Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(20)
Author: Jennifer Echols

As he was closing the door behind him, she called, “Quentin, one more thing.”

He looked around the door at her.

“About the coke.”

He said without emotion, “I don’t do coke.”

“Seriously. You stay clean until after the concert.”

“I will.”

“Great.” She smiled at him, friendly, nonjudgmental.

He paused in the hall to collect himself before going downstairs, running both hands back through his hair. Besides the intense headache, he felt off balance, with every atom of his world turned upside down. Like when he got out of the ICU last month. But he also felt lucky that he hadn’t made love to her, so he wouldn’t get kicked out of the band.

And so he didn’t know what he was missing.

4

Yes, if you’d had gambling losses, you could have expensed them, but only if the gambling had led to consummation. See the employee handbook, section 2, paragraph 6, “Copulation with the Stars of New Country.”

And no, you should not have hinted to that nice coke addict that you might be pregnant. I don’t care what he did to deserve it or how it advanced your position in your battle of wits with him. You’re going to hell.

Wendy Mann

Senior Consultant

Stargazer Public Relations

It was difficult to close the e-mail on a cell phone really hard, but Sarah tried her best, giving the screen a jab with one long fingernail. Wendy was always funny and supportive right up until she wasn’t anymore. And somewhere under the sarcasm, she was almost always right.

What irked Sarah most, besides the haunting tingle when Quentin took her in his strong arms and comforted his supposed one-night stand, was the idea that she’d turned him off to her. He’d been content enough to toy with her on the bed. But by the time they’d finished with each other, he was more agreeable with the plan not to have sex than she would have liked.

There was no way she would get involved with a coke addict. It was for the best. But she didn’t want him to think so.

That was her job, though. She’d suspected before that he’d been the one who made the call for help to Manhattan Music. Her suspicion was stronger now. He’d been right to do it, too. She could definitely keep the players in this band playing. She might get herself heartbroken in the process, but not if she had no heart left.

To distract herself from her desire for Quentin and from Wendy’s opinion of her destination in the afterlife—with which she heartily agreed—she checked Quentin’s story by googling banjo and Cox on her phone. Several articles popped up on Ernest and Velma Cox, honky-tonk musicians during the 1950s who later became studio artists and joined the regular band at the Grand Ole Opry. From the black-and-white photos posted of the couple, playing their instruments with their mouths wide open, singing their hearts out, it was clear to Sarah that part of their “showmanship,” as Quentin called it, was dressing Velma up in a sequined leotard and fishnet stockings.

“Grandma!” she exclaimed.

There was also a story, with sketchy details because all the eyewitnesses remembered it differently, about Ernest and Velma shooting off a Civil War cannon to draw a crowd to their opening night at a bar in Eclectic, Alabama, and accidentally burning down the church next door.

Some of what Quentin had told her was true, then. The only question was, which part? In her eight years working for Stargazer Public Relations, she’d never had a celebrity tell her the truth when he promised her, “I’m not on cocaine.” If the subject of cocaine came up, the star was on it.

She studied Quentin’s bedroom in the daylight. What she was looking for besides dope, she wasn’t sure. She would know it when she saw it. She’d felt last night that something was off about the band. She’d persuaded Quentin to tell her some secrets, but there were more. He’d told her what he’d told her very carefully. This was disconcerting. She’d been able to read Nine Lives like a book. Right up until the last few weeks in Rio, which she hadn’t seen coming.

But there wasn’t much to find in Quentin’s room. As with the rest of the house, it looked like a rich bachelor had called an interior designer and said, “Furnish my house,” with no further instructions. Each piece of furniture was expensive and elegant and modern and black or brown or tan.

Feeling guilty, and assuring herself that she was just gathering information as part of her job, she opened every drawer in his room. Most of them were empty. A few contained clothes. She slid a hand down the sides and into the corners, searching for small vials or plastic bags of coke. Nothing.

The last drawer she opened was full of boxer shorts. She’d figured Quentin had worn his dog bone boxers because he was playing strip poker, but no. Here was an entire collection of joke boxers. Halloween boxers with ghosts and bats, football boxers, a pair covered in bottles of hot sauce. If he’d bought all these himself, it would be extremely odd. She wondered whether he had sisters who gave him funny underwear every birthday. She and Wendy had given quite a few joke neckties to Tom, their protégé at work.

It did make sense, Sarah decided. Quentin was fun-loving. Liked to wear funny boxers. Liked to do a little cocaine at parties, thought he could handle it, until one day it turned sinister on him.

Straightening, she noticed six chessboards with games in play were positioned on top of the dresser and armoire. Odd. She knew Quentin liked games, but he didn’t strike her as a chess man. He was talented, yes, but no intellectual. He was more of a checkers man, Chinese checkers at best. She was afraid that in chess, he’d forget which way the horse went. Otherwise, the room was empty of his signature.

She peeked into his closet. One suit and two shirts hung there, but the space was mostly filled with large, stacked boxes marked Q, likely because he was always on tour and hadn’t stayed home long enough to unpack in the two years since he’d bought the mansion.

The bathroom was tan marble, with nothing on the clean countertop. Nine Lives had kept his flask of vodka in the water-filled back of the toilet and his meth in a manicure kit in a bathroom drawer. So, again, Sarah forced herself to be nosy. She found nothing but Quentin’s bottles of pills that were not on her list of prescriptions stars used to sneak a high. She puzzled over the bottles . . . but of course he would have these on hand to bolster his cover story about asthma and allergies. This was how rich and famous addicts worked.

Though, if he was using, it was strange he hadn’t suggested to her last night that he pull out his secret stash for them to share.