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He set off at her side. She inquired about the tour. In the old days, she’d have wanted to know which women would be traveling with the band and where they’d be staying. Now she asked a businesswoman’s questions about overhead and advance ticket sales. They wandered toward the newly painted white wooden fence surrounding the mowed pasture. “I heard Dean talk to Riley about buying some horses next spring.”
“He’s always loved them,” she said.
He braced his foot on the bottom rail. “Did you know Riley could sing?”
“You’re just finding out, aren’t you?”
He was getting sick of everyone pointing out all his failures when he was more than aware of them himself. “What do you think?”
April took a pass on going for his jugular. “I heard her last week for the first time.” She propped her arms on the fence. “Riley was hiding behind the grape arbor. I got chills.”
“Did you talk to her about it?”
“She didn’t give me a chance. The second she spotted me, she stopped singing and begged me not to tell you. It’s hard to fathom a voice like that coming from someone so young.”
Jack didn’t get it. “Why is she trying to hide it from me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she explained her reasons to Dean.”
“Ask him for me, will you?”
“Do your own dirty work.”
“You know he won’t talk to me,” he said. “Hell, we built that damn porch without exchanging more than twenty sentences.”
“My BlackBerry’s in the kitchen. E-mail him when you go in.”
He dropped his foot from the fence. “This just gets more and more pathetic, doesn’t it?”
“You’re trying, Jack. That’s what matters.”
He wanted more than that. He wanted more from Dean. More from Riley. More from April. He wanted what she used to give him so freely, and he brushed the backs of his knuckles over her soft cheek. “April…”
She shook her head and walked away.
Dean didn’t see the e-mail about Riley’s singing until later that day, and it took him a moment to realize it came from Jack instead of April. He read it quickly, then punched in his reply.
Figure it out for yourself.
As he headed outside, he thought about Blue, something he’d been doing with increasing frequency. So many women believed they had to perform like porn stars to turn him on, and it all got so phony. But Blue didn’t seem to watch a lot of porn. She was clumsy, earthy, impulsive, exhilarating, and always herself—as unpredictable in bed as she was out of it. But he didn’t trust her, and he sure as hell couldn’t depend on her.
The ladder rested against the side of the porch. His shoulder didn’t protest as he moved it to check the roof. With training camp only a month away, he’d never had anything more than a short-term affair in mind. A good thing, because Blue was fundamentally a loner. He was supposed to take her horseback riding next week, but who could predict if she’d still be around? One night he’d go over that balcony and find her gone.
As he clipped on his tool belt and climbed the ladder, he knew one thing. She might be giving him her body, but she was withholding everything else, and he didn’t like it.
Two nights later, Jack came upon April dancing barefoot at the edge of the pond, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Only the rustle of reeds and rasp of crickets accompanied her. Her arms rippled in the air, her hair flew in golden filaments around her head, and her hips, those seductive hips, beat out a sexual telegram…Give it to me, babee…Give it to me, babee…
Blood shot straight to his groin. The absence of music made her seem bewitched, both eerily beautiful and more than a little mad. April, with her goddess eyes and kitten’s pout…The girl who’d spent the seventies servicing the gods of rock and roll…He knew this disruptive virago dancing at the edge of the pond to the very marrow of his bones. Her excesses, her wild demands, her sexual recklessness had been toxic to a kid of twenty-three. A kid he’d left behind long ago. Now he couldn’t imagine her bending to anyone’s will but her own.
As she rocked to the imaginary beat, the light spilling from the cottage’s back door fixture caught on the cord of a headset. The music wasn’t imaginary after all. She was dancing to a song coming from her iPod. She was nothing more than a middle-aged woman kicking up her heels. But knowing that didn’t break her spell.
Her hips beat out a final tattoo. Her hair shimmered one last time, and then her arms fell to her sides. She pulled out the earphones. He slipped back into the woods.
Chapter Twenty-one
Blue gazed at the finished portrait before she left the house. Nita wore an ice blue ball gown from a dancing exhibition in the fifties and a sixties beehive that showcased the diamond earrings Marshall had given her as a wedding present in the seventies. She was slim and glamorous. Her skin was flawless, her makeup dramatic. Blue had posed her on an imaginary grand staircase with Tango at her feet. Nita had made her paint out Tango.
“It’s not as bad as I expected,” Nita said the first time she saw the portrait hung against the gold-flocked wallpaper in the foyer.
