by Meg Benjamin
The band began to play something he only vaguely recognized, but at least it was a slow one. “Want to dance?”
“Sure.” She stood beside him, then seemed to slide into his arms.
It took him a moment to identify the song, but when he did he felt a quick tightening in his gut. “Help Me Make It Through the Night”. Terrific. One of the songs he’d played over and over during his recovery days. Now associated forever more with those raggedy months when he was putting himself back together again.
Except he’d never really listened to the lyrics before, just the idea. Help me, somebody, help me through this long night. But now that he took the time to hear it, the words were, well, hot.
MG moved in his arms slightly. He felt the warmth of her skin against his palms, the slight scent of rosemary in her hair. He had a sudden impulse to pull her tight against him, but he held her lightly still. Gently, gently.
“Yesterday is dead and gone.” The lyrics floated around them. He moved closer almost without thinking about it, his hand sliding across the small of her back. The music swelled again.
He leaned closer, then paused. MG was singing.
Softly, very softly, her voice barely above a whisper, low and sweet, almost like a radio playing a long way away. She looked up at him and stopped, her eyes wide.
“I’m sorry.”
He blinked. “For what?”
“For singing. I didn’t mean to. I just…I do it without thinking sometimes.”
He gave her a cautious smile. “Don’t be sorry. I liked it. You sing nice.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened slightly. “Oh. Thanks.”
He detoured around another couple. “You’re telling me somebody objected to your singing?”
She shook her head. “No, not exactly. I just haven’t done it in a while—I didn’t sing while Grandpa was sick. He didn’t feel much like music. And I guess singing in the kitchen isn’t a good idea.”
“Says who?” His smile widened. “I sing down there all the time. Not that anybody’s going to tell me to stop. Although I’m pretty sure they’d like to sometimes.” He ran his fingers along the bumps of her spine. “Sing it again.”
MG leaned next to him, tucking her forehead into the curve of his throat. “Yesterday is dead and gone…” she sang softly.
He closed his eyes, wrapping his arm more tightly around her waist. The words of the song, the sound of her voice, all of it seemed to blend together into something rich and warm, like caramel pouring through his senses.
After another few moments, she pulled back slightly. “Joe?”
He looked down at her. “Hmm?”
“The music’s stopped.”
He glanced up toward the bandstand where the leader was talking about some CDs they had on sale. Reluctantly, he loosened his arm. “Damn.”
“That was really nice,” MG said softly.
“Yeah.” He stared down into eyes the deep green of his grandmother’s favorite malachite necklace.
The guitarist launched into something that was sort of halfway between a two-step and a polka. Joe felt like shooting him.
“Oh, it’s swing.” MG’s voice sounded faintly relieved.
Joe blew out a breath. Maybe it was time to back down a little. Jumping your partner on the dance floor was seldom a good idea. Particularly on the first date.
He raised an eyebrow. “Want to give it a try?”
Her smile was warm. “Sure. If you don’t mind me stumbling around.”
“Sugar, we’ll stumble together.” He slid his arm around her waist again, and moved into the crowd. There should be another slow one in a few minutes. He could put up with a little swing until then.
It was well after midnight when they got back to MG’s place. She was glad she didn’t have to go to work at six for once. Of course, she’d still have to get up and collect eggs, but she could probably grab a couple of hours of sleep that she didn’t get normally.
However, at the moment, she didn’t feel even vaguely sleepy. Joe opened the door of the truck and extended his hand, helping her down even though she didn’t need it.
Do I invite him in or not? If she did, she was pretty sure she knew where they’d end up. She wasn’t necessarily opposed to it. In fact, the more she thought about it, the better it sounded. But there was something, some part of her, that wanted to wait, to savor, to wallow in the growing heat between them before they pushed to the next level.
They walked to the front steps where they’d kissed the first time. She licked her lips. “Thanks. This was really nice. I really…” She paused, looking up into those fierce blue eyes, and promptly forgot what she was going to say.
Joe leaned down, one arm looping around her waist, pulling her tight against him. She felt the swell of his arousal against her belly. And then she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him down.
His mouth was hot against hers, his tongue sliding inside, teeth touching. She sucked against it, suddenly breathless. He groaned deep in his throat as his other arm wrapped around her shoulders.
She whimpered softly, all her justification for keeping him out vaporizing in the heat that poured through her body. In another moment she’d have the door open and have him inside, halfway to the bedroom before the kiss ended.
And then he was pulling back, staring down at her again. She gasped in a breath, her lungs suddenly seizing. “Oh my,” she murmured.
Ask him to come in. But she didn’t.
“Good night, MG,” he whispered after a moment. “Take care of your chickens. I’ll talk to you later.”
She watched him walk back to his pickup, telling herself she wasn’t disappointed. But as the truck rolled up her driveway toward the road, she found herself wishing she hadn’t been so conscientious. Why couldn’t she be as reckless in her sex life as she’d been in her professional one?
Chapter Nine
It occurred to MG as she lay in her bed the next morning that “talk to you later” could mean anything from “I’ll call you as soon as I wake up” to “I’ll say good morning when you drop off the eggs tomorrow.” At any rate, she decided she wouldn’t necessarily count on hearing from Joe today no matter what he’d said.
Which was just as well, she told herself over her first cup of coffee. She had errands to run. Groceries to buy. Nest boxes to clean. Chickens to graze.
Music to play.
The last of those chores made her chest tighten almost painfully. She hadn’t picked up her guitar for weeks. Her grandpa had been too sick to want to hear her sing, and after he died she hadn’t felt all that musical herself. She took a deep breath, feeling her chest tighten. She’d given up music for the duration when she’d come back to nurse Grandpa. She wasn’t entirely sure she was ready to take it up again.
But she was due to play at Dewey Hesseltine’s club day after tomorrow.
Which made it all the more necessary to get the other chores done before she did anything else, she told herself. It wasn’t that she was avoiding practicing, but really she had to get her priorities straight. Groceries and chickens came first. Didn’t they?
After she’d spent half the day on trivia, she finally faced herself. “You don’t have time for this,” she muttered. “You can be afraid of a lot of things, but being afraid to pick up your damn guitar is just pathetic.”
The case was still at the back of her closet where she’d left it when she’d moved in. She pulled it out and placed it flat on the bed, then flipped open the catches, lifting out the Martin with the reverence it deserved.
“Come to Mama, sweetheart,” she murmured.
She sank down on the side of her bed, strumming the strings gently as she tuned. After a moment, she took a deep breath and began to sing softly. If she kept it quiet, maybe it wouldn’t count.
“If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone…”
Her former manager would have made a face. He’d hated anything that hadn’t been written with electric guitars in mi
nd. The deep resonating tone of the Martin echoed through the bedroom as she raised her voice slightly.
“Five hundred miles, five hundred miles…”
Little by little, she let her voice gain volume stretching into the silence of the room. “Lord I’m one, Lord I’m two…”
Almost without thinking her fingers shifted at the song’s end, and she segued into Trish Murphy, Marcia Ball, Teri Hendrix.
The Martin’s chords reverberated down the hall, filling the house. She was singing at top volume now, her eyes closed, sliding from one note to another. “If you ever change your mind…”
The doorbell cut through the sound like a knife. MG grabbed the guitar neck, one hand flat on the sound hole to silence the strings. Her pulse pounded in her ears. It’s nothing. Probably the mailman. Nobody heard you.
She pushed herself to her feet. Carefully replacing the Martin in its case and flipping the catches closed. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. The neighbors wouldn’t complain because you’re not singing the right stuff. And besides, nobody’s close enough to hear anyway.
When she pulled the door open, Darcy stood on her front step, regarding her with narrowed eyes. She wore cutoffs and a Pantera T-shirt that showed the tattoos on her biceps. One looked like a diagram of beef cuts, while the other was some kind of flower. Maybe lavender. The tips of her hair were now electric blue.
MG blinked. “Uh…hi. What’s up?”
“I told Joe I’d bring you your check. He wanted to do it but he’s stuck with the Beav working on something for some contest.” She handed MG an envelope, her eyes still narrowed. “Was that you?”
MG managed to plaster on a smile that probably looked as phony as it felt. “Was that me doing what?”
Darcy nodded toward the back of the house. “Singing. Sam Cooke. Was that you?”
Well hell. “Yeah. It’s my day off,” she added irrelevantly.
“No shit.” Darcy folded her arms across her chest. “You’re good.”
“Thanks.” MG shrugged. “Would you like to come in? The house isn’t much, but it’s cool inside.”
“You’ve got chickens, right?”
Considering that she’d been bringing eggs to the restaurant every morning since she’d started work, that seemed to be sort of a rhetorical question. “Right.”
“I used to date a guy who raised chickens. Can I see them?”
MG shrugged. “Sure. You want a beer while you do?”
Darcy nodded, then followed her down the hall to the kitchen.
“They’re out back. Actually, I should put them out on the grass for a while. Can you chicken wrangle?”
Darcy frowned. “Depends. How many are there?”
“Twenty-five. Plus a rooster.” Who should probably count as two, given how much trouble he made.
Darcy snorted. “Twenty-five’s nothing. Yeah, I can follow them around. Why don’t you bring out your guitar?”
MG’s shoulders felt tight again. She rubbed a hand across them. “I guess I could do that.”
“You never know. The chickens might like it.” Darcy gave her a dry smile.
“Anything for increased egg production,” MG muttered, opening the back door.
In the end, they sat in the shade at the back, watching the chickens move jerkily around the grass. MG strummed her fingers across the Martin while Darcy sipped her beer.
“You could do that Sam Cooke one again,” Darcy said. “I like that one.”
MG slid down into the chords and began to sing. After the first verse, Darcy tapped her foot to the beat. After the second verse, she began to sing along on the chorus.
The chickens ignored them.
“Whoo,” Darcy yelled at the end. “I love that fucker. Play something else.”
MG grinned. Somehow she doubted “Five Hundred Miles” would fit in here, but she did love an enthusiastic audience. She launched into “Bye-Bye Love” and Darcy sang with her again. After that she segued into “Bobby McGee” and “The Silver-Tongued Devil.”
Darcy shook her head at the last song. “I don’t know that one.”
“Kris Kristofferson,” MG explained. “Off his first record. I always liked it.”
“So.” Darcy leaned back, resting her elbows on the back step. “You’re a singer, right?”
MG took a breath. “Right. Sort of.”
“And you’re working in the kitchen because you can’t make a living just singing yet, right?”
“Something like that.” She began picking out chords again, letting her fingers slip back into the familiar patterns.
“So where’s your next gig?” Darcy raised a pale eyebrow.
Crap. But there was probably no use in keeping it a secret anyway. “Oltdorf. Dewey Hesseltine’s place. Wednesday night.”
Darcy shook her head. “Don’t know it.”
“I don’t know what the place is called. I just know who owns it. There can’t be too many clubs in Oltdorf, though. It’s not that big.” She watched Robespierre strut across the grass after one of the hens. Maybe it was mating season. She had no idea how she’d know one way or the other.
“So you come to the kitchen at the crack of fucking dawn and then go out to sing until your rooster starts crowing. Do you get any sleep at all?”
That was one thing MG had begun to wonder about herself, but she wasn’t really interested in talking about it at the moment. “It’s no big deal. I’ll get by.”
“You going to be at that place more than one night? Maybe I’ll come listen to you sometime.”
MG frowned. “This is sort of a tryout. I don’t know yet whether he’ll want me to come back again.” Or whether I’ll want to come back again either.
“He will,” Darcy said confidently. “Like I said—you’re good.” She narrowed her eyes again. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t come to see you?”
MG blew out a breath. Screw it. “Nope. I’d be glad to see you. Provided I get a second night.”
“You’ll get a second night.” Darcy frowned slightly as she sipped her beer. “You know, you don’t sound as jazzed about doing this as you should.”
“I’m excited.” Her jaw firmed. She sounded faintly defensive even to herself.
“You do a great job of hiding it,” Darcy said dryly.
MG let her fingers drift over the strings. After a moment, she sighed. “I had some…problems in Nashville. It sort of took the excitement out of it for me. I’m hoping I’ll get it back if I start singing again here.” Or anyway that I won’t feel any worse than I already do.
“What kind of problems?” Darcy’s eyebrow quirked up.
“I’m not…I don’t exactly sing what they like in Nashville,” she said slowly. “I got a manager who had me singing different stuff. I think he thought I could be some kind of Taylor Swift clone or something.”
Darcy’s eyebrow quirked higher.
MG gave her a lopsided grin. “Yeah, I know. Too old. Too fat. Too weird.”
“Too fat?” Darcy looked like she’d sucked on something sour.
“Hey, have you seen Taylor Swift? She’s like some water sprite or something.”
Darcy shook her head. “So that’s why you left?”
“No, I left because my grandpa needed me. But I’d pretty much stopped singing by then anyway.” Seeing as how nobody much wanted to hear her, she hadn’t had a whole lot of choice about that.
“Okay, so you’ll start again now.” Darcy shrugged. “Lots of singers around here. Lots of places they can sing. And like I say, you’re good. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
MG licked her lips. That, of course, assumed she could actually get up on a stage and sing again. Toward the end of her Nashville career, that hadn’t been a sure thing. “Hope so anyway.” She managed a few more chords.
Darcy took another swallow of her beer. “So are you sleeping with Joe?”
MG gritted her teeth. “Jesus, Darcy.”
“Are you?”
She blew out a breath, feeling her
cheeks heat up to flame level. “No. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Okay, so you’re not sleeping with Joe yet.” Darcy gave her a sly grin. “No bets on the future.”
MG closed her eyes for a moment. “So does everybody in the kitchen know?”
“About you and Joe?” Darcy shrugged. “I don’t know. Leo saw you guys out together last night. But I don’t know if he’s told anybody besides me.”
“Is that how you found out?”
Darcy’s smile was back. “I saw Joe take off after you the night your car died. It didn’t take any brains to figure out what was on his mind.”
“Does anybody care?” MG rubbed her eyes, telling herself she wasn’t really getting a headache.
Darcy frowned. “Hard to say. The Beav might if he gets wind of it, seeing as how he’s decided he wants you out for some reason. But nobody else would give a damn. People sleep around in kitchens all the time.”
“Terrific.” MG played another couple of chords, then launched into “Something To Talk About.”
Joe was not in the best of moods. He’d planned on taking MG’s check to her personally, then seeing if he could somehow talk his way into the house. And once there, maybe, just maybe, things would take a more interesting turn.
But of course it hadn’t worked out that way.
When he got to the kitchen, he found Fairley doing inventory in the pantry, even though it was his day off. While Joe was all for industry, he was less delighted when Fairley cornered him to talk about the contest, particularly since he was suffering from an attack of guilty conscience after talking to Clem the night before. If they were going to be part of the damn thing, they needed to spend some time thinking about what they’d serve.
Fairley had some ideas. Actually, Fairley had lots of ideas, most of them involving complicated French or Italian dishes that would be hell on wheels to cook in the makeshift kitchen the contest arena would provide.
“This isn’t Iron Chef,” Joe said as politely as he could. “We don’t get points for attempting the impossible.”
