American Diva (32 page)

It
was impossible for Audrey to speak to Lucas before the show that night—she went straight from the business meeting she had with Lucas and Rich about the added tour dates, the perfume line someone wanted her to start, and details about the studio dates Lucas had managed to secure, to rehearsal. Which—if anyone was keeping score, and Audrey was fairly certain that every member of the band was doing just that—was pushed back two hours because of her late arrival.

The looks she got were not exactly smiles. She didn’t know what to say or do, really—she could hardly tell them she’d been in bed with Jack this morning and got a late start—so she just picked up her guitar and said, “Let’s go.”

After rehearsal, she wolfed a tuna sub Courtney brought her on the way to hair and makeup. “Have a good time last night?” Courtney asked with a bit of a salacious sneer. “Any of those fantasies come true?”

Her expression made Audrey’s heart skip a beat—the girl
knew
something. It flustered her; she bent down to scoop up Bruno so Courtney wouldn’t see just how much. “What happened to the stuff I asked you to do for the Songbird Foundation?” Audrey asked.

“Working on it,” Courtney said, her knowing smile widening a little further.

“Work on it harder or I will find someone who will,” Audrey responded just before sailing into the makeup room.

She scarcely had a moment to breathe; there was so much to prepare. But self-loathing thoughts kept creeping into her brain, thoughts that left her longing for Jack. Yesterday, everything had seemed so right. Today, everything seemed a mess.

At show time, she stood backstage, her stomach in knots, listening to Lucas finish up his opening set. The only comfort in that darkened passage was Jack, who caught her eye more than once and gave her a reassuring smile. As Lucas finished up his set, Jack walked behind Audrey, let his fingers trail over her hips, his hand rest on the small of her back.

Audrey shivered with the promise of his touch. She wanted to turn and throw her arms around him and feel the comfort of his body next to hers. But she didn’t move, didn’t turn. She felt him leave, disappearing into the dark, leaving her standing alone.

A moment later, Lucas rushed off the stage. He was grinning broadly and caught her up with one arm, kissing her fully on the mouth. “What a fucking
rush
!” he exclaimed, and kissed her again. “Feel the power?” he asked breathlessly. “I am passing it to you, baby. Go tear it up.”

“Okay,” she said, and squirmed out of his embrace. It seemed to her, in that dark passageway, that Lucas’s smile faded a bit.

“I know you will,” he said, his voice cooler. “I’m going to grab a beer, but I’ll be right here when you go on.”

She nodded, watched him walk away, watched him pause to throw his arm around the shoulder of his bass player and say something as they went. And she continued to watch him because she couldn’t make herself turn around, couldn’t make herself look into Jack’s eyes. She knew he was somewhere just behind her. She could
feel
him.

She’d never
felt
Lucas like that in the entire time they had been together.

“Ready, Miss LaRue?” one of the stagehands whispered.

Ready? At this point, there was no refuge from her mess but the stage. “Yeah, Jerry, I’m ready,” she said, and followed his flashlight trail down to the lift that would bring her up to the stage in a cloud of smoke.

A half hour later, when the set had been readied for her, Audrey put the guitar strap around her neck, closed her eyes, and hoped for peace from her raging thoughts for at least the space of her show.

But the stage betrayed her. If anything, her thoughts ramped up during the course of her show. It didn’t help matters that her first song had to do with cheating boyfriends. It angered her—she didn’t need to be reminded and stroked her guitar with a vengeance and kicked the mic stand over. When it came time to abandon her guitar for dance, she leapt into the routine like a lion, kicking higher and landing harder than she ever had before.

The crowd roared.

The next two songs were angry, hard-hitting tunes, and that suited her. But then she reached the acoustical version of her old ballad about a love gone bad.

 

The memory was heart-wrenching. Lucas really had loved her when no one else would.

 

She closed her eyes, tried to think of Jack, wondering if he was standing just beyond the lights like he did every night, if he was feeling the force of the words. Did Lucas?

By the time the show had come to an end, she was exhausted, wrung dry of every possible emotion, her body feeling limp from the extraordinary exertion she’d put into the show.

“Girl, you were
hot
tonight!” Trystan shouted as he and the other dancers ran off the stage.

Audrey took her final bow, walked off into the dark on the opposite side, where she stood with two stagehands and one security guard. The applause was deafening. Bucky, one of the security guards, grinned at her. “You
rocked
!” he said. “I’ve never heard you sound so good.”

“Thanks, dude,” she said with a thin smile.

“No kidding,” Bob, a roadie, added. “That was fantastic!”

Then why didn’t she feel fantastic? The crowd was screaming—across the stage, Audrey could see Lucas frantically waving her on, and she knew she should go, knew she should walk out there and do an encore before it got too wild, but she couldn’t seem to make herself. She didn’t want to walk out there and share the stage with Lucas like she knew she would have to do. It seemed disingenuous somehow.

The crowd had begun to stomp, which was the point facility managers usually insisted she go back out. “Aren’t you going?” Bucky asked, looking at her curiously.

She looked at Bucky, then at Lucas across the way, feeling almost paralyzed with indecision. It was the warmth at her back that saved her—she felt his hand ride her hip, his breath on her ear. “They love you, starlight. Go out there and give them what they want. That’s the only thing you need to think about right now.”

She moved then, walking back out on stage, accepting her guitar from one of the band members, hearing the screams of the crowd as the lights came up and a spotlight hit her. It was impossible to see in the crowd with the light shining in her face, but she could hear it and feel it, a living, moving thing, the rhythm of it matching the rhythm of her heart. The bass player started the encore tune, and Audrey struck her first chord on the guitar, and like a savage beast, the crowd quieted.

And as she sang her encore song, Lucas, who came on stage as he had every night since the first time he’d surprised her with it, smiled and winked at her as he played the guitar, and reached out his hand to her as he sang the harmony to “Frantic.”

And for the first time, Audrey pretended not to see his hand and walked to the other end of the stage, singing out to the audience, using her guitar as a shield, wondering where Jack was as she sang,
I’m frantic when you’re not with me, frantic when you’re here
, wishing she could see him, knowing he was near.

The encore ended with Audrey and Lucas riding down into the bowels of the stage. And before they had disappeared from the audience view, Lucas grabbed her in a passionate embrace. As they sank lower, he did not let go, but began to grope for her in the dark, trying to push her under the stage scaffolding.

“Lucas,” Audrey said, pushing him away. “
Stop
it.” He groaned, ignoring her. Audrey panicked and slapped his hands away from her. “
Stop it!
”

He drew up, surprised. “What the hell is the matter with you? I’m just trying to love you, baby.”

“I don’t want you to
love
me under the stage like some whore,” she said, pushing him again.

“
Whoa
,” he said, throwing up his hands. “What the hell is wrong, Audrey? I thought you liked it when we got it on under the stage.”

“No,
I
don’t like it,
you
like it. It makes me feel—”

“It should make you feel hot, because you totally are,” he said, reaching for her before she could complete her thought.

“
Cheap
,” she said, knocking his hand away again. “It makes me feel
cheap
. Courtney does guys under the stage. Not me.”

“Holy shit!” he said, glaring at her. “Pardon a guy for trying to make love to his girlfriend.”

“You’re not trying to make love to me, Lucas. You are trying to show off, and it’s weird.” She moved to pass him, but he caught her arm.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he barked. “Are you on the rag? PMSing? Because you have been a bitch since you got back from Texas.”

Audrey gasped. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t pull that diva shit on me, Audrey. I
made
you.”

“Lucas,” she said, shaking his hand from her arm. “Just leave me alone, will you?” She shoved past him, walked through the scaffolding, and tripped over cables before she reached the lights where the crew was waiting. She didn’t stop until she reached the after-show party room, which seemed to be part boiler room, part bar.

She walked in, smiling past the dozens already assembled, managing to respond to all those who told her that she and her show rocked as she made her way to the bar. She tried to help herself to a strong gin and tonic, but was intercepted by a well-meaning fan. When she at last got her hand on the drink, she downed it, feeling the burn of it all the way to her toes.

It did nothing to help the churning inside her. The room had filled with the usual group—the band and their groupies, the roadies and their groupies, the people who had won a chance to meet her and
their
groupies, a dozen or more people somehow associated with her that showed up after every show, and whom she’d never even met. As she helped herself to another gin and tonic, she tried to see over the heads of everyone crammed into that large square room, looking for Jack.

She couldn’t see him anywhere.

More fans found her—she had no chance to look for him, no time to breathe.

It wasn’t until a half hour later, when she had extracted herself from the clutches of one Sandy Winn, who proclaimed herself Audrey’s most avid fan and then proceeded to prove that she was, indeed, a very rabid fan, by asking Audrey to autograph her shirts, hats, and canvas tote bags, that Audrey managed to slip away and help herself to an unprecedented third gin and tonic.

Drink in hand, she backed away from the crowd, stepping beneath a large vent and leaning up against the column, out from under the lights. She turned her face up, to the fan. Nashville was
hot
.

The touch of a hand startled her; Audrey almost dropped her drink. She took a quick look around before turning to Jack as his fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling her into the dark behind the large column.

“Where have you been?” she moaned as he slipped his arms around her and pressed his lips to her throat.

“Right here,” he murmured against her skin. He kissed her ardently, as if they had been separated days instead of hours.

Audrey’s pulse surged with excitement. She broke the kiss and looked furtively to her right. “They might see us—”

“Did you get a chance to tell him?”

“No,” she said, and shifted her gaze to the tuft of dark hair peeking out from the vee of his shirt. “I haven’t had a moment to myself. But I will. Soon.” Telling Lucas loomed like a beast in her mind, and Audrey suddenly threw her arms around Jack’s neck and held him tight. “I miss you already.”

“Me too, sweetheart.” As his hand rode her nipple, he kissed her again. Her body reacted, her breasts began to swell. She was actually contemplating another illicit encounter when he suddenly stepped away and flashed a sexy smile that suggested he knew what his touch did to her. “More of that later,” he said. “A whole lot more of that later. But right now, I think you better get back to your public.” He untangled his fingers from hers as he moved back into the shadows, leaving Audrey full of a healthy dose of angst.

The angst intensified when she finally slid out from the shadows to see that Lucas, across the room, was staring at her.