American Diva (14 page)

That
kiss at the lagoon was hot enough to rouse a dead man, but it was nonetheless a huge mistake, and Jack was going to make damn sure it did not happen again.

Frankly, he didn’t know if he was insulted or amused by the whole thing. He’d never had a woman launch herself at him in quite that manner, then just as quickly fall all over herself to assure him she had just made a colossal mistake, and that it would not, come hell or high water, ever happen again.

It wouldn’t because now
he
was in charge. But he was right about one thing: Audrey LaRue needed someone to make love to her.
Real
love to her—and he hoped she had good luck with that because it would not be him.

Fortunately, Audrey kept her distance during the first week of the tour. Jack and his guys rotated through the tour buses, but he managed never to end up on Audrey’s. They made it through Minneapolis and Grand Rapids without incident—either the kissing kind or the ugly letter kind. He and Audrey avoided each other—when he saw her coming, he went in the opposite direction. She apparently was employing the same avoidance technique, for he rarely saw her, and when he did, she was usually with Casanova, who, Jack wryly noted, continued to show up in her encore and do his bit.

But that didn’t matter to Jack—the only thing that mattered was that he remain as invisible as possible to Audrey. He didn’t want to be near her, didn’t want to smell her perfume or the sweet scent of her hair. At their tour stops, he managed it just fine. There was a lot of work to do; he didn’t even see her until show time. When the lights went down and the smoke began to fill the stage, Jack would stand back, his eyes trained on the stage and band and crew, watching everything but her.

But he could not avoid her voice, and his head, his senses, were filled with it. And what a voice she had—explosive, powerful, but alluringly seductive. There were some songs she sang that gave him a chill, others whose beat and tone were so persuasive that he couldn’t help but move a foot. Yet it was the ballads, the love songs and the haunting melodies of love lost and love survived that really moved him. He marveled at her ability to convey emotion and struggled to fathom how someone, born of flesh and bone and blood like him, could produce such a surreal sound as she did.

He knew she was destined for greatness.

But once the songs were over and the lights came up and the inevitable after party was in full swing, he would see her from the corner of his eye, talking and laughing and looking beautiful, and his thoughts would flash back to the beach. Or the lagoon. And he would feel something inside him tug a little harder.

It was making him crazy. He didn’t need thoughts like that clouding his mind. He didn’t need to be near her, didn’t need to catch her eye across the room as he did every once in a while and feel something flow between them. He just needed to do his job and get back to his life and his flight school and the plane he had left half torn apart in a rented hangar in Orange County. He just needed to keep his head down, his mind focused on his work and the wiring specs he’d brought along, and everything would be fine.

That was his standard operating procedure, ever since Janet Richards, the girl for whom he had developed a massive crush when he was seventeen, dumped him. He tended to retreat into extreme sports or flying. Something as far removed from women as he could possibly get within the bounds of earth.

It was only a couple of months. But if a person was counting—and he wasn’t, not really—it was seven weeks. A man could do anything for seven weeks if he put his mind to it.

That was his intractable belief until the day of the shoes.

It started when Bonner decided to stick his nose in Jack’s business. When they were loading up for Cleveland, The Assclown tracked Jack down and insisted he ride in the tour bus.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“Because I caught your boy over there,” Bonner said, nodding at Ted, “about to do Courtney before I stopped him. You’re lucky I didn’t call the cops.”

Jack scoffed. “Why should he lose out on what she’s offering to all the other guys? If you’d called the cops, she would have hit on them, too.”

“Whatever,” Bonner said dismissively. “The point is, you need to make some adjustments.
You
need to be on the bus—no one else.”

Jack did not want to be on that bus—he would rather be strung up naked between two light poles than get on that bus. So he argued with Bonner that his guys were the real trained bodyguards, that he was really along to coordinate the security effort.

Lucas wouldn’t hear of it.

“We hired
you
, man.
You
need to be there, and I think that the fee we are paying you buys us you on that bus. Audrey won’t feel safe with any other guy.”

Jack paused and squinted at Bonner. “Did she say that?”

“Look, dude, I know her better than anyone. Trust me. I know what I am saying.”

The Assclown had no clue what he was saying, but Jack was stuck. Without a word, he turned and strode away from Bonner to grab his gear and give Ted the good news that he’d be riding Audrey’s bus.

How in the
hell
had he ended up on this gig, anyway? What stupid brain spasm had he suffered that actually made him think he could endure this bullshit? Forget it—he was beginning to believe he would rather earn every penny for his flight school through his work with TA than this, even if it took him one hundred years to raise the dough he needed.

And it had only been a week. One
week
.

When he boarded the bus an hour later, Courtney was on hand to greet him, smiling broadly as she leaned over the stairs leading up to the interior, and in doing so, revealing her cleavage. “Hey, Handsome,” she crooned so loudly that Jack wondered if she’d started her happy hour, “I hear we’re going to be bedmates.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said as he entered, brushing past her when she refused to move to let him past.

But Courtney was cheerfully undeterred. “Let me show you where you’ll sleep,” she said, and led him through a small area that doubled as a kitchen and lounge, to a dark hallway that housed some coffin-like sleeping berths. Just the sort of accommodations every man dreamed of getting. Jack shoved his bag onto the top bunk, then turned around and walked back to the so-called lounge area, and sat down, cell phone in hand.

“What are you doing?” Courtney asked, taking a seat directly across from him and leaning forward again.

“Making a couple of calls,” he said, and shifted his gaze to the ground to avoid Courtney’s breasts.

For two hours, he avoided those breasts completely. He chatted with the representative from local security they’d hired for the Cleveland performance, which would present a different set of challenges as it was an outdoor venue. He checked in with the guys in L.A., too.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Cooper asked cheerfully.

“Different,” Jack said.

“The women? Or the job?” Cooper asked with a snort. But when Jack didn’t answer immediately—he was uncertain
how
to answer it—Cooper laughed. “Don’t tell me you’ve already gotten yourself into trouble.”

Jack frowned at Cooper’s laughter and quickly changed the subject. “Anything I need to know about?”

“Women, apparently.”

Jack closed his eyes. “About work, Coop.”

“Oh yeah. Remember Lindsey, the production assistant on
War of the Soccer Moms
?” he asked, referring to a film the Thrillseeker guys had worked on and a woman Jack had tried hard—and unsuccessfully—to date.

“Cooper,” he said wearily.

“I thought you might,” Cooper continued. “She got married over the weekend.”

Jack blinked.

“That young director everyone is talking about—Sam somebody. Anyway, apparently they met on a set and it was love at first sight.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Jack said. “What about work?”

Cooper laughed again. “Don’t let it get you down, pal. Someday, a woman will be able to see past all your obvious issues and phobias and—”

“
Cooper
,” Jack said again, only more forcefully.

“All right, all right,” Cooper said, and managed to get over his amusement, telling Jack about a new film that had cropped up on their radar screen—a remake of
The Jetsons
.

When Jack finally clicked off—and not before Cooper could get one more good-natured dig in—he was relieved to see that at least one of his strategies had worked. He’d been on the phone so long that Courtney had grown bored of him and had wandered to a different area—about two feet away—to look over Lucy’s shoulder as she flipped through some fashion magazine.

In addition, Fred, Audrey’s hairstylist and makeup artist, had rolled out of one of the coffins and had wandered into the lounge area, where he stood, yawning and scratching his bare belly. As Jack put his phone away, the two lovebirds decided to come out of isolation from the back bedroom.

Assclown came first. Jack was fascinated by his appearance—his hair was carefully messed up and sprayed into place. He was wearing a pair of jeans that rode low on his hips and made him look like a toothpick. The muscle-man tank did nothing to dispel that illusion. Jack had been in Hollywood a long time, had seen lots of guys who had paid a lot to be put together—but he’d never known anyone who looked like they’d paid so much to be put together.

Audrey followed behind, carrying a guitar. In stark contrast to the leech she called boyfriend, she looked perfectly natural and pretty damn good. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, her hair was knotted at her crown, and little corkscrew curls floated around her face. She was dressed in a pair of cut-off shorts, which, intentionally or not, flaunted a pair of the shapeliest legs he’d ever had the good fortune to view. She also wore a T-shirt that had the words GRUENE HALL, GRUENE, TEXAS curved around a drawing of an old dance hall.

As Bonner took the lone empty seat—no surprise there—Audrey looked around and realized the only seat left in the lounge was the one next to Jack. Her eyelids fluttered with a little panic; she shifted her gaze to Courtney, who was in another of the captain’s chairs, leaning over the arm to read the magazine with Lucy. Audrey opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again, and glanced at Jack from the corner of her eye.

He winked.

Audrey did not smile as she carefully took the seat next to him, taking great pains to sit on the very edge of the couch, her back ramrod straight and stiff, her guitar in her lap. Without speaking to him, she strummed a few chords. She seemed very self-conscious.

She paused in her strumming and adjusted a string, then struck another chord. Jack leaned back, slung one arm over the back of the couch behind her, and stretched his legs in front of him, crossing them at the ankles on a stool next to her.

Audrey paused and looked at his feet. Then she slowly turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder.

He lifted a questioning brow. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Who said you were stopping me?” And as if to prove it, she turned away, folded over the guitar, and began again to strum a melody.

She’d played a couple of stanzas when Bonner suddenly looked up from a stack of mail and peered at her, listening for a moment. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No—that’s too subtle.”

“What?” Audrey asked, sounding confused.

“The chords are too subtle,” Bonner said, swiveling around to face her. “You need it to
pop
,” he said, making a gesture like he was flinging something. “You want something strong and vibrant to form the skeleton of the song, not soft.” He sang a few da-da-
dums
to demonstrate.

From where he was sitting, Jack could see a bit of color bleed into Audrey’s cheeks. Her hand curled around the neck of the guitar. “But I like soft,” she said. “It’s what I do best. This is a song about a love gone cold. It’s not pop.”

“So?” Bonner said with the sensitivity of a bull. “That’s not what you are making the bucks to write and perform. Think
pop
, Audrey.”

“I do think
pop
, Lucas, but I like to write other stuff, too, and—”

“Why waste your time?” Bonner interjected as he turned back to the mail. “We’ve got enough on our plate without you trying to add any more to it.”

He focused on the mail again, effectively dismissing Audrey. Her neck turned redder, and she glanced at the group at the table—who had stopped reading the magazine and were watching what happened between Audrey and Lucas.