by Cindy Dees
Austin went airborne, laying himself out flat. His arms wrapped around Sampson’s waist, and his momentum carried both men straight forward, down to the very end of the plank they stood on. He felt himself tilting to the left. Air loomed under his left side. In a survival reflex, he wrapped his legs tightly around the narrow catwalk he straddled.
Sampson started to fall, and as strong as Austin was, he wasn’t powerful enough to stop the guy’s body weight. Nonetheless, he hung onto Sampson’s waist with all his strength. The guy flung out his arms and managed to snag the perpendicular catwalk. With Austin’s help, the other man dragged himself back up onto the planks.
“Give it up, Sampson,” Austin grunted. “You’re gonna kill yourself up here.”
“If I can’t have Silver, who cares?”
“Get over it. You never gave a damn about her. You just wanted her fame and fortune.”
“Go to hell, Dearing.”
“Your life’s not over. You still have a lot of years to score the big one and get rich. Don’t throw it away.”
“You’ve got nothing on me. Back off!”
“Ever hear of a guy named Dingo? He and I had a little chat earlier today. He’s in the custody of Las Vegas’s finest as we speak, singing his heart out.”
That took the remaining starch out of Sampson.
“If you make a full confession, maybe the district attorney will go easy on you. Come quietly with me now, and I’ll put in a good word for you.”
“I didn’t shoot at her that day,” Sampson blurted. “I had nothing to do with that.”
“You willing to say that hooked up to a lie detector?”
“Yeah, I’m telling you. It wasn’t me!”
Somehow, he believed the guy’s whining. But he wasn’t about to give Sampson the weapon of that knowledge. “Tell it to the cops. You and Dingo cut her brakes. You had Dingo assault her. You sent her threatening notes—”
He broke off as Sampson frowned, perplexed. So he hadn’t been behind the bouquet and the death threat that came with it? Damn. Aloud, he commented, “It doesn’t matter. With what Dingo’s telling the cops, they’ll still nail you cold. You’re hosed.”
Sampson uttered another foul suggestion for what he could do to himself. Time for a little reverse psychology.
Austin shrugged. “If that’s the way you feel, there’s no sense in my trying to save you. You should go ahead and jump. The publicity for Silver will be spectacular. She’ll make global headlines. You’ll make her millions of dollars in record sales.”
Sampson snarled something about not giving her a red damned cent. Austin didn’t catch the rest of what the guy called Silver, which was probably just as well. He would’ve hated to have to toss Sampson off the scaffold himself.
Austin loosened his grip slightly and glanced below. “I’d recommend you go off the back of that plank you’re on. It’s a longer fall on that side, and there’s some sound equipment down there. The combination ought to kill you nicely.” He gave Sampson a little push in that direction.
“Are you crazy?” Sampson hollered.
Austin’s voice dripped with anger when he replied coldly, “Buddy, I’m stone-cold sane. But I am getting you out of Silver’s life for good one way or another tonight.”
Sampson’s eyes widened fractionally as he realized that Austin meant business.
Austin continued emphatically. “I really don’t give a damn if you climb down from here or fly down. But you’re done stalking Silver. As of now. It’s over. What’s it gonna be? Stairs or airborne?”
Silver looked up yet again, watching in horror at the drama unfolding over her head. She had to do something! Mark was volatile and unpredictable, and Austin could get hurt or killed up there!
She stumbled and missed a couple steps but did her best to cover it.
She couldn’t lose Austin now, just when she’d finally found him again. She sang through the song’s chorus, and as the last verse approached, the words didn’t come to her. Damn. What came next?
She looked up again. And gasped. Austin dived for Sampson and both men crashed down onto the scaffold, which started to swing ominously. She missed the first line of the verse, but thankfully the backup singers were also belting it out at the same moment, neatly covering her gaff.
The two men looked to be struggling. She couldn’t make out who was winning, but she had to believe Austin had the upper hand, given his fitness and training. Assuming Mark didn’t pull them off the scaffold and kill them both. He was vindictive enough to do it.
She searched frantically off to her left. There. Warren was still lurking offstage. In the guise of waving at the audience, she desperately gestured at the bodyguard until he glanced her way. She made frantic eye contact with him.
He started to move forward, but she shook her head. He stopped, looking confused. She pointed up, looking up as she did so. It wasn’t the choreographed movement for the song, but fortunately she was the star of the show, and she could deviate from the routine the backup dancers were grinding out without looking strange.
Warren, thank goodness, correctly interpreted her movements. Frowning, he looked up, peering into the blackness of the stage ceiling. Suddenly he jolted and reached into his jacket for his pistol. He must’ve spotted the two men. He spun and took off running into the bowels of the theater.
She executed a couple of spins across the stage, glanced at the dancers to see what they were doing, got in front of them where she belonged and picked up the routine again. An urgent prayer for Austin’s safety ran through her head in a continuous loop of near panic as she continued the performance. It was the best she could do.
Austin waited tensely while Sampson blustered for a few more seconds, but then the guy went limp.
All the fight went out of Bubba and sullen defeat entered his eyes. “Stairs, you son of a bitch,” Sampson snarled.
Austin laughed shortly, without humor, a hard sound even to his ears. “Your misfortune was to run into a son of a bitch who wanted the girl just a little bit more than you. Let’s go.”
He dragged the guy to his feet and, as much as was possible in the narrow, dangerous confines up here, goose-stepped him to the ladder that led offstage.
Sampson stopped abruptly at the top of the ladder and muttered, “Who the hell’s that?”
Austin glanced down. Praise the Lord. Warren. His worry about how to maneuver Sampson down the ladder without the guy pulling something stupid evaporated. He answered, “That’s my partner. And if you think I’m a badass, you ought to tangle with him. He’d kill his own mother to get the job done.”
Sampson grumbled under his breath. Uh huh. As Austin had thought. The guy had been planning to do something on the way down.
“Here’s how this is gonna work, Mike. You’re gonna go down in first, and my buddy down there’s going to keep his gun on you. Try anything and he’ll shoot you off the ladder like a juicy little pig in a shooting gallery.”
“My name is Mark, dammit,” Sampson ground out.
Austin leaned close and murmured in the guy’s ear. “I’ve got a friend named Mark. Good man. Saved my life a few times. You don’t deserve the same name as him, you slimeball. Now get moving.” He gave Sampson’s arm a sharp twist that drove the guy to his knees.
For the first time, true fear entered Sampson’s gaze. Was the jerk just now starting to figure out how dangerous a man he really was? Austin snorted. Gee, Maynard. A little slow on the uptake there.
On stage, Silver spied Austin standing at the top of the ladder with Sampson kneeling in front of him and nearly sobbed her relief into her microphone. Thankfully, she was due for her last costume change before the grand finale, a medley of her greatest hits. She was supposed to exit stage left, but there wasn’t a chance she was going anywhere but stage right to meet Austin.
She all but ran off the stage at the end of the song, while the lead guitarist held a “Which side of the theater can cheer louder?” contest.
Acro
ss the stage, she spotted Saul and Stella flapping in consternation like a pair of wet chickens, and a flurry of activity as they tried to pack up, no doubt, with the intent to race over with the last costume. Whatever. She so didn’t give a darn about any old outfit right now.
She raced behind the big velvet curtain to where Warren was just finishing slapping handcuffs on Mark. With a wordless cry she flung herself at Austin. He heard her coming in enough time to turn around before she barreled into him, which was probably what saved them both from tumbling to the floor.
“Oh my God,” she cried. “Are you okay?”
“Easy, darlin’. I’m fine. I spotted me a rat up in the light rig and went on a little hunting expedition.”
She twisted in Austin’s arms to stare at Mark. “What did I ever do to you to make you want to hurt me?”
The guy opened his mouth, but Austin cut him off. “Don’t answer that, Sampson. In fact, don’t say anything at all. You scared Silver tonight, and that’s all the reason I need to break your neck.” He added in disgust, “Get him out of here, Warren, before I hurt him or worse.”
The other bodyguard nodded tersely and dragged Sampson away.
Silver buried her face against Austin’s chest and let out the sob she’d been desperately holding in ever since she’d realized what was going on overhead.
“Hey, sweetheart. Why the tears? Everything’s okay now.”
She sniffed, smiling up at him damply. “That’s why I’m crying, you big oaf. I thought I was going to lose you again, and I flipped out.”
He pulled her close and buried his face in her hair, murmuring unintelligibly beneath the roar of the crowd. But she didn’t need to hear the words. She felt his relief that she was okay in the way he crushed her against him, felt his caring in the way he nuzzled her hair with his nose, felt his emotion in the way his heart pounded against hers.
She’d almost lost him tonight. The realization flowed through her like a glacier, freezing everything in its path with stark terror. Suddenly, nothing else mattered. Not some stupid costume change, not her career, nothing. She’d been out there shimmying around and he’d been overhead, putting his life on the line for her. It made what she did seem so blessed shallow.
Heck, she’d spent all these weeks assuming he’d left her for some selfish reason of his own. He probably had some noble reason for doing that, too! “Why did you leave?” she blurted.
He lifted his head to look down at her solemnly. “You were having another man’s baby. A man you were involved with. What kind of lowlife would I be to break the two of you up? I cared about you too much to do that to you. I had to leave. It was the only right thing to do.”
Yup. Noble to the core. And she’d been too blind to see it. She’d been busy thinking all kinds of terrible things about him, and he’d done it all for her. She so didn’t deserve him. How was she ever going to live up to his sense of honor and decency?
She’d sold out on him. Given up on him—and on them. She’d sold out on her career. Sold out on everything. She’d just rolled over and done what everyone around her told her to, whining all the while about how miserable she was. Meanwhile, he’d made a giant sacrifice for her, an ultimate gesture of caring, without a word of complaint. How could she possibly make that up to him?
And then what he’d just said truly registered on her overwrought brain. He’d cared for her enough to leave. Cared.
Past tense.
It was too late. He’d come back to nab Sampson, not to be with her. She was in the middle of her big show, and he was gentleman enough not to dump her until it was over. But his return had nothing to do with her. She’d truly blown it.
The floor might just as well have opened up and swallowed her whole at that moment. Apparently, somewhere deep in her subconscious, she’d been holding out some small hope that they’d get back together, for that spark just blinked out of existence. And her world went black. All desire to go back out on that stage drained away.
She had to leave. Go somewhere far, far away from here, and never come back.
Austin frowned down at her, and all of a sudden, the light disappeared from his gaze, too. He knew. He’d realized that she’d figured out why he was here and that he could drop the pretense now. She spun away. “I’ve…I’ve got to…go,” she mumbled. Where to, she had no idea. Just away. Now.
Vaguely, she became aware of her name being repeated over and over. “Silver! Silver! Silver!” It was the crowd chanting—screaming at the top of its lungs, actually—for her return.
Austin gave her a push toward the stage. “Go. Your fans are waiting for you.”
Blindly, she stumbled forward. And realized the spotlights had picked her up. She was back on stage. She stared out at the audience numbly. Sing. She was supposed to sing. But she had no idea what song came next. She didn’t care what song came next.
One of the guitarists whispered urgently to her, prompting her with the line for the beginning of the final medley.
She heard Saul behind her, asking Austin urgently what the hell he’d just said to her. Austin murmured back that he hadn’t said anything at all. And that was the problem. He had nothing to say.
Nothing to say.
That was the title of the song she’d written right after Austin left. It talked about how there weren’t words to describe her love and loss.
“Sing, Silver!” Saul hissed at her angrily.
Sing. Right. As if coming out of a trance, she walked out to the center of the stage and reached behind her waist to flip on her microphone pack. “Everybody, with your indulgence, I’m going to change up the pace, now.”
She gazed up toward the back of the theater where the lighting director and his men sat in a concealed booth. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. “Gentleman, if you could cut all the lights and give me a single white down-spot, center stage?”
The party atmosphere in the audience faded as the lights went down, and the crowd buzzed, clearly perplexed.
She glanced back at the band. “Jerry, may I borrow your acoustic Gibson?”
The lead guitarist looked stunned but nodded and turned to the stand behind him. He picked up the plain, wooden guitar and passed it to her.
She looked offstage. “Is there a stool around, by any chance?”
After a few seconds, a stagehand ran out with a bar stool. She directed the kid to place it in the wash of light shining down from the spotlight above. She glanced over the wings of stage right. Saul mouthed furiously something to the effect of “What in the hell are you doing?”
And Austin—he had faded back into the shadows, but she still recognized his tall form, nearly invisible behind Saul. Already pulling away from her, huh? Her heart broke a little more. Well, at least she was now in approximately the same frame of mind she’d been in when she wrote the song.
She perched on the stool and gave the guitar an experimental strum. She looked up at the audience but couldn’t see even the front rows in the blackness now enveloping the theater.
“You know, folks, a lot of time has passed since I was last onstage. And I’ve done some growing up since then. To pass the time, I’ve been trying my hand at a little songwriting. If you don’t mind, I’d like to play one of my songs for you now. It fits my mood better than what was up next on the playlist. I hope you like it.”
And with that, she closed her eyes, strummed the opening chords, and began to sing. It wasn’t so much a song as a confession. The ballad told the story of her long search for and finally finding the right man. It told how she’d taken him for granted and how she’d lied to him and lost him. She sang of her loss and pain but also of her regret and sorrow. She poured out all the anguish in her soul into the music, her voice soaring into the silent void all around her.
And then the song was over. The audience was dead silent. The moment stretched out eerily as she opened her eyes in slow motion and looked up. And then the spellbound quiet broke as thunderous applause erupted, shocking
her out of her reverie. The applause swelled to cheering, then to screaming and to a standing ovation that was deafening.
But that din was nothing compared to what came next. A massive explosion slammed into her, throwing her off the stool, flattening her on the stage. It was so loud that the impact of the noise ripped the air from her lungs. Sharp pain burst in her ears, ringing through her head until she couldn’t see.
She registered screams. Then a crunching, creaking sound of metal tearing.
And then the entire lighting scaffold crashed down on top of her.
Chapter 16
The explosion sent ice picks of agony stabbing into Austin’s left ear, driving him to the floor along with the concussion of the blast. Holy— Before he could finish the thought, his instincts took over and he rolled back to his feet all in one lightning fast motion. Silver. Must get to Silver.
He jumped for the stage just as the light system came crashing down before his eyes, burying Silver somewhere beneath tons of lights and wires and steel beams.
Right then and there his life flashed before his eyes. Except it wasn’t his past scrolling through his mind’s eye…it was the future they could’ve had together. Laughter and fireworks and sweet memories. The exciting roller coaster of her career. Laid-back retirement for him. Kids playing in the backyard. Fourth of July picnics with sparklers and burnt hot dogs. Lazy moments together in bed. And the love.
Oh, God. The love.
Oblivious to the screams and chaos around him, he leaped onto the twisted pile of steel, thinking frantically. She’d been sitting slightly forward of where he was now. He shifted over that way, searching furiously. He threw pieces of twisted metal in all directions, dodged bundles of wires that might or might not be hot, all the while bellowing, “Silver! Silver! Where are you?”
The noise in the theater was deafening. People screamed, feet stampeded and the roaring aftereffects of the explosion still echoed in his skull.
