Always a Hero

by Justine Davis

  Now there was something to add to the door rotation, she thought. Some of her personal favorite acoustic bits, six- and twelve-string, Steve Davison and Jaquie Gipson first on the list, Kaki too, and John Butler and his custom eleven strings. Nobody could listen to them and still think acoustics were boring.

  But in the meantime, the boy wanted the solace that laboriously plinking out chords until his fingers were sore brought him.

  “No,” she said to his request, startling him; she’d never declined him before. But at her gesture he followed her into the former storage room she’d had converted into a soundproof room with a small recording system set up. Nothing fancy, but enough for accurate and fairly full playback. The conversion had cost her, but it had paid for itself by the third year; not many aspiring players could resist the temptation of purchasing the instrument they liked best once they’d heard the sound played back for them. There was something about the process that was an incredible selling tool.

  Jordy followed her into the room, knowing to dodge the corner of the keyboard in the slightly cramped space before she even flipped the lights on. She walked across to the rack where she’d put the Gibson SG when she’d finished last night; the mood had been upon her and she’d indulged in a rare these days midnight jam, playing riff after riff until her own out-of-practice fingers were sore.

  She picked up the gleaming blue guitar and held it out to the boy.

  “Try this one.”

  The boy’s eyes widened and she heard him smother a gulping breath. “BeeGee?”

  She grinned at his use of her old nickname for the guitar, B for the color, and G for Gibson. A name she’d come up with before it had been pointed out to her that she’d inadvertently chosen the name of her mother’s favorite group, back in the day. It had taken her a while to get over the humiliation of that, but the name had stuck.

  And the gesture had the result she’d wanted; the boy completely forgot the pain he’d been mired in. For the moment, he would be all right.

  She closed the door behind her, thinking it might be better if she couldn’t hear what sounds his untrained fingers might coax out of her baby. The neck was small enough, but it tended to be a bit head-heavy and might give him trouble. Maybe it would teach him that form had a big role in function; right now he was too taken with looks and flash to absorb that.

  When she got back into the store she found Mrs. Ogilvie waiting, a new book of piano music in her hands. Marilyn was desperate to get her youngest daughter seriously interested, although Kai knew Jessica couldn’t care less. At sixteen, her life was full of other things. But her mother kept trying, and Kai wondered if at some point, despite the steady stream of money, she should try and explain that some people just didn’t have the desire or the talent.

  Maybe I should suggest she take lessons herself, Kai thought. Then at least somebody would get some use out of all these books.

  “I saw Wyatt’s boy come in,” Marilyn said as she rang up the sale.

  “He comes in almost every day,” Kai said. Marilyn glanced around questioningly. “He’s in the sound room,” Kai explained. “Practicing.”

  Marilyn sniffed audibly. “At least he will practice. Is he taking lessons?”

  “He’d like to, but his father won’t let him. I guess he’s pretty strict.”

  “Now that’s hard to believe,” Marilyn said with a laugh.

  Marilyn would have likely known Jordy’s dad, Kai realized; she’d lived here for most of her life. She, having only been here four years, knew nothing about him outside of Jordy’s litany of complaints.

  All he does is work and hassle me, the boy had told her once. She remembered smiling at the typical complaint, one she’d made about her own father before she’d grown up enough to appreciate the love behind both actions.

  “You remember him?” Kai asked, curious to see if there was another viewpoint on the man, curious enough to endure Marilyn’s rather scattered conversational style. “From before, I mean?”

  “Wyatt Blake? Anybody who lived in Deer Creek then remembers Wyatt. Smart, restless, and reckless. When he left town at seventeen, nobody was surprised. We all felt bad for Tim and Claire though. Tim was strict, but Wyatt needed that, reckless as he was.”

  This hardly fit with Jordy’s description, Kai thought. But people changed. Or maybe that was why he was strict with Jordy, because it was all he knew.

  “They were good to that boy,” Marilyn added, “worked hard to give him a good life, and he still couldn’t wait to get out of here. They almost never heard from him. Then when it’s too late for them, he shows up back here, a widower with a young son, and won’t even talk about it. Why, I tried to tell him how sorry I was, and he wouldn’t have any of it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want any pity or sympathy.”

  “But he was downright rude about it. Claire would never have stood for that.”

  “Seems like he learned from them after all, though,” Kai said. “Jordy says he works hard.”

  And boring work, Jordy had added, as if it were a crime.

  “Yes,” Marilyn said.

  “And he did come back home.”

  Marilyn brightened at that. “Yes. Yes, he did. Not a word out of him about where he’s been or what he’s been doing for more than twenty years, but he did come home. Moved himself and the boy back into their old house.”

  As the woman later went on her way, Kai wondered yet again why people had kids at all. Seemed to just be asking for pain and tears.

  I should call Mom, she thought. Let her tell me again how it was all worth it.

  Except that that would be followed by the inevitable lecture, very wearing considering she’d been so consumed by Play On that she’d barely had time to breathe, let alone date. But it didn’t stop her mom from declaring it was time she found a good man and settled down to the task of a family herself. The very idea still gave her the shivers. She liked kids well enough, but babies made her very, very nervous. And she couldn’t imagine sending a baby to sleep with a smoking riff on BeeGee; they needed soft, lullaby stuff. Someday, maybe. But that day was a long way off.

  Not to mention there was that “good man” problem.

  The Edge modulated his way through that six-note arpeggio again as the door opened. A man stepped in, a stranger to her, and she almost grinned at the juxtaposition of his sudden appearance and her own thoughts. Especially since he certainly had the looking part of good down. His hair was a little short for her taste, but she liked the sandy blond color. And he had that body type she liked—lean, wiry. And just tall enough; she liked a man she had to look up at even in heels, but not get a neck ache doing it.

  He glanced around the store, quickly, almost assessingly, in a way that was somehow disconcerting. She had the odd thought that if she made him close his eyes and describe it to her, he’d get it perfectly, down to the Deer Creek High School Musical poster on the wall behind him.

  And he moves like a big cat, she thought as the man began to walk toward the back of the store. All grace and coiled power.

  She shook her head, laughing inwardly at herself.

  It’s because he’s a stranger, she told herself. Deer Creek was a small enough town that she’d seen most of the men around, and none had even come close to sparking such a sudden interest.

  He paused for a moment to look at the one personal souvenir she’d allowed herself here; a photograph of her onstage at the peak of Relative Fusion’s brief but promising existence, playing a packed, full-size arena for the first time. For her it had been the pinnacle, a height she would never see again, because Kit had tumbled off the high wire he’d been walking soon after that night, and her charmed life as she’d known it had ended.

  She slid off the stool she’d been sitting on and took a couple of steps toward the man. She put on her best helpful smile, and in a tone to match she asked, “Help you find something?”

  “Someone,” the man said, still looking at the photograph.

  Oo
h, great voice, too, Kai thought. She had such a weakness for that rough, gravelly timbre.

  Then he looked at her. Gave the photo another split-second glance.

  “Never mind,” he said, obviously realizing it was her in the photo, despite the fact that she had looked radically different in those days, with her hair long and wild and a ton of makeup and glitter on.

  She met his gaze as this time he focused his attention on her unwaveringly. “You’re Kai Reynolds.”

  Three things hit her in rapid-fire succession.

  She was being assessed, in much the same way as his surroundings had been when he’d first come in.

  Second, she knew those eyes. Jordy’s eyes. The same vivid green, although somehow muted. Tired, she thought.

  And at last came the realization. Impossibly, this was the stuffy, boring, staid Wyatt Blake.

  And he was looking at her as if she’d crawled out from under the nearest rock.

  Chapter 2

  It was worse than he’d feared.

  Wyatt stared at the young woman before him. He’d hoped, when he’d first seen the tidy, well-organized store that perhaps he’d been wrong to expect a problem here.

  Play On hadn’t been here when he’d lived here as a kid. He’d heard that the woman who owned and ran it had once been in a semi-successful rock band, which had registered only as an oddity in a little town like Deer Creek. But Mrs. Ogilvie—who had been the local information center when he was a teenager seemingly in trouble at every turn, and apparently still fulfilled that obligation—told him that Jordan came here after school almost every day, he’d known he had to check it out. Especially since Jordan had told him he was studying at school. He didn’t like being lied to, especially by his own son. If this was going to work at all—and he had serious doubts about that—there had to be honesty between them.

  The hypocrisy of that high-flown thought, given his own secrets, made him grimace.

  “You’re the owner,” he said.

  It came out more like an accusation than a question. He hadn’t meant to sound so harsh, but his thoughts had put an edge in his voice.

  She said nothing, but he’d spent his life gauging people’s reactions, and as clearly as if she’d shouted it he knew he’d gotten her hackles up already. That wasn’t how he’d wanted to approach this, but damn, she looked like his worst nightmare as far as Jordan was concerned. The rock-and-roll history was bad enough, but the slightly spiky red hair that fell forward to surround a face that managed to look sexy and impish at the same time, and the slim, intricate, knotted bracelet of a tattoo in a deep bluish-green color around her left wrist finished it for him. She would be an impossible-to-resist lure for an impressionable boy.

  “Well?” he said, his voice even sharper.

  “Was there a question?” she asked, her tone as cool as the steady gaze of smoky gray eyes. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t easily intimidated.

  He took a deep breath, and tried to rein it in. After all, she wasn’t some rock gypsy any longer, was she? She’d quit that life, so maybe there was some sense behind those eyes.

  The question was, how much of that life had she brought with her here?

  “Where’s the paraphernalia? In back?”

  She blinked then, looking genuinely puzzled. “What?”

  “The cigarette papers, the bongs, the glass pipes.”

  She went very still. The smoky gray eyes narrowed as she looked at him. “This is a music store, not a head shop.”

  “Right. And you never touched the stuff when you were a rock star.”

  She looked at him levelly. She was tall, he thought, five-eight or so. She wore black jeans and a gray shirt that had some sort of shine to it. Unremarkable, except for the way the shift and sheen of it subtly emphasized curves beneath it.

  A subtle rocker? Hard to believe, he thought.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said icily, “I never did. And also as a matter of fact, I was never a rock star. I played in a band.”

  “A successful one.”

  “For a while.”

  “And you use that.”

  “Marketing,” she said. “I’d be a fool not to, if I want to stay in business in a tough world.” The practical assessment surprised him. “You have a problem with that?”

  She was challenging him now.

  “Only when you use it to lure in kids.”

  She went very still. When she spoke, her voice held a new edge that made him wary. “Lure?”

  “Sexy girl rocker,” he said. “If you’re a teenage boy there’s not many lures bigger.”

  For an instant she looked startled. But her voice was no less edgy, and the edge sharpened as her words came bursting out.

  “That dream died thanks to the kind of thing you’re accusing me of selling. I would no more have drug paraphernalia here than I’d cook up meth in my kitchen.”

  At the fierceness of her voice Wyatt drew back slightly. Perhaps he should have done some research before he’d come charging in here. He didn’t care for the way she was looking at him. Which was odd, since he’d come in here not caring what she thought, only wanting to find out what drew his son here day after day.

  “You know,” she said, “when Jordy told me his father did nothing but work and hassle him, I thought he was being a typical teenager. That his situation just made normal parenting seem like hassling. Seems I was wrong. You really are a…hard-ass.”

  Wyatt had the feeling Jordan had used another word, and he noted the fact that even angry she had not repeated it. He assumed a woman who’d lived in the rock world had much worse in her vocabulary, so either she’d censored herself because she didn’t use the language with a potential customer, or because she was protecting Jordan.

  Belatedly—much too belatedly—he realized that she knew he wasn’t a potential customer at all, that she knew who he was.

  “How did you know?”

  To her credit, she didn’t play dumb. “Please. Like there’s more than two sets of those eyes in Deer Creek.”

  He blinked. He’d of course known Jordan had the same color eyes. It was one of the reasons, along with childhood pictures of each of them that could be interchangeable, that he’d never doubted Jordan was his son. He just hadn’t expected a total stranger to notice it within five minutes.

  And he hadn’t wanted to tick off the one person in town that Jordan seemed to voluntarily gravitate to within that first five minutes, either. He wasn’t even sure what had set him off. There had been a time when he’d been smoother, when he’d assessed a person accurately and chosen the right approach to get what information he needed from them.

  Apparently that time was long past.

  “Is my son here?” he asked, not even bothering to comment on her recognition.

  “He’s in back.”

  His brows furrowed as he glanced at the hallway behind her. “Doing what?”

  “Smoking dope.”

  His gaze snapped back to her face.

  “Isn’t that what you expected?”

  There was no denying the sour tone, or the annoyance in her voice.

  And there was no denying that, if she was telling the truth, he had it coming. He just couldn’t seem to find the right path on anything connected to Jordan.

  With an effort he was almost too weary to make, he pulled his scattered thoughts together and made himself focus on the reason he was here and the best way to get what he needed from this woman, not the woman herself. It was surprisingly difficult. She had a presence, and he had the brief, flitting thought that she must have been something onstage.

  “Ms. Reynolds,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, “I’m just looking for my son.”

  “What you’re doing,” she said, “is driving him away.”

  “He’d have to be a lot closer before I could drive him away,” he said wryly.

  Something flickered in her eyes, whether at his rueful words or his tone he didn’t know. But it was a better reaction than t
hat fierce anger, or that icy cool, and he’d take it.

  “Look, I just found out how much time Jordan spends here. I wanted to check the place out.”

  “So you come in with an attitude and a lot of assumptions?”

  She had him there. “Yes,” he admitted simply.

  That won him the briefest trace of a smile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not realizing he was going to say it until the words were out.

  “About which?” she asked, clearly requiring more than just a simple, blanket apology.

  He looked at her for a moment. She held his gaze steadily. Nerve, he thought. Or else he’d lost his knack for intimidation entirely in the last year. Since that had been his goal he should be happy, not standing here missing the skill.

  “The attitude,” he said finally. “And the assumptions…they should have stayed at the possibilities stage.”

  “Every music store is a haven for druggies and their gear? A bit old-school, aren’t you? Why risk it when people can get whatever they need or want online, with no open display of wares to get hassled over?”

  She had, he knew, a very valid point. Several of them. He really should have thought more before he’d barged in here on the offensive.

  “I was just worried about Jordan.” He let out a long breath, lowering his gaze and shaking his head. “I pretty much suck at this father thing,” he muttered.

  “It’s a tough gig.”

  The sudden gentleness of her tone caught him off guard. “I know this has been…difficult for him.”

  “Ya think?” she said. “His mom dies, the father he never knew shows up out of nowhere and proceeds to drag him back to that nowhere with him…well, nowhere in his view, anyway.”

  He’d been right about that, it seemed, Wyatt thought. Jordan talked to her. A lot. Certainly more than to him.