But he also knew enough not to push her on it. Lana, who appeared so tough she could chew up nails and spit out tacks, was actually deeply wounded. It was all an act.
Just like everybody else. Just like him. “I won’t tell a soul.” And he meant it.
Sharp tension lines left the corners of her eyes. “Thank you.”
“But –” he started.
“Still no.”
“Just consider it.”
“Taft …” Lana sighed. “Oh you are incorrigible.” There was no heat in her voice.
He laughed. “That’s what my pa always said. I like hearing it. Say it again.”
The side of her mouth screwed sideways, and she shook her head. Just like that, he could see she was trying not to smile.
“Thanks,” Taft said.
“For what?”
“For letting me stay. No matter what I say, no matter how I talked Jake into it, it really is up to you. If you said that you honestly wanted me to get on a plane tomorrow, I’d leave.”
“Really? You would?”
“Yes.” Of course he would. He’d hate it, but he wouldn’t make the woman see him if she actually hated the very sight of him. “You were so angry that night.”
She sighed. “I know. It wasn’t about you. It was about a lot of other stuff.”
It was a relief. A big one. “Okay.”
“You’re welcome to stay and help. I’m sure I’ll appreciate it once I get used to the idea.”
With difficulty, he stopped himself from pumping his fist. “Maybe you’ll change your mind on the songs once you get used to that idea.”
Lana poked his thigh, hard. “I’m stubborn. You might have heard.”
“Me, too.”
“Hmmph.” She tilted her neck so she could look up at the stars.
Taft followed suit.
For a long moment, there was no noise but the faint bass beat from the jukebox and a man’s laughter coming from the street. In the distance, the fog horn sounded. The night smelled of pine needles and wet salt.
For the same long moment, Taft was happy.
Perfectly happy right through to his booted feet.
Damn, it felt good.
Lana gave a long sigh. “I really am going to bed.”
He had an image of her in it. She was probably one of those women who slept right on her face. Enthusiastically. She probably woke up with a pink, flattened nose, her hair sticking straight up. Without thinking what he was doing, he raised his hand to touch the black end of a jaw-length strand. “What made you dye your hair?”
Lana stilled but didn’t draw away. She kept her eyes on his, as if making sure she knew exactly where he was. “Just wanted a change. The new, non-country me.”
“Country girls have long, blonde hair, that’s true.”
“I’m not one anymore.”
“You can take the girl out of the country …”
In a move he didn’t expect, she raised her hand to catch his, to press it against her cheek. Her skin was cool, soft. He caught his breath and ran his thumb along her jawline. His heart rate juddered, accelerated.
She gazed softly into his eyes.
His heart literally skipped a beat.
Lana said, “That really was the worst sex of my life.”
He wanted to roar with laughter, but only allowed the corner of his mouth to twitch. “If by worst you mean strangest, sure. We just didn’t find our rhythm.”
“You think?” She pushed her chin against his thumb, like a cat would.
Lord, she was dangerous. He was a pile of kindling. She was both gasoline and the match. “Yeah,” Taft said. “You ever get a song that comes to you, just the words?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Her voice was a purr.
“Sometimes it takes a while to figure out the music it needs, that’s all.”
“Mmm.”
If she kept making that sound …
As if she’d heard his almost-thought, she drew back. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” She rubbed her cheeks. “I’m just tired.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Her eyes caught his again.
Taft’s throat thickened. “I want to kiss you.”
“I’m … not sure that’s a good idea.”
He would take the high road. It was the right thing to do. “Probably not.”
Was that disappointment on her face? “Yeah.”
Taft gave up his effort. He leaned forward and took the kiss he wanted, the one she almost seemed to sway forward to give.
It was innocent at first. A closed-mouth kiss, something sweet. A goodnight kiss. That’s what Taft told himself it was.
It turned into an all-night kind of kiss fast. Yeah, this was the kiss he’d remembered. He hadn’t gotten that wrong. In fact, if anything, it was hotter. Her lips seared his, and when she opened her mouth, she tasted of red wine and flame.
All he wanted in the whole damn wide world was to pick her up and carry her through the garden behind the arbor, up to the hotel. He’d set her on her bed, he’d take off her clothing, and they’d start over, from scratch. From the beginning. She wouldn’t be scared.
He pulled away. “Whew. Damn, woman.” That was him, moving too fast, expecting too much. Expecting more than he was worthy of. As usual.
Lana’s lips were wet, her cheeks were pink, and there was no one he’d ever wanted more in his life.
But Taft had three months before the studio needed the song drafts. He’d spend that time here. In Darling Bay. With this incredible woman. He had time.
No, scratch that. That made it sound like it was his decision. He hated it when men put it that way. I’ll bag her. She’ll be mine, easy. It sounded like women were prey, the men their hunters. Taft had never liked taking down a kill. His father had liked to hunt rabbits and squirrels in the hills. Taft thought it had been his one weakness.
They had time. He and Lana both. They could see if there really was something between them. This was about way more than just the songs, he’d known that from the start. This was about what had happened between them that night, the feeling of connection, like she and he were both running on the same electricity feeding into something even bigger.
“What? Why are you staring at me?” She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, rubbing away his kiss. “I’m sorry. I know I started that.”
Taft touched her cheek again. “We both did. Can I walk you to your room?”
She jumped, as if remembering she had a room to go to. Standing, she tugged the hem of her black shirt. There was a hole at her side, and in the low light he saw a flash of her skin beneath it. The woman was sex walking. Taft wondered when he’d be able to take a full breath again.
“No.” Lana turned. “I’ll see you Monday.”
Then she literally sprinted away from him, up the low rise through the flower garden to the path that must lead to the hotel rooms set back on the hill.
She moved so quickly that it was almost as if she’d flown away.
“See you Monday, Birdie,” Taft said into the darkness.
Three days. A damn eternity.
Chapter Nineteen
Lana spent Friday night up in Uncle Hugh’s old quarters where Adele and Nate were now living, the big apartment above the bar.
Knocking on their door was difficult, especially with her heart jammed into her throat. If Adele said one wrong word, criticized even one small thing about her – she’d what? Have the fight they’d been spoiling for, for the last twelve years?
Adele, though, opened the door with a smile so big it warmed Lana right through to the bottom of her pitch-black, ice-cold heart.
Adele always had been the one who could do that.
“Come in. Look what I’ve done with the place. Oh, Lana. I’m so happy you’re here.”
Hugh had been a hoarder, by nature and then by habit, but Adele had done an amazing job cleaning out the old place. The parlor really looked as if nineteenth-century women in leg o’mutton sleeves could wal
k in at any moment. The bathroom, always pink to please Hugh’s three nieces, was clean and bright (still very, very pink). The kitchen had been totally redone. The stove was new, industrial and huge, and the fridge didn’t whir or thump like Uncle Hugh’s had. The windows he’d painted shut had been pried open, and the ocean breeze came in. Lana sat in a chair at the small yellow kitchen table, watching as Nate and Adele made dinner for her – fresh lingcod cooked in homemade teriyaki sauce.
Adele and Nate were the real kind of happy. It was obvious. They squabbled cheerfully about how much salt to add, and she caught them kissing when she came back from the bathroom. All three of them ate dinner on the back porch, the one that faced the hotel rooms. It had a great view of both the garden and the bright-blue tarps that flapped over most of the hotel rooms.
“It’s a hell of a job you’ve got ahead of you,” Nate said.
“Yep.”
Adele cut the apricot pie (homemade – when had Adele started to bake?).
What if Lana had stayed in touch with her older sister? What if she’d reached out and stayed linked, instead of being so stupidly caught in an angry cycle of longing for connection and being sure she didn’t deserve it?
Mama, standing in the kitchen, smiling as Adele and Molly ran in from outside, cheerful and clean and chirping. Her smile falling as Lana rolled in, covered in mud after tussling with a recalcitrant frog at the creek.
Lana’s mother had loved her. Lana knew that. But she’s always been disappointed in Lana.
Adele took after their mother.
Not tonight, though—Lana didn’t want to hash anything out tonight. She was in town now. Plenty of time to feel jealousy of her perfect sisters, to build up a resistance to the looks on their faces (especially Adele’s) as she inevitably let them down by being the last, smallest, weakest Songbird yet again.
As if her sister could hear her thoughts, Adele said, “Lana has never been scared of a challenge.”
Lana almost laughed out loud. It was Adele who’d never been scared, who kept songwriting in Nashville, competing with the big dogs. Or Molly, who’d said screw all of it, who had gotten a real degree in nutrition and had put it to use.
Lana had just run. She’d kept running for almost twelve years. Singing, songwriting, moving from town to town, from busted futon to sagging mattress in town after town where she knew one or two people, well enough to crash with them but never well enough to really connect other than physically. She’d had strings of one-night stands that had turned into every-other-yearly stands. When she rolled into San Francisco, she stayed with Jesus, who had amazing legs from his day job of bike messengering. He’d never once pronounced her name right. “It’s Lah-nah. Not LAY-nah,” she’d corrected him a million times and had then started pronouncing his name like the biblical figure. He’d only laughed, saying he’d heard it so much growing up in church that now he took it as a compliment. In Tucson, there was Jonathan, who wrote computer code during the day and put together the local open mics at night. In Miami, there was Douglas, who drove a different beat-up car every time she saw him. All of them she met through the music scene, none of them close enough to her to know her middle name.
Adele and Molly.
They were probably the only two in the whole wide world who knew her middle name was Mirabelle.
After dinner, both Nate and Adele went downstairs to work the Friday-night rush with their other bartender, Dixie. They invited her down, of course.
And of course, she said no. What if Taft took it in his head to get a drink in the local watering hole? She wasn’t ready to face him.
Monday, when they started work: that would be soon enough to see the man who scrambled all the circuits of her brain.
So she stayed out of the bar.
Saturday night, she had dinner at Molly’s sheriff’s place. Colin seemed great for a cop. He was down-to-earth and funny. He seemed like he’d actually be a good leader. He listened carefully and asked excellent questions. He seemed genuinely interested in not only what Lana said, but in every single thing Molly said or did. He probably didn’t know – which made it nice – that his eyes followed Molly wherever she moved in the room. When she spoke, he listened. Molly did the same for him.
Freaking love.
What the hell?
Colin even pointed it out to her. “You’d better watch out, Lana. There’s a shacking-up epidemic around here when it comes to the Darling girls. Careful, or you’ll be next.”
Lana saw Taft Hill’s knuckles in her mind. She’d stared at them so hard in the bar while they’d been talking, and she hadn’t been able to get them out of her mind. They were broad and bony at the same time. Thick cords of muscles had sprung up every time he’d flexed his fingers (picking up his beer, pushing his floppy blond hair back off his brow) and one large blue vein had popped on the back of his hand.
She’d wanted to bite those knuckles. Taste them.
“Oh, my God, look at you.” Molly laughed. “Where did you just go? Are you thinking about Taft Hill, maybe?”
Lana managed to change the subject, though she wasn’t smooth at all. Colin had driven her back to the hotel. She’d put herself to bed mildly tipsy. In her dreams, she’d seen Taft’s left hand with a broad matte gold band on the third finger. She’d woken up so embarrassed she’d buried her head in the pillow until she’d run out of oxygen and had to come up for air.
Stuck without a plan for the rest of the weekend except reading through the home-repair book she’d gone back to Floyd’s to buy, she ended up painting room one’s interior. The walls had been dingy white for long enough – she cleaned and primed the walls, then painted them a dusky gold color with a bright yellow feature wall.
Even that didn’t take up her full weekend.
It was strange. In the past, time had always flown in Darling Bay. She remembered the summers and Christmas holidays they’d spent in town when they were children as weeks that had flown by in a matter of hours. They’d arrive in June and she’d wake up, a minute later, suddenly smack in the middle of early September. Her skin would be dark brown from spending almost all day outside.
Back then, Adele (the Good Daughter) would follow their father and Uncle Hugh around the bar, offering to help in whatever way she could. Molly had naturally gravitated to the café. Arnie, the cook back then, had aided in Molly’s first foodie forays. She’d spent hours in the kitchen with him, thrilling the customers when they peeked over the pass-through to see a little girl making their pancakes. Child Protective Services had been called out once by a nosy woman from Santa Barbara who’d been driving through town. “This can’t be legal,” she’d sniffed, before going home to make some calls. The complaint was waved aside when it was established that no one was paying Molly to work, nor were they forcing her – she desperately wanted to be in that hot, small space, laughing with the teenage busboys, getting hair tips from the waitresses on college break.
Lana had been alone.
For a majority of the time, she’d had no one to hang out with, which was exactly as she’d liked it. She spent time on the pier with the kids who smoked a lot of weed and performed jump tricks on their skateboards that defied the laws of gravity. She was friends with the woman who owned the riding stables, and would sometimes be allowed to trundle the ancient Darby down the beach to the river’s end and back. Darby was twenty-seven. Lana spent a lot of time just trying to get her to do a pace faster than a plod. At the water’s edge, Lana would close her eyes, pretending to be on a silver-white Andalusian, imagining they’d just finished a breathless, breakneck gallop instead of the trundling sway they’d actually done.
Always alone.
Even when she was with others.
Well, it sure seemed like she hadn’t grown out of that.
It turned out Sunday was the worst day of all.
She finished the painting. The faucet assembly in the bathroom could stand to be replaced – it was dull and old, wiggling a little when she pushed at it, but
when she honestly assessed it, it could go another year or two. She spent the day in a corner of the café reading her home-improvement book, learning about dry rot and smoke damage. From time to time Molly would plop next to her, telling her stories about the clientele, and Nikki kept her coffee cup so full that Lana’s hands started shaking by two o’clock.
“Come to the saloon tonight,” Molly said when Lana had finally decided to go back to her room. “It’s open mic, which is so fun. You can’t imagine the range of talent and non-talent we’ve got in town.”
Lana? Lana couldn’t imagine? Lana had spent the last twelve years listening to hopeful people croon into twenty-year-old mics that squealed with feedback and outrage. “No, thanks. Been there.”
But at nine-thirty, so caffeinated she was sure she wouldn’t sleep until dawn, she went onto the hotel porch. She sat in the swing in front of her room (the only swing safe to sit in, according to Adele, who’d been sure to let her know that she’d fixed it by herself).
From the saloon below, she heard a telltale shriek of a mic set too close to an amp. It was silenced immediately. A woman’s voice floated up the hill from the open back door. Even at a distance of a hundred yards or more, she could tell the woman didn’t have experience in front of an audience. Her voice shook, fading in and out. This far away, Lana couldn’t quite understand the words, but she knew the singer would never climb out of the open-mic world. That was fine. That was where most people wanted to be, honestly. They wanted to write and sing for friends and family. That was great.
Lana had always wanted more than that.
Sitting on the swing, staring into the low, foot-level lights on the path that ran through the roses, she realized for the first time that she’d failed.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, putting her hand across her mouth.
She’d failed.
She’d given up. Sure, she’d written a hit so huge it would probably keep paying her big for the rest of her life. Someone on a radio station had compared it to “Friends in Low Places” in terms of instantly working its way into country-music culture.
The Songbird Sisters Page 11
