Playing Dirty (9 page)

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 cock 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.

She whispered against his lips, “What about Martin?”

He stopped stock-still on top of her for several seconds, then kissed her cheek, close to her ear. “I’m calling your bluff,” he murmured. “What
about
Martin?”

“What is he doing? Heroin?”

Quentin rolled off Sarah and pressed his hand to his temple so his eyeball didn’t fall out. He had one mother of a headache, which had gotten worse each of the many times in the past half hour that Sarah had threatened to ruin his life. It had gotten better each time he put his hands on her.

He’d almost kicked her out of the house after she told him they did it, and then told him they didn’t. That was coldhearted of her. But it was hard to stay too mad at her when he
had
been laying the hick act on thick. And he didn’t feel the least bit guilty about getting as close to doing her as she’d let him without actually doing her.

Funny to think he’d gone into the bathroom to take out his sticky contacts and put on his glasses so he could see the woman he might be having a child with. He’d been terrified that she was an ugly chick he’d just laid because he was drunk. He’d never had a one-night stand before, but he’d heard stories.

Well, as far as he was concerned, the one-night
stand with an ugly chick might be an urban myth. The night before, she’d seemed unreal, like an impossibly sexy comic book villainess from another universe. This morning, she was still a gorgeous pink-haired girl, only real, and warm, and barefoot in his bed.

And with superhuman powers of perception. He wondered what could have given Martin away. Maybe the long-sleeved shirt—it had been eighty-five degrees last night. He should talk Martin into linen. No, that would be enabling. But wasn’t that better than—

“Do you want me to get you some painkillers?” Sarah whispered. She sounded genuinely concerned.

“I already had some.” He looked sideways at her. “Please don’t tell Erin and Owen about Martin. They’ll kick him out of the band. We have a rule about that. No drugs.”

“Really. Then why don’t they kick
you
out?”

“Because I’m not a cokehead.” Ironic that having asthma had lost them a potential contract two years ago, whereas his fake drug use had made them famous. And now that the band was established, he was willing to admit he had asthma, yet he was in trouble with her for using drugs.

She clearly didn’t believe him, but that wasn’t what concerned her now. Her dark eyes stared off. He could tell she was doing the algebra in her head. Cheatin’ Hearts with Martin on heroin? Or Cheatin’ Hearts without Martin? Which would make the record company more money?

She said, “Maybe getting kicked out would help Martin.”

Like you care
, Quentin thought, but it was important not to let her see how much he hated her. Or the record company that had sent her, at least. He rolled on his side and propped his head on one hand so he could look at her and hold his eyeball in his skull at the same time. With his other hand, he reached over and traced around her belly button where her shirt had fallen away. She jumped at first, then relaxed against his fingers.

“I’ve threatened Martin,” he told her. “He promised me he’d clean up while we’re in Birmingham, before the next tour. It’s gotten worse instead. He has a steady dealer in town. But if I told Erin and Owen and we kicked him out, that wouldn’t help
him
. He’d get depressed and use more. Believe me, I’ve given this a lot of thought. Martin had a girlfriend—”

“Rachel,” Sarah said.

“Yeah,” Quentin acknowledged, “but he lost her because of the drugs. There are only three things left he cares about in life.” He tapped his thumb. “Music.” He tapped his pointer finger. “The band.” He tapped his middle finger. “Heroin. This isn’t the first time Martin’s gone off the deep end. I made drug use against band rules for a reason. At first it was the only way I would stay in the band with him. Now it’s the only way Erin and Owen will stay. If they find out he’s been using, they will
shit
. We’ll have to kick him out
of the band, and what’s he got left?” Quentin put his thumb and pointer finger down.

Sarah stared at his extended middle finger, which represented heroin. Suddenly he realized he was shooting her the bird. He drew his hand back, but she caught it and held it in both her hands. Her brows knitted as she watched him. “I can tell Martin means a lot to you.”

“Well, we’ve been friends since—”

He stopped himself before he said that they’d been assigned as dorm roommates when Quentin was a freshman in college and Martin was a sophomore. Or that they’d shared a tiny apartment on Birmingham’s Southside when Martin was earning his master’s in nursing and Quentin was starting work as a respiratory therapist. The record company thought Quentin was an uneducated hick. He sure wasn’t going to show her his hand now.

“—since before the band got together,” he finished. He smoothed his hand under her shirt. She didn’t back away, so he cupped her breast and flicked his thumb back and forth across her nipple. She only parted her lips and breathed more deeply.

“Listen,” he whispered, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the record company about
any
of this. But I guess that’s too much to ask. And I don’t suppose there’s anything I could do to persuade you.” If she took him up on this proposition, he was going to be in trouble, since he had no intention of breaking Rule Three now that he was sober. But he was pretty sure she was playing him, after that pregnancy threat.

“It’s sweet of you to offer.” She shifted so that her breast edged away from his hand.

“I wouldn’t take it as a hardship. I’m feeling real close to you right now. Five minutes ago, I thought you might be having my baby.” He slid his hand back down to her flat belly to drive home his point.

Her face fell. “I’m truly sorry. Like I said, I was just trying to give you a wake-up call. As you woke up.”

“Well, tit for tat. Except that your tit
was
a damn sight bigger than my tat.” He chuckled. “I’m sorry, Susan. That sounds vulgar, doesn’t it?”

If her face had fallen before, now it was utterly flattened. Her brown eyes wouldn’t meet his eyes. He could see only her long, dark lashes. She pushed his hand off her belly and corrected him. “Sarah.”

“Right, sorry again. Sarah.” He hadn’t expected her to react quite this way. He’d wanted to put her in her place, not crush her. He reached out to the scar under her chin.