Stargazer: Playing Dirty Part 2

She leaned forward. "Who's the brains of this outfit?" she pressed them. "Did you have your employees sign a waiver-"

"Yes, we did," Owen said.

With one carefully manicured fingernail, Sarah thunked a firefly off her bare shoulder. "Of course, Rachel cares too much about you to cross you, with or without a waiver. I'm surprised the two of you aren't tighter, Martin. I know you're not dating anymore, but she wouldn't tell me why, almost like it's a big secret."

"There's no secret," Erin said, patting Martin's hand protectively. "They just don't want to talk about it with a stranger."

Maybe Erin didn't know the secret, either. But Sarah saw the panicked look Martin shot Quentin. Quentin didn't return the look. He was either too smart to react and give away whatever the secret was, or too stupid to know there was a problem.

Sarah suspected the latter. As Quentin picked up his cards, he asked her, "How d'you like the big ol' salty 'Ham?" He spoke in a thick Southern drawl similar to her mother's, but without the cla.s.s.

"You mean your lovely little town?" Sarah sipped her delicious margarita. Mmmmm. "I can stand the heat." She looked at her cards. Nothing. She threw away three and asked Quentin to deal her three more. Still nothing. Erin, Owen, and Martin folded. Sarah raised.

Now Quentin stared her down, trying to decide whether she was bluffing. She met his gaze and got the chance to study him in person for the first time. His T-shirt was printed with a fire-breathing dragon, the mascot for the local university. Some people were fans of a college's athletic teams without ever attending school, she supposed. The shirt was so well loved that a layer of faded white fuzz showed on top of the green material. His eyes had looked intense on the alb.u.m cover, but against this shirt, in only the weak floodlights from the mansion now that the sun had set, she could have sworn his eyes were dark green, like a Southern pine forest. With the alcohol ma.s.saging her skin and this handsome hick speeding up her heartbeat, she liked her job a lot more than she had for the past nine months.

"Call," he said, throwing in his chips. "Let me see them." This must have been an inside joke because, inexplicably, Erin slapped his shoulder.

Sarah turned up her cards, and he turned up his. Drat, he'd won. She wished she'd won the first hand, setting the tone for her relationship with the band. No matter, though. She'd be winning before they were through.

Quentin raked the chips toward himself and winked at her. "Good start. I wonder how many clothes I'll get off you by the end of the night."

She smiled. She knew he was a cocaine addict from the country. The stars who'd never had money were the ones who got into the most trouble when they suddenly made it big. And he was flirting with her to get even with Erin. Erin took him back again and again, and would again, as soon as she tired of Owen. If the band didn't break up first.

But Quentin had an infectious pleasantness about him. Even now, as he half propositioned Sarah, he didn't gaze at her in narrow-eyed lechery. His face was open and friendly and focused, and he looked absolutely delighted to be sitting next to her. She almost wouldn't mind losing this game to him.

Almost. Soon it was her turn to deal, and she enjoyed the Cheatin' Hearts' stares again as she flipped the cards expertly. She'd played quite a bit of poker in her career as babysitter to the stars, and she was the daughter of bridge players. Before long, Martin's socks, Owen's shoes, and Erin's ponytail holder were bobbing in the pool, and Sarah hadn't lost so much as an earring. Quentin hadn't lost any clothes, either, but now Sarah had most of the chips.

They were an easy take. Erin kept asking Owen what to do. She was either a novice or a coquette. She also pretended to be more drunk than she was. In fact, Sarah wasn't sure Erin was drinking at all. She put her margarita to her lips occasionally, but the level in the gla.s.s never changed. Owen was constantly distracted by Erin. His eyes slid to her after every play.

Martin did seem to make an effort at winning hands, and his face fell every time he lost. Sarah wondered again about the long-sleeved shirt he still wore in the oppressively hot night. He was awfully thin, too. She'd seen every bit of his well-formed posterior on the cover of a.s.s Backwards, and he'd probably lost twenty pounds since that photo shoot.

And then there was Quentin, who seemed considerably more drunk than the other three. As the night went on, he paused longer and longer before making decisions, as if his already slow brain was slowing more.

Finally, Erin called for a bathroom break. Owen followed her inside the mansion. After the door closed, Quentin said smoothly, "So, Susan," grabbing both Sarah's wrists in his big hands.

"Sarah," she corrected him, trying to conceal her disappointment that he'd forgotten her name. Of course he was just another drugged-up singing star, but she was crushing hard on him by now. She twisted her wrists in his grasp gently to extricate herself without causing a fuss.

He let her go and settled for holding her hand loosely on her knee, his fingers always moving, rubbing up and down her fingers and circling on her palm. Electricity shot up her arm. "What's your favorite Cheatin' Hearts song?" he asked her.

"You want me to name one you wrote," she said coyly.

He kept drilling his dark green eyes into her and electrifying the palm of her hand.

She was enjoying him a bit too much. She could hold her liquor, but that margarita was clouding her judgment, if flirting with this out-of-control celebrity seemed like a good idea. The time had arrived to back him off. She said, "'Come to Find Out' is pretty amusing. It's unusual to hear a country song about backdoor action." When he gave her a confused look, she prompted him, "'Come to find out I got screwed in the end'?"

He let her go in surprise. "I never thought about it that way," he said slowly.

Now Sarah missed the constant tease of his hand on her hand. She knew she was feeling the margarita, but she couldn't stop herself. She hadn't had this much fun in a long while. She baited him, "Do you come up with your alb.u.m t.i.tles and covers? Are you an a.s.s man? Because that seems to be a recurring theme."

"I am now." His gaze flicked down to the region of her thigh. He c.o.c.ked his head to let her know he was considering her bottom. Then his gaze returned to her face.

"Good G.o.d," Martin grumbled. "I have to be more drunk than this before I like to watch." He poured himself a margarita out of the pitcher.

Sarah came back down to earth. "Excuse me," she said, recovering her dignity. She clopped across the flagstones in her heels and pa.s.sed Erin and Owen tickling each other on their way out of the mansion.

In the bathroom, Sarah clung to the marble counter and stared into the mirror at her pink highlights. She needed to concentrate, remember why she was here, and develop a plan. Without calling Wendy. She didn't want to drag Wendy any further into the mess she'd made for herself at Stargazer.

So. She wasn't getting the feeling she'd expected from the group. She'd thought at first that the drunken party would quickly devolve into a three-way fight among Quentin, Erin, and Owen, with seemingly levelheaded Martin refereeing.

Tension definitely filled the air. But some of it was a result of Sarah's presence and the fact that Quentin was coming on to her. It made sense that the others in the group would want to stop Quentin from hooking up with a PR expert sent by the record company, which would create even more tension. They were about to be in hot water for missing their alb.u.m deadline, whether they broke up or not.

What was absent, other than the one time Erin had slapped Quentin on the shoulder for no apparent reason, was tension directly between Quentin and Erin. Likely there was s.e.xual tension between them, and Sarah wasn't detecting it, despite her honed senses. She'd gone through this with bands before. The members spent so much time together, knew each other so well, and were such good friends or archenemies, that they conveyed messages to each other without saying a word.

Or Quentin could be just as close to leaving the group as the mysterious caller had warned Manhattan Music, but the band was covering up their troubles to get rid of her.

At any rate, she would get to the bottom of it. She could use Quentin's pa.s.sing attraction to her to edge closer to him and find out what was going on.

The problem with this plan was that she liked Quentin a little too much. Enjoyed his cheesy pickup lines. Thrilled each time he touched her hand. She couldn't be sure at this point, but she didn't think it was all because of the tequila.

She convinced herself that she was doing a great job for Stargazer. Natsuko would act aloof from the likes of Nine Lives, but upon encountering someone handsome and friendly like Quentin, she would flirt. Seduce. Make a pretense of following through.

Sarah would never actually sleep with a drug addict. Or anyone she'd just met, for that matter. Natsuko might not, either, but she would at least respond to Quentin and lead him on. Otherwise, the whole band might sense that Sarah wasn't a scary b.i.t.c.h after all, but a marathon runner who'd just learned to apply makeup at age twenty-nine.

She knew how she could make this work. Quentin hadn't been drunk when she got there. But she'd taken note of every sip he'd consumed since she'd arrived, and by now he was more inebriated than such a big man should have been. He couldn't hold his liquor at all-which was the opposite of what she usually saw in hard-partying musicians. Whatever the reason, she intended to take advantage. After a few shots of tequila, it would be lights out for him. Just before that happened, she intended to be very much in his way.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching her bada.s.s and not entirely familiar reflection in the mirror. A year ago, she wouldn't have dreamed of cooking up a scheme like this or placing herself so dangerously close to a star. Even nine months ago, after her makeover, she wouldn't have done it. But her experience with Nine Lives in Rio had changed her. She had no husband, no social life-and if she didn't make a bold move to save her job, nothing left to lose.

She headed back out to the game, pausing in the kitchen. Through the gla.s.s-paned door, she glimpsed Erin walking along the pool's edge. Erin watched the men to make sure they weren't paying her any attention. She held her margarita gla.s.s low and behind her, then dumped its entire contents into the water.

What the h.e.l.l was going on here? Too much to figure out in one night. Best to file it away for later: Erin hides sobriety from men. Sarah let Erin think she'd gotten away with it. She waited until Erin sat back down with the men before she exited the kitchen and returned to the poker game herself.

As Sarah took her seat, Quentin touched her hand. "I was about to come in there after you."

"I'm fine," she a.s.sured him. "And ready to get you undressed."

He smiled at her as he dealt. In fact, he couldn't seem to tear his eyes away from her for long. Cards fluttered onto the flagstones and into Erin's lap amid shouts of, "Q! Earth to Q!"

The others folded. Sarah squared off against Quentin again. He stared at her long and hard, considering whether to call her bluff.

"You've been awfully quiet tonight, Q," Erin remarked. Perhaps she was jealous of Quentin's attentions to Sarah.

"Strategery," Quentin said with a straight face. Sarah couldn't tell whether he'd seen the Sat.u.r.day Night Live imitation of George W. Bush or he really thought it was a word.

He looked at his cards, then looked at Sarah. His dark green eyes pierced her eyes, caressed her cheek, paused over her lips, stroked her neck, lingered at her cleavage. He had the audacity to tilt his head to make sure she knew he was contemplating her a.s.s again. This was good for her bluff, though. The longer he stared at her, the closer she came to forgetting she held only a pair of threes.

"'Let the Wookiee win,'" Owen quoted Star Wars in a bad British accent.

"I fold," Quentin said finally, throwing two eights on the table.

Sarah turned her cards over.

"Oh!" the others moaned, and Quentin laughed. And laughed, and laughed, and started everyone else laughing because he was laughing so long. Sarah recognized that infectious laugh. A full thirty seconds of his laugh ended the alb.u.m In Poor Taste.

"d.a.m.n, woman," he said finally, brushing away the tears at the corners of his eyes. "That's some poker face. I got lucky the first time, and no luck since."

"Story of your life," Owen said. Erin giggled more loudly. Quentin's eyes flickered toward them.

"You bluff well, too," Sarah told Quentin, although she suspected it was easy for a blissful ignoramus to look noncommittal.

"Course, you ain't as inebriated as we are," he said, pouring her another margarita. He paused. "Inebri-Is that a word?" Now he faced her full-on, knee to knee with her. He stroked his fingers from her scalp all the way down to the ends of her locks.

She shuddered under his touch but didn't dodge it. Flirting with this intense man was exciting and frightening and something Old Sarah never would have done. The tequila helped, too.

"I really like your hair," he growled. "Did you know that?"

She shook her head, but not hard enough to shake her hair out of his hand.

"It changes when you move." He slid his fingers down a blond strand and held it next to her cheek. "You're a blonde." He did the same with a brown strand. "You're a brunette." She suppressed shivers of antic.i.p.ation as he touched her scalp one more time and selected a pink strand. "I don't know what you call this." He smiled at her. "I ain't never seen nothing like it."

"It's pretty normal in New York," she a.s.sured him.

"Let me clue you in on something," Owen said. "Pink hair isn't normal anywhere."

Erin hit Owen's chest and said, "Rude," at the same time Quentin said, "Do you mind, dumba.s.s? I've got something going on over here."

"That's what worries us," Martin said.

Ignoring Martin, Quentin stroked Sarah's hair again. "It's like that ice cream with all the flavors. Napoleon."

"Neapolitan," laughed Erin, Owen, and Martin. Now Quentin was laughing, too, and Sarah laughed along. She wasn't really Natsuko, and never would be. She had no real designs on Quentin. But wouldn't Wendy just die if Sarah ended her yearlong celibacy by having a fling with this handsome idiot, bringing the grand total of her s.e.xual partners to two in her lifetime? If only everything were different. If only he wasn't a c.o.ke addict, he wasn't a stupid hick, she wasn't trying to keep him together with his band, and she wasn't contracted to his record company, she would have had the most delightful decision to make: to ho or not to ho.

Martin's mouth was moving. Quentin switched off the blender so he could hear what Martin was saying.

"-the matter with you?" Martin asked, leaning against the kitchen counter. "Drunk?"

"It's hard to play dumb this long at a stretch," Quentin said. "I may go cross-eyed." Of course, he was also drunk, and he knew it when, pouring margaritas from the blender into the pitcher, he asked Martin casually, "Would you do her?"

"I knew it," Martin scolded him. "You can't do her. Rule Three."

"I'm not going to do her," Quentin said, putting down the pitcher and holding up his hands. He shouldn't be pursuing this at all, but he was so full of this girl, this beautiful pink-haired manga she-villain. "I'm just asking, hypothetically, would you?"

"Yeah," Martin said quickly as Owen stumbled in from the bathroom.

"Yeah, what?" Owen asked.

Quentin turned to Owen. "Would you do her?"

Owen looked shocked. "Who?"

"The Wookiee, dumba.s.s," Martin said. "Who did you think? Erin?"

"I can't do Erin," Owen said self-righteously. "Rule Two."

"So," Quentin pressed, "hypothetically, would you do her?"

Owen asked, "Who?"

Quentin and Martin looked at each other.

Owen clarified, "The Wookiee?"

"Yes!" Quentin and Martin said.

"Oh. Yeah, I'd do the Wookiee." Owen picked up the pitcher and walked toward the door to the patio. "But she's frightening."

As Owen pa.s.sed through the doorway, Erin came in. The two of them rubbed against each other and laughed in a way that made Quentin uncomfortable. If he asked, they would say they were touching because Sarah could see them from the table outside. But Quentin wasn't so sure. He and Erin had played lovers and yet resisted each other for two years. Surely Erin and Owen had been able to resist each other for a week of pretending? Of course, when Quentin had faked a relationship with Erin, he'd also had the band manager on the side. Owen hadn't been in a steady relationship in a couple of years.

Erin snapped Quentin out of his thoughts by asking sharply, "What have you boys been talking about in here?" Then, in a complete failure at an imitation of a man's deep voice, she asked, "Would you do her?"

Martin laughed and went outside, leaving them alone, as Quentin told Erin, "No, that's not what we were talking about, and I'm offended that you would a.s.sume such a thing. We're not shallow. We were talking about the potential impact of current unemployment figures on US Treasury note prices."

Erin grinned. "If you're not interested in Sarah, then you won't want to hear what she said about you."

Quentin's gaze darted outside to Sarah at the table. She and Erin must have had a girl talk. Oh G.o.d. "What'd she say?"

"It looks good for you," Erin teased him. "It's a shame you're not allowed to have s.e.x with her."

"What'd she say?"

"She said you're cute. You remind her of Ernie from Sesame Street."

"Ernie," Quentin said, nodding. "Good guy. Jolly prankster." He paused. "Not the s.e.xiest fellow."

Erin smiled smugly. "Better than Bert."

"Speaking of Bert," Quentin said, searching her innocent blue eyes, "you're not breaking Rule Two with Owen, are you?"

She grimaced and stuck her finger in her mouth, as if to say Gag me. Then she asked brightly, "Did we fool you? We've been working hard on it." She tilted her head and considered him. "You're drunk."

He gave up. "I guess."

"Come on." She took him by the hand and led him back outside to Sarah.

Sarah. s.e.xy white high-heeled sandals. White pants that flared at the bottom and tapered up to hug her perfect a.s.s. A black blouse that pooled in the front to reveal her cleavage, and in the back-well, there was no back, just some thin strings keeping the front on. He could have reached behind her and bared her with a few tugs. Clearly no bra. Red lips. Crazy hair.

With a twist. She gave the first impression of being tall, unattainable, hardened. But he'd studied her while calling her bluff. She was average height or smaller. The longer he gazed at her, the smaller and softer she got. Her eyes were brown and gentle. And her name: Sarah, like a sigh.

And the way she said his name. Not Quentin, enunciating every consonant. Soft and lazy and half-gone, Que'n. He detected the slightest Southern drag on her voice, from somewhere far south. Maybe Mobile, with old money.