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“That was the Gibson, not me,” she said, as if they hadn’t had this conversation before. “What did you do, run all the way?”
The boy walked from the middle school that was about a mile away. Then, when he was done, he walked back to school, usually in haste, before his father got there to pick him up. She thought it odd, since she was closer to where the boy lived than the school was, but Jordy said his father insisted because he didn’t trust him.
“Should he?” she’d asked.
“Sure,” Jordy had answered, his expression grim. “Where am I gonna go in this town?”
There had been a wealth of disdain in his voice, but Kai had let it pass.
“Nah, it’s just hot out today,” he said now.
“Enjoy it. Fall’s hovering.” The boy made a face. “Maybe we’ll get snow this winter.”
His expression changed slightly, looking the tiniest bit intrigued, as she’d guessed a kid who’d grown up in Southern California might at the idea.
“That would be cool,” he said, then smiled at his own unintentional pun.
“So how’s life today?”
“Sucks,” Jordy said, his smile fading.
“Still not getting along with your dad, huh?”
“He’s an as—” Jordy broke off what had obviously been going to be a crude bodily assessment.
“Good save,” Kai said, acknowledging the effort. “Your mom probably didn’t like you swearing.”
“Only reason I stopped,” Jordy muttered, looking away. Kai guessed he was tearing up and didn’t want her to see.
“If we can’t cry for the ones we’ve loved and lost, then what good are we?” she asked softly.
He looked up at her then, and she indeed saw the gleam of moisture in his eyes. Those green eyes, she thought, were going to knock that girl he’d meet someday right on her backside.
“You understand, because you lost someone, too.”
The boy not only had a good ear, he was perceptive.
“Yes.”
“Kit.”
She didn’t talk about him, ever. But this was a kid in pain, worse today than she’d ever seen it, and she sensed he needed to know he wasn’t alone. And she suspected he already knew how Christopher Hudson had died; the info was out there, on the Net, and easy enough to find.
“Yes. And I loved him very much,” she finally said. “But it wasn’t like your mother, who didn’t want to leave you. He did it to himself.”
Jordy’s eyes widened. “He killed himself?”
No outside source would have said that, she knew. They all said it was accidental. She didn’t look at it that way. But then, she’d been in the middle of it.
“Slowly. Years of drugs.”
“Oh.” Jordy was silent for a moment before he said, in a small voice, “How long ago?”
She hesitated again. Was he wondering how long it took to feel life was worth living again?
“A long time ago.” Six years ago was almost half his lifetime, so she figured that was accurate. “And,” she added quietly, “yesterday.”
She saw his brows furrow, then clear as he nodded slowly in understanding.
“So you haven’t … forgotten?”
Panic edged his voice. Ah, she thought. So that was it. “No. And I never will. And you won’t either, Jordy. I promise you.”
“But … sometimes I can’t remember what she sounded like.”
Interesting, she thought, that it was sound and not image that he was worried about.
“But do you remember how you felt when she talked to you, told you how much she loved you?”
The boy colored slightly, but nodded again.
“Then you remember the important part. And you always will.”
It was a few minutes before the boy got around to asking if he could have the sound room and the slightly battered but well-loved Strat she often let people use. Jordan was just starting out, and it was a bit too much for his hands. She had a small acoustic in back she thought he’d do better with, but he thought acoustics were boring and wasn’t interested. Yet.
Now there was something to add to the door rotation, she thought. Some of her personal favorite acoustic bits, six- and twelve-string, Steve Davison and Jaquie Gipson first on the list, Kaki too, and John Butler and his custom eleven strings. Nobody could listen to them and still think acoustics were boring.
But in the meantime, the boy wanted the solace that laboriously plinking out chords until his fingers were sore brought him.
“No,” she said to his request, startling him; she’d never declined him before. But at her gesture he followed her into the former storage room she’d had converted into a soundproof room with a small recording system set up. Nothing fancy, but enough for accurate and fairly full playback. The conversion had cost her, but it had paid for itself by the third year; not many aspiring players could resist the temptation of purchasing the instrument they liked best once they’d heard the sound played back for them. There was something about the process that was an incredible selling tool.
Jordy followed her into the room, knowing to dodge the corner of the keyboard in the slightly cramped space before she even flipped the lights on. She walked across to the rack where she’d put the Gibson SG when she’d finished last night; the mood had been upon her and she’d indulged in a rare these days midnight jam, playing riff after riff until her own out-of-practice fingers were sore.
She picked up the gleaming blue guitar and held it out to the boy.
“Try this one.”
The boy’s eyes widened and she heard him smother a gulping breath. “BeeGee?”
She grinned at his use of her old nickname for the guitar, B for the color, and G for Gibson. A name she’d come up with before it had been pointed out to her that she’d inadvertently chosen the name of her mother’s favorite group, back in the day. It had taken her a while to get over the humiliation of that, but the name had stuck.
And the gesture had the result she’d wanted; the boy completely forgot the pain he’d been mired in. For the moment, he would be all right.
She closed the door behind her, thinking it might be better if she couldn’t hear what sounds his untrained fingers might coax out of her baby. The neck was small enough, but it tended to be a bit head-heavy and might give him trouble. Maybe it would teach him that form had a big role in function; right now he was too taken with looks and flash to absorb that.
When she got back into the store she found Mrs. Ogilvie waiting, a new book of piano music in her hands. Marilyn was desperate to get her youngest daughter seriously interested, although Kai knew Jessica couldn’t care less. At sixteen, her life was full of other things. But her mother kept trying, and Kai wondered if at some point, despite the steady stream of money, she should try and explain that some people just didn’t have the desire or the talent.
Maybe I should suggest she take lessons herself, Kai thought. Then at least somebody would get some use out of all these books.
“I saw Wyatt’s boy come in,” Marilyn said as she rang up the sale.
“He comes in almost every day,” Kai said. Marilyn glanced around questioningly. “He’s in the sound room,” Kai explained. “Practicing.”
Marilyn sniffed audibly. “At least he will practice. Is he taking lessons?”
“He’d like to, but his father won’t let him. I guess he’s pretty strict.”
“Now that’s hard to believe,” Marilyn said with a laugh.
Marilyn would have likely known Jordy’s dad, Kai realized; she’d lived here for most of her life. She, having only been here four years, knew nothing about him outside of Jordy’s litany of complaints.
All he does is work and hassle me, the boy had told her once.
She remembered smiling at the typical complaint, one she’d made about her own father before she’d grown up enough to appreciate the love behind both actions.
“You remember him?” Kai asked, curious to see if there was another viewpoint on the man, curious enough to endure Marilyn’s rather scattered conversational style. “From before, I mean?”
“Wyatt Blake? Anybody who lived in Deer Creek then remembers Wyatt. Smart, restless, and reckless. When he left town at seventeen, nobody was surprised. We all felt bad for Tim and Claire though. Tim was strict, but Wyatt needed that, reckless as he was.”
This hardly fit with Jordy’s description, Kai thought. But people changed. Or maybe that was why he was strict with Jordy, because it was all he knew.
“They were good to that boy,” Marilyn added, “worked hard to give him a good life, and he still couldn’t wait to get out of here. They almost never heard from him. Then when it’s too late for them, he shows up back here, a widower with a young son, and won’t even talk about it. Why, I tried to tell him how sorry I was, and he wouldn’t have any of it.”
“Maybe he didn’t want any pity or sympathy.”
“But he was downright rude about it. Claire would never have stood for that.”
“Seems like he learned from them after all, though,” Kai said. “Jordy says he works hard.”
And boring work, Jordy had added, as if it were a crime.
“Yes,” Marilyn said.
“And he did come back home.”
Marilyn brightened at that. “Yes. Yes, he did. Not a word out of him about where he’s been or what he’s been doing for more than twenty years, but he did come home. Moved himself and the boy back into their old house.”
As the woman later went on her way, Kai wondered yet again why people had kids at all. Seemed to just be asking for pain and tears.
I should call Mom, she thought. Let her tell me again how it was all worth it.
Except that that would be followed by the inevitable lecture, very wearing considering she’d been so consumed by Play On that she’d barely had time to breathe, let alone date. But it didn’t stop her mom from declaring it was time she found a good man and settled down to the task of a family herself. The very idea still gave her the shivers. She liked kids well enough, but babies made her very, very nervous. And she couldn’t imagine sending a baby to sleep with a smoking riff on BeeGee; they needed soft, lullaby stuff. Someday, maybe. But that day was a long way off.
Not to mention there was that “good man” problem.
The Edge modulated his way through that six-note arpeggio again as the door opened. A man stepped in, a stranger to her, and she almost grinned at the juxtaposition of his sudden appearance and her own thoughts. Especially since he certainly had the looking part of good down. His hair was a little short for her taste, but she liked the sandy blond color. And he had that body type she liked—lean, wiry. And just tall enough; she liked a man she had to look up at even in heels, but not get a neck ache doing it.
He glanced around the store, quickly, almost assessingly, in a way that was somehow disconcerting. She had the odd thought that if she made him close his eyes and describe it to her, he’d get it perfectly, down to the Deer Creek High School Musical poster on the wall behind him.
And he moves like a big cat, she thought as the man began to walk toward the back of the store. All grace and coiled power.
She shook her head, laughing inwardly at herself.
It’s because he’s a stranger, she told herself. Deer Creek was a small enough town that she’d seen most of the men around, and none had even come close to sparking such a sudden interest.
He paused for a moment to look at the one personal souvenir she’d allowed herself here; a photograph of her onstage at the peak of Relative Fusion’s brief but promising existence, playing a packed, full-size arena for the first time. For her it had been the pinnacle, a height she would never see again, because Kit had tumbled off the high wire he’d been walking soon after that night, and her charmed life as she’d known it had ended.
She slid off the stool she’d been sitting on and took a couple of steps toward the man. She put on her best helpful smile, and in a tone to match she asked, “Help you find something?”
“Someone,” the man said, still looking at the photograph.
Ooh, great voice, too, Kai thought. She had such a weakness for that rough, gravelly timbre.
Then he looked at her. Gave the photo another split-second glance.
“Never mind,” he said, obviously realizing it was her in the photo, despite the fact that she had looked radically different in those days, with her hair long and wild and a ton of makeup and glitter on.
She met his gaze as this time he focused his attention on her unwaveringly. “You’re Kai Reynolds.”
Three things hit her in rapid-fire succession.
She was being assessed, in much the same way as his surroundings had been when he’d first come in.
Second, she knew those eyes. Jordy’s eyes. The same vivid green, although somehow muted. Tired, she thought.
And at last came the realization. Impossibly, this was the stuffy, boring, staid Wyatt Blake.
And he was looking at her as if she’d crawled out from under the nearest rock.
Chapter 2
It was worse than he’d feared.
Wyatt stared at the young woman before him. He’d hoped, when he’d first seen the tidy, well-organized store that perhaps he’d been wrong to expect a problem here.
Play On hadn’t been here when he’d lived here as a kid. He’d heard that the woman who owned and ran it had once been in a semi-successful rock band, which had registered only as an oddity in a little town like Deer Creek. But Mrs. Ogilvie—who had been the local information center when he was a teenager seemingly in trouble at every turn, and apparently still fulfilled that obligation—told him that Jordan came here after school almost every day, he’d known he had to check it out. Especially since Jordan had told him he was studying at school. He didn’t like being lied to, especially by his own son. If this was going to work at all—and he had serious doubts about that—there had to be honesty between them.
The hypocrisy of that high-flown thought, given his own secrets, made him grimace.
“You’re the owner,” he said.
It came out more like an accusation than a question. He hadn’t meant to sound so harsh, but his thoughts had put an edge in his voice.
She said nothing, but he’d spent his life gauging people’s reactions, and as clearly as if she’d shouted it he knew he’d gotten her hackles up already. That wasn’t how he’d wanted to approach this, but damn, she looked like his worst nightmare as far as Jordan was concerned. The rock-and-roll history was bad enough, but the slightly spiky red hair that fell forward to surround a face that managed to look sexy and impish at the same time, and the slim, intricate, knotted bracelet of a tattoo in a deep bluish-green color around her left wrist finished it for him. She would be an impossible-to-resist lure for an impressionable boy.
“Well?” he said, his voice even sharper.
“Was there a question?” she asked, her tone as cool as the steady gaze of smoky gray eyes. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t easily intimidated.
