Then it occurred to him that he might not have everything under control after all. “Did you lie to me that first morning? Did we do it?” It came out hoarse: “Are you pregnant?”

“No,” she said quietly, gazing down at her manicured hands in her lap.

He reached over and took her chin in his hand, so she had to look at him. He asked again, “Sarah, are you pregnant?”

“No,” she said, glaring at him with dark-fringed eyes. She jerked her chin away.

“Then why do you act like you just saw a ghost?”

She huffed out a sigh. “What did you want to give me?” she asked coldly.

Reluctantly, he pulled the shopping bag from behind the seat. “I’m in a band. I have to get along with them. And sometimes that means doing things I don’t want to do.” He passed the bag to her.

She peered inside at her clothes from Quentin’s dresser drawer, which Erin had packed up for her.

“But, Sarah,” he began, taking her hand.

“ ‘But, Sarah,’ ” she repeated woodenly, pulling her hand away.

“I want to be with you,” he said in a rush. “Only you. But it will get me in big trouble. And I need to know how you feel about me.”

“I feel more than I should,” she said, meeting his gaze head-on.

“You think I’m in love with Erin,” he said. “I’m not. There was a time when I was, but that was a long time ago, and way before you.”

“You told me you were in love with her. In the emergency room.”

“I never told you I was in love with her,” he objected. “I told you I love her.” He laughed shortly. “I love Owen, too, on a good day.”

Sarah stared at him with the poker face.

“My God, Sarah,” he said, feeling the anger rise again. “You don’t still believe I’m on coke, do you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe you’re stupid, either.”

Oh no.

She said through her teeth, “Why all this subterfuge? And if you pretend again that you don’t know what subterfuge means—”

He opened his hands. “To keep you away.”

She nodded. “Anything to protect yourself. You’re used to doing what makes you feel good at the moment. That’s fine when you’re twenty-one. Or, at least, it’s to be expected. But when you’re thirty, it’s irresponsible.”

He folded his arms. “And you think that before the Cheatin’ Hearts took off, I just worked at some shit job at the hospital, and never saved any money or did anything so I could support a family. The fact that I have money now doesn’t count for anything.”

“Of course it counts,” she said. “Of course your success with the band counts. But you live the band lifestyle. You tour, and you start fights, and you have a girl in every port—”

“I don’t have a girl in every port. We travel by bus or airplane.”

“—and that’s not what I want,” she said more loudly. “You see, even now, you’re not taking this seriously.”

“I am!” he exclaimed. “I’m taking this very seriously! But the person you’re describing is not me.”

“How the hell would I know that?” Sarah asked.

Quentin didn’t have an answer.

“This has been fun,” she said. “I mean, fun. This has been the most fun I’ve ever had. But, long-term . . . ”

“You’re not really a pink-haired girl,” he finished for her.

“I guess not.” She reached behind her neck to unclasp the emerald necklace.

“Don’t do that,” he said in alarm.

She paused with her hands behind her head, watching him.

“Just give me until tomorrow,” he said. “There’s something I need to do.”

Sarah shook her head. “It’s not what you can do. It’s what you are.” She put her graceful hand on his knee. “You need to go back to Erin.” Dragging the shopping bag after her, she jumped out of the big-ass truck and slammed the door.

He got out and followed her at a distance as the sharp crack of her shoes echoed across the parking lot. His crazy comic book villainess in high heels, abbreviated green dress, and brown ponytail striped with pink. Leaving him.

Think, Q. Think, Quentin. His mind was a blank. Just when he needed it most.

As she started the engine, he reached the BMW. He knocked once on the window and she lowered it.

He knelt on the asphalt so he was on her level. He asked her, “Are you bluffing?”

Her poker face remained motionless, but her dark brown eyes filled with tears.

“You’re not bluffing,” he breathed.

As she raised the window, her face was replaced with a reflection of Vulcan’s ass. Quentin stepped back and she sped away.

He stood alone on the black asphalt in the black night for some moments, willing the black mood to lift so he could think again.

Finally he spun around and looked up to the spotlit iron man for inspiration. Vulcan mooned him, mocking him.

“Come on, big guy!” Quentin shouted. “Turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you!”

The cool mountain breeze swayed the trees, and the frogs chirped in answer.

With a dejected sigh, Quentin turned for his truck. And that’s when it hit him. He had a big-ass truck! He was mobile. He could drive home to talk to his dad, the expert on falling headlong in love with the world’s most inconvenient woman.

15

Yes, you’re going to hell for knowingly ha**g s*x with the father of a pregnant woman’s baby. No, you can’t assign a numerical value to the great sex and insert it into an algorithm to figure out exactly how damned you are. It’s no use. You’re toast. If you get there first, save me a good seat.

Wendy Mann

Senior Consultant

Stargazer Public Relations

Sarah drove to the Galleria and packed her bags, because Nine Lives might be after her and she had no protector now. She moved to the hotel downtown where she’d played bridge with her mother and Quentin, but of course she couldn’t sleep. She found the gym and went for a long run.

In the morning, she returned to the office at the Galleria and tied up loose ends. Hugged Amber and Beige and the men in the office good-bye. Gave Rachel some last-minute advice about life as a PR diva. Called the holiday skeleton crew at the Manhattan Music office to arrange for a replacement drummer to be put on standby in case Owen found out about Quentin and Erin’s baby, freaked, and quit the band right before the Nationally Televised Holiday Concert Event. Then Sarah booked her own late afternoon flight back to New York.

Now she needed only to swing by the mansion and drop off Quentin’s asthma inhaler and adrenaline shot, which he’d transferred from his truck to her bag before they left for New York. And the necklace, she thought to herself, fingering the heavy emeralds.

His truck wasn’t in the driveway. The other two trucks and Erin’s Corvette were home. Sarah balked at the idea of bursting in on them when Quentin wasn’t there. But they were all her responsibility, not just Quentin. And if she didn’t return his things now, what would she do? Sit around in lovelorn agony, awaiting his return? Mail the emerald necklace back to him? She compromised by knocking twice on the door from the garage before walking in.

Erin, standing barefoot in the kitchen, looked up from arranging ham on a slice of bread. She said in her sweet chipmunk voice, “Speak of the devil.”

“I wanted to return a few things to Quentin,” Sarah said. She hoped Erin would offer to take the inhaler, the shot, and the emerald necklace. That would rub in to Erin how close Quentin and Sarah had been. And shock Quentin when he received these items from girlfriend number two via girlfriend number one. All that was left of Sarah was a bitter shell.

Erin didn’t offer to play courier. “He’s not here. Can’t you tell?” She gestured to the bread. “We can hardly boil water without him. He called last night to say he was going to see his dad. I don’t know where he is now. He was a lot easier to keep track of before he could drive.” She walked over to the open door of the studio and called down the stairs, “Sarah’s here.”

Owen climbed the stairs to the kitchen and put his hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “We need to talk to you,” he said pleasantly. “Can I get you a beer?”

Sarah glanced at her watch. It was two o’clock. She asked, “Do I need a beer?”

“You might,” Martin said from the stairs. “Let’s sit outside.” He was pounding loudly on a pack of cigarettes. Sarah hadn’t known he smoked.

This did not look good.

She’d thought PR for the Cheatin’ Hearts was Rachel’s problem from here on out, but now she wasn’t so sure. She fished in her bag and turned off her cell phone, which had been ringing constantly all morning.

Owen passed out bottles, and Sarah refrained from pointing out that Erin’s was a waste of a perfectly good beer. They filed outside and sat at the table in the palpable heat of mid-afternoon, despite the shade of a crepe myrtle. Hundreds of bees buzzed in the tree, and Sarah almost shied away. But she didn’t fear anaphylactic shock—at least, not while the bees minded their own business, and she still had Quentin’s rescue shot in her bag in the kitchen, and a nurse sat next to her. Albeit one wasted on heroin.

Owen leaned forward across the table. “Sarah, we’re coming clean with you. We want to make you an offer, but we have to extract a promise from you first that this is in strictest confidence, and you won’t tell the record company what we tell you.”

“Okay.” Sarah wasn’t sure she could keep such a promise. It depended on what the secret was. She had a job to do, after all. But whether she could keep the secret didn’t matter. She got the feeling that it had to do with Quentin’s conspicuous absence. She needed to know.

Erin gripped her diamond cross pendant between her thumb and forefinger and slid it back and forth on its chain. “Two years ago, before we got the contract with Manhattan Music, we thought we were finally about to sign a different contract in Nashville. A record company executive had come to a show to recruit us.” She put a hand on Owen’s back. “And then Owen, in his infinite wisdom, slept with her. Somewhere between the first kiss and the bl*w j*b—”

Owen shrugged away from Erin’s hand on his back. “Just the facts, ma’am,” he said angrily.

“—he told her that Q has asthma. Well, there were other acts she could sign, with lead singers who never had a problem breathing. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Needless to say, we didn’t get our contract. In fact, to have any chance at all of signing with another company, we had to pay her to keep quiet about Q’s asthma. We pooled our savings and scraped together twenty thousand dollars.”

“Thus Owen earned the moniker dumbass,” Martin said.

“We all had pretty good jobs at the hospital,” Erin said, “but Q gave up more. He had a promising career, and he was about to quit the band to pursue it. We didn’t think the Cheatin’ Hearts could make it without him. For that, we were really pissed at him and . . . ” She looked guiltily at Owen. “Behaved badly.”

“Pitched fits,” Owen confirmed. “Made him feel like he was betraying his three best friends.”

Erin nodded. “We convinced him to stay and make one last push for a contract. And he wanted to make sure it was worth the risk of giving up his career.”

Sarah tried to envision Quentin’s promising career as head lactation consultant.

“So Q made three rules,” Erin said. “If any of us broke them, we’d get kicked out of the band. Rule Three”—she touched her middle finger—“no sex with the record company, so there wouldn’t be a repeat of a band member giving our secrets away. Since Manhattan Music sent you, you fall in that category, too. We’ve known all along that you and Q weren’t doing it, and that y’all pretended to be together to get me back with Q.”

Calmly, very calmly, controlling her hand to keep it from shaking, Sarah took a sip of her beer. “Really? That was a lot of good making out, all for nothing. Why didn’t he just tell me about your rules?”

Owen said, “I assure you his intentions were completely dishonorable.”

“Yeah,” Erin said, “he’s made it painfully clear to us the entire time that he thinks you’re hot. In fact, I was afraid that y’all had really fallen for each other. Martin was sure you had. Yesterday I acted like I was getting back with Q in the airport to chase you off. But now we can see that you—that it was all business.”

Sarah nodded knowingly.

“And he couldn’t tell you about Rule Three because he didn’t want you to find out about Rule Two”—Erin touched her index finger—“no sex between band members. Our relationship with the record company has been so difficult, and our badass image is so important to our success, that we didn’t want to let on to you what straightlaced nerds we are. In reality, Owen and I have never done it, and Q and I never did it.”

“Yes you did,” Owen protested angrily, as if this were an old and rehashed argument.

“Okay, we did,” Erin said to Owen, “two years ago. But not since we made the rules and got the contract. Do you mind ?” She turned back to Sarah. “That’s why Q made the rule. Q and I fought like cats and dogs when we dated, and he didn’t think the band could survive another relationship like that.

“And Rule One”—she touched her thumb—“no drugs. That’s because Martin had a problem a long time ago.” She glanced at Martin, who smoked his cigarette, seemingly oblivious, clearly high.