Encore

by Rachel Lacey

  “It’s a mess. A really stupid mess.”

  “Well, I suppose even the most straitlaced people land there occasionally.” Kate was smiling again. “I can call Sterling for you if you want.”

  “I already called him.”

  Kate’s smile widened. “Of course you did. Well, he’ll be able to find a way out of this for you, and I’m sure Cole has someone working on it too. I have to say, I don’t think anything you could have told me today would have shocked me more. You and Colton Nix getting drunk-married in the Bahamas?”

  “I’m officially never drinking again.”

  “Relax. I’d say you were due for a screwup. We all make them.” Kate added a finger sandwich and a sprig of grapes to her plate and motioned for Jenn to dig in too. “Lord knows I’ve screwed up enough times.”

  “Honestly?” Jenn gave her a shrewd look. “I don’t think you’ve ever done anything this stupid.”

  Kate laughed. “Okay, fine, you win for drunken screwup of the year. How did you and Cole leave things this morning?”

  “I kind of just freaked out and bolted.”

  “You spent the night in his room?”

  Jenn nodded, popping a grape into her mouth.

  “But you’re sure you didn’t have sex with him?”

  “I’m positive.” She remembered enough of last night to know she and Cole had passed out as soon as they’d made it back to his room. There had been some fooling around, but he hadn’t even tried to get her naked.

  “Well, thank goodness for that. A lot of men would have…well, I’m just glad he didn’t.”

  “Me too.” Jenn scarfed down two finger sandwiches and a plateful of fruit while they were talking and felt one hundred percent better now that she had something other than the remnants of last night’s alcohol in her stomach. “Where’s Josh?”

  “Fishing,” Kate said. “He went out on a boat with a couple of guys from the crew. Hey, remember what you told him last night? Your husband would be a few years older, comfortable but not rich, with a steady job…”

  “And I never date men in the business. Yeah, I know.” She scrunched her face. “How old is Cole?”

  “Twenty-seven, I think,” Kate said, looking amused.

  “Great. I married a younger man who is the polar opposite of everything I want in a husband. On the plus side, he’s rich and sexy, which is all the more sad since I didn’t even get to sleep with him.”

  “Pretty sure you could still change that part of the equation…”

  “Not a chance. Last night could have been a fun one-night stand, but now that we’re married, the whole dynamic has changed. Plus, it’s much easier to get our marriage annulled if it hasn’t been consummated.”

  * * *

  Cole paced from one end of the living room to the other. He wanted to go for a jog or a swim, go pound the shit out of the punching bag at the gym, but he didn’t dare leave his villa, not until he knew the damage had been managed. Being a celebrity was the loneliest fucking thing in the world sometimes. Jorja had chartered a plane that should be arriving in a few hours to take him home, and it couldn’t happen soon enough as far as he was concerned.

  A brisk knock sounded at the back door. Who the hell was that, and why were they at the back door rather than the front? If one of the groupies from yesterday had somehow found out which villa he was staying in…

  He strode to the door and yanked it open, not realizing the snarl that must be on his face until he saw Jenn blinking up at him, her expression wary. The sight of her sent a punch of pure adrenaline racing through his system. He inhaled, schooling his expression as he stepped back to invite her inside. “I’ve been trying to track you down ever since you bolted out of here this morning.”

  “Well, I’ve been busy since I left,” she said, her tone neutral. “I sent all the relevant paperwork to my lawyer so he can determine if our marriage is legal, and if it is, how best to get out of it, quickly and discreetly. And I’ve been running damage control here on the island. I printed out a nondisclosure agreement and convinced as many resort employees as I could find that were working last night to sign it, preventing them from sharing anything they may have seen or heard.”

  Well, holy shit. Jennifer MacDonald meant business, and she might be the only woman on the planet as interested in getting out of this mess quietly as he was. “That’s…that’s good. I’ve got my lawyer working on the same thing, but I didn’t think of NDAs. That was really smart.”

  “There’s a reason Kate’s kept me around for this many years, and it’s not because I’m pretty,” Jenn said, narrowing her eyes at him.

  Maybe not, but she sure as hell was pretty.

  “Do you have a card for your lawyer?” she asked. “I’ll put him in touch with mine, and hopefully they can work out the formalities for us. We’ll just need to sign on the dotted line and get this thing annulled.”

  “I don’t have a card, but I can give you his number.” He thumbed through his contacts, somewhat put off by her businesslike manner. She was saying all the things he wanted to hear and giving him exactly what he wanted. She wasn’t trying to get any of his money or even grab her own moment in the spotlight as his wife. So why did he want her to show some sort of emotion about this? Why did he want her to be at least somewhat disappointed about divorcing him?

  “That will work.” She held up her phone and stared at him expectantly.

  He read off the number.

  “Great. Here’s mine.” She handed him a crisp white business card.

  Of course she carried her lawyer’s card around, even while she was working on location in the Caribbean. “Guess that’s that, then.”

  She gave him a tight smile. “If all goes well, this should be nothing but a bad memory by the end of the week.”

  “It wasn’t all bad,” he said, still irrationally pissed that she seemed so unaffected by their night together…at least the part before they got married.

  She shrugged. “That’s your opinion. I don’t think I’ll look back on last night with anything other than frustration and embarrassment.”

  “That’s cold, Jenn. I was genuinely into you last night. I enjoyed hanging out with you at the bar, and I was sure as hell looking forward to having you in my bed.”

  “I’ve got dreams.” Her green eyes flashed. “Expectations. I want to fall in love and get married the old-fashioned way, and my husband will be absolutely nothing like you.”

  “Sorry to break it to you, sweetheart, but I am your husband.” His face was only inches from hers now, and goddammit, he wanted to kiss her as badly as he wanted to throttle her for the words coming out of her mouth.

  “Once the annulment goes through, you won’t be.”

  He curled his fingers against the desire to touch her. “We were both drunk last night, and we did a hell of a stupid thing, but I still liked and respected you this morning, right up until this fucking moment.”

  She drew back, some of the bravado fading from her expression. She stared at him for a long moment, then nodded and headed for the door. As she yanked it open, she glanced back at him. “There’s just one thing I still don’t understand. I know why I thought getting married last night was a good idea, but why did you agree to it?”

  He turned away, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Because I’d just realized you were too drunk to come back to my room, and I was that desperate for a chance—any chance—to see you again.”

  Her eyes rounded. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it and walked out the door, shutting it softly behind her.

  4

  Cole sat in the soundproofed studio in the basement of his town house, mahogany Fender 28 in his lap. This guitar had been his grandfather’s. Cole had strummed his first chords on it, sitting on his Pop’s lap. It was old and weathered now—much like Pop—but it was still his favorite guitar to compose on. His fingers knew the strings and frets like old friends.

  Since his return from Luca Cay, he’d put hi
s phone on silent and holed up in here to write new music. Three songs in two days. All inspired by the beautiful, vivacious redhead who’d overtaken his fantasies. His wife for a day. It might end up being a week, but the annulment was expected to be finalized any day now. No harm, no foul.

  Except for the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He’d fantasized about their night together in the Bahamas a million different ways, all of which began with them staying sober enough to go through with their one-night stand and ended in him frantically jerking off alone in his bed.

  In two weeks, it would be a full year since he’d had sex, which was approximately three hundred and sixty-four days too long. Screw it. As soon as his annulment with Jenn went through, he was going to find a willing groupie and fuck her into next week.

  But what if she feeds another rumor to the press?

  His fingers moved absently over the strings, perfecting the riff he’d just composed. Maybe he ought to take a page from Jenn’s book and have his future hookups sign a nondisclosure agreement before they got naked. And he could just imagine what the press would say about that if they got wind that he was asking women to sign NDAs before he fucked them. Of course, they’d assume he was protecting his tiny, limp dick.

  He could always pay for sex. But goddammit, when did he get so desperate that he’d even consider hiring a prostitute? Was that really what this life had done to him?

  Satisfied that he’d gotten the riff, he jotted down the bars in his notebook and recorded it on his sound system before heading upstairs to fix something for lunch. His phone showed texts and missed calls from his assistant, his manager, his lawyer, and…his mother. He stopped dead in his tracks. Well, shit. This couldn’t be good.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose as he dialed his mom. Better to get the worst over with first.

  “Married?” she said in lieu of hello. “And I have to find out about it in the newspapers like one of your fans?”

  “What?” A tight fist closed over his stomach, squeezing the remnants of his breakfast up into his throat.

  “Who is she?” his mother asked.

  He put her on speaker, frantically clicking through the missed text messages on his phone, and there it was. A link to an article on Celebrity Insider, a popular gossip site. “Colton Nix Gets Hitched!” it proclaimed in big, bold letters, accompanied by a grainy photo of him and Jenn exchanging midnight vows on the beach and several full-color pictures of their “honeymoon” as they canoodled in the Caribbean waters together—photos taken during the filming of the music video but which looked awfully damning now.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?” his mother screeched.

  He’d all but forgotten he was on the phone with her. “Sorry, Mom. Look, this is just a big misunderstanding…”

  “Well, of course it is, sweetie,” she said, her voice suddenly gentle. “I’m sure you had something special planned to tell me, and the press has gone and blown your surprise the way they’re so good at. Tell me about my new daughter-in-law. What’s her name? How did you meet? And most importantly, when do I get to meet her?”

  He walked to the window overlooking the street, pacing like an animal in a cage. “Her name is Jenn—Jennifer MacDonald. She’s Katherine Hayes’s assistant, but Mom, it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’m not sure it’s even going to work out…”

  “Oh, shush now, don’t talk like that. When you know, you just know. I understand that better than anyone. Just look at me and Royce.” Royce was his mother’s third husband, and yes, they’d eloped after knowing each other exactly a week. She claimed to have finally found true love with the owner of a seedy little casino about as far from the Strip as a place could get and still be within the Las Vegas city limits. They’d met after she won “big” on a penny slot, and he came out to congratulate her. And maybe Cole was just being cynical, but he had little faith this marriage would last any longer than her first two.

  As for Robert, Cole’s father, he was onto wife number four these days and no longer pretending she was anything but his latest conquest. With parents like his, it was no wonder Cole had soured to the idea of love and marriage. It was all a crock, as far as he was concerned, and he wanted nothing to do with it.

  He ended the call after promising to introduce his mother to Jenn soon (and intending no such thing). Then he dialed Benny, his manager.

  “Apparently, your plan to get this quietly annulled didn’t work out,” Benny said dryly.

  “No.” He palmed his forehead. He needed a beer, maybe something stronger.

  “Well, I have a few things to say, and you may not like them.”

  That was an understatement, but as much as Cole sometimes loathed Benny’s advice, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that his manager had never led him astray. “Spill it.”

  “This headline about your marriage is the best press you’ve had all year, maybe a couple of years,” Benny said.

  Cole stopped moving. “What?”

  “All the focus on your dick and your womanizing, well…it wasn’t flattering. You’ve been dropping in popularity with your core base of twenty-to-thirty-something females. They want to believe in the fairy tale that their favorite rock star is someone they’d actually want to be romanced by in real life. And this morning, they’re all swooning over the fact that you’ve settled down and dying to know more about your new bride.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Your album sales are through the roof. Highest numbers since release week.”

  And considering Crash and Burn had been out for almost a year now, that was saying something. “Too bad the whole thing’s a sham, then, isn’t it?”

  “A damn shame,” Benny agreed. “Cole, if you get this marriage annulled within the week, you know what they’re going to say.”

  They were going to say it was because he couldn’t satisfy his wife in bed. The annulment records would be public. Every gossip blog in the world would know he hadn’t consummated his marriage. And he could kiss this wave of positive press goodbye.

  “Far be it from me to mess around in your private life, but if you guys could find a way to stay married for a few months before you call it quits, then you could say things just didn’t work out. Your fans would be all over that. Poor Cole, alone and single again. They’ll love you more than ever.”

  * * *

  Jenn thumbed through her messages as she walked, phone in one hand, coffee and a white paper bag containing her favorite poppy seed bagel in the other. She’d been back in New York City for two days now. Kate was still in the Bahamas on her babymoon with Josh, which meant that Jenn was technically on vacation too, but she’d spent an hour earlier that morning on her phone scheduling logistics for Kate’s promotional appearances next week.

  The sun shone overhead, filtering between the buildings on either side of her to form warm patches of sunshine on the sidewalk. Warm enough that she’d worn a T-shirt, but not so warm that she hadn’t also brought a light sweater to wear over it. Right now, she was headed for the library—not that she didn’t have a Kindle fully loaded with books in her bag—but the ambiance in the New York Public Library was just so incredible. It made her breath catch and her heart race and brought out the romantic in her who totally swooned for its nineteenth-century architecture and charm. She’d find an old book, something that had been read so many times, the pages were soft and worn and sometimes even had notes and other treasures tucked inside, and she’d just sit and lose herself in another world for a few hours.

  Her phone dinged with the first of her daily HeadTalker alerts. She got them three times a day, a summary of every new mention of Kate online. A year and a half ago, Kate had been the victim of a smear campaign, and things had gotten ugly. Jenn had combed each report, looking for anything new that would need to be dealt with.

  These days, she just gave them a cursory glance. It was her job to alert Kate to anything unflattering or potentially false that had b
een reported about her, but the headlines lately were all about her pregnancy—was the pink dress Kate had worn during an interview last week a hint that she was expecting a girl?—and her duet with Cole, which had released at the beginning of the month and was already headed for the top of the charts.

  Cole.

  Her jaw clenched in irritation. Any day now, their annulment would be finalized. Annoyingly, he and Kate would be performing their duet live several times on the morning talk show circuit this summer, which meant Jenn would have to see him again, no way around it. Whatever. He’d never actually been her husband. Whatever stupid, drunken vows they’d exchanged back on Luca Cay didn’t change the fact that she barely knew the man.

  A text message from her friend Ezra appeared on her screen.

  Be cool tonight, you guys, I’m bringing a date!

  She grinned, sidestepping a group of tourists gawking at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as she walked past. She and some of her friends were meeting tonight for a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the outdoor pavilion in Bryant Park. Ezra hadn’t dated in almost as long as Jenn herself, and she couldn’t wait to meet the new man in his life. She replied with a string of emojis to express her excitement.

  Ezra’s text ignited a flurry of messages between her, Alex, Lucy, Casey, and Farrah. She’d been friends with this group for years. Even when she’d still lived in LA, she’d spent a lot of time here in New York with Kate. And now that she lived here, they’d gone a long way toward making the city feel like home.

  She sipped her coffee as she made her way along Fifth Avenue, laughing as her friends continued to chat about tonight’s festivities. She wanted so badly to tell them about everything that had happened in the Bahamas, but with Cole being who he was, it was better that no one else knew. As Kate’s assistant, she’d seen it a hundred times…people with the best intentions repeating something they’d overheard and before they knew it, their “private” news was splashed all over the latest gossip headlines.