He’d not been surprised by her studio, the bastard. He’d gone snooping and knew it was there. But he’d wisely kept his mouth shut as she’d removed her computer from the safe and allowed him to haul it out to his truck.
The prospect of actually being involved in his TV project loomed on her radar like a towering mountain that she didn’t have the power to soar above. A crash was inevitable.
Well, she’d gone down in flames before and, like the phoenix, survived. What didn’t kill her made her stronger? She tried to think of more platitudes, but Oz was too distracting.
After they’d removed the computer, Oz had gone back to the B&B and changed into loose linen trousers and a Hawaiian shirt, one almost as loud as her dress. Driving the big truck down the mountain with one hand draped over the wheel, his overlong hair blowing from the open window, he looked as if all he needed was a surfboard in the truck bed.
He glanced at her warily. She knew she was sitting stiff as the surfboard he didn’t have, with her hands clasped in her lap as if fearful the truck would fly off the side of the road. The highway did have some spectacular curves and drop-offs, but his driving wasn’t her fear.
“There are CDs in the console,” he suggested. “I promise not to jump your bones if you sing along. Or I’ll wait for a good place to pull off first.”
She wanted to smack him for laughing at her fears. Just feeling angry could get them killed if she opened her mouth and said something. She took a deep breath, crossed her legs on the seat, and rested her hands palms upward on her knees. She needed to find her center and calm the Beast.
He slid an Anonymous Four disc into the player, and the haunting sopranos soared from the speaker.
She definitely needed to smack him, the irritating, nonbelieving man. But the lilting voices filled the cab and sucked her up until the music filled her, and she became the music.
Glorious, glorious sound, lifting her higher, spinning her around. How she’d missed the music!
Inside her zone, she hummed through “Wayfaring Stranger” and “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” When the CD came around to “Amazing Grace,” she lost her control. It was one of her favorite songs, and she couldn’t keep the words from her tongue, softly at first.
She sounded rusty even to herself, so she tried to blend with the voices, disguising her own to fit in. These were the songs she’d first learned, the ones she’d sang in church choir, before she’d been discovered. Childhood songs, without the painful memories of later.
She was weeping so hard before the song ended that she couldn’t see the road. Oz was destroying her, not the other way around. These few blissful hours of freedom had set her soul gliding too close to the sun. How would she ever confine her real self again, after he left? She ought to jump out of the truck and run home and lock the doors and never speak to him again.
“Shit!” Oz shouted, startling her out of her morass of despair.
Terrified her singing had caused still another trauma, Pippa grabbed the door handle. Forcing the sobs back down her throat, she waited for the moment she’d have to fling herself out the door. She sent him a frantic glance.
Jaw tight, Oz stomped on the brake and competently swung the truck into a wide space on the narrow shoulder. The rear of the truck fishtailed, but he held the big machine to the gravel without sliding into the ditch nearby. He wasn’t even looking at her.
Blinded by tears and fear, Pippa didn’t know whether to fall out of the truck and run or stay and fight whatever had set Oz off. Without waiting to explain, he flung open his door and hit the road running. Robbie had almost driven her off a cliff. Had she driven this man to flinging himself off the mountain?
Finally realizing Oz was running down the road, she blinked the moisture from her eyes, still afraid she’d hurt him. No longer blinded by fear, she looked out the windshield and finally recognized what he’d seen—an abandoned car, a man and woman farther down the road. The man was viciously dragging and beating at the furious woman while she screamed and fought.
Their car had apparently gone off the road—while arguing? The old Ford Escort teetered ominously on the steep embankment in a narrow stretch of the road farther down the mountain. Alarmed, Pippa watched a crying toddler climb from the precariously tilted car. Without another thought, she jumped out of the truck and raced in Oz’s wake.
He was far ahead of her, his long legs carrying him directly to the grappling couple on the far side of the car. None of them were aware of the baby behind them. Pippa cried out a warning, but she was too far away, they were too angry, and the wind through the canyon drowned her out. She winced as Oz seized the man’s shoulder, spun him around, and plowed a fist into his jaw. Assault and battery would look good on his record. Not. But she had to admire a man willing to step from his own comfortable world to take charge of a bad situation.
She couldn’t possibly catch the attention of the adults. But she had to stop the little boy.
She threw her Voice as she had learned to do in church, singing whatever silly song came into her head to catch the child’s attention. Children had sharp hearing. The mop-haired toddler looked up in interest. He’d heard her!
Loosened by her singing in the cab, her Voice rang out clearly. To her ears, it echoed off the canyon walls, but the adults still didn’t notice. The wife beater had turned his rage away from his victim, intent on flinging Oz out of his way first. He was larger than Oz but slower. Oz’s fast fists didn’t allow the bully to get close. Pippa was terrified they’d both go over the side, along with the car.
She slowed her song to a lullaby, singing sweetly now that she was closer, teasing the child with smiles as she’d learned to do in the day care, doing her best to look nonthreatening. Clad in a too-small T-shirt and a dirty diaper, he took a step toward her.
The shouts and blows of the men and his mother’s terrified weeping distracted him into turning away.
Pippa forced the panic inside the strongbox she’d forged over the years. Panic would only exacerbate the anger and pain of the situation. Instead, she separated the panic from the music in her head, letting the song come out of its own accord, as it once had, before she’d discovered the danger. But this was for good. It was just a song…
“Sing, sing a song,” she called, aiming for an audience of one. Her fright eased as the toddler swung back to her again. She added a teasing lilt, and he began clapping his hands. She made up lyrics to encourage him to continue clapping.
By the time she reached him, he willingly climbed into her arms and hugged her neck, and she could breathe again.
Only then did she realize that the boy’s mother had also heard her song. Looking dazed, she abandoned the brawling men and walked back to meet Pippa, slowly clapping as well. Pippa switched from her made-up ditty to “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and the woman nodded and began to sing with her. The boy laughed and thumped Pippa’s shoulders in delight.
She glanced up to see how Oz was faring, wondering if there was any way on earth she could stop the fight. She’d never been successful in stopping the riots she’d caused before she quit the business.
Her Voice should reach them now that she was closer. She raised it higher, staying with the light-hearted song.
The bully hesitated, looking around and shaking his head as if to clear it. Unfazed by her Voice, Oz felled him with a powerful blow to the jaw.
The man didn’t get up again.
***
Leaving the puking drunk beside the road where he belonged, Oz jogged past the beat-up Escort. Pippa’s voice soared through the air with the ethereal power of angelic choirs and birdcalls at dawn. He’d known she was talented.
But observing what she’d just done, he was ready to believe she was enchanted.
She’d frozen a drunk in place. Oz hadn’t made a lucky blow. The dolt had heard her, stopped fighting, and b
een diverted by a damned child’s song. And now she had a bruised and weeping woman and a frightened toddler clapping and smiling and singing beside the road like puppets whose strings she pulled.
Siren magic.
Pippa raised her eyebrows questioningly as he approached but seemed to think it necessary to keep up the entertainment. He nodded, kissed her soft, golden-red hair, and murmured, “I’ll pull their car back to the road. Take them away from the edge.”
Like the Pied Piper, Pippa sang and clapped and led her audience of two across the narrow mountain road to a grassy area where oncoming traffic wouldn’t endanger them. By the time Oz had chains on the Escort, she had them sitting in a circle, clapping hands with one another in a three-way game of patty-cake.
He had to be imagining this. He’d seen the man hit his wife so hard, she shouldn’t have a tooth left in her head. But here she was, laughing with the joy of a child—because of Pippa.
And she hid this magical gift of hers?
Magic. Yeah, like he believed in magic. Oz thought he ought to bang his head against the truck a few times, but he had better things to do for now.
After setting out flares in both directions, he returned to the Ram. Making certain the road was clear, he climbed into the cab, threw the shift, and carefully tugged the small car off its precarious perch and back to the road shoulder.
He returned the pickup to its original parking space farther up the mountain and then jogged down to see what his personal genie intended to do with her new fans-for-life.
He wasn’t a fanciful man. As a kid, he’d preferred real stories about sports heroes to his mother’s fairy tales, and as an adult he read histories and biographies. Magic was fantasy.
Pippa was real. And very possibly as dangerous as she claimed.
She ended the singing circle by taking her audience’s hands. One last clear note echoed over the canyon, and peace descended with only the occasional rumble of traffic farther below.
“Will the Escort run?” she asked quietly while the little boy climbed into the woman’s lap.
Oz watched the boy with a hungry pang, wishing it could have been Donal, wishing he could bash out the brains of the boy’s father all over again. Which reminded him…
“The Escort will run. I think it will be safer if I load our friend down there into the Ram while these two drive on. Can you drive?” He threw the last question at the woman climbing to her feet with the boy in her arms.
She nodded. “He’ll report the car as stolen, but I can reach my family before the cops find it.”
“Then get going. I won’t be too fast in delivering him to a hospital. He’ll be fine, but the medics will keep him around for a while.”
Oz watched the pair safely cross the road and return to their car as if they hadn’t just been mesmerized by a voice from the gods.
Then, reluctantly, he turned back to the wicked elf standing with crossed arms in a stand of prairie grass, glaring at him defiantly.
Chapter 17
“I’ll need you to sit behind the wheel while I load the bastard into the back,” Oz said after the Escort drove away. He glared back at Pippa as if the problem was all hers.
“What, you don’t want to clap and sing with me?” she asked mockingly, because that worry was at the top of her head. Why hadn’t he responded to her singing? Was he really immune?
“I’ll pass this time,” he retorted. “Give me another chance later.” He grabbed her arm and half dragged her across the road.
Fortunately, she had long legs and could keep up with him as he hurried back to the pickup. She kept glancing over her shoulder to the man sprawled in the dust, wondering how long before he got up and wandered into traffic.
“He’s passed out,” Oz said, opening the passenger door so she could climb in. “The alcohol fumes were enough to knock me over.”
“I hope she goes far, far away and never has to see him again,” Pippa said vehemently. “There ought to be vaccinations against alcoholism.”
He snorted and started the ignition. “Or against stupidity, because chances are, she’ll go back to him as soon as he shows up sober.”
Pippa couldn’t argue that. She’d spent almost two years taking Robbie back every time he pulled a stupid stunt. At least he’d never hit her. He was far too busy being sick and groveling beneath the fury of her evil, evil Voice. As soon as she cooled off and shut up so he realized that he’d been behaving like a mewling milksop, his humiliation made him go out and get high again. It had been a vicious circle neither of them knew how to end. Until it was too late, and she realized the problem was her.
Oz parked the truck as far off the road as he could, and Pippa slid behind the wheel to keep an eye on traffic while he climbed out. Watching the rearview mirror, she could see him tote the heavy drunk as if he were no more than a sack of grain. She didn’t think a lock of Oz’s golden-brown hair fell out of place as he did so. And he didn’t appear winded when he returned to reclaim his seat.
He wasn’t Robbie by any stretch of the imagination.
She wasn’t entirely certain Oz was real. Which worked out, she thought, remembering how he’d glared at her a few minutes ago. He wasn’t certain her Voice was real, and her Voice was her.
A chasm wider than a canyon loomed between them. She was out of her mind to think of sleeping with him again. But she was.
And so was he, she was pretty sure. She’d like to bask in the satisfaction of knowing that golden boy wanted dorky her, but more than one night smacked of relationship territory, and she really shouldn’t go there.
He darted her another of those wary looks as he hit the ignition. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she said airily. “I used to sing to abused women and children and drunks all the time. Usually, though, the crowd was bigger.”
He chuckled sardonically and pulled back on the highway. “If you sang like that in front of audiences, they forgot they were abused and drunk for a few hours. Where in hell did that voice come from? You’re good on CD, but in person, you’re surreal.”
She shrugged and then folded her legs into a lotus position again, taking deep breaths to calm herself before committing any irreversible act. Oz had seen more of her than any man since Robbie, and he wasn’t running. Now was the opportunity to give him the chance to get the hell out of Dodge. Decision made. “In my nightmares, I dream it’s my Voice that made my parents dump me at a fire station.”
There, she’d said it, her worst fear. She could seduce and entertain with her Voice for only so long. Eventually, her temper exploded, her terror escaped, her sorrow poured out, and everyone was miserable with her. Who could possibly live with that kind of turmoil?
“Your foster parents didn’t dump you,” he pointed out, logically enough. “So chances are pretty damned good that loving parents wouldn’t. And if your first experience with a man coming on to you was after puberty, it’s possible that whatever…”
He hesitated, and Pippa hid her grin. He would have to admit that she wasn’t just singing if he continued that sentence.
“That puberty gave you a greater range?” he finished with a nice save. “In which case, it’s doubtful you drove your parents to abandonment.”
She liked that idea. She happily absorbed it into her lexicon of theories. “Maybe I wasn’t abandoned but stolen?” she added, for good measure. She didn’t want to be thrown away.
“That, I can believe. Can you imagine hearing a child prodigy, stealing her in hopes of making a fortune, then having her turn into a raging virago? A kidnapper would have dropped you, pronto.” He grinned. “I bet you were a hellion.”
“I wasn’t an angel,” she agreed. “I know that’s the image my managers tried to promote, but I was an angry toddler, a sullen grade school kid, and a mean teenager. I knew I was being used and resented it, but I’d ne
ver known any alternative. The nobody-loves-me syndrome, I guess. I thought if I did what I was told, they’d learn to love me, so I tried to please. For far too long, I tried. But they only loved me when I was doing what they wanted. They turned away when I showed them my unhappiness,” she said with the dispassion gained from the perspective of distance. She’d had lots and lots of time and therapy to understand the dynamics. And realize they’d never change.
“Wicked dangerous—beauty, talent, and temperament. It’s a wonder you survived.” He glanced in his mirror and muttered a curse. “Our guest is awake.”
Turning to see the bearded passenger shaking his shaggy head, Pippa debated. They couldn’t let him fall out of the truck if he tried to climb out. She was pretty sure she could stop a drunk with her Voice. She certainly had the experience. And she’d already stopped this one once.
Except Oz was driving. She didn’t want to distract him or put him to sleep at the wheel. But so far, he’d seemed impervious to everything she threw his way. He’d unleashed her urge to experiment with his encouragement, and she had barely begun to sample the heady taste of freedom. She’d probably never be satisfied with the results of her research until she killed someone else, she realized bitterly. But the drunk was likely to kill himself if she didn’t try something.
She slid the cab window partially open while considering her repertoire. She couldn’t sing her Syrene songs without the danger of being recognized. She had to stick to standard fare.
She hummed a few bars near the window, watching to see how the moaning man reacted. He was unsteadily trying to sit while holding his jaw. She hoped Oz had broken it.
The man winced and tumbled over, bouncing with the bed of the truck. Oops. Her anger had escaped. Taking a deep breath, aiming for the control she’d so painstakingly developed over these past years, she sought a calming tune. She hummed a little louder. Their passenger quit cursing.
Lure of Song and Magic Page 13
