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“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.
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.
He shouldn’t have messed around with her last night. He’d pushed her too far too fast, and now she was shying away. Which was smart of her, because they couldn’t be together. Right.
Owen walked onto the porch without knocking, with Martin behind him. Owen snatched the copy of Clinical Immunology and Allergy Today away from Quentin and threw it at Martin, then collapsed into a wicker chair that creaked under his weight. Martin sat in the chair on Quentin’s other side. Quentin was cornered.
“I didn’t break Rule Three,” Quentin said automatically.
“We know Erin will go ballistic,” Owen assured him. “This is just between us.”
“I still didn’t break Rule Three,” Quentin insisted.
Owen and Martin looked at each other.
“Don’t I look frustrated?” Quentin asked.
“But you will break Rule Three,” Martin said.
“No I won’t.” Quentin rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. “There are only eight more days until the concert.”
Owen said, “We want you to go ahead and cut her loose.”
Quentin had to tread carefully here, so they wouldn’t see his desperation. “I can’t do that,” he reasoned. “There wouldn’t be any way to explain it to her without telling her that the thing between Erin and me is fake.”
