“Bastards,” she said sympathetically.
“Well, that’s what I would have thought if I was still listening to my dad,” he admitted. “But my granddad had just died a few months before. I could see his whole career, this long span where he almost made it big. I could hear him in my head, talking me into it, telling me a little showmanship never hurt nobody.”
“Uh-oh,” Sarah said.
Quentin nodded. “We decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If people wanted a hot mess with their country music, that’s what we’d be. We started getting drunk and staging a fight at every concert.”
“Staging a fight?” she repeated. “You mean the table in the pool?”
He took a deep breath, watching her, realizing he’d given something else away, and calculating how to back out of the admission.
She raised one eyebrow.
He sighed, giving in. “Have you ever heard of Mad ‘Red’ Mud?”
“The professional wrestler?”
“Yeah. He used to work at the steel mill over in Fairfield with Martin’s uncle. He taught us some moves. We just try to keep Erin from getting hurt.” Quentin shrugged. “Usually it goes more smoothly than last night. I told them I shouldn’t get drunk while you were here. I tend to start laughing and lose my threatening scowl. Watch.”
He showed her such a ridiculous scowl that she laughed herself.
“When we started setting up fights,” he said, “our local fan base increased, because we weren’t just getting the country music fans anymore. We were getting the monster truck fans, too, the kind of folks who pay cash money to watch shit crash. That’s when the local paper started a column called the Cheatin’ Hearts Death Watch. Have you seen it?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it. You act like you’re proud of it.”
“I am,” he insisted. “That was a big break, because it got Nashville’s attention, and then Manhattan Music came calling. Don’t look at me like that. Put your eyebrow down.” He reached out to touch her brow.
His other hand already held her hand captive in a tingling dance. But something happened when he reached toward her face and touched her gently. His own expression changed. His green eyes turned serious and dark.
Then he was kissing her. Astonishingly, she was kissing him back. She couldn’t resist. His mouth took her mouth. His tongue tangled with her tongue and slicked across her teeth. She was embarrassed that she gasped a little. Natsuko most likely had made out with someone else this year and was used to this sort of thing.
He rolled on top of her, pinning her beneath him with his weight. She started to push him off, remembering that she hardly knew him and he could be dangerous, despite how he’d reassured her last night—and then his glasses fell onto her forehead. He laughed, sounding embarrassed for the first time. He seemed so young and vulnerable at that moment that she laughed, too, to make him feel better.
He moved her wrists close together above her head so he could hold them with one hand while he tossed his glasses onto the bedside table with the other.
“So we got the contract with the record company,” he said, and pressed his lips hard on hers again.
“But it was a tough fight,” he whispered, biting at the corner of her mouth.
“And then we had to reneg—What’s the word?” Through his cotton boxers and her silk shirt, his c**k moved against her belly.
“Renegotiate,” she breathed. “Stop the act. You know the word renegotiate.”
He grinned like the devil. “We had to reneg—what you said—between the first and the second album.” His tongue was inside her mouth again. Between this insistent pleasure and the pressure of the bulge shifting against her down below, Sarah had a hard time following what he was telling her.
He stopped kissing her to say, “And we’re damn tired of giving the lawyers all the crumbs Manhattan Music throws us. We want to seem crazy enough that the record company is scared to mess with us. But not crazy enough that the record company sends you down here to spy on us.”
His kisses deepened. Her body had never enjoyed a man’s body more, but her mind spun with realization. He’d just called her a spy. He seemed to take perverse pleasure in keeping her wrists captive above her head while he tortured her. He thought he had her right where he wanted her when the reverse was true. Her job, her whole life as she knew it, was riding on what she did next.
She whispered against his lips, “What about Martin?”
He stopped stock-still on top of her for several seconds, then kissed her cheek, close to her ear. “I’m calling your bluff,” he murmured. “What about Martin?”
“What is he doing? Heroin?”
Quentin rolled off Sarah and pressed his hand to his temple so his eyeball didn’t fall out. He had one mother of a headache, which had gotten worse each of the many times in the past half hour that Sarah had threatened to ruin his life. It had gotten better each time he put his hands on her.
He’d almost kicked her out of the house after she told him they did it, and then told him they didn’t. That was coldhearted of her. But it was hard to stay too mad at her when he had been laying the hick act on thick. And he didn’t feel the least bit guilty about getting as close to doing her as she’d let him without actually doing her.
Funny to think he’d gone into the bathroom to take out his sticky contacts and put on his glasses so he could see the woman he might be having a child with. He’d been terrified that she was an ugly chick he’d just laid because he was drunk. He’d never had a one-night stand before, but he’d heard stories.
Well, as far as he was concerned, the one-night stand with an ugly chick might be an urban myth. The night before, she’d seemed unreal, like an impossibly sexy comic book villainess from another universe. This morning, she was still a gorgeous pink-haired girl, only real, and warm, and barefoot in his bed.
And with superhuman powers of perception. He wondered what could have given Martin away. Maybe the long-sleeved shirt—it had been eighty-five degrees last night. He should talk Martin into linen. No, that would be enabling. But wasn’t that better than—
“Do you want me to get you some painkillers?” Sarah whispered. She sounded genuinely concerned.
“I already had some.” He looked sideways at her. “Please don’t tell Erin and Owen about Martin. They’ll kick him out of the band. We have a rule about that. No drugs.”