I Love the 80s (14 page)

‘He’s protective,’ Tommy said, a smile she couldn’t see warming his voice. ‘Of the band, but also of me. Nick and I grew up together. If he thought Duncan was even thinking about this kind of thing …’ He shook his head. ‘And the last thing we need is Nick getting in Duncan’s face. It wouldn’t end well.’

Jenna tried to absorb that description, though it was of a different Nick than the one she’d come to know: blustery, furious Nick. Nick who was always in a rage.

‘I’m guessing you didn’t grow up in Manchester, England, as advertised,’ Jenna said drily.

‘No.’ This time when he looked at her, laughter crinkled up the corners of his eyes. ‘Buffalo, New York. But that’s a secret, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘If it helps,’ he said in the same dry tone, ‘I’m pretty sure there’s a Tommy Seer who did grow up in Manchester, and I’m also pretty sure Duncan keeps him on the payroll. But I can’t say for certain.’

Jenna felt a warm sort of glow spread through her, simply because he was telling her one of his secrets. Even though it was a secret she already sort of knew, given the fact he never bothered with his English accent in the town house. She hadn’t known he was from Buffalo, though. He hadn’t had to tell her that. He didn’t need to talk to her at all. The fact that he was pleased her more than it should have, more than she was willing to admit, even to herself.

Though she couldn’t quite figure out why he would want to.

He led her through the quiet house, all the way to the spacious living room where they’d had that awful scene. Jenna generally avoided that room whenever possible. He didn’t stop there, thankfully, but continued on out into the garden. Only when he’d gone to the furthest edge of the walled-in space, to the small stone bench fetched up next to the brick wall and protected from the house by trees and the gurgling fountain, did he stop and face her. His expression was serious.

‘I told Duncan I’m leaving the band after this album,’ he said, with no preamble. ‘I’ll tour, but then I’m done with the Wild Boys. With him. He went ballistic.’

Jenna’s mind cartwheeled around her typical fan girl’s
reaction to that announcement. It was hard not to show it. But there was a more pressing question.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked haltingly. She tilted her chin up, braced for his response. ‘Why are you even talking to me? It’s been nothing but sarcasm since the night we— since that first night after the Video TV show.’

Tommy sighed, and sat down on the stone bench. He stretched his long, denim-covered legs out before him, flexing his bare toes against the warm grass.

‘You had the groupie look then,’ he said simply. His gaze was challenging. ‘You don’t have it any more.’

‘What—’ She stopped, composed herself. She ignored the shaft of pain that lanced through her. She cleared her throat. ‘What is the groupie look, exactly?’

He didn’t look away. Nor was his expression particularly kind.

‘That creepy blank stare.’ His voice was quiet. Not quite bitter, more resigned. ‘They don’t see you, whoever you are. They only see what they think you are. The fantasy. Usually they’re dreaming something about you while they’re looking at you. You’re just the object. You could be anyone. They’re like zombies.’

Jenna swallowed. She wanted to deny that she’d ever been like that, a
zombie
for God’s sake, but the protest died unspoken on her lips. Because she knew he was right, that she was still fighting it, even in this moment, and it shamed her.

‘Um.’ She tried again. ‘I’m sorry about that.’ How woefully inadequate.

‘You don’t have that look any more,’ he said again. What he didn’t say was,
that’s okay
, or
all is forgiven
.

‘You must get that a lot,’ she said, aware that her cheeks had reddened. She could feel the heat spread across them, itchy and shaming. She blinked back similar heat behind her lashes before it spilled over and humiliated her further.

‘You could say that.’ The creases next to his eyes deepened. ‘Also,’ he said after a moment, ‘there’s no one else to talk to. Anyone in the band might tell Duncan, if they thought it would help them out. And there’s no one outside the band I can trust. That’s what happens when you sell out everyone you know to become a big star. Behold my success.’

‘So,’ she said briskly, not caring to discuss her groupieness any further, or his evident loneliness, because both made her chest ache and there was nothing to be done about it, anyway. ‘Duncan going ballistic because you’re leaving the band makes sense, given, you know, Duncan’s personality. But what makes you think he’d kill you rather than lose you?’

‘I don’t know that I do think that.’ Tommy watched her carefully, his head cocked to one side. ‘It’s been a weird thought, that’s all. But then you didn’t laugh it off.’

‘You can’t be basing it on
that.
’ Jenna shook her head. ‘You must have other reasons to think it, right?’

‘There’s Eugenia.’ His expression got very distant, as if he was remembering something. ‘She’s been much friendlier lately. Which is terrifying.’ He smirked. ‘She’s normally vicious.’

‘And yet you asked her to marry you,’ Jenna couldn’t help but point out. His eyes flashed.

‘Or Duncan announced our engagement so he could keep his piece of ass available at all times, without his very jealous and very connected wife any the wiser,’ Tommy retorted. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read. Or even part of it.’

‘You used to date her,’ Jenna replied, feeling defensive.

Tommy sighed. He raked his dark hair back from his face with an impatient hand. ‘Eugenia Wentworth is a failed model with a very large trust fund, and can tell people at parties that she’s one hundred and sixty-seventh in line for the British throne. She’s exactly who I
should
have dated when I was twenty-two and in love with myself and our first single hit the top ten.’ He tipped his head back against the brick wall, and sighed. ‘And then, years later, she was still hanging around. So I dated her again, except this time it was perfectly clear that she wasn’t what I was looking for, but it was too late because I finally realized I was trapped and she was banging the guy who put me in the cage.’ He let out a small laugh then. ‘That’s how I ended up engaged to Eugenia Fucking Wentworth.’

He said
engaged
as if it was in quotation marks, and also as if the very word sickened him. Jenna could relate.

‘That’s a terrible story.’ More than that, it made her want to reach out and soothe him, comfort him, but she didn’t dare.

‘Yes,’ Tommy agreed. He shifted on the bench. ‘The
thing about Eugenia is that she has no filter between her emotions and her mouth. And I know she hates my guts.’

‘She told me you can be cruel,’ Jenna added helpfully. She did not add that she already knew that from firsthand experience.

‘She’s right.’ Tommy shrugged, as if cruelty was of no matter to him. ‘Her being friendly disturbs me. Deeply.’

‘Okay, sure,’ Jenna said, rocking back on her heels as she considered the situation. She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. ‘But that still doesn’t add up to her conspiring to do anything but mess with your head.’

‘The only way to get out from under Duncan’s thumb is to get out of the band,’ Tommy said, looking away again. ‘And he isn’t the kind of guy to give up his power.’

‘But—’

‘You want proof,’ he said, interrupting her. ‘I don’t have any. I just have a feeling. It’s not like he ever saw me as more than a means to an end, but lately, I don’t know, there’s something different in the way he looks at me. I can’t explain it, but I think he has a big plan.’

‘Which isn’t the same thing as planning a
murder
,’ Jenna argued. Tommy shook his head.

‘Duncan Paradis is a thug,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘That story he tells about his loving family and his poor childhood in the Bronx is a lie. There was no loving family. There were foster homes and sealed juvenile records. He lies about everything, he pays people off to help tell the lies, and he really only cares about money. Believe me, I
know. I’m his biggest investment. I can’t imagine he’s going to let that change.’

‘I believe you,’ Jenna said. ‘I think he’s a creep. I just think it would make more sense for him to force you to make more albums, and therefore make more money …’ But even as she said it, she realized that idols who died tragically and at the height of their glory raked in far more money, and for far longer, than bands of once-great heights whose follow-up albums lost listeners. Kurt Cobain versus Simon Le Bon, for example.

‘Dead singers make a whole lot more money,’ Tommy said softly, as if he could read her mind. ‘Indefinitely. To say nothing of the cults that spring up around them. The greatest-hits compilations. The loving tributes and concerts. It’s big business.’

Jenna’s mind raced. Tommy Seer’s body had never been recovered. Theoretically, anyone could have crashed his car through the guard rail and sent it spinning into the Hudson river. She’d seen it done in enough movies, at any rate, to know that it was possible. And if someone had done that deliberately, it made sense that they’d also done away with him. Because everything he’d just said with that bitter twist to his mouth had come to pass. Tommy Seer was a legend. Cut down in his prime, his death had been one of the most shocking events of not just Jenna’s young life, but of the lives of her contemporaries. Years later, when Kurt Cobain died, they’d all hugged themselves and wondered why the voices of their generation all seemed to die before their time.

There was no evidence that it had been anything but an unfortunate accident. But there had always been the suspicion – or hope – amongst the fans that it had been an elaborate set-up and Tommy Seer still lived. Kind of like in that wonderful early-Eighties movie,
Eddie and the Cruisers.
The fact that there was no body kept the suspicion stoked no matter what official-sounding statements were made to the contrary.

But it could also mean that someone else had set the whole thing up. And if there was anyone Jenna thought might be not only capable of such an act, but gunning for it, that would be Duncan Paradis.

‘It’s only a feeling,’ Tommy said again.

‘I understand where you’re coming from,’ Jenna said slowly, her mind still spinning through all the reams and reams of news articles she’d read about Tommy’s death, the documentaries with the news footage, her own more recent and exhaustive search through everything she could find that vaguely related to Tommy’s life in those last months … She shook herself slightly, aware that he was still watching her closely. Heaven forbid he see
zombie eyes
when she was just thinking things through. ‘So what do we do? Wait to see if he tries to shoot you one day?’

Tommy’s mouth pulled to one side, and his eyes warmed.

‘That’s not the best plan I’ve ever heard,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, I can’t think of any reason Duncan would share his plans with me. Or anyone else.’

‘He thinks I’m an idiot,’ Jenna said, pulling on her bottom lip with her fingers as she thought it over. ‘If that.’

They looked at each other, in perfect accord. Tommy smirked and Jenna smiled. And at the same time, they said her name.

‘Eugenia.’

As it turned out, Jenna did not have to look very far for the other woman, because she was thoughtfully lying in wait when Tommy and Jenna returned to the house. She sneered as they walked in the glass doors from the garden.

‘A little early for a nooner, isn’t it?’ she asked snidely.

Tommy ignored her completely, the way he always did. He walked past her as if the room was empty, as if she was not arrayed across the couch with that spiteful look on her face. Jenna made as if to do the same, and hid her smile when Eugenia barked out her name. Not that she thought Eugenia was likely to spill Duncan’s plot at the drop of a hat, but every conversation was an opportunity to get a little bit closer to that possibility.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘I have to be up in the studio.’

‘A few minutes in the garden with Tommy and suddenly you think highly of yourself,’ Eugenia murmured. ‘You shouldn’t be so naïve, Jenna.’

‘I didn’t think I was,’ Jenna replied, crossing her arms as she stared down at Eugenia’s awful little rat face. ‘I thought I was doing my job.’

‘Is that what he told you?’ Eugenia let out a trill of
laughter. ‘He certainly has slipped. Used to be, he didn’t have to tell his groupies that it was part of the job – they did it for free.’

Jenna hated that word,
groupies.
She particularly hated it coming from Eugenia’s nasty mouth.

‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you fall all over yourself in the kitchen earlier to tell me what an asshole you think Tommy is? Why would you care what he does?’

‘I don’t,’ Eugenia retorted. She crossed her legs, and let them slide against each other, as if performing for someone who cared. ‘But don’t you think you’re fooling yourself?’ She smiled. It was a brittle thing. ‘You’re not exactly his type, are you?’

Jenna knew perfectly well that Eugenia was trying to hurt her feelings. She also knew that this conversation was absurd at best, because she knew Tommy had less than no feelings about her. Not to mention she thought there were many other matters she could be talking about with Eugenia.

But, ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, instead of all the reasonable things she should have said. Eugenia’s smile sharpened.

‘Well, look at you,’ she said, waving a languid hand at Jenna. ‘Tommy is one of the most famous men in the world. Sure, he’d sleep with anything, including a garden hose, but it’s not like he’d be seen in public with a poor little secretary like you, now would he?’

It was ridiculous to let that hurt her. For one thing, it was true. And for another, it was irrelevant, because he
wasn’t sleeping with her. So there was absolutely no rational explanation for the stab of pain that bloomed under her breastplate, much less her sudden, violent urge to leap across the coffee table and punch Eugenia Wentworth in the face.

Eugenia uncoiled herself from the sofa like a cobra. She closed the distance between them with one long-legged stride. ‘Oh,’ she said then, ‘I almost forgot. Your boss called. He needs you back at the office.’