Quentin bit down on Sarah’s thigh so hard that it almost hurt. “I’m gonna skin me a fiddle player,” he grumbled. Then he rolled open the shower door and called, “Step one, take eggs from refrigerator. I’m in the shower.”
“That’s the point!” Erin said.
Sarah whispered, “She heard me. She knows we’re in here together.”
He rolled the shower door shut. But by this time, cold air from the room whirled in the shower, mixing with the hot spray. Sarah shivered and weakly tried to sit up. He pulled her into his lap and warmed her with his strong hug. “There’s no reason to feel caught,” he whispered. “This is what we wanted, to make her jealous.”
Sarah giggled nervously. “Don’t you feel caught?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.” He kissed her gently, his tongue playing at the corners of her mouth, as if he planned to do this all morning.
With a reluctant sigh, Sarah said, “You need to go after Erin. You’re supposed to get her back. You have to go after her and string her along.” Sarah reached down to unbutton and unzip his shorts, this time without resistance. She reached her hand past his boxers and around his big, solid cock. “But first, I could return the favor.”
He closed his eyes, took in a deep breath through his nose, and exhaled. “I can’t let you do that,” he said, pushing her hands out of his shorts.
“Why not?” she coaxed him.
“Because my self-control has limits. If you got me off in this shower, I’d have to have you right here. Or maybe I’d bend you over the bathroom counter, depending on how things worked out. And you don’t want that.” He rolled the shower door open again. She shivered in the cold draft.
Defrosting in the warm water, she thought, That’s exactly what I want.
At the muffled galloping noise, Quentin looked up from the stove. Sarah ran down the stairs from his bedroom in her high heels. In a high mood. He noted with amusement that the more comfortable she became with him, the less sophisticated she got, with the athlete showing through.
“Good morning,” she sang to Erin, hugging her on her barstool. “Good morning,” she sang to Owen, reaching up to pat his head. “Good morning,” she sang to Martin, pinching his cheek.
She clopped into the kitchen. “Good morning,” she purred suggestively to Quentin. She still wore the emerald necklace, this time with a plunging white shirt.
He knew he was grinning, and his bandmates were glaring at him, but he couldn’t help it. He put his hands on Sarah’s ass and kissed her. “What do you want for breakfast?”
“Can’t eat breakfast. Goofed off all day yesterday. Got to get to the office. I already called your driver and he’s probably waiting for me.”
“You have to eat breakfast,” he protested, calculating how long it would take to make her a breakfast burrito to go.
“Office,” she repeated, already pulling away and clopping toward the door to the garage.
Following her, he backed her against the door and kissed her again, deeply, doing to her tongue what he had done to the rest of her earlier. She shuddered under his hands, and he couldn’t help breaking the kiss and laughing.
She smiled, too, and cupped his chin in her small hand, then clopped down the steps into the garage. As she reached the bright sunlight outside, she turned back to him and smiled one last time. A secret smile: more to come.
But he felt the band glaring at him all the while. He knew that this lover routine would go over like a lead zeppelin. He returned to the stove and feigned surprise at the expressions on their faces. “Now what?”
“There was no thud,” Martin said. “You didn’t bang your head against the door in frustration. That’s a bad sign.”
Quentin pointed at him. “I did not. Have. Sexual relations with that woman,” he said in his Bill Clinton impression.
Owen said, “We all know by now that Clinton needed to define sexual relations.”
“Well . . . ” Quentin paused to think. “I may have touched her inappropriately.”
“Q!” Erin wailed.
He banged the frying pan down on the stove and said in a rush, “It’s been five days and I haven’t broken Rule Three! I’ve been so good! You expect me not to touch her boobs? Come on! Erin won’t even let me look at her boobs. I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Y’all never let me have any fun. A month ago, I was in the ICU—”
Martin groaned.
“—about to die—”
“You used that one already,” Erin said. She set down her fork and drew the bow across her fiddle in another funeral tune.
“You have to call off this thing with Sarah, trying to make Erin jealous,” Owen said.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Just tell her the truth,” Owen suggested. “You don’t really think she’d tell the Evil Empire, do you?”
“Yes,” Martin and Erin said together.
“Yes, I do,” Quentin agreed. “She botched the Nine Lives job, and now she needs a big success or she’ll get fired. She’s using us. If she knew we’ve been screwing with her, she’d tell the Empire so they’d see what a difficult case we are and what a great job she’s done.” He wasn’t sure whether he believed this, but it didn’t matter. He was just trying to get them off his back for five more days.
“But here’s an idea,” he said, running his hands through his damp hair. “I could break Rule Three with her, and then she’d feel loyalty to the band, to me, and then we could tell her.”
Again they gave him that collective silent stare of disapproval that was as familiar to him as his own face.
“Y’all seemed cool with her yesterday,” he complained. “Why are y’all pissed about her today?”
Erin said acidly, “Because she has moved in with you.”
“That’s just to make you mad,” Quentin said lightly. “And she’s scared of Nine Lives.” He glanced at Martin. If Owen asked later, Martin would back him up on this. “Nine Lives is in jail in Rio, but for some reason, Sarah seems to think he’s going to get out and come kill her.”
Owen said, “I know how he feels.”
“Okay, okay,” Quentin said, holding up his hands in defeat. “I probably won’t even see her today, except at the photo shoot. Tomorrow I’ll hardly see her because we’re finishing the album. July second, she’ll be stuck in the office all day doing PR for the concert. We have rehearsal for the concert on the third. On the fourth, after the concert, she’ll leave.” Fighting down his panic at the thought, he managed to shrug. “I can keep from breaking Rule Three with her for five more days.”