Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance

by Shelley Ann Clark

  That morning, Tom had met her at the van with a huge coffee. Dave had glowered and Guillermo had rolled his eyes and snarked about her fancy coffee habit, but when Tom handed her the venti skim two-pump latte, something warm and sweet spread through her.

  And then all of her warm sweet feelings had drained away when she asked Dave to play the latest edition of the podcast in the van, and she’d heard what the hosts had to say about her.

  She’d watched the kudzu shapes out the window while she listened.

  “So, best bets this week, Jed. What shows should our listeners go see?”

  “Well, we’re hosting a show with Emme at the Alley on Saturday night at seven. Should be a great bet. If you don’t know her work—”

  “Wait, Emme. She’s the one who broke up Indelible Lines, right? Backup singer who turned into a solo artist?”

  Hellfire. Emme gripped her coffee cup more tightly and watched a billboard fly by, disappearing under the steady green creep of the vines.

  “Yeah, her solo work is really unlike anything else that’s come out this year. I know other critics have compared her to Dusty Springfield, but I think there’s an Americana element to her music that’s reminiscent of a modernist, stripped-down version of Patsy Cline.”

  “And”—chuckle—“if nothing else, it should be a great show just to see if any fights break out over her among her band members.”

  “Right, or to guess which ones she’s writing her songs about.”

  “That’s the thing with Emme’s music. Sometimes I have to wonder if she’s been such a big Internet sensation because of her talent, or if we’re all just watching this train to see when it will wreck.”

  God damn, that hurt. She’d heard the phrase punched in the gut before and thought it was just a figure of speech. It wasn’t. Emme lost her breath for a moment at the shock of it.

  “So! Possibly great music, or possibly a mental breakdown onstage! This Saturday. We’ll be producing an exclusive interview beforehand—”

  “And she’s famously hard to interview, too, so tune in for that one!”

  “And an exclusive SoundGap after-party at the Hotel M in Buckhead just for SoundGap contributors. Be at the show, and be there afterward to see if she throws a drink in anyone’s face.”

  The fade-out music was “Walking Away.” Her song. Her song that, yes, she’d written about leaving behind Jared and the burning rubble of Indelible Lines.

  “Turn it off,” she said. She could feel Tom’s eyes on her, could hear Guillermo turn around in the front seat to look at her.

  “Fuck, Emme,” Guillermo began, but she couldn’t take sympathy. It would make her fall apart.

  Instead, she held on to anger, the rising sensation of fury enough to almost cover up the sinking humiliation in the pit of her.

  “Might have a mental breakdown onstage?” She wanted to tear something up, claw at someone’s eyes. Curl up in a ball and hide. “I have never, ever had anything close to a mental breakdown onstage.”

  “You did cry that one time you sang ‘Walking Away,’ ” Dave said quietly from the front seat.

  “Dude, not the time,” Guillermo said.

  “Crying during an emotional song is not having a mental breakdown. And, if you’ll remember, my grandmother had died two weeks before that show.” Emme heard her voice shaking, felt the hot press of tears at the back of her nasal passages, and hated it. Hated herself for being weak.

  “No one would say a damn word if you were a man,” Tom said. His voice wasn’t loud or particularly angry, but it was firm. Certain. “I’ve seen musicians who were so drunk they damn near fell off the stage. I’ve seen musicians who slept with five women from the audience every night, and had a wife and three kids at home. I’ve seen musicians get in fistfights with their band members onstage. Completely unprofessional behavior. But no one ever said a goddamn thing about any of it, because they were men.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t cry,” Dave said, as if that explained everything.

  “Clapton does,” Guillermo interjected.

  “How is crying worse than being falling-down drunk?” Emme felt the tears recede and the wash of righteous rage. “And men write songs about women all the time, but nobody spends hours poring over their lyrics, trying to figure out who the subject is.”

  “Except maybe ‘Layla,’ ” Guillermo added.

  “Okay, except ‘Layla.’ But I’m not Eric Clapton. I don’t even have a label.” Emme expelled a breath that took sixteen tons of frustration with it. “Turn on some music, Dave. Something nice and pissed off-sounding.”

  “I can do you one better, Emily.” Dave met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Here. Have fourteen minutes to spare?”

  He thumbed through his phone, and the opening strains of “Telegraph Road” came through the speakers. Emme felt that sting behind her eyes again, but this time, she also felt another huge weight roll off her shoulders. “I dare you to play the guitar part,” she said.

  “Only if you try the piano. Put your money where your mouth is, show-off.”

  She kicked the back of his seat, but they were both grinning.

  Tom reached for her hand, and she almost took his before she remembered that she shouldn’t. She gave him a tiny shake of her head, and he pulled his arm away, grimacing. He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again before finally settling on, “You gonna give them hell today?”

  “Oh, I’m gonna give ’em hell, all right,” she said. And then she blushed, because the way his eyes darkened at her tone of voice sent her whole body awash in memories of the night before when he’d looked at her that way while handing her his belt.

  “Good.” Tom’s voice was low and throaty. She found her body swaying toward his. She pulled away and tried to smile.

  Tom wanted to smoke. His whole body itched with it, his fingers kept reaching for invisible cigarettes, and his right knee kept doing this inadvertent jiggling motion whenever he tried to sit still.

  More than he wanted to smoke, he wanted to reach out and pull Emme into his arms, maybe punch the hosts of SoundGap, and then have lots and lots of dirty sex in their new, shiny hotel.

  He couldn’t, though. Not in front of Dave and Guillermo, not in front of anyone, could he even hold her hand when she was upset. He’d agreed to it last night, but he hadn’t realized then how much that blow could hurt.

  The hotel was certainly shiny. When the van pulled up in front of one of many sparkly skyscraper hotels in what was obviously some kind of ritzy part of the city, Tom thought at first that they’d gone to the wrong place. The lobby was all spare, minimalist furniture and some kind of signature scent. He didn’t know what it was supposed to smell like, other than expensive. The guy behind the desk, who had to be a model or something in his spare time, because no way did real people look like that, kept talking about the “Hotel M experience” like it was an amusement park ride instead of a place to sleep. Tom was pretty sure he was the first person in his family to ever set foot in a hotel like this.

  He suddenly felt suffocated. It was probably that damn fancy-ass air freshener stuff.

  “I need to make a call,” he said to no one in particular, and strode out of the lobby at a pace close to a run.

  Tom pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed Marcos, his bar’s manager. He hadn’t let a day go by that he hadn’t checked in with him at least once, sometimes twice, and he knew he had to be driving the poor guy crazy because there was never anything wrong.

  Somehow his business was running smoothly without him. It should have been a relief, but every call that went by without a problem to speak of just felt like walking closer and closer to the edge of a cliff and waiting to trip and fall over the edge.

  This time he knew there were tiny little pebbles beginning to rain down beneath his feet. An avalanche to come for sure.

  “Yeah, last night was good but Jimmy called off—man, I think I’m gonna have to fire him, it’s the third time he’s done that thi
s month—so your sister stepped in and poured for us. Why didn’t you tell me how much help she is? She’s great.”

  Oh, that was not good. Katie had no business being in a bar, not if she was serious about recovery. “Marcos, I don’t want Katie working.”

  “I didn’t ask her to or anything, I swear. She just showed up, saw we were short, and went to work. She’s cool, Tom. How come you never told me about her?”

  Dizzy sickness filled Tom’s head. “I really don’t want her around the bar at all. I’d rather not talk about why.” It would make sense to Marcos. You couldn’t work in a bar and not know about alcoholism, but it wasn’t his problem to share.

  Marcos’s voice was incredulous. “You want me to ban her from coming in?”

  Yes. “No. Just—don’t let her work, okay? Fire Jimmy, find a replacement. Call Lou to pick up a few shifts if she’s got time. But tell Katie no thanks on the help, all right?”

  By the end of the phone call, Tom had gone from feeling out of place to feeling out of control. He tried Katie’s phone, but he knew she wouldn’t answer this early in the morning. She wouldn’t answer later, either, if she didn’t want to talk to him. He texted a terse CALL ME and then a terser STAY OUT OF THE BAR with no hope he’d get a response.

  Thank God they had no time to waste before the interview, or he’d have chewed his fingers bloody without cigarettes to smoke.

  The studio for the interview was in a shady, slightly industrial area on the outskirts of town. Once they arrived, the setup at least took up most of Tom’s attention, though he could feel the tension in the room pressing down on his shoulders, a weight added to every movement. Emme never seemed nervous in front of a crowd; she usually thrived on the attention, but today she was withdrawn, playing piano scales on every flat surface her red-tipped fingers could touch. Even Guillermo’s shoulders were hunched, his usual easygoing cluelessness replaced with fidgety anxiety.

  The hosts, Jed and Greg, looked like music critics. There was no other way for Tom to think of them. Both wore black-rimmed glasses and plaid shirts. Both had beards. Greg was taller and heavier, and Jed was darker and smaller, but otherwise they were interchangeable. They seemed friendly enough, almost like they’d forgotten that the woman they were currently trying to make comfortable with small talk was the one they’d called a mentally ill home wrecker the week before.

  Tom wanted to punch them in their smug, bearded faces.

  In the small, windowless studio, Emme looked diminished and he hated it. Her smile had faltered as she’d introduced herself, and she didn’t radiate the kind of encompassing presence he’d come to expect from her. She looked like someone named Emily. She looked like someone who might bake pies to take to church potlucks. She looked wrong.

  Greg explained the format of the show, that they’d interview Emme for ten minutes, ask for a song, interview for another ten, and then have a final song for the fade-out. Jed offered the band bottled water, but otherwise, they could have been invisible.

  Emme sat down at the table with Jed on one side and Greg on the other. She smiled a smile that Tom was beginning to realize she’d cultivated as a mask of sorts; innocent, seemingly open. Not like her at all. He got the distinct impression of a baby dolphin swimming between two sharks, and he knew he couldn’t jump in the water to save her.

  Greg began the interview. “This week, we have special guest Emme in the studio with us. She’s touring small venues in the South right now, and we’ve caught her on her Atlanta stop.”

  “So, Emme.” Jed leaned forward, and Tom swore he could smell blood in the water. “You’re touring in support of your album From the Ashes. Tell us a little about that title. Is it a reference to anything in particular?”

  Emme cleared her throat. She was playing chords on the tabletop again. “Well, it’s symbolic of renewal after destruction. Starting over after everything has burned down around you. When I named the album, I was thinking about phoenixes, how they rise again from the flames. And also—”

  Greg interrupted. “So is that a reference to the band you sang with before, that you left, essentially, in the ashes?”

  “For those of you who don’t know, Emme started her career as a backup singer for the indie-folk group Indelible Lines,” Jed added. “What, exactly, happened there? The band broke up, didn’t it? Did you play a role in that?”

  Emme’s face turned a splotchy shade of pink. Those two bright red dots she got on her cheeks had appeared again, and Tom wanted to get up and pace a hole in the goddamn carpet.

  “Well …” She cleared her throat and sank lower in her chair.

  Give them hell, Tom thought at her, as hard as he possibly could. Don’t let them do this to you.

  “My personal life …,” she started, but her voice wavered. Her eyes looked suspiciously bright.

  Don’t cry; God, don’t give them that. Tom wanted to claw his skin off, throw a guitar across the room, and shout every curse word he could think of. Dave didn’t look like he was faring any better, glaring a hole in Emme’s head from the corner. Guillermo’s foot was tapping so incessantly Tom wanted to stomp on it.

  “Do you need a minute?” Greg asked gently, but he was smiling a nasty gotcha smile, that son of a bitch.

  Emme looked up from the table. She met Tom’s gaze from across the room, and then her eyes traveled down his body before they came to rest on his belt. She smiled then, not that shy lamb smile she’d smiled earlier, but her Emme smile, the one with a razor-sharp edge behind it.

  She turned back to Greg. “No, sugar,” she purred. “I’m fine. But if you want to know what happened with Indelible Lines, I’d suggest you interview the two lead singers, not a backup singer. Budget low this year? Was I all you could afford?” Her voice kept enough teasing in it that it sounded light, joking, but Tom could sense the danger behind it, and if Greg and Jed were smart, they would hear it, too.

  Yes. Tom let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

  Greg and Jed laughed uncomfortably until Emme took pity on them. “What I was saying, before y’all went and got so excited on me that you had to ask about that, was that my grandmother died while I was writing the album. She was one of my biggest supporters and was the woman who introduced me to the great jazz and soul singers when I was a kid. She told me, before she died, that she wanted me to take her ashes and have them turned into a diamond. I didn’t literally do that, but figuratively, this album is the diamond from her ashes.” She smiled again, that poisoned honey smile, and then added, “But that doesn’t make for near as good gossip, now, does it?”

  Tom wanted to stand up and fucking cheer. That was the Emme he knew. There was that Amazon warrior. He couldn’t wipe the giant grin off his face; his cheeks hurt from smiling so wide.

  “No, I suppose it doesn’t.” Jed cleared his throat. “So I suppose you’re not going to address the rumors—”

  “That I was responsible for the breakup of a band I sang backup for? I’d say the responsibility for any band’s breakup rests with the people in charge, wouldn’t you? Y’all are granting me an awful lot of power in this scenario! It’s flattering, honey. Thanks.”

  Oh, that just ever-so-slightly condescending note in her voice behind the surface teasing just got Tom. And then she looked up at him and winked, all eyelashes and flirtation as she delivered the blows. God, he loved her.

  He loved her.

  It was no great revelation; he’d been nearly there for weeks now. The feeling was more like the final piece of a puzzle sliding into place exactly where he knew it should go.

  By the time they played “Lord Have Mercy,” a stripped-down version for the radio audience, and her voice rang out as sultry as a humid summer day, Tom couldn’t decide if he wanted to high-five Emme or throw himself prostrate at her feet. Maybe both. He had no right to feel proud of her; she was her own person, her own force of nature, really, and he’d had nothing to do with how she handled herself. But pride lingered, still, and sheer joy in wa
tching her take ownership of herself with no apologies.

  By the time they played the last song, “Walking Away,” Tom was even beginning to hear the song differently. When Emme sang it before, he pictured her escaping from the rubble, a little broken, perhaps. But this time, as her voice oozed through his body, he imagined a woman standing, triumphant, in the ruins she’d created by dropping a bomb straight in the middle of them herself.

  Chapter Nine

  The first Atlanta show was a triumph.

  They sold out the space in the Alley, and the crowd was fantastic. Jed followed Emme around all night like a lost puppy, though Greg didn’t seem so impressed by her interview earlier in the day.

  The after-party was held in their hotel bar, which at least had the advantage of being nicer than the bars they played in. Apparently the “Hotel M experience” included a lounge that served seventeen-dollar martinis and looked like it had been decorated by Belle Watling’s interior designer. Everything from the red-velvet upholstered banquettes to the gold-flocked wallpaper to the dim lighting screamed antebellum brothel to Emme.

  She loved it.

  She didn’t, however, love watching every woman at the party try to flirt with Tom. She couldn’t blame them; he’d played brilliantly, and watching him onstage would have been enough to set her libido aflame even if she hadn’t known just what he could do in a bed. Or on a floor. Or on his knees. She also couldn’t walk over to him, slide her hand over the nape of his neck, and pull him down to kiss her hard and slow in front of the entire room. No matter how badly she wanted to publicly stake her territory, she would be on her good behavior. Especially with Jed and Greg right there in the bar.

  Emme wound her way through the crowd. She stopped to greet a couple of fans, chatted for a while with an aspiring singer, and fended off the advances of three different guys wearing far too much cheap cologne.

  Somehow, without consciously planning to, she found herself sliding into a booth next to Tom, who was nursing a club soda with lime and talking to a very pretty and very young brunette.