American Diva (29 page)

“This is fabulous, Jack!” Audrey said.

He had worried that she would be disappointed—it was hardly the sort of accommodations she was accustomed to—but she seemed genuinely thrilled to be here.

“Can we swim? The lake looks so inviting. When we were kids, before Gene and Leanne began to hate each other,” she said with a laugh, “we would go to the Cliffs.”

“Know it well,” he said. “My folks bought this lot when we were little. We always liked it because it’s away from the tourist spots and is a little more private.”

“Let’s swim—oh, but I don’t have anything to swim in!”

“Let me see what I can do,” he said, and walked into the back, where the bedrooms were. He riffled through a dresser and produced one of his sisters’ old swimsuits, which was well worn, but serviceable. Audrey laughed when he handed it to her—it was green with big white polka dots. “How stylish,” she said with a grin.

But when she appeared a few minutes later, wearing the suit and one of his old shirts as a cover-up, Jack was fairly certain that suit had never looked so good.

“It’s a little small,” she said.

He let his gaze slowly sweep the length of her. “I guess that depends on your perspective.”

Audrey laughed and gave him a sexy smile as she brushed past him and opened the sliding glass doors. “Are you coming?” she asked him over her shoulder.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’ll meet you at the lake.”

When he met her there a few minutes later, he was wearing some old shorts and flip-flops and was carrying a small cooler in one hand, an inner tube in the other. Audrey was already in the water, paddling around. He stood on the boat dock, watching her a moment, his thoughts in places they shouldn’t have been—on her body. Inside her body, moving long and slow inside her body. What could he say? The woman was sexy to begin with, but awe-inspiring as she floated on her back.

“What’s that?” she called up to him.

With a grin, he fit the cooler into the small tube, then got on his knees. “Come and get it,” he said, and handed it to her.

In the water, Audrey opened the top of the cooler and laughed as she withdrew a beer. “Perfect!”

“Not yet,” he said, and walked back to the little shack they kept on the boat dock. He turned the combination lock until it clicked open, then reached inside for two tractor-trailer inner tubes. He rolled them back across the dock.

“Oh, gimme!” Audrey cried, waving a hand. Jack rolled one off the dock and watched her swim to catch it. The other, he swung out with one arm at the same moment he jumped, landing perfectly within it. Audrey grabbed his foot with one hand and the cooler in the other and tossed him a beer.

Jack tethered Audrey and the cooler to his tube, and they spent the afternoon bobbing in the wake of passing motorboats as the rest of the world floated away from them. They drank beer, waved at passing skiers, and lied to each other about the heights from which they had jumped at the Cliffs when they were kids.

Audrey told Jack how she and Allen had commandeered a small outboard motorboat one year and had puttered across the lake, only to run out of gas. It was night before anyone found them, and she laughed when she told how much trouble they had been in. “Dad whipped Allen,” she said. “But Mom saved me and told him she was going to punish me with kitchen duty the rest of the trip. I think I did it once,” she said, laughing. “Allen never forgave me.”

Jack told Audrey about the year he and two of his partners, Eli and Cooper, graduated from high school and had come up here, built a catapult on the dock, and used it to shoot cantaloupes from Jack’s father’s garden at passing boats until the lake patrol had come and taken their catapult away.

They laughed together like two people from the same neck of the woods who spoke each other’s language. Their chatter was comfortable, their friendship easy. And it didn’t hurt that Audrey was so damn good-looking. Every time Jack looked at her, he felt something stir inside him, something that wanted desperately to be inside her. But he felt something else just as strong—a genuine, full-fledged attachment.

Who would have thought he could feel that for the woman who, just a few short weeks ago, he thought was the world’s biggest diva?

When the sun began to creep behind the house in preparation for its descent, Jack rowed them to the steps leading up to the dock. He went first, taking the cooler up with him. On his second trip, he managed the tubes. And on his third trip, he laughingly hung a slightly inebriated Audrey over his shoulder and climbed up.

She laughed when he put her down on the deck, and wrapped her hands around his biceps. “Dude,” she said, squinting up at him, “you’re so
strong
.” She caressed his arm for a moment. Jack was about to caress her back, but then she said, “I am starving.”

“Great,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulders. “Chef Jack showed up to cook for us.”

Inside, Jack showered first, donning another pair of shorts and an old camp shirt that belonged to Parker. “Your turn,” he said when he came out of the bathroom. “Turn the knob toward cold to get hot.”

She blinked up at him.

“Plumbing job gone bad,” he said. “Just do the opposite of what it says.”

While Audrey showered, Jack checked on the steaks he had taken out of the deep freeze and left on the deck to thaw. In the storage room, he found a couple of bottles of cheap wine. With the fresh green beans and squash he’d picked up at the roadside market, there was enough to make a decent meal.

By the time Audrey emerged from the shower, he had snapped the beans and cut up the squash. He glanced up as she walked into the living room, wearing a pale blue slip of a sundress that shone against her skin. Her blond hair, still wet, curled around her face. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but she didn’t need to—her eyes were large and sparkling. He couldn’t remember a time he’d ever seen her look so totally relaxed . . . or sexier.

She paused at the table that held the flat-screen TV and the various framed pictures there. “Oh wow,” she said, picking one up. “Is that you?”

Jack squinted at it—it was a picture of him at the age of twelve or thirteen, a skinny thing in short bathing trunks and with his hair sticking up in several directions. Standing next to him was his sister Paige, who, at that age, had been in her strike-a-pose phase, and Parker, still a little runt. “Yep. That’s my brother Parker and my sister Paige. My other sister, Janet, must have been behind the camera.”

“It looks like you have a nice family,” she said, picking up a picture of his folks.

“I do,” he said. “They’re great people.”

“Must be nice,” she muttered as she put the picture down and wandered into the kitchen. “Can I help? It’s been ages since I did anything in a kitchen.”

“Sure. You can open the wine.”

Audrey picked up the bottle and laughed, then unscrewed the top.

“Yeah, that’s the Price family all right—only the best from the discount aisle for us.”

Still grinning, Audrey poured the wine. She held it up to her nose, then to Jack’s as he put the vegetables into a skillet to be sautéed. “It’s good!”

He didn’t know about that, but he was more than willing to drink it.

Audrey poured him a glass, then sidled around the bar and sat opposite him, sipping her wine as she watched him cook. “I have to thank you for today, Jack,” she said with a soft smile. “I can’t remember the last time I was so relaxed.”

“Me either,” he said, and grinned when she flicked the screw-off wine top at him. “I was thinking of you when I was showering.” When Jack lifted a very curious brow, she giggled. “I
mean
, I was thinking that you . . . you were really cool today. My family isn’t easy to deal with.”

His gaze absently dipped to her breasts. “It was no big deal, sweet cheeks. Everyone’s got a few whackos in their family.”

“Really? Do you?”

He lifted his gaze to her glittering green eyes and realized he couldn’t lie to her. “No,” he said with a sigh. “We’re disgustingly normal.”

“I noticed,” she said, nodding. “Pictures of the entire family, everyone smiling. You look really close, all of you.”

“We are,” he said.

“I would kill for that. I can’t tell you how many times in the last two or three years, since I started getting so famous, that I just wished I had someone to talk to. Someone who really knew me and could advise me what to
do
, someone whose opinion I could trust implicity. That’s what is hard about this job—I don’t know what to do half the time. Do I endorse a line of jeans or not? Should I make a big deal over the cover art they came up with for my next release because I hate it? Do I go pop, or stay alternative?”

Jack knew what she meant. When Parker had moved into the major leagues of baseball, he’d called Jack many times for advice on how to handle various aspects of his fame, and his brother’s fame was nothing compared to Audrey’s.

“I feel like I am swimming blind sometimes,” she said. “Even Lucas . . . sometimes I don’t know if he has any better idea than I do.” She laughed and shook her head. “Do you know that once we handed over fifteen hundred dollars to a guy who promised us he’d record an album with me? No contract, nothing but this guy’s word. Of course he skipped town with our money. God, we were stupid.”

He preferred not to think of the prick Lucas, and said blithely, “At least you won’t make that mistake again.” He picked up the platter of steaks. “I’m going to throw these on the pit,” he said, and walked out onto the deck.

Audrey followed him and stood beside him as he placed the steaks on the grill.

“You’re lucky,” she said thoughtfully, her gaze on the steaks. “You’re lucky just knowing you can trust your family. You’re lucky you don’t have to worry about them making up something about you to make a quick buck, or to tell the media your darkest secrets.”

She looked away, out over the lake. “That’s the hardest part about this fame business, knowing who you can trust.”

“You can trust me, sweet cheeks.”

She turned around, a smile on her face, her eyes sparkling. “Oh yeah, I
know
,” she said playfully. “You made that perfectly clear from the get-go—not interested in the drama.”

“That’s right,” he said as he flipped a steak. “Put down the stiletto and move away.”

Audrey tossed her head back and laughed, giving Jack a glimpse of the young woman she might have been had she not been thrust so hard and fast into the spotlight. She looked happy and free, full of life and youthful beauty. Her eyes were glittering, the laugh lines around them telling of her personality.

Jesus, he wanted to kiss her, to make love to her. He forced his attention back to the steaks and said, “Still hungry?”

“
Famished
.”

They dined on the deck as the sun sank on the horizon. They polished off one bottle of wine and laughed as Jack unscrewed the top of the second. When they had finished the meal and put the dishes in the sink, they stood out on the deck, illuminated with a strand of Christmas lights.

“I could live out here, you know?” Audrey said wistfully.

“Nah,” Jack said. “It’s too remote. You’d be lonely.”

“What’s new? I’m always lonely.”

Jack looked at her. “How can you be lonely?” he asked. “You’re surrounded by people twenty-four/seven.”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense. But honestly? I never felt lonelier in my life.”

He wanted to take her in his arms and promise her she’d never be lonely. He wanted to kiss that look from her face. But Audrey’s cell phone rang. They both looked at the glass doors. “Don’t answer it,” he said.

She hesitated, but then shook her head. “It might be Allen.”

It
wasn’t Allen; it was Lucas. “Where are you?” he demanded. “I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

“You have?” she said, and glanced over her shoulder as Jack walked into the house. “I guess I didn’t hear it.”

“Your mother says you left today, said you had to get back.”

Audrey’s head began to swim from the wine and the sun and the niggling guilt at having such a lovely time today. “Oh yeah. Yes, I told her that,” she said, and put a hand to her temple. “But I just said that to get out of there because she was driving me nuts.”

“Then where are you?” Lucas asked, his voice full of suspicion.

“At Dad’s,” she said, and turned away from Jack’s gaze.

Lucas didn’t speak for a moment. “You’re at Gene’s?” he said, his voice less accusatory.

“Yep. With him and his new girlfriend. She’s younger than I am.”

“Oh hell,” Lucas said. “So where is Muscle Man?”

“Ahh . . .” Audrey squeezed her eyes shut. “Ah . . . not sure. He’s around somewhere. I don’t know.”

That seemed to satisfy Lucas. “I needed to talk to you,” he said, moving on without asking about Allen or Gail, or her, for that matter. “I have agreed to add a few tour dates—”