“I’ve hit you before and you survived.”
“And anyway,” Martin said, “the three of us agreed you were going to pass out before you could make a move on her.”
“Then what the hell’s the problem?” Quentin smacked the omelet onto a plate and shoved it across the bar at Martin.
“The problem is that there was a vibe between you and Sarah,” Erin repeated. “You know I know you, Q. You know I know the vibe.”
Quentin glanced at Owen, expecting to see him jealous. But Owen didn’t emote much, and his face was the usual blank. Quentin could have sworn he’d sensed something real between Erin and Owen last night. But he’d been drunk. Or he was just no good at detecting the vibe.
He confessed, “Sarah wants to fake a thing with me until the concert, to get me back with Erin.”
Martin grumbled, “What kind of thing?” and Owen cursed, but Erin’s voice rose high above theirs. “What have you gotten yourself into? What have you gotten us into? Don’t you remember what’s at stake here? Owen, tell him what’s at stake.”
Owen recited the sales figures for In Poor Taste, the portion of profit that went to the Cheatin’ Hearts, the large portion that went to the record company, and the other large portion that went to the lawyers. Then the figures for Ass Backwards with the profit breakdowns for the band, the record company, and the lawyers.
After he finished, Erin declared, “I’m not fighting the record company and signing my life away to the lawyers again. I’m not going to do it, Q. This double life we’re leading isn’t worth the money.” Her diatribe escalated into a wail. “My grandmother thinks I’m a slattern!”
Quentin decided this was not the time to point out that they still had an awful lot of money. He allowed them to complete the ritual. Erin lectured and Owen recited the sales figures every time Quentin made a decision they didn’t like. That was fine if it made them feel better.
Then he said, “We don’t have much choice. Sarah’s a Jedi. She figured out the burly hick act is a put-on.” He explained the deal he’d arranged with Sarah, deleting their discussion of Martin’s heroin use. Also omitting Sarah’s opinion that Owen didn’t matter as much to the band as Quentin did. Owen was thin-skinned. Also editing out that his dreams last night had been filled with making love to Sarah, which was probably why he’d woken with his hand in her pants.
“That bitch!” Erin exclaimed.
“She makes me very nervous,” Owen agreed.
“That’s what she’s here for,” Quentin said to Owen. He gave Erin a reproving look. “And she’s not a bitch. She took a page out of our book. Look, y’all, I didn’t break a rule. I won’t get drunk again. I’ll pretend—pretend—to be doing the deed with her to make Erin jealous, just like Erin and Owen are pretending to do it to make me jealous. Hell, none of us are getting any. No wonder we’re all on edge.”
Martin stared at his untouched food. Owen laughed nervously, and Erin watched her fingers flying on the neck of her fiddle.
“We’ll put our energy into the album,” Quentin went on. “Come the Fourth of July, Erin and I will pretend to get back together. The Wookiee will see that the band’s not breaking up, and she’ll go back to New York or Tatooine or wherever the hell she’s from.”
He turned to Erin. “So you act jealous.” He turned to Owen. “And you . . . continue to say as little as possible. Grunt if you must.”
Owen grunted.
Quentin said, “And I’ll beat my head against the wall for nine more days.”
Late that afternoon, while Martin and Erin worked in the studio on Erin’s solo for “Barefoot and Pregnant,” Quentin and Owen lay on opposite sides of the sectional sofa in the den, watching Owen’s DVD of an old Masterpiece Theatre production of Crime and Punishment. Quentin had argued about this at first because he wanted to watch World Poker Tournament, but he’d relented after a few minutes. He’d come so close to getting kicked out of the band this morning that he figured he’d better tread lightly for a few days. Or just hours, maybe, depending on how things went.
Now he was sorry he’d given in. He’d only skimmed Crime and Punishment in college because he’d had a calculus midterm that same week. He’d convinced his girlfriend at the time to fill him in on the details of the novel so he could ace the test. Owen had started the DVD on episode two, and Quentin was thoroughly confused. He couldn’t remember how Raskolnikov had gotten himself into this guilt-ridden fix in the first place. Quentin hated being confused. “Why’d he whack those old ladies?” he asked Owen.
“Shut up,” Owen said without taking his eyes off the screen.
Martin appeared behind them with his phone in his hand. “Excuse me, Porfiry Petrovich.”
“Which one?” Quentin asked.
“Rachel just called,” Martin told them. “We got an offer to be on a late-night talk show in a few days, and Sarah turned it down.”
Owen actually peeled his eyes from the TV and turned to Quentin. “You see? That’s exactly why we don’t get involved with the record company.”
“I’m sure she had some reason,” Quentin said, strangely defensive of the pink-haired girl yet again. “She doesn’t want us to do badly. The record company brought her in, and they want us to have good sales. That’s how they make money.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Owen said. “We want to sell albums on our terms. She’s manipulating us on their behalf, and you’re letting her.”
Quentin held his hand backward so Martin could give him the phone. “I’ll call her and find out what’s going on.”
Martin’s steps sounded back down the stairs to the studio, and Owen and Quentin were reabsorbed by Crime and Punishment. Quentin found the story revolting but hard to stop watching. Like a particularly nasty gunshot wound to the abdomen with intestines spilling out that had come into the emergency room on his shift once. Anyway, it was a lot easier to watch this poor sod torture himself with guilt than to think about Sarah, the problem with Sarah, what he was going to do about Sarah.
“Call her,” Owen insisted, eyes glued to the TV.
“I have it under control,” Quentin said. It was early evening, and he half expected the phone in his hand to ring with the signal that she was at the gate in her car. He’d hoped all day, hoped and dreaded, that she would come back over to check on their progress on “her” album.
“Chop-chop! Where’s my album?” she said behind them, startling him. The phone flew out of his hand and hit Owen on the nose.
“Under control, eh?” Owen muttered, flinging the phone back at Quentin.
Quentin deflected it instinctively with his forearm. It flew in a high lob behind the sectional, where Sarah amazingly caught it with one hand. Quentin thought she’d spin it on her finger like a basketball next, but she just tossed it onto the kitchen counter.
She was wearing a tight. Red. Low-cut. Shirt.
“Good evening,” she said pointedly to Quentin. She gestured with her eyes. He got the message. She wanted him to kiss her hello in front of Owen.
He knelt on the cushion, pulled her as close as he could get her with the back of the sofa between them, and showed her that he’d missed her all day.
Finally she pushed him away. “I missed you, too,” she whispered, breathing light and fast.
“You figured out the gate code,” he said.
“I have eyes in the back of my head,” she said ominously. Then she laughed. “That’s my mother’s line. She always knows more than she’s supposed to.”
“That’s creepy,” said Quentin.
“You have a mother?” Owen asked.
Sarah didn’t answer. Her eyes had fallen on the TV. “When you’re through watching this, you can borrow my copy of Anna Karenina.”
Owen didn’t understand Sarah’s sarcasm. “The one with Helen McCrory or Nicola Pagett?” he asked. If he was going to understand that membership in a redneck country band was not consistent with an interest in nineteenth-century Russian literature, he was going to come to
this understanding very, very slowly.
Quentin said only, “Owen, you dumbass.” Then, to distract Sarah, he grabbed her around the waist in a wrestling hold, lifted her over the back of the sofa, and threw her bouncing onto the cushions. It was a rude move that seemed ruder performed on a sophisticated woman like Sarah, which was why he did it. He slid her across the leather to trap her against the arm of the sectional.
“We hear you turned down a late-night talk show for us,” he said softly. Sitting close beside her, he stroked his thumb slowly down the open neckline of her shirt, dipped cheekily into her cleavage, and stroked slowly up the other side. Then he turned his thumb and stroked her in the same places using his callus from holding down his guitar string. She’d seemed to enjoy the touch of his thumb in his bedroom that morning.
She gasped a little. “I did,” she breathed.
“Well, we think you must be nuts,” he told her gently, retracing the tender path of his thumb. “That would have been great publicity.”
“We didn’t need you to come down from New York to do something inane,” Owen added.
Inane, Quentin thought in alarm. The Cheatin’ Hearts didn’t know the word inane. But Owen was too inane to realize this.
“I want my album,” Sarah said stubbornly, despite Quentin’s thumb in her cleavage. “The album is the most important thing. If you don’t have an album, you don’t have anything to publicize.”
“We could fly up there, do the show, and fly back down that night,” Quentin suggested, moving his whole hand to cup the part of her breast that was bare in her neckline.
“I know it’s never that simple with you,” she said. “There’s no telling what kind of stunt you’d pull, and that poor TV host has had heart surgery.” She slapped Quentin’s hand away and tried to stand. “I can’t believe Rachel told you about this. I’m going to have a talk with her.”
“You’re not going anywhere until we settle this,” Quentin said with authority. He stood over her, his hands on the sofa so she couldn’t escape.
She raised one eyebrow, asking him, Are you bluffing?
He was not. The band was too important. He kept his eyes on hers. But he had his contacts in, and he would have to blink sooner or later. So he said, “You need a spanking.”
“You have to catch me first,” she said. She feinted left under his caging arm, then dashed right. She slipped through his grasp.
“Thanks for taking care of it,” Owen called as Quentin ran after Sarah into the dining room.
She was on the far side of the pool table. “Elegantly appointed dining room,” she commented, patting the felt. Her voice echoed weirdly against the marble walls and the painted ceiling. The evening light from the window danced in the chandelier and shot shadowed dots across her face and chest.
He took one slow step to the left, and she moved to the right. He stepped to the right, and she moved to the left. He bent as if to slide under the pool table. She scrambled over it.
Too easy. He caught her, laid her down on the felt, and kissed her. His hand crept across her pants to the inside of her thigh.
She took a deep breath and said low, “I mean it. You’re stretched too thin right now. The talk show will ask you back after the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event.”
He kissed her neck, carefully avoiding the scar under her chin because he didn’t want her to shy. “From now on,” he said, “I want you to discuss it with me before you decide something like that.” He bit her earlobe.
“Okay.”
Now he ran his tongue lightly inside her ear, and it seemed from her reaction that he really did have everything under control. He told her, “If you were my girlfriend, I’d make love to you right now.”
“I’m not your girlfriend,” she whispered.
“You feel like my girlfriend,” he said. “Let’s see if you sound like my girlfriend.” Despite her protests and her feeble attempts to tickle his ribs, he lifted her onto his shoulder. Registering with a quick glance into the next room that Erin and Martin were leaning over the sofa in discussion with Owen, he climbed up the stairs to his bedroom.
He shut and locked the door behind him, tossed her onto the leather armchair by the window, and pushed the chair over to the door with her in it.
“I thought we agreed that we’re not going to do this,” she said, sitting up.
“We’re not.” He noted with supreme interest that she looked disappointed. “But we want Erin to think we are. Right?”
“Right,” she said uncertainly.
“So make it sound like we are.” He folded his arms. “Show me what you’ve got.”
She looked at him dubiously, then laughed, nervous. Her cheeks had turned bright pink, the same shade as a wayward lock of hair that half hid one of her big, dark eyes.
“Come on, now,” he scolded her. “This is for your job security.”
She got serious, squaring her shoulders. “Don’t watch me.”
He looked away while she uttered a pitiful imitation.
Turning back to her, he shook his head. “Every fake orgasm from now until the end of time is going to sound like When Harry Met Sally.” He picked her up, sat down in the leather chair himself, and settled her in his lap with her back to him. After cranking up the footrest so they reclined comfortably together, he deftly unbuttoned and unzipped her pants and slipped his hand inside, past the delicate lace of her panties.
“This isn’t a good idea,” she said in warning, clutching his hand. “I have to go to the office tonight to get some more work done, and I don’t want my clothes to be all wrinkled.”
He laughed shortly. “I’ve never heard that one before. And that’s the worst excuse I’ve heard in probably a decade.” He removed his hand from her panties and pulled down on the waistband of her pants.
“Quentin,” she scolded him, slapping his hands. “My trousers are headed in the wrong direction.”
“Relax.” He slipped out from under her and stood up so he could get more leverage on the pants leg. “Are your clothes always this hard to get off?”
“When my shoes are on.”
“I don’t want you to take your shoes off. I really like you in those shoes. Oh!” he exclaimed in relief, finally coming away with the pants. He made a great show of smoothing them and folding them carefully before dropping them in a heap on the carpet. Now that she was cooperating, he handled her shirt with one good tug. He crumpled it on the floor beside the pants. Then he sat on the footrest to look at her.
Red lace bra. Red lace panties, some stylish kind that sat low on her hips and cut straight across her ass in back. Underneath, creamy skin stretched taut over the hard muscles of an athlete.
He said sincerely, “You are so beautiful.”
“Thank you!” She smiled, brown eyes big.
“I really like being in cahoots with you.”
“Me, too.”
He moved to the chair and pulled her back against him again, positioning her so she could feel his erection. This time when he pushed his hand into her panties and she began to protest, he was ready. He clamped his other hand over her mouth. She’d been talking like she wanted to stay in control. But instinct told him if she thought she wanted control in the bedroom, nobody had ever shown her what she really wanted.
“We need to get down to business,” he whispered. “We’re wasting time. Don’t say anything else until you’ve got a good moan ready. You understand me?”
In answer, she bit his hand gently. He put his fingers in her mouth.
He worked on her, his middle finger circling and stroking her clit. She pressed against him. His cock complied, swelling further. At the same time, she raised her hips, giving him better access to her mound. He wanted to push his fingers into her, and he figured that’s what she wanted, too. But he didn’t dare, because once he knew what she felt like inside, he wasn’t sure he could keep himself from snatching down her panties and taking her from the back.
So he tried to content h
imself with feeling the pressure of her ass against his cock, and circling his finger on her clit. The rest of her body relaxed, but her sex grew tense. And he thought, What am I doing? Sex with his ex-manager Karen had been one thing. Karen had been casual. There was nothing casual about this. Sarah’s pink hair and red bra and red panties turned his mood dead serious.
Several exquisite minutes passed this way. The room grew hot. Finally she pulled her mouth away from his hand and rested her cheek on his shoulder, pleading to him, eyes half-closed. “Don’t make me.”
“A beautiful woman like you,” he murmured. “I don’t understand why you need this so bad. I have to make you, for your own good.”
Still gazing at him, she seemed to stop seeing, and shuddered under his hand. He kept circling, pressing more firmly. She dug her high heels into the footrest and arched her back, raising herself off the leather and nearer to his hand. He circled and she shuddered. Then came the long, loud moan he’d been waiting for. And then she cried, “Que’n!”
He pressed her mouth with his mouth. His fingers still circled as she sparked and finally vibrated to a halt. He forced his tongue past her teeth, sweeping inside her mouth, showing her the way he wanted to make love to her.
But now he was thinking, What have I done? Making her come had seemed like a good idea while he was chasing her around the pool table. But they’d just transformed their business relationship into something a lot more complicated.
She broke the kiss and said, “I’d better go.”
“You’d better,” he agreed grimly.
She couldn’t get her clothes on fast enough. She cursed as she tried to pull the pants on over her shoes and got the legs caught on her high heels. He handed the small red shirt to her.
They went downstairs. The TV room was empty. As they walked through the kitchen, Quentin pointed to the open door that led downstairs to the studio and put his finger to his lips: the band was still listening.
By the time they stopped at the door out to the garage, Quentin had finally recovered himself enough for salvage operations. He put his hand on her elbow. “This isn’t the end of the world,” he whispered.