Playing Dirty (Stargazer #2)(60)
Author: Jennifer Echols

What she’d said to him the day she convinced him to drive was dead-on. He played his friends like chess pieces, and he knew it. The solution, she’d said, was to develop relationships outside the band. Well, she was his solution. But he’d put his own solution out of reach by writing Rule Three.

Suppressing the insistent Oh no, oh no in his head, he tried to work out a logical plan of action. The others would know when he left the tour to make a booty call in New York. He had to tell them. And leave the band.

He couldn’t ask Sarah to quit her job, because her job was part of what made her alive. He suspected that his job did the same for him. He knew the band made him happy, kept him buoyant, got him through the day.

It did the same for Martin, and he couldn’t abandon Martin. In his current state, without the band, Martin would do himself in.

Quentin wouldn’t. If he didn’t have the band, he could beg the medical school to let him in two years after he’d been admitted. In fact, since Thailand, the need to return to his medical career had been gnawing at him.

But he knew that without the band to distract him, he let the sick kids he treated at work and his own health problems and the specter of death get him down. He brooded, and as Owen and Martin had pointed out to him countless times in college, before they started the band, he was difficult to be around. Like now. If he got stuck like this, Sarah wouldn’t want him anyway, and he would have given up the band for nothing.

So even if he found a solution to Martin’s problem, there was no solution to his own.

He was thirty years old. If he lived to be a hundred—which he rather doubted, after Thailand—he would pine every day for the beautiful pink-haired girl. He was a character in a sad country song. Oh no.

With an exasperated sigh at himself, he looked up for the first time and noticed that the TV was tuned to the World Poker Tournament. He told Erin, “Sarah’s here. Turn it to NASCAR.”

“I’m watching this.” Erin sat up with her fiddle in her lap. “Hell’s Belle is racking up. She claims this is her first time playing poker, and she just wandered into the tournament. But she’s putting all the men to shame. Except that she has a Southern accent, this chick could be Sarah’s mother, right down to raising one eyebrow.”

Quentin said, “That is Sarah’s mother.”

12

I honestly can’t say. It’s been so long since I had a sexual encounter of ANY KIND WHATSOEVER. Theoretically, no, Daniel wouldn’t be silent afterward, because he’s sweet-talking me, angling for a victory lap. He’s all, “Don’t think I’m done with you, dirty girl.” Ah, to hear those sweet words again. But I digress. Maybe Quentin wanted to horse around with you, then go back to Erin. He warned you not to push him over the edge. You pushed him anyway. He’s acting funny because now he wants you instead of Erin, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Wendy Mann

Senior Consultant

Stargazer Public Relations

Sarah was on step ninety-nine of her hundred-step beauty routine when Quentin called to her. If it had been anyone else, she would have applied her red lipstick before responding. But Quentin had never yelled her name before.

Alarmed, she descended the stairs in a controlled fall. Quentin and Erin lounged on the sofas, eyes glued to the TV.

“Where’s my album?” Sarah exclaimed. “The courier will be here at noon.”

Quentin gestured to the television. Sarah walked around the sectional so she could see the World Poker Tournament. Her mother sat at the poker table, looking very pretty in her gray suit, wearing earrings Sarah had given her, gazing at her cards. The announcer explained that Tennessee Frank was currently the chip leader, with the amateur Ethel Seville, a.k.a. Hell’s Belle, now a close second. Hell’s Belle shook her head at this hand and threw away her cards. Rising, she excused herself to the men, who all half stood politely as she left the table.

Sarah pulled out her cell phone. Punching her mother’s number, she rolled over the back of the sofa and plopped down beside Quentin, who didn’t take his eyes from the TV.

Her mother had been making her way through the crowd behind the poker table, but now she stopped and felt in her bag for her phone. “Sweetie, what a delightful surprise!”

“How’s Branson, Missouri?” Sarah asked.

Her mother looked around the casino. “An absolute circus.”

“Mom,” Sarah said, “I’m watching you on TV.”

“Oh.” Sarah’s mother touched her hair, then gave a small wave to the wrong camera. “Sweetie, I was headed to Branson. I was standing in the Birmingham airport with my ticket. But Branson is such small potatoes. I had been there and done that, as you say. I’m a Diamond Life Master, I need forty-four hundred more points to make Grand Life Master, and I may never make it in my lifetime if I keep drawing partners like that—What was that unfortunate woman’s name?”

“Beulah.”

“Yes, Beulah,” her mother repeated, the name dripping with derision. “So, as I was standing in the airport a few mornings ago, I decided I’d trade in my ticket and try my hand at Vegas.”

“You seem to be doing okay,” Sarah said. “Did you know they call you Hell’s Belle?”

“I do declare,” her mother said innocently. Then, with a not-so-innocent smile, she asked, “What do you think of Frank?”

Sarah eyed the white-haired gentleman who seemed to own the poker table. “As an adversary or a date?”

Her mother cupped her hand over the phone and whispered, “The next stop for the World Poker Tournament is San Juan. He wants me to fly to the coast and sail to San Juan with him on his yacht.” She looked toward the table as Tennessee Frank motioned to her that the hand was over. In her normal voice she said, “Sweetie, I have to go. I have another few days here. I’ll call you from the boat. Give my regards to your Quentin.” She put the phone back in her bag and walked toward the poker table. Tennessee Frank jumped up to pull out her chair for her.

Erin giggled. “That was an awfully short explanation of how your mother got to the featured table in the World Poker Tournament.”

“My mother doesn’t have time for me,” Sarah said. “But in a good way.” She turned to Quentin, who still refused to look at her. “Quentin, thank you!”

“What’d he do?” Erin asked, cheerful and suspicious.

“We played bridge with my mother,” Sarah gushed before she thought. This date sounded decidedly unromantic. But maybe it would seem serious to Erin that Quentin had met her mom. “My mother’s been unhappy, and Quentin goaded her into making a big change in her life, a switch from bridge to poker. At least, she thinks Quentin goaded her.”