Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(29)
Author: Jennifer Echols

This simply couldn’t be. Blond, muscle-bound Owen didn’t strike Sarah as perspicacious. His friends referred to him as dumbass.

But maybe he had been the mysterious caller to Manhattan Music, desperate for help in keeping Quentin with the band?

No. Owen was so into Erin that he valued his relationship with her more than the band. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started the affair with her. He wouldn’t have called Manhattan Music for help in keeping Quentin around. Sarah must have been mistaken.

As the piano stopped abruptly and Erin leaned forward with a pencil to mark a measure on the sheet music, Sarah knocked on the open door. “Planning to play a piano concerto with the symphony next?”

“Oh, no,” Erin said with her chipmunk giggle. She patted a soft upholstered chair next to the piano bench for Sarah. “The violin concerto didn’t work out too well.”

Sarah couldn’t believe hold-her-own Erin would stoop to this level of self-deprecation. “Everyone else seemed to think so,” she said as she sat down. “It made the entertainment news on TV.”

“Yeah, but Q got really mad about it,” Erin said sadly. “Q wants me to remember the difference between fiddle”—she placed her left hand on the piano bench—“and violin”—she put down her right hand—“and he says I’m a fiddle player. Q has to have his way. And that’s why we broke up.”

Sarah was searching for an in to explore this topic when Erin went on, “No, I’m just fooling around, trying to chill out. I spent the whole morning alone in the studio with Martin. Lately he’s so loopy. Exhausted from the tour, I guess. It’s nice to come back here to my pretty house and hide, and play an easy little Bach. Bach makes such good sense.”

“It is a pretty house.” Sarah smiled. “Quentin has better taste than I thought.”

“Oh, it came this way,” Erin said. “I figure the old man he bought his mansion from must have kept a mistress.”

Sarah nodded, carefully controlling her poker face. She would not give away to Erin how much the idea of Quentin keeping a mistress bothered her. “Why don’t you guys hang out here?” she asked. “This house is so much homier than the mansion.”

“The studio’s over there, and Q cooks. And like I say, I prefer to go over there and get what I need and retreat, you know? Martin and Quentin are high-strung. They make me tired.”

Despite the warm colors in the pretty house, and Erin’s big blue eyes and very sweet face, Sarah couldn’t shake the cold and sick feeling. She had the nagging suspicion that she and Erin would make terrific friends if they could just keep Quentin out of it.

Just as Sarah and Quentin would make terrific lovers if they could just keep Erin out of it.

But there it was. Rather than skirting the issue, maybe it would be best to face it head-on. Sarah said, “Listen, I’m sorry about all the public displays of affection with Quentin. You seem really happy with Owen, but I know you and Quentin broke up only recently.”

“Oh! Don’t worry about that,” Erin said, waving her hand and sounding sincere. “I’m used to it. He acted the same way with our manager.”

Sarah couldn’t feel any sicker and colder without needing a hot toddy of Pepto-Bismol. Maybe the problem was that Erin wasn’t jealous. She really believed Sarah was just another of Quentin’s dalliances, like the band’s former manager. If Erin thought Sarah and Quentin were getting serious, things might change. Sarah decided then that she and Quentin would get some extended time alone the next day.

Suddenly Quentin himself breezed in on a shady draft from the patio. His presence filled the room. He caught Sarah around the waist, lifted her off her feet, and ran outside with her, without giving her a chance to say good-bye to Erin.

“Let’s go do some shooting,” he said. “Yee-haw!”

Suddenly he stopped on the patio and put her down. “Sorry. I forgot you don’t like to play caveman.” He brushed some imaginary dust off her shoulder.

“I thought you were recording,” she scolded him.

“I was. We finished.”

“That was quick,” she said suspiciously.

“It doesn’t take long when you get it right the first time. Course, I’m talking about recording. Other things might take me all afternoon,” he informed her provocatively, wrapping his warm hand around her icy one.

As they crossed the flagstones, Sarah glanced back toward Erin’s house, Bach drifting out the open door again. She was the one who was jealous, not Erin. Quentin might have his coke, and Martin his heroin, and Owen his nineteenth-century Russian literature fetish, but they all were strong men ready to defend Erin in her stylish little castle. Nothing bad could happen to Erin. Unless one of her men did it to her.

Sarah had no one to defend her. Not while her friend Tom from Stargazer was in Moscow, convincing a Hollywood movie star to make a commercial for vodka rather than drink it all. Well, there was Wendy’s husband, Daniel, too. Wendy might talk Daniel into committing murder if Sarah really needed protection. But Daniel was the press secretary for a senator, and somehow Sarah didn’t think his murder conviction on her behalf would make for good political PR. Wendy might not forgive her.

Besides, Sarah couldn’t drag Wendy anywhere near Nine Lives. Quentin would help Sarah get her very own gun, and then she could defend herself. He swung her hand as they passed under the crepe myrtle trees buzzing with bees. She thawed a little in the sunshine.

That night, Quentin sipped his beer and tried to concentrate on peanut antigens and the cytokine response. So much had been discovered in the two years he’d been on tour. Now he was refreshing his memory with the most recent issues of Clinical Immunology and Allergy Today.

He hadn’t had trouble concentrating for the last few weeks. It was pleasant out here at night on the secluded screened porch, his Fortress of Solitude. The ceiling fan faked a breeze in the still dark, and tree frogs chanted in the forest. He hadn’t even had trouble concentrating last night, after he’d made Sarah come and then cooked jehangiri shorba.

Tonight he was having trouble. Maybe because he was looking forward to a definite date with Sarah tomorrow night. She’d whispered to him as she left this evening that they should go out alone tomorrow to give Erin the willies.

More likely it was the cold shoulder he’d gotten from Sarah that was bothering him now. He suspected she’d only come over in the afternoon because she wanted a gun. And he couldn’t convince her to stay after they returned from the firing range.