it big, but because of their showmanship, they got on as studio musicians in Nashville.

“Course, that still wasn’t much of a living, and my dad resented getting dragged around the country and growing up poor. He always told me since my mom died from allergic asthma and I have the same problem, I didn’t have any business trying to make it with a band. I needed to hold down a steady job, get health insurance, and take care of myself. A little over two years ago, I was so frustrated with trying to get a recording contract I was about ready to agree with what my dad had always told me and quit the band. Then somebody in the front row at a show smoked a cigarette, and I had an asthma attack.”

“Oh no,” Sarah said gamely. She wasn’t for a second buying this asthma story the band had been feeding the press. Downstairs, Owen had mentioned Quentin’s inhaler. Probably more preplanned subterfuge. But she didn’t stop Quentin from telling her this tale. To protect the one lie, he might just reveal everything else.

“I had to go to the hospital,” he said. “A rumor started that I was on coke. All of a sudden, we got attention. More people came out to see us play. The newspaper wanted to interview us. I kept telling the truth, but of course the louder I said I have asthma and allergies, the surer everybody was that I was on coke.”

“Bastards,” she said sympathetically.

“Well, that’s what I would have thought if I was still listening to my dad,” he admitted. “But my granddad had just died a few months before. I could see his whole career, this long span where he almost made it big. I could hear him in my head, talking me into it, telling me a little showmanship never hurt nobody.”

“Uh-oh,” Sarah said.

Quentin nodded. “We decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If people wanted a hot mess with their country music, that’s what we’d be. We started getting drunk and staging a fight at every concert.”

“Staging a fight?” she repeated. “You mean the table in the pool?”

He took a deep breath, watching her, realizing he’d given something else away, and calculating how to back out of the admission.

She raised one eyebrow.

He sighed, giving in. “Have you ever heard of Mad ‘Red’ Mud?”

“The professional wrestler?”

“Yeah. He used to work at the steel mill over in Fairfield with Martin’s uncle. He taught us some moves. We just try to keep Erin from getting hurt.” Quentin shrugged. “Usually it goes more smoothly than last night. I told them I shouldn’t get drunk while you were here. I tend to start laughing and lose my threatening scowl. Watch.”

He showed her such a ridiculous scowl that she laughed herself.

“When we started setting up fights,” he said, “our local fan base increased, because we weren’t just getting the country music fans anymore. We were getting the monster truck fans, too, the kind of folks who pay cash money to watch shit crash. That’s when the local paper started a column called the Cheatin’ Hearts Death Watch. Have you seen it?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it. You act like you’re proud of it.”

“I am,” he insisted. “That was a big break, because it got Nashville’s attention, and then Manhattan Music came calling. Don’t look at me like that. Put your eyebrow down.” He reached out to touch her brow.

His other hand already held her hand captive in a tingling dance. But something happened when he reached toward her face and touched her gently. His own expression changed. His green eyes turned serious and dark.

Then he was kissing her. Astonishingly, she was kissing him back. She couldn’t resist. His mouth took her mouth. His tongue tangled with her tongue and slicked across her teeth. She was embarrassed that she gasped a little. Natsuko most likely had made out with someone else this year and was used to this sort of thing.

He rolled on top of her, pinning her beneath him with his weight. She started to push him off, remembering that she hardly knew him and he could be dangerous, despite how he’d reassured her last night—and then his glasses fell onto her forehead. He laughed, sounding embarrassed for the first time. He seemed so young and vulnerable at that moment that she laughed, too, to make him feel better.

He moved her wrists close together above her head so he could hold them with one hand while he tossed his glasses onto the bedside table with the other.

“So we got the contract with the record company,” he said, and pressed his lips hard on hers again.

“But it was a tough fight,” he whispered, biting at the corner of her mouth.

“And then we had to reneg—What’s the word?” Through his cotton boxers and her silk shirt, his c**k moved against her belly.

“Renegotiate,” she breathed. “Stop the act. You know the word renegotiate.”

He grinned like the devil. “We had to reneg—what you said—between the first and the second album.” His tongue was inside her mouth again. Between this insistent pleasure and the pressure of the bulge shifting against her down below, Sarah had a hard time following what he was telling her.

He stopped kissing her to say, “And we’re damn tired of giving the lawyers all the crumbs Manhattan Music throws us. We want to seem crazy enough that the record company is scared to mess with us. But not crazy enough that the record company sends you down here to spy on us.”

His kisses deepened. Her body had never enjoyed a man’s body more, but her mind spun with realization. He’d just called her a spy. He seemed to take perverse pleasure in keeping her wrists captive above her head while he tortured her. He thought he had her right where he wanted her when the reverse was true. Her job, her whole life as she knew it, was riding on what she did next.