Dirty Little Secret (13 page)

Now he did open his eyes. He stared me down like I’d just awakened him from a long winter’s nap.

“Sorry!” I exclaimed. My tone let him know I wasn’t sorry at all. “Am I fired, too?”

“Maybe,” he grumbled. “Why were you giving me all that guff about the tip jar? You’re the one who got Charlotte started in the first place.”

“Oh, no. All this between you has been going on for a long time. You neglected to tell me before you dragged me here.”

“The point is the gig,” he said impatiently. “I’m in the wrong mind-set for the gig. Now I’ve got to turn this thing around somehow.” His dark eyes, warm beneath his long, dark lashes, slid to meet mine. I realized by degrees that he wanted me.

Self-conscious, and trying not to be, and not a hundred percent sure I was reading him right, I held his gaze, waiting for him to make the first move. When he did, tingles raced up my arms. He took my hand and tugged me closer. “Come here.”

I held back, not stepping forward until the strength of his pull overcame the gravity rooting me to the spot. But when I did give in to his momentum, I led with my chest and dropped my shoulders so he could catch a glimpse down the front of my dress.

He looked where I wanted him to look as we stood as close to each other as we could get without embracing. In the warm night I could feel the heat of his body through his shirt and my dress.
Slowly he raised his eyes to meet mine. “Would you mind helping me get in the mood?”

“I thought we were supposed to act like we don’t like each other.”

“Around Ace and Charlotte.” He lifted his thumb to stroke my lip. Through the coating of lipstick, his touch made me shudder. “Let me kiss you just this once,” he said.

Just this once
was a refrain with him. He was the devil in disguise, the handsome but low-down, no-good sneaky guy from a thousand country songstresses’ revenge plots. Yet there was no way I was turning him down, any more than I could have turned down playing this gig. Ace and Charlotte weren’t peeking around the corner of the building at us—too frightened by Sam’s sudden and insistent exit, I thought—and there were no windows on this wall that they could spy through. Anyway, the two of them were Sam’s concern, not mine. We were on the side of the building facing the deserted end of the street, not Broadway, so there was nobody at all to see us.

I said coyly, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

He gave me a small smile, then solved the problem by carefully sliding my glasses off and folding them into his back pocket. His other hand never left my mouth.

I opened my lips, letting his thumb dip inside.

His dark eyes widened and he watched me for a moment, like he’d expected to get slapped, not invited, and now he wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Only for a moment. His thumb slid from my mouth down to trace my jaw. He cradled my chin in his hand and lowered his lips to mine.

His mouth was unexpectedly hot, like he’d been drinking coffee, or I was even more thoroughly frozen than I’d thought. But
he didn’t force the kiss into a big production like Toby had during our first encounter. His mouth pressed mine almost chastely, until I felt the very tip of his tongue rub along my bottom lip.

I felt like gasping with pleasure and shock, but I didn’t want him to know how he was affecting me, in case he didn’t feel the same way. I kept my mouth on his and inched forward instead, slipping my hands around his waist. Except for a few brushes against him at the mall, this was the first time I’d touched him. I’d thought, and Ace had confirmed, that Sam was an athlete. I still wasn’t prepared for how solid he was underneath my fingertips.

I shouldn’t have worried that he wasn’t enjoying this as much as I was. As soon as I touched him, he inhaled sharply through his nose, pressed his hand more firmly around my jaw like he never wanted to let me go, and wrapped his other arm around my back. The stubble on his cheeks pricked my face. He kissed me more deeply—still taking his time, but eagerly enough to let me know the feeling was mutual. We took turns leading each other down a dark spiral.

He pulled away, blinking at me like he wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He glanced at his watch. “We have to go in and get started.” Then he looked into my eyes with an intensity that let me know there was nothing he’d rather do less.

After a year spent feeling worthless, and several months with a boyfriend who treated me like he was making do with me until he found someone better, I was really enjoying Sam. I knew I was being ridiculous, and I half thought he was setting me up and faking the whole thing, because he was too cute and the situation was too perfect. Maybe I was about to get cut down, but as good as I felt right then, I was willing to take the chance.

Surging with more power than I’d felt since I could remember, I rubbed my thumbs down toward the waist of his jeans before I
let him go and drew back. “Is that what you needed?” I said in a teasing voice I didn’t know I had. “Are you in the right mind-set now?”

“Uh-huh,” he affirmed, eyes still wide on me as if he couldn’t quite focus. He acted like kissing me had blown his mind. It was adorable. “Wow. Yes. I wish we had a song about this on the playlist. Or maybe we do.”

Seeing a strange shadow across his mouth, I drew his handkerchief from my dress pocket. “Uh-oh, lipstick.”

He chuckled as I cleaned him up. “Not my best look?”

“What about me? Am I smeared?” I pursed my lips and lifted my chin to give him a better view.

“You’re perfect.” He pulled my glasses from his back pocket, unfolded them, and set them across my nose. Brows drawn together like he was deep in thought, he took my hand and tugged me around the corner to begin our gig.

6

I
expected Sam to drop my hand
as soon as we entered the building so Charlotte wouldn’t see us and pitch another fit. But he didn’t, for whatever reason—maybe because he thought he might lose me in the crowd that had packed the place while we went missing. The sidewalk outside the bar had been just as empty when we walked in this time as when we first walked in. I had no idea where these people were materializing from. They crowded the floor and overflowed onto the ramp we struggled up.

I was happy to walk behind him. Happy, for the first time in a long time. I felt my cheeks glowing with pleasure that he was still holding my hand. I loved looking at the back of his head. Everything about him seemed perfect and positive. I was going insane.

He hopped up onstage and pulled me after him. Settling his hat on his dark waves again, he surveyed the crowd as he said in my ear, “The natives are restless. Let’s get tuned up quick and get going. I’m not going to try to butter them up with a ‘How’re you doing, Nashville?’ I’ll just jump right into it and hold Alan Jackson in front of me like a shield. I signal Charlotte and she starts first, so listen for her.”

Nodding, I knelt and opened my fiddle case against the wall and plugged my pickup into the available amp. While my back was turned, I heard Sam hollering over the noise, but I couldn’t make out anything he was saying except “Perfect pitch.” When I stood, Sam and Ace both crowded me and tuned their guitars to my long, low E. Then Ace backed up all the way to the window onto the sidewalk.

I set my bow against my strings, ready to start, and looked over at Sam for the signal. I shifted uncomfortably with my elbow against the wall. Even with all the room Ace was giving us, Sam was too close on my left side. I wouldn’t have room for full strokes of my bow. If it came down to it, the lead singer was a more important member of this band than I was. I would give him my place and stand on the floor, and possibly be groped by the frat boys currently leering at me and inching closer to the stage in the hope of seeing up my dress.

Glancing over at me, Sam saw me shifting and solved the problem. “I’ll go over here,” he said, making one wide step to straddle the space between the stage and the end of the bar. He shifted from a wash of blue light into a flood of bright white. The bar waitress only glanced casually up at him like he wasn’t the first lead singer to arrive at this solution. Ace waited until a couple of newcomers passed by, then handed Sam’s amp across the space to him, then his mike stand, then his guitar. Ace acted like this wasn’t the band’s first concert in cramped quarters, either. As Sam and the bar waitress got the cords situated, I wondered what the facilities had been like at the Lao weddings.

I half expected Charlotte to give me a dirty look for holding her boyfriend’s hand and stealing her tip jar and existing generally. She only had eyes for Sam, though, and this time she wasn’t gazing at him moonily but watching him closely with her sticks raised,
an experienced drummer with her head in the game, waiting for her signal.

The music on the loudspeakers suddenly diminished and died as the bar waitress dialed the volume down. Voices swelled, and someone whistled. Every face turned to us.

Sam looked over his shoulder at Ace to make sure he was ready.

He looked at me. I winked at him like I played gigs in bars every night of the week. Adrenaline flooded my arms and made my fingers tingle.

He glanced over his shoulder at Charlotte.

That must have been his signal to her, just meeting her steady gaze. Before he’d turned back around, her drums burst into life, Ace played the bass line and Sam the melody, and I was waiting for a place to jump in, feeling like I was running to catch up.

I found my slot and laid into my lick exactly as the audience burst into applause and cheers as they recognized the song, an oldie that pleased the moms in the audience, but popular enough that the college girls up front knew it, too, and raised their bottles and whooped. I couldn’t laugh. My chin stayed glued to my fiddle to keep it steady under the sawing of my bow. But I wanted to look over at Sam and exchange a chuckle with him at the appreciative response of the crowd to such a hokey old tune.

Sam was smiling, too, but not at me. When he pulled off a complicated riff and the crowd clapped, he beamed at them like he was a kid on Christmas and they’d just given him exactly the toy he’d always wanted.

That was all before he started to sing.

After the first few words, a cheer went up again as the audience expressed their relief that Sam wasn’t just a pretty face and he had the chops to go with the hat. As I began a few measures of staccato notes, backing him up with chords in the verse until I bowed along
with him in the chorus, I had time to look out at the crowd. The college girls stared up at him on the bar in awe. I could tell from the occasional hand raised above the crowd that someone behind the rail on the upper level was doing the Texas two-step. Everyone was smiling.

Including me. My jaw was aching already. I tried to relax it and return my expression to my usual neutral. I couldn’t have my face sore when I needed to secure the fiddle with my chin for the next two hours.

But it was hard not to smile when the crowd seemed so enthralled with us. I glanced over at Ace to see if he was as wowed by the experience as I was. He hadn’t smiled at me before now, but he flashed me an understated grin that let me know the big football player was moved. Thick fingers nimbly picking the metal bass strings, he closed his eyes and lost himself in the groove. Sweat along his neat hairline glistened in the blue light. On the other tiny stage, Charlotte was a whirling dervish of drumsticks and arms and brown wavy hair, such a flurry of energy that it was hard to reconcile the crazed sight of her with the precise beat she was putting out.

We sounded good together, I was realizing. The first song was a bit early to hand down a verdict, but so far we sounded like we’d been playing together forever. The groups at the mall had sounded like that, too, since we were all seasoned musicians, more or less interchangeable. But at the mall, we’d been imitating something great and bygone. Right here, right now, Charlotte and Ace and Sam and I might have been playing a cover, but we weren’t imitating anybody.
We
were the young, hip thing to see in a Nashville dive on a Saturday night.

As the song drew to a close, I knew what was coming. There was a money note at the end, and I was afraid Sam wouldn’t be
able to hit it. It seemed too high for him. But he made it, as if he’d calculated the key of this tune carefully to play up his voice to advantage. After the abrupt ending, there was a half second of silence before the crowd screamed. Now Sam did ask, “How’re you doing, Nashville?” in an exaggerated drawl worthy of the most down-home, country-fried musical savant. The audience didn’t have time to respond with another howl before he took a quick look behind him at Charlotte and she kicked off the next driving beat.

Sam had engineered this song, too, transposing it into exactly the right key to make his strong voice sound as good as it could without going over. During the first verse, he glanced over at me, pointed at me, and touched his mouth. I assumed he meant I should sing the prominent harmony on the chorus. If the band had been performing this song in the past—and they must have been, since they sounded this good now—they’d been doing it without the harmony. Now that Sam had me, he wanted me to make the song sound more like the original.