Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(28)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“The deal is off!” she told his very nice butt. “I’ll consult you about doing late-night talk shows. But if you won’t let me bribe your way out of trouble, I can’t do my job!”

“Let me explain something to you,” Quentin huffed, still catching his breath. “I work hard to plant stories. We’ve got to give the newspaper material for the Cheatin’ Hearts Death Watch. When the newswire picks it up, it can make every newspaper in the country, all for free. But if we don’t give them anything to gab about, they bump us and fill that bottom corner of page C1 with a recap of last night’s reality shows. You think I want you to erase a story I didn’t even have to work on?”

“But you’re trying to get Erin back!” Sarah reminded him, her voice sounding hollow now that they’d entered the garage. “She’ll see your fight with Martin in the newspaper and think you were coming on to Rachel!”

“No she won’t. She knows I wouldn’t do that to Martin and Rachel.” He opened the door and carried Sarah into the kitchen.

Sarah wasn’t following his logic. Erin would know his intentions were honorable, after all Erin and Quentin’s nasty breakups in the past? Sarah was losing her battle of wits with him because she couldn’t even see the battlefield. “Put me down,” she said suddenly. “I don’t like it when you pick me up and toss me around.”

Effortlessly he flipped her off his shoulder and set her lightly on the marble floor. “You don’t?”

“No. It makes me feel like I’m out of control.” Which she was.

“I could have sworn you liked it. Is it cold in here to you?” He bent to peer at the thermostat on the wall again. “I turned this up already, didn’t I?” He faced her. “You think I have the hots for Rachel ?” he asked incredulously.

“No . . . ” Sarah slipped her feet back into her high heels. “But Martin seemed pretty convinced of it when he ran down there and hauled you out of the car.”

“Martin’s on heroin,” Quentin said dismissively. “He hasn’t seen Rachel all week, because she won’t come over here while he’s using. I had a devil of a time getting her to show up today. That’s what I was talking to her about. I tried to convince her to come all the way up to the house, make Martin win her back, make him realize what matters.”

“Properly executed, that’s called an intervention,” Sarah informed him acidly.

“I told you.” Quentin’s voice rose for the first time. “Erin and Owen will kick him out of the band. And the band and Rachel are all that’s keeping Martin on this earth right now.”

Sarah didn’t ask again why Quentin hadn’t gotten kicked out of the band for using coke, because she knew the answer. Quentin was different. Quentin could get away with anything. That was part of his problem.

The door from the garage into the kitchen slammed. Quentin went on in the same loud tone, “Anyway, I’m glad Martin and I put on a good show for the cameras. But he’s not really mad. Are you, Martin?”

Martin, glasses even further askew than usual, indicated that he was, in fact, angry with Quentin and Rachel for sneaking around and plotting behind his back. He directed a stream of obscenities toward Quentin that would have made Nine Lives’ driver blush. Then he stomped down the stairs to the control room.

“I’d better go record your album,” Quentin told Sarah. “Please tell me you’re not really mad.”

Sarah folded her arms against the cold. “Are we still on?”

“Of course we’re still on! I never meant—”

She threw her billfold at her bag on the counter. “Where’s Erin?”

He jerked his thumb toward the guesthouse. When Sarah stepped through the door to the patio outside, he leaned through the doorway and called after her, “Why? What are you doing?”

“Going fishing.”

“I haven’t restocked the pool in a while,” he said uneasily.

Sarah heard another barrage of curses from Martin drift up the stairs. Quentin closed the door and disappeared from the window.

For the first time, she walked around the pool at a leisurely pace. Cool was a relative term in the Alabama summer, but at least there was some relief today from the previously unrelenting heat: a more gentle sun, lower humidity, a breeze meandering under the enormous oaks.

She paused at the edge of the patio and looked toward the back of the mansion. She’d seen the inside of only six or seven rooms, but the house was vast, way more square footage than Quentin needed. She supposed he’d bought it for the basement that he’d converted into a studio, the security gate of questionable effectiveness, the guesthouse, the pool, and the view through the trees of the Birmingham skyline in the valley far below.

The mansion towered above her and fell away below her. The steep bank was planted with white crepe myrtles buzzing with bees. A screened porch protruded off the lowest story. She took a step closer and made out a magazine folded open on a lounge chair, a coffee cup on a side table, and the glint of Quentin’s glasses.

Erin intruded, as always. The plink of a piano recording began to cascade from her guesthouse, across the patio. As Sarah walked nearer, she noted that all the doors and windows were thrown open to the pool, and she recognized the first movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto in F Major.

She nearly tripped on the flagstones with a rush of déjà vu. Her father had loved Bach, and her mother sometimes opened all the windows for a few hours on a summer morning, replacing the air-conditioning with the breeze off Mobile Bay—an act that bespoke money above any other, because her parents’ ancestral antebellum house was hard to cool. Sarah would return from a run to hear a piano piece trickling out the windows just like this, alternately whispering and inaudible under the breeze in the trees.

Pausing in the open doorway to the guesthouse, she saw Erin with her back turned, playing a grand piano expertly in a tight tank top and Daisy Dukes, barefoot.

And Owen across the colorful, stylishly furnished room, sitting on a flight of stairs, hidden from Erin by the angle of the wall. When he saw Sarah, he glared at her for a moment, then disappeared upstairs.

This shook Sarah. Something was wrong. Owen didn’t want Erin to catch him listening to her play. As if he wasn’t supposed to be in love with her.

And the look he’d shot Sarah was pure hatred. He knew she was trying to get Erin back together with Quentin.