Fearless Love

by Meg Benjamin

  MG blinked. Oh well, she’d heard worse band names. “Hi,” she said, sticking out her hand.

  “This is…” Dewey paused, staring at her.

  Crap. He was already blanking on her name. “MG Carmody,” she supplied. “Nice to meet you.”

  Coleman gave her a limp handshake. “Hey.”

  “You about ready to go on, sweet thing?” Dewey gave her an overly bright smile that made her stomach clench.

  “Absolutely. You’ve got my name now, right?” she asked through clenched teeth, giving him an overly bright smile of her own.

  “Sure, sure.” He turned and ambled toward the stage again.

  Coleman narrowed his eyes. “So you’re just starting out?”

  “Sort of.” MG leaned closer to the stage entrance, trying to hear Dewey.

  “Well, good luck,” Coleman said doubtfully. He didn’t add you’re going to need it, but MG figured it was on his mind.

  “Thanks.”

  Coleman was already heading back toward the main room, probably to join the rest of his band in the bar. MG blew out a breath and moved closer.

  “A great little performer, new to Texas. Let’s give her a real Oltdorf welcome, folks. Miss MG Carmody.”

  Dewey turned toward her from the front of the stage, smiling as he clapped. The crowd gave her applause that fell into the polite category. Quietly polite. MG gripped the neck of the Martin and headed out, the brightest smile she could muster plastered on her face.

  Her opening set was going to be mostly covers—she’d already decided that. Once she got their attention, she figured she could try some of her own stuff, but not until then. She launched into “Jambalaya,” hitting the Martin with the kind of open-handed strum she’d learned from a sideman at one of the Nashville recording sessions where she’d sat in. The balance was a little off on the sound, but the sound guy caught it quickly and after that it was pure adrenaline. At the end she even managed a quick growl—hell, if Emmylou could do it, so could she.

  The applause afterward was a little more enthusiastic. At least now they knew she could sing. She wandered through Americana’s Greatest Hits—Willie, Billy Joe Shaver, Townes—until the end of the set, then finished off with a slightly feminized version of “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” As she sang, an image of Joe’s face popped into her memory, accompanied by an unexpected twinge of guilt. She hadn’t exactly lied to him about her time in Nashville, but she sure hadn’t told him the whole truth either. Sooner or later she’d have to explain about the singing.

  The applause at the break was respectable, and she grinned as she walked backstage. The long-haired leather-wearing guy was back. She tried to dredge his name out of her memory. Coleman. She hadn’t a clue about his first name, though. She wasn’t sure she’d even heard it.

  “Not bad,” he said, giving her a sensationally insincere smile.

  “Thanks.” As a compliment, not bad was pretty damn lame, but maybe he was trying for understatement.

  “You’ve done this before, right?”

  She nodded. “Not around here, though.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Where were you before this?”

  “Oh, around. You know—Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee.”

  “Tennessee?” One eyebrow went up. “Nashville?”

  Her shoulders clenched, but she managed a terse nod.

  He shrugged. “Well, it sounded good. Maybe Dewey can book you to open for us again sometime.” He gave her a smile that was a bit more sincere than the last one. Of course, now he looked like he was getting ready to hit on her. “Come on back to the bar after you finish,” he drawled. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Thanks. I better get back out there now.” She gave him her own best insincere smile and headed back onto the stage again.

  There were more people on the benches now, most of them probably there for the main act. At least the buzz of conversation died down a little when she sat back on her stool. She sang a few more standards, then slipped in a couple of the ones she’d written back in Tennessee. The ones her manager had said wouldn’t sell. The crowd was friendly, applauding enthusiastically if not exactly over the top. She saw the main act, Antietam, standing now at the back of the room. Time to wrap things up.

  “Here’s one for Nashville,” she began.

  Somebody in the crowd gave a very wet raspberry.

  MG grinned over the laughter. “Believe me, I know just how you feel.” She hit a D minor chord, then slid into “Travelin’ On.” It wasn’t one of the ones she’d written in Tennessee. She sang the words she’d written a few weeks ago, the words that had come out of the whole Nashville debacle. She wasn’t sure which had come first, the decision to give up on being a country singer or the song, but the two things went together—of that she was very sure. The notes seemed to take off beneath her fingers, the words tumbling out as if she’d only just thought of them, the emotions still new and raw. All the anger and frustration she’d felt when she’d first written the song built beneath the lyrics, tearing along with the rhythm.

  She might have imagined it, but the crowd seemed to have quieted slightly by the time she finished. She drew out the last note, her eyes closed until the sound finally was gone.

  And the crowd roared its approval. When she opened her eyes she saw people clapping and whistling, even a couple of fist pumps from the band in back. She was so surprised she almost fell off the stool.

  Dewey came back on stage as she stood, sliding his arm around her waist. “Ain’t she somethin’, folks?” he yelled. “Y’all gotta come back now and hear her again.” His accent seemed to be getting thicker as he spoke. MG half-expected him to start doing the Cotton-Eyed Joe across the stage.

  She waved to the crowd and started to move off to let the main act set up, but Dewey caught her hand. “How ’bout an encore, sugar?”

  MG licked her lips. Planning for an encore had seemed a little too optimistic, but hell, here she was. “Sure.”

  She hit the opening chords of “Bring It On Home To Me,” mentally thanking Darcy for making her practice it.

  Ten minutes later, she leaned against a table at the side of the room, trying to come down from her adrenaline high. Antietam hadn’t been too delighted about having to wait until she was through. She had a feeling the offer of a beer had probably been rescinded, not that she gave a damn. Dewey had passed the tin bucket he used for donations one last time after she’d finished, then given her the take. She hadn’t counted it yet but it looked respectable.

  A small girl with long straight hair, maybe eight or nine, approached her from the side, a napkin in her hand. “Miss?” she almost whispered.

  MG smiled. “Hi, sweetheart. What do you need?”

  “Could I have your autograph?”

  MG’s heart gave a mighty thump. “Sure, sweetheart,” she murmured, scrawling her signature on the napkin. “There you go.”

  “Thank you,” the child murmured and ran back to her seat.

  MG sighed, hoisting the Martin back in its case. Time to head back to the farm before she started making more out of this than she should. She walked toward the exit, stopping when Dewey stepped up next to her.

  “Got an opening Saturday night, sugar. You interested?”

  Saturday. Shit. “Opening act?”

  He nodded. “Different band—bunch out of Fort Worth.”

  She licked her lips. Opening act started around seven thirty. Give it an hour, ninety minutes tops. She could be back in time to meet Joe. “Sure.”

  “Okay then.” Dewey gave her another of his sunny smiles. “You did real good tonight, sugar. Real good. Looks like you might build yourself a following here.”

  “Here’s hoping.” At the front of the room, Antietam began to play an ear-splitting version of something that sounded like a Toby Keith cover. “See you then,” she yelled over the sound and headed for the parking lot.

  She did a little dance step once she was far enough away from the entrance that nobod
y would see. Saturday night might present a few scheduling problems, but she’d figure a way around them. She’d sung for a crowd, and she’d been good, by god. She leaned down to unlock the car, then jerked upright again as a shadow fell across her hands.

  The man standing at the back of her car was immense—so immense he partially blocked one of the mercury lights. He was also vaguely familiar. Long hair caught back in a ponytail, arms like hams, hands like paddles, Fu Manchu moustache drooping beside his lips. The bouncer from the Faro.

  Whose name was a blank. At the moment, she was working on breathing.

  “You’re MG Carmody.” His voice sounded like a landslide, more rumble than anything else.

  She nodded. Had they been introduced? She couldn’t remember offhand.

  “So what are you doing here in Bumfuck?” His black eyebrows arched up.

  MG blew out a breath. “Taking a break from Nashville. Trying to build my rep.”

  “Bullshit.” The man folded his arms across his enormous chest. “I know you. I saw you in Knoxville last year. You’ve already got a rep.”

  Her shoulders clenched tight. She managed to assume her blandest expression. “I don’t believe I know you.”

  “Chico Burnside. I book talent for the Faro Tavern in Konigsburg.” He gave her a long look. “Didn’t recognize you the other night. Now I do.”

  She frowned. “I thought you were…” MG wasn’t sure whether calling him a bouncer was an insult or not.

  “Yeah, I’m the bouncer too. But Tom doesn’t know squat about the musicians around here, and I do. So I find the talent.”

  Terrific. If she could just get her heart to slow down, maybe she could pick up another booking. “I left Nashville when my grandfather got sick here,” she said stiffly. “I’m trying to get started again.”

  Burnside’s eyebrow stayed up. “At Oltdorf?”

  “Dewey offered me a shot.” She was beginning to feel pissed rather than frightened, a welcome change. “The crowd was good.”

  Burnside nodded toward the club. “Dewey know who you are?”

  She nodded. “Sort of. I met him a while ago in Nashville.” Of course, he also couldn’t remember her name.

  “You looking for another gig?”

  “You mean here?” She frowned. “I’ve already got one.”

  Burnside shook his head. “I mean at the Faro. I book weekend acts—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I couldn’t put you on as the main act, but you could open.”

  She nodded slowly. “I’d like that.”

  “So shall I schedule you in?”

  “Okay. I’ve got a day job I need to work around, though.” And a lover who doesn’t know about my other life.

  He shrugged again. “Fine by me. How about the Wine and Food Festival weekend? That’s the first opening I’ve got. We’ll have stuff going all three days, with a lot of slots to fill.”

  She nodded. “Fine. I get off work around four usually. And I’m off all day on Sunday.”

  Chico Burnside extended a massive hand that totally enveloped hers when they shook. He frowned slightly, staring down at her as she climbed into her car. “You okay getting home? These back roads can be tricky after dark.”

  She wasn’t sure what kind of help he was offering. “That’s all right. I don’t live far from here.”

  “Okay, keep in touch.” He closed the car door for her.

  She gave him a totally inappropriate grin. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  All the way back on the twisting gravel roads, she warmed herself with the thought. I’ve got a gig. Two, actually. And nobody asked me to sing like Taylor Swift.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nedda called Lloyd Kurtz around the first of the week. He hadn’t given her the report about her grand-niece that he was supposed to pass on, but she hadn’t really expected him to. People like Lloyd Kurtz usually had to be prodded a few times before they got the message. Nedda was good at prodding.

  Kurtz sounded sleepy. Given that it was a little after six in the morning, she wasn’t entirely surprised. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “What?”

  “You were supposed to tell me what’s been going on at my niece’s place,” Nedda snapped. “I got a good mind to charge you extra instead of knocking off fifty.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end. Kurtz cleared his throat. “Oh. Okay, yeah. I been watching like you said.”

  “And?”

  “And, well…” His voice trailed off.

  Nedda checked the phone to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. “Spit it out.”

  “She’s had some man over there. Car was there the next morning.” Kurtz said it so quickly his words seemed to tumble over each other.

  “Some man? What man?” Nedda reached for her coffee cup.

  “Don’t know. Big guy. Shitty truck. Never saw him before.” Kurtz sounded like he was yawning. “Been there before, though. Saw him out running a couple times. On Wildrose Road.”

  Nedda sighed, drumming her fingers on the desk. She was so tired of dealing with incompetents. “You’ll find out.”

  “Find out what? I got work to do.” Kurtz was perilously close to whining.

  “You’ll find out who he is. If he’s on that road he must live around there. Nobody would come out there just to run. So you’ll find out who he is. I’ll call you next week. And you’ll tell me.”

  Kurtz started to answer back—she heard the stutter of his voice. But then he thought better of it. Smart man.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Guess I will.”

  Nedda hung up. Always best to leave while you were still in control.

  MG was about as tired as she’d expected to be the day after she’d sung at Dewey’s club. Fortunately, everybody was tired at that particular breakfast service so she didn’t stand out. Darcy had her chopping vegetables most of the morning, which at least had the virtue of being pretty mindless work. On the other hand, if she made it too mindless, she ran the risk of chopping off a finger.

  “So how was the show?” Darcy asked when she brought over a large box of carrots for processing.

  “Good. I’m going back on Saturday.” At least that’s what she’d meant to say. Unfortunately, she’d yawned a little at the end.

  “Oh yeah, performing at night and working in the kitchen in the morning is a real good idea,” Darcy muttered. “Try not to bleed on stuff, okay?”

  MG began scraping the carrots, dropping the peels into the waste sink. One of the chicken blogs had recommended feeding the chickens carrot peels since the hens seemed to like them and the peels were full of nutrients. Right now the vegetable scraps the kitchen produced went into the garbage, but she wondered if she could talk Joe into letting her have some peels to try it at home.

  “Hey, you, runner,” Jorge called. “Go get me some tomato paste from the pantry.”

  She wasn’t sure what he was working on, but it apparently required his total concentration. He didn’t even look up to see if she’d heard.

  She put down the carrot she was scraping and headed for the pantry, a small room at the side of the kitchen where they kept all the staples that didn’t need refrigeration. The organization was fairly loose, although she’d gotten used to it by now—canned goods in one section, bottles in another, sacks of flour and sugar and salt at one side, pasta above the cans. Since she was the one who was supposed to put away the new deliveries of supplies, she’d even managed to make a few improvements, although people kept shoving things around, which made it hard to keep up.

  She rifled through the cans, looking for tomato paste. It was usually toward the front since they used it for everything from pasta sauce to braised buffalo, but today she didn’t find it immediately. She reached toward the back of the shelf, which was too deep for her to see clearly, trying to identify the tomato paste can by touch. Her fingers slipped over the shapes until she reached something tall and slippery. Something that definitely shouldn’t be there.

  “Hey there, honeybuns, need
some help with that?”

  Whether it was her exhaustion or Fishhead’s stealth mode, MG didn’t know, but she definitely hadn’t realized he was behind her until he spoke. She jumped, whirling to face him. It was never a good idea to have your back to a groper. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Yeah. Seemed like you were kind of busy. Let’s see what you got on that shelf.” Fishhead reached over her head and pulled something to the front.

  She gaped. It was a bottle of balsamic vinegar that shouldn’t have been anywhere near the canned goods. “What the hell is that doing there?”

  “My, my, my. Got yourself a real nice little present here. This stuff would run you around a hundred bucks retail.” Fishhead’s lips spread in a singularly unattractive smile.

  She stared at him. “That’s not mine. Jorge sent me in here for tomato paste. That was out of order on the shelves.”

  “Uh huh,” Fishhead’s smile slid into something closer to a smirk. “So how did it get out of order in the first place, honeybuns?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.”

  “What’s going on in here?” Fairley stood in the doorway to the pantry, scowling.

  “Look what turned up at the back of the canned goods shelf.” Fishhead brandished the bottle of balsamic in Fairley’s direction.

  Fairley stared at the bottle, narrowing his eyes, then turned to MG. “How did it get there?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I was looking for tomato paste.”

  “Aren’t you the one who puts away the supplies?” Fairley’s jaw tightened.

  “Yes, I am. But I didn’t put that bottle there. Actually, I’ve never seen that bottle before so far as I know. All the vinegar is on the other side of the shelves.”

  Fairley and Fishhead exchanged glances. MG tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Why should it matter so much that a bottle of vinegar was in the wrong place? “Shall I put it back on the shelf with the others?”

  “No,” Fairley snapped. “LeBlanc needs to see this.” He nodded toward Fishhead. “Go see if he’s available for a few minutes.”