American Diva

by Julia London

  Jack saw him out, saw Courtney skip around the town car to the front passenger side, and with a roll of his eyes, shut and locked the cabin door.

  He glanced back at Audrey. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking around the cabin. “I’m going to try and get some sleep if that’s all right.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We ought to be out of here in about fifteen minutes. It’s about a two-hour flight to Dallas.”

  “Okay.”

  “Buckle up,” he reminded her as he stepped into the cockpit. But she’d already leaned back, her eyes closed. She looked, he thought, very tired.

  He shut the door behind him and went to work. A half hour later, having reached a safe cruising altitude, and having cleared through the various towers in the area, Jack cranked the volume on his iPod. A touch on his shoulder almost sent him through the roof.

  He jerked around as he ripped one earbud out of his ear. He frowned at Audrey’s gleeful laughter.

  “Oh my God!” she cried. “You almost ejected!”

  “Most people knock,” he said, turning his attention back to the instrument panel.

  “I did knock, but you were hooked up to your iPod.” She leaned over his shoulder to look out the windshield; a curl of blond hair fell off her shoulder and tickled his cheek. “Wow. It’s so black out there.”

  Yes, it was very black, which was why he needed to keep an eye on the instrument panel and not the curve of her breasts. “I thought you were going to get some sleep,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Too many things on my mind. May I sit there?” she asked, pointing at the copilot seat.

  “Help yourself,” he said, and watched as she stretched one long, bare, and very sexy leg into the space, and followed it with another. “Seatbelt,” he reminded her as she settled in.

  Audrey dutifully strapped herself in, then began to peer at the instrument panel, leaning over to read the labels. “It is very cool that you know how to fly this,” she said, reaching for a dial. Jack caught her wrist—she looked at him, then at her wrist.

  “I’d rather you not touch anything,” he said. But he couldn’t seem to let go of her wrist, until Audrey lifted a golden brow. He reluctantly let go.

  She smiled, her eyes glittering with amusement. Jack looked straight ahead, into the night.

  “What did you think of the show tonight?” she asked.

  “Fantastic. It always is.”

  “Really?” she asked, as if she was somehow surprised by his answer. She twisted in her seat as much as she could beneath the seatbelt to face him. “Let me ask you something. Do you think the ‘Pieces of My Heart’ should come before or after ‘Frantic’? I’ve really been struggling with that—I don’t know if I want a slow and easy lead-in to ‘Frantic’ or a slow and easy comedown from it. We’ve tried it both ways and I can’t decide which is best.”

  Jack had never paid much attention to the order of the songs and shrugged. “I don’t know. It seems okay the way it is.”

  “Hmm,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll move it to the top of the set list. You know, start out slow and easy.”

  He said nothing, figuring she had plenty of people around to weigh in with opinions on that one.

  “Which is your favorite song?” she asked.

  “ ‘Complicated Measures,’ ” he said instantly and chuckled at Audrey’s gasp of surprise.

  “You’re kidding. That one is slow and—”

  “And one of your old songs,” he interjected. “I wish you’d do more of the old stuff.”

  Audrey grinned. “I’m a little partial to the old stuff, too.” She sang a few bars of “Complicated Measures,” her voice clear and beautiful. Jack began to nod his head along in time to the music, and with a laugh, Audrey paused. “Come on. Sing it with me.”

  Jack snorted and shook his head. “I fly. You sing.”

  “Come on,” she said again, nudging him. “You’ve heard it enough times.” She began to sing again, and Jack sheepishly joined in, squawking along with her in a voice that reminded him of a pack of dogs howling at the moon. In a matter of moments, Audrey was doubled over with laughter. “You’re awful!” she cried gleefully.

  “Thank you,” he said, grinning.

  “You win—you fly, I sing,” she said cheerfully, and beamed a smile at him that seeped into his pores. Audrey hummed a little more of the song then looked at him again. “Why do you like that song the best?”

  He didn’t know precisely. It was a love song, and he loved how sultry her voice sounded when she sang it. Almost as sultry as she sounded now, singing it softly beneath her breath.

  “It just seems more like you,” he said.

  “Really? How so?”

  He had no idea how, only that it was true. “I don’t really know,” he admitted. “But I think you have more of life and living in you than the pop songs can convey, and in the ballads, it really comes out.”

  “Living?”

  He looked at her. “You know—good times and bad times. Heartache and happiness. You’re a whole lot more than bubble gum.”

  She held his gaze, nodding thoughtfully, then looked out the window, at the splatter of lights in the black below that marked towns. “My life has not been bubble gum, that’s for sure.”

  “Mind if I ask what’s going on with your brother?”

  She shot him a suspicious look.

  “Never mind.”

  “Sorry,” she said, relaxing. “It’s just that when someone asks me a question, I have this instant fear that they are looking for something to give the tabloids.” She sighed and shook her head. “Talk about paranoid.”

  “I think you have every right to be paranoid.”

  She smiled a little. “But I knew a long time ago that I could trust you. It’s just habit.”

  That made him feel good.

  “My brother,” she sighed, and settled back in the chair and folded her arms across her midriff. “Where do I start? How about with this: He was one of the most talented guitarists in all of Texas. At least I firmly believe he had the potential to be. When we were kids, we used to hang out in the garage and play guitar to cover up the sound of my parents’ fighting.”

  Jack looked at her—she smiled sheepishly. “Mom and Dad hated each other by the time Allen was born, and not a day went by we weren’t reminded.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, ouch. Anyway, my sister Gail, she just took off with her boyfriends when they would start up. But Allen and I were too young, so we hung out in the garage. He’s two years younger than me,” she said. “And he used to worship me. I could have told that kid to jump off a bridge and he would have done it with a smile on his face. And he loved playing guitar—a whole lot more than I ever did,” she said with a laugh. “Ironic, huh?”

  “A little,” Jack agreed. “Does he still play?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “We were close until we hit high school, and you know how that goes. He had his friends, I had mine. We didn’t hang out in the garage anymore. I kept playing and Allen . . . Allen was playing games at that point. I just never understood what happened to the dream.”

  “The dream?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding, looking at him again. “We had a pact—we’d get out of Redhill as soon as we could and form a band. We were determined to go to Austin and get some gigs. When I graduated, I was seventeen. I promised Allen I would go to Austin first and figure out where we were going to live and how we could get a band together. He wanted me to stay, you know, because of Mom and Dad . . .” Her voice trailed off and she turned her head so that he could not see her face. “My parents are a piece of work—none of us wanted to be stuck with them. And Allen was the baby, but I . . . I had to get out of there,” she said, her voice going soft. “I couldn’t take it.”

  She stopped there and absently ran a finger over the hem of her shorts. “I had to get out,” she said again. “
But I told Allen when he got out of high school he was going to follow me, and I’d have a place for him. Only he never came. He quit playing guitar altogether, and the next thing I knew, he was getting into trouble all the time. Needless to say, it went downhill from there.”

  With a sudden smile, she rubbed her hands on her arms. “We weren’t exactly the model family,” she said. “It’s kind of cold in here, isn’t it?”

  “There’s a jacket hanging behind my seat,” he said, motioning with his head.

  Audrey reached around him and grabbed his old Air Force jacket. She slipped into it backward, so the back of the jacket covered her front. The thing engulfed her. She wrapped her arms around her and crossed her legs.

  “Did you ever see Allen after you left home?” Jack asked.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “It was a couple of years before I could get up the money to go back to Redhill, but by then, I’d met Lucas, and he had a car and would drive me.”

  At the mention of Bonner’s name, Jack clenched his jaw.

  “But half the time, Allen wasn’t around. He would take off with reprobates and get into all kinds of trouble. He’s had a lot of odd jobs, but nothing permanent. He just keeps drifting.”

  “So what happened to Allen this time?” Jack asked.

  Audrey shook her head, and the light in the cockpit caught the shimmering gold highlights in her hair. “I don’t know. Mom was pretty vague, but it was definitely drugs.” She bit her lower lip, lost in thought, and then suddenly straightened up and looked at him again. “What about you, Jack Price? What’s your family like?”

  The exact opposite—his parents were rock solid, his two older sisters as protective of him and his brother Parker as they were of their own kids. He and Parker had left Midland, where they’d grown up in the shadows of the auto body shop his father had owned, but the rest of them were still there, still getting together on weekends, still as close-knit as they’d ever been. “We’re pretty tight as a family,” he said, wishing Audrey could know what that was like. “Everyone gets along.”

  “Wow,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  Oh, but he did—he’d known too many people in his life from screwed-up families that he very much appreciated his.

  “I can’t trust anyone in my family,” Audrey continued, and twisted to face him again. “Do you know that my father sold himself to a celebrity talk show and told them a bunch of crap about me? Stuff he made up from nowhere,” she said, flinging a hand out to indicate nowhere. “He got fifty thousand dollars for it! And then he had the nerve to ask me why I was upset!”

  “That sucks,” Jack agreed. “It is the price of fame, I guess. I’ve seen it with a lot of people I work with—the number of friends and family you can just be yourself around dwindles pretty fast.”

  “Exactly,” Audrey said. “My dad never showed any signs of turning on me until a lot of money was dangled in front of him, and then suddenly, I’m his meal ticket. You ought to see the house I built for him—well, you will, because you can’t miss it if you go to Redhill. But I told the builder, just build what he wants. Dad wanted this huge mansion in a town of three-bedroom, two-bath ranch houses. It’s ridiculous.” She looked off again, shaking her head. “I don’t know who I can trust anymore.”

  He knew. And at least in one case, he suspected he knew better than Audrey. He debated telling her his suspicions about Lucas. “Are you sure you can trust everyone around you today?” he asked carefully.

  To his great surprise, she laughed. “Hell no! Do you honestly think I don’t know who would sell me out in a minute?”

  Her answer surprised him—there was a glimmer of hope that maybe she did see through Lucas Bonner. “You do?” he asked.

  “Of course!”

  “But . . . but you seem so tight with him—and you let him tell you everything.”

  Audrey’s brow sank into a deep frown. “Who tells me everything?”

  Shit.

  “Who are you talking about?” she demanded.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Courtney!”

  “Ah,” he said with a nod. “Good call.”

  “Are you talking about Lucas?” she asked, clearly miffed.

  Jack groaned softly. Sometimes, when it came to women, he really had a knack for walking into a buzz saw. “I guess I am,” he said wearily.

  Her mouth dropped open. Then snapped shut. For a moment. “You really are something else,” she said.

  “You’re not the first woman to have that opinion,” he said with a snort of amusement. “But I don’t respect a man who will use a woman to further his own ends.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Audrey,” he said, looking at her, “don’t you think it’s just a little questionable that every time you end up in a tabloid or the paper or on the Internet that he is with you and, nine times out of ten, taking credit for something that is all you?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s questionable. There are cameras stuck in my face everywhere I go, and Lucas and I are together a lot. Of course he shows up!”

  “He shows up in the photos because he practically demands it,” Jack said as all his common sense flew right out the window into the blackness around them. “He won’t let you be your own person. He wants you to be his person. He wants to use your career as a stepping-stone to his own. Look at what he did at Katie’s house. He didn’t want you to go, but the moment he knew you had, he capitalized on it.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Audrey said, but she looked uncertain. “He was promoting Songbird Foundation.”

  “Which just happened to coincide with the release of his CD.”

  “Dammit, Jack, you and I have . . . we’ve . . . well, we’re friends. But that doesn’t mean you suddenly know all about me and Lucas.”

  “I think you have a right to know that he is using you and that you can chart your own course without him.”

  “I am charting my own course.”

  “Oh really?” he asked. “So it was your idea to go pop and to do this nationwide tour?”

  Audrey blinked.

  “And your idea to hire security and choreographers and Courtney?”

  “He is my manager, Jack. That is what managers do! They handle all the business stuff,” she said, with a flutter of her fingers, “so that people like me can concentrate on the music. If I didn’t concentrate on the music, there would be no business at all, would there?”

  He’d obviously upset her, and he couldn’t really say why he’d done it. What did it matter to him if she let Lucas Bonner walk all over her? “You’re right,” he said. “You’re the music. You have a tremendous talent.”

  She folded her arms across her middle and looked out the window. After a moment, she asked softly, “Do you really think so?”

  She looked suddenly and strangely vulnerable sitting there, a young woman uncertain of her talent. “Sweet cheeks,” he said softly, “when you sing, I swear to God I see angels standing around you. I don’t think there is another female artist on the charts today that has even half of your talent, and there is not another artist, male or female, whose music moves me the way your music moves me. That is the God’s honest truth. Don’t ever doubt your talent.”

  A grateful smile spread across her lips. “Thank you,” she said, and put her hand on his forearm. “You have no idea what that means to me.” Her smile broadened. “But you’re wrong about Lucas.”

  “I’m not, either,” he said.

  “Yes, you are,” she said cheerfully, and let go of his arm as she moved to get out of the chair. “I’m going to try and get some sleep now, okay?” With one last smile, she went out, leaving Jack to feel warm and sentimental and, God help him, incredibly horny.

  Eighteen

  They were in Dallas by three that morning, and thanks to Courtney’s ability to pull a few strings, a Cadillac sports car was waiting for them. From there, without traffic, it was about an ho
ur’s drive to Redhill, which sat smack in the middle of absolutely nothing just southeast of Fort Worth.

  Redhill, where Audrey had grown up with two parents who, having divorced ten years ago, still argued about everything. The town was nestled between a feed lot on one end and a tool and dye operation on the other end, and flanked by two opposing houses on hills that overlooked the towns. Audrey’s father lived in one, her mother in the other.

  Dad still owned the two-bay auto mechanic shop, but he rarely went in anymore. He preferred to hold court at the sprawling stucco and red-tiled mansion Audrey had built for him on the hill so that he could see over the town. He had insisted on being the general contractor for the job, and the result was a hodge-podge of design ideas that made the place look schizophrenic. There was a large lap pool in back that he had promptly turned into a pond, and a barn where he kept various cars in various stages of repair, and a stand of pecan trees that needed pruning. Dad wasn’t much on upkeep—the house was surrounded by car and motorcycle parts, and the crowning glory, a guitar-playing frog that had once sat on top of his shop.

  Across town, on the other hill, was Mom’s house, an old Victorian that had stood on that hill since the town was founded. Always the martyr, Mom had insisted she did not want a new house when Audrey could afford to give her one. She swore she was fine in the family’s three-bedroom, two-bath shotgun and she didn’t need a big fancy house.

  But then she saw Dad’s.

  Audrey bought the house Mom had coveted since they were kids. She tried to have it renovated, too, but Mom fought her every step of the way. Tile or wood floors, Mom? Neither—the old floors were fine. Pool or no pool, Mom? What a silly question. The result was a dated interior Mom insisted was too big and too hard to clean, and God forbid she should have anyone come clean it. When Allen was sober, he stayed there and kept up the lawn. When he was gone, two garden gnomes Mom had salvaged from the old house stood sentry in front of rosebushes that never bloomed.

  As they drove toward Redhill, Audrey was sickened by the possibility of Jack meeting all of her family at once. Individually, they weren’t so bad. Together, they were a redneck convention.