Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(36)
Author: Jennifer Echols

She knew from experience that if you grew up in a small town in Alabama, you had a car. If you were of driving age, you had a car. If you were poor and lived in the projects, you had a car. If you had to sell one of your kidneys to get it, you had a car. There just wasn’t any public transportation to speak of. You had to have a car. Especially if you were a lusty teenage boy.

It made no sense that Quentin, thirtyish, didn’t have a license. She would get to the bottom of this. She began to plan.

Quentin interrupted her thoughts. “Your mama’s nice.”

“You have got to be joking.”

“Nope. Our manager’s mama—wow, what a piece of work. The key is, could you stand to spend Christmas with her without staying drunk the whole time? And I think your mama passes that test.”

“You’d like to spend Christmas with my mom?”

“Yeah, I bet it would be nice,” he said. “I bet she lives in an old house, and everything is all decorated and fixed. I bet the house is big enough that you can kind of get lost in it if you want to be by yourself. And then, when you’re ready to go downstairs, I bet there’s lots of bridge.”

Sarah laughed, because he was right.

He went on, “I bet it gets to be a problem that there’s three people instead of four, or seven people instead of eight, and you have to round up somebody to play bridge with you. And it’s always somebody that doesn’t fit in, like the next door neighbor’s addled aunt Emmy.”

Sarah was cracking up. “No, it’s my mother’s gardener’s brother-in-law. When my mother can’t find a partner for the bridge club in Fairhope, she pays him to play with her, because otherwise he won’t go.”

“Exactly,” Quentin said triumphantly. “And I bet your mama isn’t much of a cook because she’d rather play bridge, but she knows all the best caterers, so the food is always great. And then, this is Fairhope, so when you get tired of food and bridge and relatives, you can go sit in the park and look out over Mobile Bay.”

Sarah glanced at him, but she couldn’t see his face in the shadows between streetlights. “How do you know all that?”

“I’ve been to Fairhope,” he said. “When the band started out, we used to work all week and play gigs at every honky-tonk in the Southeast on the weekends.”

Sarah said, “I meant about my mother.”

“She’s a lot like you.”

Which means you know all about me, Sarah thought. And he had known her four days.

“Seems like you and your mama don’t get along great, though,” he said. “You’re trying to work something out. And it isn’t bridge.”

“My dad played peacemaker.” Sarah sighed. “Or distracted us from our arguments. It’s hard for us to relate to each other without Dad standing between us.”

“He was a real funny guy?”

“Yeah.” Sarah smiled as she parked the BMW beside Erin’s Corvette. She left the motor running.

Before she could prepare herself for this, Quentin pulled her across the seat and into his lap. She demurred, pushing halfheartedly against his chest. He quickly pinioned both her wrists behind her back with one of his big hands.

The kiss was a tranquilizer. Any fight she’d had left in her escaped suddenly, and she opened her mouth for his.

Then she felt his thumb on her scar.

“Don’t!” she cried, jerking her hands free, backing up against the car door.

“Does it still hurt?” His low voice vibrated through her.

The house floodlights were off. She couldn’t see his face clearly in the darkness.

He asked, “Did you go to the doctor when it happened?”

She didn’t even process the question. She was busy thinking Why did he have to do that? Her body still wanted him.

“Let me look at it,” he said.

“No!” she said. “Get out.”

“I want to get close to you.”

“I don’t,” she insisted. This was a lie. “I do,” she admitted, “but there’s this thing between us.” The thing’s name was Erin.

He laughed. “I liked it better two nights ago, when there was a thing between us and I made you come anyway.”

She turned forward, gripping the steering wheel. “Thanks for putting up with bridge and all.”

She could feel his eyes on her, watching her, waiting for her to say something else.

Finally he reasoned, “We’re adults. We can talk this out. This is all real high school.”

“If it were high school, you’d be driving.”

He slid his big frame out of the car and slammed the door.

She drove as fast as she could down the driveway, away from his touch on her chin.

7

Quentin stood in the driveway, watching the retreating taillights of Sarah’s BMW, considering her scar. At registration for the bridge tournament, she’d quickly called dibs on the north position. When her mother sat down at the table with them, he’d realized why: her mother played west. Sarah’s scar faced away from her mother.

But Sarah’s mother didn’t miss a thing. When he’d walked with her to the teller machine, she’d said with a hard grin, “You’re made, mister.”

“Ma’am?” It was all he could do to keep from laughing while the elegant pentagenarian raised one eyebrow at him just like Sarah, calling his bluff. She suspected he was putting on the hick act. But he didn’t laugh. If she really made him, that would be a serious problem. Unless she kept it from Sarah. It seemed that she and Sarah didn’t communicate.

She pulled her teller card and the cash from the machine and tucked them in her purse, then turned back to him with her arms folded. “How did she get that mark on her chin?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. She had it when I met her.”

Sarah’s mother raised that eyebrow again as she glared at him. “You look after her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he’d promised. But he couldn’t keep that promise if Sarah wouldn’t let him.

It was so frustrating. He walked through the garage to his house, closed the door behind him, and was about to bang his head when Owen bounded up the stairs from the studio, looking alarmed.

Owen saw Quentin and sighed with relief. “I thought you were Sarah.”

“What if it had been Sarah?” Quentin asked, walking into the next room, where the TV was tuned to an orchestra performance. “When we’re not watching TV, we need to keep it on NASCAR.”