The second bouquet was two dozen red roses. The card for this one read,
Birthday wish granted.
Harold
Harold. Her ex-husband. Folded inside the card was a form. Glancing once at Sarah, who still breathed evenly, Quentin unfolded it. A copy of a divorce decree from a New York court, dated yesterday. Harold Fawn v. Sarah Seville.
Quentin stood for a full minute, staring at the paper, staring at the sleeping Sarah, going back to the paper. She’d told him yesterday that her husband had cheated on her when she said she wanted a baby. And that this was before she had pink hair and showed her cle**age. But Quentin simply couldn’t picture Sarah married to a jackass, no matter how she was dressed. She wouldn’t stand for it.
Would she?
He wondered how Rio fit into this.
Now he studied the third bouquet warily. If the messages got worse as he went down the dresser, he wasn’t sure he wanted to open the last one. The bouquet itself didn’t instill confidence. There were flowers, but they all seemed to have thorns, and some green stalks thrown in couldn’t have been anything but briars. And—was that a Venus flytrap? He reached for the card and withdrew his hand carefully, half expecting to be bitten.
Happy b-day
See you soon
Nine Lives
He detected movement out the corner of his eye and whirled around just in time to see Sarah, a terrified expression on her face, start toward him.
He backed away from her, toward the door. “Sarah,” he began in explanation.
He’d almost reached the door when she slapped his cheek with enough force to turn him around sideways. While he was still off balance and stunned, she pulled open the door and shoved him into the hall.
The door slammed. The dead bolt clicked.
He rubbed his stinging cheek, staring dumbfounded at her door. Then he crossed the hall and knocked.
There was a pause. She was breathing hard. “Who is it?” she called sarcastically.
“It’s your friendly neighborhood country music legend, Quentin Cox.” When she didn’t respond, he went on, “You may know me for hit songs like ‘Slap My Face and Slam the Door.’ ” Still there was no response but her breathing.
He backed a few paces away and sang a medium-tempo ballad at full volume:
Slap my face and slam the door.
You never done that way before.
I feel bad I scared you so
But now I don’t want to go.
I’m just standing in the hall
Singing to you through the wall.
You done shook me to the core.
Slap my face and slam the door.
As he sang, several hotel patrons down the hall peeked out of their rooms. When he finished, there was a smattering of applause. He tipped an imaginary hat. “Thank you very much,” he said in his Elvis impression.
The lock clicked open, and Sarah threw herself into his arms and buried her face against his chest. She said into his T-shirt, “I don’t recall hearing that song.”
“There’s always room for one more on your album.”
Without loosening her hold around him, she looked up into his eyes. “That was really good. I can’t believe you made that up standing here.”
He shrugged. “It ain’t brain surgery.” He stroked his hand through her wet locks. “Are you going to let me in?”
“Oh.” She seemed to realize only now that she was standing in the hotel hallway in her bathrobe with, he thought with pleasure, nothing on underneath. She pulled him into the room and closed the door.
“Why don’t you lock this from now on?” he asked as he turned the dead bolt. “In case the Grand Ole Opry comes calling unannounced.”
“Usually I’m careful,” she said. “I must have forgotten the last time. People kept knocking on the door this morning, bringing me ominous flowers.” She put a hand up to his cheek. “It’s really red. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’m used to it.” He laughed. “I have that effect on women. Though I have to say, Erin’s slap is more like a love pat next to yours. Yours will make a man think twice.”
She smiled guiltily. “How did you get a key?”
“You’re not the only one with connections,” he said mysteriously. “You’re always busting into my house unannounced, so I thought I’d return the favor. I didn’t mean to scare you that bad.” In turn, he put a hand to her chin, not quite touching her scar. “What happened to you in Rio?”
Predictably, she pulled away from him and closed herself in the bathroom. When she came back out, she wore a tank top and running shorts. And she’d regained her composure. Damn. He wondered what it would take for her to tell him what had spooked her in Rio.
He tried once more to throw her off. Sitting casually on her bed, he said, “So. You’re turning thirty, your divorce came through, and Nine Lives wants to see you.”
Her smile vanished. “You read the cards.”
“I did,” he admitted, “but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known our relationship was this antagonistic.” Oops. He added, “Antagon—Is that a word?” Still she frowned at him, so he held out his arms for her. “Come here. You’ve had a bad enough morning.”
She collapsed onto the bed, put her head against his chest again, and allowed him to rub her back and to finger her damp hair. She wailed, “It’s not just that. Did they tell you what I said to Erin yesterday?”
He chuckled. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Do they all hate me?”
“No, but they think you went to a rough New York high school.” He didn’t believe she’d been to high school in New York at all, but he wanted to test her reaction.
“Rough track team,” she qualified.
He traced patterns on her smooth shoulder. “Erin gets mad, and sooner or later she gets over it. I’ve got a lot of experience with this. Anyway, right after you left, Martin told Erin that she’d met her match, and Erin got mad at Martin. Then Owen tried to jump between them, and Erin got mad at Owen. Then they all came downstairs to the studio and yelled at me. So you probably weren’t out of the driveway before we’d forgotten about you and were mad at each other, just like normal.”
Immediately he wanted to correct this statement. He certainly hadn’t forgotten about her. He’d hardly thought of anything else in the five days he’d known her. But he didn’t point this out, since he couldn’t do her. It was bad enough that he was sitting on her bed, marveling at how beautiful she looked with no makeup and wet hair.