Liar's Moon (7 page)

He turned around at last. “It seems Blake knows you.” He paused, continuing a little dryly, “Jesse talked about you—quite frequently. But you don’t know Blake. Tracy Kuger, Blake Johnston. Blake, Miss Tracy Kuger, Uncle Jesse’s daughter.”

Blake stuck a hand out over his father’s shoulder, still watching her with unabashed and blunt curiosity. “How do you do, Tracy?” He said very politely and solemnly.

She discovered that she could talk after all, that she could give him a deep and natural smile.

“Very well, thank you, Blake. How are you?”

“Super! I missed my daddy, but we’re back together, and it’s really okay, you know, because I know that Jamie needed him.”

“Hey, Leif!” Tiger called out suddenly. “Leif, the press is tearing up the place back here. You want to take a minute and say something so we can get out of here.”

“Uh—yeah.”

Leif turned around, setting Blake down. He gazed up
at Tracy questioningly, then looked back to his son. “Will you stay with Tracy for just a minute and then I promise I’ll be right back?”

Blake nodded solemnly. Leif walked away. Tracy felt a little hand fit snugly into hers.

“I’m sorry about your daddy, Tracy. I loved Uncle Jesse a whole lot. But you mustn’t worry about him, you know. He went up to heaven to live with the angels, and my mother is there, too, so I’m sure he won’t be lonely.”

Tears pricked her eyes and Tracy decided that it was only because it had been a horribly traumatic day and a worse night. She knelt down beside Blake Johnston, smiling a little to note that he had a small and very stubborn cowlick in his hair—exactly the same as his father’s. While Leif was dark, Blake was a soft blond—but the cowlick was still the same.

“Thank you, Blake. I’m sorry about your mommy, too, and I’m very glad that she and my dad will be together.” He gave her a very encouraging grin and squeezed her hand. She squeezed his back, thinking what a nice, normal little child he was. He seemed to know that his father was famous—but he didn’t seem to think that he should be especially privileged because of it.

“Do you know my Aunt Liz?” he asked her.

Tracy shook her head. Blake dragged her over to where Tiger and Sam were talking to a tall brunette woman. She turned at Tracy’s approach, and Tracy saw another version of Leif’s deep gray eyes. Liz also resembled Leif in her coloring, her elegant height, and in her slow, charming smile.

“Tracy? I’m Liz. Glad to meet you at last.” She chuckled lightly. “How strange! Leif has been searching high and low for you over the last year—and here you are!” Tracy smiled weakly, startled to hear that Leif’s search
for her had been that intensive. She liked Liz instantly. She seemed to encompass all kinds of easy warmth and grace.

“It’s nice to meet you, Liz,” she said, extending a hand.

But then she had to stop to wonder if Liz knew anything about what had happened all those years ago, and if she did know, what did she think? Or was Tracy blowing it all out of proportion herself? Maybe no one would really think anything of it at all
…

“Ah, here comes Jamie! Show’s over!” Liz said.

Jamie came in off the stage, dripping wet with perspiration, grinning from ear to ear. He gave Tracy a sloppy kiss first, hugged Liz, then swept Blake off the floor, while effusively thanking Tiger and Sam for coming on stage with him. Blake giggled away, and then it seemed that everyone was talking at once.

“Jamie—go take a shower so we can get out of here!” Liz begged at last. “Oh—look. That man from the weekly has Leif over there. He does so hate interviews— but he looks calm. Jamie—go get changed, please. Then give him a few words, too, so we can go somewhere private!”

“Gotcha, Liz!” Jamie saluted her neatly, then started toward the dressing room. He turned back once.

“Tracy—was I great?”

He asked with such eager enthusiasm that she nodded.

“You were great, Jamie.”

He blew her a kiss. “So were you. Your songs are fabulous! And you sing like a lark. And—”

“Jamie, get out of here!”

Liz laughed happily behind Tracy, then linked arms with her. “Come on—let’s go save Leif.”

Saving Leif was the last thing Tracy had on her mind,
but with Liz hurrying her along, she had little choice but to keep up. They came upon Leif and the reporter against one of the outer walls just before the dressing rooms. Leif looked calm, but he was eyeing the man carefully, though his stance was casual. He answered each question slowly, taking his time, weighing his answers, while still appearing casual and idle about the whole thing.

“You actually disbanded two years ago, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

Leif shrugged, glancing at his sister and Tracy over the man’s head, arching a brow and grimacing. He turned his attention back to the eager reporter.

“Well, because we really started out as street musicians when we were kids. Tiger and Sam were a little bit older, Jesse was sixteen, I was fifteen. Two years ago we celebrated twenty-five years together, and we just decided it was time to call it quits.”

“What about the times that you split up before?”

Leif shook his head. “We never split up before.”

“Sure you did! All the rags had this thing going about some massive fight going on between you and Jesse—”

“The group didn’t split up. We held off recording for awhile.”

“What was the fight about? How did you two finally make it up? Was it over a woman?”

Tracy felt her cheeks bu
rn
, but not a muscle in Leif’s face twitched, nor did he glance Tracy’s way.

“Jesse and I had a little blowup, yeah. It was over a song. We solved it by keeping our distance for a while, that’s all.”

“What about before?”

“There was no ‘before.’ I was drafted into the service, but the group didn’t split up then. I wrote songs when I
could, and we carried on long distance, you might say. Obviously, we didn’t do any concerts then, but we were still a group. When I came home, we toured for a year, then we worked in the studio for a year. It was like that frequently.”

“Are you planning on forming a new band with Jamie Kuger? And what about Jesse’s daughter? We’ve never heard much about her before. Why? Who is she really?
Can you—”

Leif reached around the man for Tracy’s hand, pulling her next to him in a protective gesture. “Tracy—this is Mack Arnold. Mack—Tracy Kuger. The real Tracy Kuger.”

“Miss Kuger!” Mack offered her a fleshy hand. “What a pleasure! What have you been doing all your life!” He laughed at the scope of his own question. “It’s rumored that you write music and songs—under a bunch of pseudonyms. Is that true? How—”

“Mack! You’ve gotten to see the lady—let her breathe!” Leif jumped in. “She writes—and she keeps pseudonyms because she likes her privacy. So let her keep it, OK?”

Mack didn’t get any choice—Leif smoothly introduced h
is sister and his son, then
promised to send Jamie out to talk to him. Tracy was glad that he had defended her. Mack Arnold might well have ripped her to shreds in a matter of seconds. But she was still ready to kill Leif for pulling her on stage, and she didn’t feel any kinder toward him when he smoothly got them away from Mack and into Jamie’s dressing room. Her brother’s backup musicians were all there and Jamie dragged her around like an exotic prize. She understood—he was special to her, too—maybe more so since it had taken them so long to reach one another. She just didn’t like the thousand-and-one questions everyone asked her now that they knew she was Jesse’s other child.

Champagne flowed freely in the dressing room. Tracy sipped some idly, trying to steer questions away from herself and keep her comments on her brother’s performance. Naturally, people asked her where she had been, how and when she and Jamie had gotten together—and just how well she knew Leif, since it seemed they were all so comfortable together.

After all the years she had struggled so hard to maintain her anonymity, become totally independent—and nearly invisible! All her determination to stay out of the public eye was ruined. Here she was, dragged back into it all because Leif had fed her to the wolves!

The desire to throttle Leif rose in her again. She glanced his way through the crowd and saw that he was managing to carry on easy conversations. He laughed at something someone said, offered more champagne. She saw him give a pretty redhead a friendly kiss on the cheek just before the girl left. The kiss bothered her, and she was highly irritated with herself for the stab of jealousy she felt. But he looked good that night—exceptionally good. Tall and lean, both relaxed and elegant, and somehow not quite approachable—an intriguing man with a casual manner, yet whose hard eyes veiled a thousand secrets.

At long last, Jamie disappeared with his group in tow. Blake was happily playing at the mirror with Jamie’s brushes, Leif idly stretched and rubbed the back of his neck, and Liz asked Tracy if she would like more champagne.

“I’m really a little sick of champagne,” she murmured.

“Poor baby!” Leif laughed. “Too much Dom Perignon, huh?”

“Leif, be nice!” Liz chastised. “And tell me—what are we going to do? With Blake and me—I mean. I told you, didn’t I, that I couldn’t get hotel reservations? The place is full—with groupies trying to get close to Jamie, I think!”

“Blake can sleep in with me. And Jamie can, too. Then you can have the other bedroom, Liz. Oh, wait—that’s not necessary at all. Tracy—you wouldn’t mind giving Liz your extra bedroom, would you?”

“No, not at all,” Tracy murmured, but she did. She felt as if she were being sucked into a whirlpool. She hadn’t wanted to see Leif, she hadn’t wanted to go to Connecticut, and she certainly hadn’t wanted to go on stage—but she had done it all. She was falling deeper and deeper into a vortex of the past, and it was frightening.

And to make it all much worse, Leif was staring at her again. Gray eyes charcoal and smoke, probing, somehow frightening. What was it that he was looking for when it seemed that his eyes burned into her soul, stripped her, ran her ragged, and then raked so tensely over her once again.

She lowered her head to avoid his gaze. Blake started to talk to Leif about his latest schoolwork, and Tracy felt herself shivering.

Had Leif ever told anyone about the fiasco between them? No one seemed to know. He had forced her to tell Jamie—but he had defended her smoothly before Mack Arnold’s barrage of questions.

Tracy could just imagine the truth in the paper! That he and Jesse had fought over Jesse’s daughter. Because Jesse’s daughter had been piqued at her fathe
r for forgetting her face…

Tiger stuck his head into the dressing room suddenly,
grinning and offering Liz a ride back to the hotel. “We’ve still got a room reserved for dinner?” he asked Leif.

“Yes. Did you get a room okay?”

“Sure—I planned ahead. Liz?”

“Yes, I’d better get back with Blake. It’s getting very late for him.”

Tracy swirled around to Liz. “I can go back with Blake, Liz! You’re welcome to stay here and take your time—”

“Oh, no, no!” Liz protested. “This was Jamie’s big day —all of them in a group, but very especially you. Blake— come on, young man. We’ll get to ride in Tiger’s sports car!”

Blake hadn’t appeared pleased about leaving his father until Liz mentioned Tiger’s car, then his eyes lit up. He gave Leif a massive hug but a quick kiss and slipped his hand into his aunt’s to leave. At the door he paused.

“Bye, Tracy.”

“Bye, Blake.”

The door closed behind them and Tracy was alone with Leif once again. He didn’t say anything; he just paced around, a bit like a bored panther on the prowl. Tracy stared at him for several seconds, her tension brewing, since it seemed the room had grown much much smaller with just the two of them in it.

“You’ve just wrecked my life, you know,” she told him.

He started, turning to her. “I beg your pardon?”

“I didn’t want to go out on that stage.”

He shrugged. “You’re rather dramatic, I’d say. One appearance can’t wreck your life.” He leaned against the dressing table, staring at her as he crossed his arms over his chest in a dry manner. “You did all right out there.
You’ve done your father’s things before—with your father, I imagine.”

“That’s different—”

“Tracy, you loved him, but you’re down on him. Being out there was the only way for you to understand him."

She shook her head vehemently. “No, Leif. I’ll admit —it is a power trip. All those people screaming. But it’s no excuse for a man to live with a total lack of consideration—”

“You loved him anyway.”

“Yes! But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t despise his life-style. He hurt people, Leif. He—oh, never mind! I don’t have to explain this to you. And thanks to you, I have lost my privacy, my secrecy! I didn’t want to go out there—and I damn well don’t want to go to Connecticut! I haven’t done anything that I wanted to do since you walked back into my life. Damn you, Leif! I’m not going to go to Connecticut. I’m not going to be manipulated any further.”