Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(38)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He said weakly, “She slapped me. She never slaps me. I mean, not for that.”

“Maybe she’s serious with Owen,” Sarah suggested.

Just what Quentin was afraid of.

Sarah went on, “Maybe she realizes you’ve reached an age where you can’t use each other as inflatable dolls anymore.”

“Are you saying I’m immature?”

Sarah shrugged. “Most people do want to settle down at some point, and you’re still sniffing coke and asking to see women’s br**sts. Maybe Owen looks more stable to her.”

“I don’t do coke,” Quentin said halfheartedly.

Frowning, Sarah looked deep into his eyes, like she might just believe him. But all she said was, “Maybe you should take a hint. We need to get more serious.”

Suddenly the turn of events seemed less dire to Quentin.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow,” Sarah said. “We’ll disappear again, this time when you have plans for recording, so Erin feels really inconvenienced. In fact, let’s go in the morning, so Martin is high and he jumps up and down on Erin’s last nerve.”

Quentin swirled the ice in his glass. This sounded to him like a terrific plan. Any plan involving disappearing with Sarah sounded terrific. But the band would be genuinely angry with him if he skipped out on a recording session. “What about the album?”

“To help the band stay together, it’s worth it. But you’ll have to refrain from goofing off another day. I want my album.”

A crash in the kitchen overwhelmed even the noise of the bar. “Time to go,” Quentin said, sliding his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll call my driver.”

“I’ll drive you,” Sarah offered.

Now there were shouts, and the kitchen doors burst open. Three of the cooks herded Martin in front of them, out the door of the bar.

By the time Quentin and Sarah reached the street, the Birmingham paparazzi had swooped down on them. A grizzled freelance photographer took color stills for the newspaper. Two teenage boys from the Alabama School of Fine Arts shot footage they sold to the local news stations. They were always hitting on the two black-clad college girls working on a senior project for their photography studio. Quentin had spent a couple of hours at a bar once with the art school girls, letting them take his picture, pretending to get drunk, and pretending not to be interested in the social commentary underlying their paparazzi project.

He winked at one of the girls and then, for the benefit of the cameras as well as his own satisfaction, kissed Sarah hard on the mouth. Or started to. A police siren wailed somewhere on the dark mountain. He jerked Martin away from the irate cooks and shoved him into the backseat of Sarah’s BMW amid the flash of cameras. Quentin hopped into the front passenger seat. With a squeal of tires, Sarah pulled away from the curb.

Quentin leaned over and whispered, “Erin would be so pissed if you came in the house with me.”

With a sidelong glance at him, Sarah nodded. Score!

He spent the ride home touching Sarah’s hand on the gearshift and watching her perfect br**sts heave in her plunging shirt. And, oh yeah, making small talk with a half-drunk Martin. Which didn’t stop him from fantasizing about what he would do to Sarah when he got her into his bedroom again. After all the kissing and flirting they’d done, he hadn’t even seen her bare br**sts. Something had to give.

But when they pulled into the driveway, Erin’s car was gone. Damn.

“Where’s Erin?” Sarah asked, sounding almost disappointed.

Quentin sighed. “I’ll bet she went home. Mostly she lives with her grandma in Irondale. Even if we’re working on an album, she leaves when she gets sick of us.”

“This late? Will she be back tonight?”

“Probably not,” Quentin said before he thought. Damn again! He should have waffled, and then maybe Sarah would have waited around to make Erin jealous, and ended up staying all night.

“Thanks for the ride, Sarah,” Martin said as he slid out of the backseat and closed the door.

Sarah turned to Quentin. “I think we’re still in good shape. We have tomorrow morning. And surely Martin and Owen will tell Erin they saw us together tonight.”

“Owen?” Quentin asked.

Owen sat on the tailgate of his truck in the garage, glowering at Quentin.

Quentin cursed.

“What’s the matter?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know,” Quentin said, stepping out of the car, “but I’ve got a feeling I’m about to find out.”

Owen didn’t let Quentin stand up straight before he lunged at him. He knocked Quentin into the fence beside the driveway and held him there with an undercut, then another. The last time they’d fought this hard was before Thailand. Quentin couldn’t get his breath.

Sarah and Martin were nearby, sitting on Sarah’s BMW. Sarah asked, “Are you sure they’ve practiced this fake fighting enough? Because that looks like it really hurts.”

“This isn’t fake,” Martin told her.

“I’ll say,” Quentin forced out as he finally mustered the strength to shove Owen away from him. Luckily, Owen lost his balance and smacked onto the pavement. Normally Quentin wouldn’t take advantage, but Owen had taken advantage of him first. He kicked Owen in the ribs. Not as hard as he could, but pretty damn hard.

“How do you get them to stop?” Sarah asked.

“They’ll stop soon,” Martin told her. “Q can’t go for too long at a stretch.”

“Ah, a little stamina problem,” Sarah said knowingly.

“What?” Quentin exclaimed, turning toward her.

But before he could demand clarification on exactly what Sarah and Martin meant, Owen yanked his leg out from under him. He hit the concrete flat on his back and lost his breath again.

Martin was telling Sarah, “You should know best.”

Quentin scrambled up. As Owen tried to stand, too, Quentin caught him with a left hook to the jaw, which usually made Owen call uncle. But this time it didn’t even slow him down. Quentin wasn’t sure what happened next, but he found himself upside down against the fence.

He rolled backward and slowly staggered up. “I’m thirty,” he groaned.

Martin called, “You’re only as old as you feel.”

“Then I’m eighty,” Quentin declared, looking around for Owen. Now that the headlights of Sarah’s BMW were off, it took him a moment to find Owen in the darkness. He was back in the garage, reaching into the payload of his pickup.