Quentin hadn’t expected what was left of the Birmingham paparazzi to be waiting on the sidewalk outside the emergency room, plus ten extra reporters and photographers in town early for the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event. But come to think of it, an ambulance pulling up to his house three days before the concert was a scoop.

He pushed through the photographers like a bodyguard to clear a path for Sarah, but Sarah stopped and gave a statement to the reporters. With a feeling of foreboding, he listened to her tell the truth. When they finally reached his big-ass truck, he told her reprovingly that she should be careful what she told the press, because it might come back to sting her.

“How can it possibly matter to anyone that I’m allergic to bee stings?” she asked.

“You’re going to be sorry,” he said as he drove back to the house.

He tucked her into his bed and went downstairs to the recording session made frantic by his bandmates’ fears that they might miss the deadline. Several times he went upstairs to check on Sarah and found her sound asleep in the quiet room.

But at about eight in the evening, she stumbled down the stairs to the studio. It was a far cry from the first day he’d known her. Barefoot, she wore his boxers and T-shirt. She’d knotted them to take up some slack, but they still hung off her. A blanket was hunched around her, and her tousled hair fell in stripes to frame her ashen face. Wandering behind the technicians and stepping around the Timberlanes, to whom she didn’t give a glance, she lay across the empty chairs at the back of the control room and curled into a ball. He had thought he’d never see it, but here it was: Sarah undone.

Erin nodded in Sarah’s direction, as if Quentin needed prompting. He set his bass in its stand and walked out of the sound booth. Kneeling in front of Sarah, he pushed a pink strand away from her furrowed brow. “What can I get you?”

She opened her eyes and closed them again. “Nothing, thank you,” she murmured. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“You’re sure as hell not going to get any sleep down here.”

“I wanted to be with you.”

He wished this were true. You mean you wanted to make sure we got your album done, he thought, but he didn’t have the heart to argue with her. He smoothed her hair again, squeezed her shoulder, kissed her forehead, and went back into the sound booth.

He switched off the sound to the control room and turned his back on the spectators. He wouldn’t put it past Sarah to be able to read lips. “Sarah’s taking the master copy to New York herself tomorrow,” he told the band, “and I’m going with her.”

“The hell you are,” growled Owen.

“She knows a lot of our secrets,” he said pointedly to Owen. “We don’t want her to tell the record company. I think we should keep her happy.”

Owen looked away.

Quentin explained to Erin and Martin, “We’re only going up for a few hours. She wants to see her friend who just had a baby, and I’ll check on the medical foundation. I won’t have time to break Rule Three.”

“It probably wouldn’t take you very long,” Martin remarked.

“I’m tired of your stamina jokes,” Quentin said. “Erin, tell Martin about that time in Valdosta.”

Erin smiled. Owen, adjusting a cymbal, didn’t look the least bit jealous. What a relief.

But then Erin said, “Sarah won’t tell the record company about us now that she has the album. You can check on the foundation some other time. There’s no good reason for you to go.” She ran through a fiddle lick as if that were the end of the discussion.

Quentin stepped over to Martin and said quietly, “Nine Lives is more likely to come after Sarah up there than down here. I’d appreciate it if you could help a brother out on this one.”

Martin said, “I’ll talk to Erin later.”

The Timberlanes went home, the technicians went home, and at 11:47 p.m., the Cheatin’ Hearts completed Buns of Steel. They crowded around Sarah, who was still curled in a ball on the control room chairs. They sang “Strip Poker Blues” a cappella as they presented her with the master copy of the album. She called the head honcho at Manhattan Music and yelled to him over the jubilant singing that the first part of her mission was accomplished.

13

FINALLY a chance to e-mail you. Can’t wait to see you this afternoon! We are all well rested for your visit! HAHAHAHA gotta go baby crying again

Wendy Mann

Senior Consultant

Stargazer Public Relations

“How’d your meeting go?” Quentin asked as he opened the taxi door for Sarah and stepped back to let her in the car.

She gave the driver the address of Wendy’s loft in Tribeca and waited for Quentin to slide in beside her. As the taxi moved into traffic down Sixth Avenue, she said happily, “Manhattan Music was very impressed that I turned in your album at all. They were ecstatic that it’s so good. What have you been doing to those poor people?”

“Nothing they didn’t deserve,” Quentin said.

She relaxed against the seat, watching midtown Manhattan flash by. “I just wish I had longer in the city. I didn’t expect my meeting to run over. Now I’ll hardly have time to exclaim over the baby and stop in at my apartment before our flight.”

“Oh, by the way,” Quentin said offhandedly, “I called Stargazer and talked to the lady who handles your travel reservations. I postponed our flight until noon tomorrow.”

“Really,” Sarah said, hoping she looked irritated rather than delighted. She scrolled down her contacts to the travel desk and held the phone to her ear. “Voice mail,” she informed Quentin. “This chick is just digging herself a deeper hole.” After the beep, she said, “It’s Sarah. Just calling to remind you that you don’t work for Quentin Cox. You work for Stargazer. For now.”

As she clicked the phone off, Quentin said, “That was harsh. She was a nice lady.”

Sarah felt a flash of guilt, but she brushed it off. “That nice lady was totally taken in by your act. She probably gazed moonily into space while you serenaded her with ‘Naked Mama.’ And I’m afraid you’re about to find out what harsh is. You’re supposed to be back in Birmingham tomorrow for a run-through of the concert. Erin will call you.”

“I’ll make it in time,” he said. “The run-through isn’t until tomorrow night. But you’re right. She’ll still call me. I left a message with Martin about what I was doing and then turned my phone off. Turn yours off.”

“I can’t do that,” Sarah said. “There might be a PR catastrophe while I’m gone.”

“They’ll leave a voice mail, I promise.”

“And that’s another thing,” Sarah protested. “I don’t want to talk to an angry Erin on the phone, but I don’t want to listen to a bunch of voice mails from an angry Erin, either.”

“She won’t leave you a bunch of messages. She’ll leave me a bunch of messages. She’ll leave you one.”

“I’ll bet it’s a doozy.”

“It’ll be worth it,” he said.

She glanced over at him. His brown curls danced behind his ears in the blast from the air conditioner vent. He bent his head to the bottom of the taxi window and squinted up at the tops of the passing skyscrapers, as Alabamians who had never lived in New York were wont to do, she remembered from her freshman year at college. He wore his poker face. It was impossible to tell whether he intended innuendo when he told her it would be worth it.

She wanted innuendo, and she didn’t. She wanted him, but she couldn’t entertain the possibility of stealing him from Erin. If the group broke up, even with the album completed, she might lose her job. Nine Lives would tell Manhattan Music what she’d done to him, Manhattan Music would tell Stargazer, and she’d never work in PR again. Quentin eventually would break up with her because she was an unemployed loser. And then she’d be one of these guys wandering in the busy street, spraying and wiping windshields and demanding five dollars.

Quentin lowered his window and stuck his head into the wind like a happy dog. Apparently Sarah didn’t have to make a decision about sex, because there was no innuendo. He said innocently, “You get to spend some quality time with your friend. And when you’re done, I can drop you off at your apartment and visit the foundation. We’ve been on tour so long, I haven’t been by in a year. Since Thailand, I’d like to make sure they’re on top of this allergy thing.”

Sarah nodded. “So it’s a real foundation.”

“Of course it’s a real foundation. Did you think it was a fake foundation?”

“Word around Manhattan Music is that it’s a red herring to draw attention away from your co**ine addiction.”

“That does sound like something we’d do.” He laughed. “But that would be one expensive fish. No, the foundation is real. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what I went through when I was a kid.”

“What gives you the kind of allergic reaction I had to bees?”

“Most nuts,” he said. “I’m allergic to a lot of foods, but nuts are the one that’s hardest to avoid.”

“Yeah, I imagine it’s hard to avoid nuts,” Sarah commented provocatively, “you being a man and all.”

Quentin sighed the longest sigh. “Are you making a nut joke? Don’t even start with me. I’ve had allergies since I was born. I had allergies in middle school. I’ve heard all the nut jokes. I made up all the nut jokes so I could tell them before someone else told them.”

“Is that why you never eat out? Because of your food allergies?”

“I never eat out because I’m a great cook.”

“And so humble,” she teased him.

“Have you tried my aloo gobi?”

She smiled. “Do you mean that in the carnal sense?”

“No, it’s vegetarian.” He laughed. “Seriously, you’re right. I never eat out because cooking meals myself is the only way I can be sure they won’t kill me.” He inhaled the city deeply through his nose. “And then there’s the asthma. I have to exercise carefully.”

“Thus you flaked out on me in the lake.”

“I didn’t flake out, see,” he protested. “I knew I would flake out. When I was a kid, I didn’t know my limits. Or I didn’t want to know them. I went out for high school football with Owen one year. That was interesting.”

He waved to a group of Japanese tourists on the sidewalk, and several of them waved back. Sarah turned around and watched through the back window as they gestured excitedly to each other, realizing who Quentin was, and started chasing the car. She was about to give the driver a twenty to lose them when a hole opened in traffic and he sped ahead.

“Other things trigger my asthma, too,” Quentin went on. “Cigarette smoke is the main one. And once you’re triggered, getting upset can make asthma worse, but that’s only happened to me twice, thank God. The second time was yesterday, when you threatened to shiv me.”

“Again, I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s okay. It actually wasn’t as bad as the first time. I was mortified.”

“You, mortified?”

“It does happen.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Was it when Vonnie Conner turned you down?”

“If I’d had an asthma attack because Vonnie Conner turned me down, I would never have shown my face at high school again,” he said. “No, it was at my granddad’s funeral.”

“Oh.” She covered her lips with two fingers and said through them, “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. The whole spectacle is pretty funny in retrospect.”

She cut her eyes sideways at him, unable to imagine what was so funny about having an asthma attack at his grandfather’s funeral. “This was pretty recently, right?”

“A little over two years ago,” he confirmed, “right before we signed with the record company. I was a pallbearer, which was somebody else’s mistake, because I was pretty devastated when he died . . . ”

As he trailed off, she nodded sympathetically. She knew how he’d felt.

“After we got our shoulders under the casket, the closer we got to the church, the more upset I got. I guess I could pretend it wasn’t happening before that, and I was at just another family reunion, but this was final.

“Well, somebody was smoking outside the church, and as we were crossing the threshold, I got a lungful. I couldn’t reach for my inhaler in my pocket because, hello, I was carrying a casket. Normally I could have made it all the way down the aisle without it, but I was so upset already. On top of that, I was terrified of passing out in front of all those people. A lot of them were friends of my granddad’s from Nashville, country music insiders. None of them could have gotten the Cheatin’ Hearts a contract, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was as tense as I’ve ever been, and that’s when I”—he clapped his hands, one on top of the other—“hit the aisle.”

“Oh!” Sarah gasped.

“And then the casket”—he clapped his hands again—“hit the aisle, tumbled end over end, and landed upside down.”

“Oh my God!” Sarah squealed. “Why couldn’t the other five guys hold it up?”

“That’s what I said at the emergency room later!” Quentin exclaimed. “They’re all like, ‘Give a dude a nudge when you’re about to faint like a girl, Q,’ and I’m like, ‘There are six pallbearers. I was holding up the whole thing myself? You can’t hold it up yourselves if a guy has to pass out? Jesus.’ ” He paused. “My granddad would have loved it, though.”