“Fairhope,” he said, watching Sarah go. The crowd applauded and hooted and yelled, “O-wen!” as Owen made love to the microphone. He crooned to Erin, who stood at the foot of the stage with Martin’s arm around her shoulders. The song, appropriately, was “Lake Day Love,” with Owen’s lyrics and Erin’s tune.

“Why do you come here every year?” Vonnie complained, near tears. “How long am I going to have to pay for the goddamned tenth grade?”

He faced her and said, “This is the last time.” Of course she didn’t believe him, and she flounced away. But this would be his last visit to Hank on the Banks, at least as a party crasher. He hadn’t been romantically interested in Vonnie Conner since high school. He had taken great pleasure in getting her goat. Well, she could keep her goat from now on. The idea of being with Sarah this time next year was so cool. And impossible. But he knew that after Sarah, it was going to be hard for Vonnie Conner or anyone else to hold his attention.

Sarah leaped easily onto the stage. Her striking appearance elicited a barrage of catcalls from the audience, and she did a little curtsy. Then she rubbed Owen’s upper arm and said something to him. He gave her a big, drunk grin and kept singing. The irate band they’d interrupted, including a couple of big guys, had been holding their own football huddle and began to move in Owen’s direction.

Quentin waved until he got Owen’s attention, then moved his finger in a circle. Owen said into the microphone, “Thank you very much,” in his own Elvis impression, jumped down from the stage, and helped Sarah down. The two of them plus Erin and Martin held hands and maneuvered slowly up the hill between blankets on the grass, singing “Lake Day Love.” The band onstage began playing again but was all but drowned out by “Lake Day Love” as the audience joined in.

Quentin jogged down the grass and took Sarah’s hand at the end of the line. Rather than sing along, he listened to her soft, pretty voice. He’d never heard her sing. She sounded happy. She looked happy. He hoped it had been a good birthday.

As they crested the hill, a police siren chirped. Quentin spotted the blue lights between the pine trees. “Run!” he yelled. Owen threw a squealing Erin over his shoulder. They all barreled down the hill and into the boat, and roared away in the moonlight.

“Sleepy?” Quentin asked as Sarah laid her head on his thigh in the big-ass truck.

“That funnel cake did me in.” She moved her manicured hand to stroke lightly inside his thigh. “Quentin, would it be okay if I spent the night with you from now on? To make Erin mad.”

It was more than okay with Quentin. But he thought there was more to it than Erin, especially because of the timing. Martin was right. Sarah was afraid of Nine Lives.

And he had his own problems. Sooner or later he would wake up to an asthma attack. This didn’t help attract women.

“I sleep in the nude,” he warned her.

“So do I.”

This gave him a hard-on. He wasn’t sure he’d ever driven through Socapatoy with a hard-on. Come to think of it, he’d hardly ever driven, so this was a no-brainer.

It would make a good song. “Driving through Socapatoy with a hard-on.” He could name a new town on Highway 280 for each verse: “Driving through Goodwater with a hard-on,” “Driving through Sylacauga with a hard-on.” He could call the song—how far was it from the lake to Birmingham?—“Eighty-Mile Hard-On.”

He laughed out loud, because the big-ass truck gave him a new lease on life. Sarah shifted her head on his thigh and murmured a cussword at him. This made his erection, which had been calming down some, swell again. He put his hand absently in her soft hair and continued to think through this. The song might not make it onto the third album, but they could put it on a special X-rated album. They probably had enough of Quentin’s discarded songs for one of these right now.

If Sarah stayed around much longer, they could make it a double album.

10

The rough rock scraped under Sarah’s bare feet as she leaped into the air. A hundred colorful boats floated below her on the green lake, each loaded with people waving, holding up their beer cans. The setting sun was warm. The wind rushed up. Her stomach left her—a dizzy, first-date feeling.

Too soon she smacked into the water and plunged deep under, where it was dark and cold. Her skin stung from the impact. Her head felt tight, full of fluid. She swam upward toward the yellow sunbeams filtering through the green darkness.

She had almost reached the surface. She was running out of air. She should have reached the surface by now. She ran out of air. She clawed toward the surface.

Something deep below her grabbed her ankle. She looked down into Nine Lives’ catlike eyes.

She sat up, gasping, bewildered, in the dark room. Then she saw Quentin’s silhouette as he turned on the bathroom light, just before he closed and locked the door. She knew where she was, but not what was happening. Through the door, she heard his coughs, and then a terrible sound, like he couldn’t breathe at all.

She fell out of bed and ran to bang on the door. “Let me in!”

He coughed and coughed.

“Are you okay? Damn it, Quentin, let me in!”

The terrible sound returned.

Now came a knock on Quentin’s bedroom door. Sarah went cold, and realized that she was na**d but for the weight of the emerald chain on her collarbone. She’d pulled off her clothes and flung them somewhere when Quentin had set her down in bed earlier in the night, because she’d vaguely recollected that she’d lied to him that she slept in the nude. Now she snatched one of his long-sleeved shirts out of his closet, shrugged it on, and opened the bedroom door for Martin.

In a T-shirt and sweatpants, hair mussed but the ubiquitous glasses on, Martin strode past her and knocked quietly on the bathroom door. “Q,” he said. The door opened, Martin slipped in, and the door locked behind him.

Sarah stood in the dark with her arms folded across her breasts, staring at the locked door. She didn’t want to put her ear to the door, but she didn’t want to be left out, either. It hurt so much to be snubbed. She didn’t belong to Quentin, and he didn’t belong to her, but she cared about him. She deserved to know what was going on.

There was more coughing and more of the terrible sound, and Martin speaking low. Then the door opened, spilling light into the hallway and making her blink. Martin put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed briefly. “He’s okay, kid,” he told her. “Go back to bed.” He padded across the carpet and closed the bedroom door softly behind him.

The bathroom light clicked off and Quentin met her in the dark. “I’m okay,” he choked in a strange, gravelly voice. He pushed her in front of him to the bed and drew her under the covers beside him. “You sleep in the nude,” he said, claiming the shirt she wore and throwing it across the room.

“You’re supposed to, too,” she protested, feeling a T-shirt and boxers on him.

“I may have to get up again”—he stopped, pounded his chest, and cleared his throat several times—“and cough up my other lung.”

Her eyes hadn’t readjusted to the dark. She couldn’t see his face. She reached out to put her hand on his chest, over his heart. “Is this the asthma?”

“This is the asthma.” He cleared his throat again. “Sexy, isn’t it?”

Maybe he was still thinking this way, that their relationship was all sex appeal and business, but Sarah had moved way beyond this. She didn’t want to care so much about him. But there it was. She rubbed his chest soothingly. “Don’t lock the door on me.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“Don’t get too close to me,” he said. “The record company sent you.”

“If I were your girlfriend, you’d let me in.”

“You’re not my girlfriend,” he said, and coughed. Then his body convulsed in a coughing fit.

She pressed her body to his quaking chest and curved her arms around him. His coughing subsided.

He said roughly, “I wish you were.”

She scratched his scalp with her fingernails and stroked the waves of his hair, tugging her fingers through the tight curls at his nape. He settled his head against her chest and let her hold him. Soon he was asleep.

She lay awake for hours, listening to his healthy, even breathing. Finally she fell back asleep. But immediately, it seemed, she awoke again in the room bright with morning light, and listened to Quentin’s shower.

When the hissing water shut off, she stumbled out of bed to wash the lake out of her hair. They passed each other in the hallway to the bathroom, her na**d but for the necklace, him na**d and beautiful, with wet curls. As his arm brushed against her arm, he said, “Gulp.”

She stepped into the hot shower and slowly came back to life. This meant that her brain began functioning again, but also that her ni**les hardened and her sex ached for the na**d man she’d just passed, and passed up.

She slicked the shampoo out of her hair and opened her eyes. His dark, blurred form leaned against the wall outside the shower, arms crossed, watching her. He couldn’t have seen much because the shower door was translucent glass, but her body thrilled that he was watching her at all. She stepped close to the glass and slowly passed her br**sts near it, where they’d be clear through the mottling, as if she were innocently rinsing under the shower stream. Seeing him shift positions uncomfortably, she suppressed a laugh. And rolled the door open. “You had your turn,” she said.

He wore cargo shorts and the green camo T-shirt. His eyes were still on her breasts. With effort he lifted his green eyes to her face. “I had my turn in the shower. I didn’t have my turn at you.” He stepped forward to take her mouth with his.

She drew him into the shower stream, then reached out to roll the door closed behind him. His T-shirt darkened and stuck to his solid chest.

He pushed her out of the hot stream and against the cold marble wall. His soft lips massaged hers, then traveled to her ear, making her shiver. His hand slicked down her torso, traveled around to her front, and cupped her mound. “If you were my girlfriend,” he said in her ear, raising more goose bumps, “I’d put my mouth right here.” He worked his thumb on her cl*tto emphasize his point.

“I’m not your girlfriend,” she said weakly.

“You look like my girlfriend. Let’s see if you taste like my girlfriend.”

He went down on his knees and still had to bend a little to get under her. Spreading her thighs with his warm hands, he began to tease her with his tongue, and then to suck her. And then she wasn’t sure what he was doing, because she’d never experienced anything like it. She felt herself open.

He stopped. “Sarah,” he said gently.

“More!”

“Breathe,” he ordered her.

She took in a ragged gasp, but it was hard to worry about pesky things like breathing when her center radiated heat. He must have sensed that she was too dizzy to stand, because he held her with both strong arms and laid her on the marble floor of the shower. Sliding his forearm underneath her buttocks so he had her just where he wanted her, he gave her the most intimate kiss.

The feeling was incredible. It was so good that she could hardly stand it. But she could and did stand it, because when she tried to shift away from his hungry mouth, he held her more firmly. She had no choice.

Then came a moment when she was hyperaware of everything touching her: hot water splashing over her breasts, cold marble under her back, warm arm under her ass, Quentin’s hot tongue. She knew she was about to come. She put her hands in his hair. That wasn’t enough. She wanted to give back what he gave. But when she reached toward his shorts, he took both her wrists in one hand in that familiar, delicious grip.

There was no release but her screams. She bucked under him. Still he held her. He pressed his mouth to her until she stopped.

Moving to the inside of her thigh, he kissed her even then, as if he regretted it was over. She took a shuddering breath of wet air.

A pounding sounded out in the bedroom, on the bedroom door. Erin’s voice called, “Q, where’s breakfast?”

Quentin bit down on Sarah’s thigh so hard that it almost hurt. “I’m gonna skin me a fiddle player,” he grumbled. Then he rolled open the shower door and called, “Step one, take eggs from refrigerator. I’m in the shower.”

“That’s the point!” Erin said.

Sarah whispered, “She heard me. She knows we’re in here together.”

He rolled the shower door shut. But by this time, cold air from the room whirled in the shower, mixing with the hot spray. Sarah shivered and weakly tried to sit up. He pulled her into his lap and warmed her with his strong hug. “There’s no reason to feel caught,” he whispered. “This is what we wanted, to make her jealous.”

Sarah giggled nervously. “Don’t you feel caught?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.” He kissed her gently, his tongue playing at the corners of her mouth, as if he planned to do this all morning.

With a reluctant sigh, Sarah said, “You need to go after Erin. You’re supposed to get her back. You have to go after her and string her along.” Sarah reached down to unbutton and unzip his shorts, this time without resistance. She reached her hand past his boxers and around his big, solid cock. “But first, I could return the favor.”

He closed his eyes, took in a deep breath through his nose, and exhaled. “I can’t let you do that,” he said, pushing her hands out of his shorts.

“Why not?” she coaxed him.