American Diva

by Julia London

  “Yeah, but you guys will do anything for money,” Leah, Michael’s wife, said, oblivious to their startled looks. “They must have offered her a lot of money, like platinum record money, because I cannot imagine what would possess any woman in her right mind to go to Costa Rica and spend an entire weekend with a bunch of drunks.”

  Jack was half tempted to ask Ms. LaRue as she struggled to untangle the lines of the harness she had managed to tangle in the space of two minutes. “Can you fix it?” she asked one of the boys. He responded in Spanish as Audrey pushed a thick curl of blond hair from her eyes. She turned to Jack and Cooper. “Can someone help me?” she demanded.

  The redhead turned her back and snickered.

  Jack hoped Cooper would do it. But when he glanced at Coop, he noticed he wasn’t exactly looking at her harness. Jack couldn’t blame him—with those long tanned legs and green eyes that could light up a stage, this girl was hot.

  Jack didn’t realize just how hot until he stepped up to help her with the harness.

  “How did you get the straps so twisted?” he asked.

  “I don’t know!”

  He grabbed the end of two straps and gave them a good tug, cinching the harness up, and almost yanking Audrey into his chest in the process. She looked up at him with remarkable green eyes and raised one dark gold brow high above the other. “I think it’s tight.”

  Jack smiled a little. “You sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  He let go and stepped back, and gestured for her to precede him to the edge. She carefully inched her way forward to have another look over the end of the rock.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Jack asked her most excellent ass.

  “Like I have a choice,” she said irritably.

  “She means she has to if she wants their fifty thousand dollars,” The redhead said gleefully.

  “Auuuuud-drey!” Some numb nuts who stood in the shallow end of the lagoon was shouting up at her, flailing his massively white and flabby arms. “Come on down, baby! I’ll catch you!” A roar of drunken laughter went up from his compatriots.

  Jack glanced at the sots below, then at Audrey. “Like I was saying . . . are you sure you want to do this?”

  She groaned. “Dude, I’ve been here twenty-four hours now. I think I am battle tested, and besides, a few middle-aged men and a few beers don’t scare me.” She paused and looked at the beach below. “I mean, they scare me, but not like that. I can handle them. I just want to get this over with. So can you just back up and give me some space?”

  Jack lifted his hands and did precisely that.

  “Let’s go over a few things,” Cooper said. “Hands on the line,” he said as he hooked her harness to the line. “Legs together and in front of you. Eli and Michael will help you at the end of the death slide.”

  She frowned at Cooper. “That’s a funny name for it. So okay, here I go.” And before Cooper could tell her not to jump, to step off the ridge, she jumped and bounced.

  “Damn,” Cooper said, shaking his head. The redhead muscled her way in between them, and the three of them listened to Audrey squeal all the way down, landing on the beach in one huge sprawl. She was immediately swarmed by two or three fat guys, as well as Eli and Michael, who put themselves between her and the others so they could unhook her.

  The redhead suddenly started laughing. But Cooper let out a low whistle. “Damn,” he said. “Damn.”

  Jack’s sentiments exactly.

  Two

  The LaRue party was housed in a three-bedroom beach cottage with doors that opened onto a private patio overlooking the ocean. Audrey could be the Queen of England, and still, she would never get used to this sort of wealth. It was gorgeous here, absolutely gorgeous.

  Gorgeous notwithstanding, she was still contemplating killing her longtime boyfriend and manager, Lucas, and her publicist, Mitzi—they’d talked her into this deal. She didn’t want to do it, but they had promised her it would be fun. They had used words like vacation and relax, and she’d really begun to feel the vibe.

  But then she’d met Marty Weiss and his pals, and discovered that, once again, her instincts were dead on. She had survived twenty-four hours with men who ogled her like a good salami sandwich, then drank and ogled her like a hooker. Her concert—for which Marty Weiss had paid an unbelievable fortune to stage (would she ever have the kind of money he had? Did she want that kind of money?)—had gone well, she supposed, in spite of the two guys who kept trying to climb up on stage with her. Marty stood below, three sheets to the wind, tears streaming down his face.

  The man was older than her dad, for Chrissakes, and furthermore, it wasn’t like she was singing opera or something that should really move him—she was singing a song about kicking a guy to the curb, and dancing around on stage as she sang.

  It was Lucas who convinced her that the money—a half a million to bring her and the band here—was worth it. It would help bankroll her first national tour, timed to coincide with the release of her third album, the first with a major label. The label wanted her to tour, and they were even kicking in some seed money—but the majority of the tour’s costs would be borne by Audrey. After set design, staff costs, transportation, and lodging, that was not a cheap proposition. She’d be lucky if she broke even.

  Lucas had convinced her, and it would have been okay, except that Marty would not leave her be. She had asked him, threatened him, pleaded with him to stop. And to his credit, Marty had vowed to try, but he had not succeeded. He followed her all day, knocked on the door of her beachfront cabin at odd hours, and seemed to be waiting for her when she stepped out of the communal kitchen. He’d obviously forgotten he had a wife—who, by the look of it, was getting cozy with one of Marty’s closest two hundred friends.

  Audrey complained to Lucas, but Lucas rolled his eyes and sighed. “It is one weekend, Audrey. One. Surely you can handle an intense fan in the middle of a tropical paradise for one weekend. Can’t you understand what this does for us?”

  She hated the way he said it, like she was being a diva or something. “You didn’t say I had to handle it when that creep broke into my house,” Audrey reminded him.

  “That’s right, because then you should have been alarmed. But Marty Weiss doesn’t want to hurt you. He wants to put you on an alabaster throne and suck your toes. There is a difference in the two types of stalkers.”

  “Maybe to you,” Audrey snapped.

  Lucas grinned, put his arm around her, and kissed her cheek. “Just grin and bear it. It’s almost over.”

  Audrey did not grin. But that night, after her concert was over and Marty was practically prone on the sand, weeping with joy—or more likely, too much rum—she slipped out the back way, grabbed one of the ATVs provided for the pleasure of the LaRue party, and headed for the other side of the island. The peaceful side of the island. The side that drunken Marty and his drunker pals could not reach without serious assistance.

  After a day of hooking up sides of beef to the zip line, Jack Price was pretty sick of the island, Chicago natives, and party gigs in general. To make matters worse, Marnie and Leah were determined to hook him up with one of the caterers.

  He avoided those two like bird flu. It seemed that since Eli and Marnie had hooked up a couple of years ago, the rest of the guys had likewise gone down like tin ducks in a shooting gallery. Michael and Leah had actually married a couple of months ago, and even Cooper was seeing Jill regularly now. Now, everyone was “concerned” about Jack.

  Okay, so Jack was experiencing a bit of a dry spell in the feminine companionship category. He realized he was getting to the age—thirty-five—where it was time to put up or shut up if he ever wanted to have kids. But it wasn’t exactly happening, and it damn sure wasn’t going to happen with the caterer. Leah and Marnie acted as if they could hardly stand his single status. It was suddenly their ambition in life to see him happily involved with a woman. It didn’t matter that Jack was okay with being single. He figu
red he was just a cowboy who was best on his own. And besides, now that the guys were settling down, Jack had a new goal.

  For years he’d thought TA was the best gig a guy could ever hope for, particularly after coming off a career in the Air Force where he’d learned to fly practically anything. He loved to fly, but at TA, he’d found his second calling—he loved the feature film stunt work they did, loved the movie business in general, and loved the extreme sports outings they arranged. Granted, a couple of their extreme gigs haven’t been his cup of tea (a wedding, coaching twenty women to do some pretty wild stunts, and now this one), but he was usually up for anything.

  What he wanted was to start his own flight school. But flight schools were expensive—in addition to needing a good, reliable plane, he’d need a hangar, an airstrip, and enough money to get a business off the ground.

  He had the plane—an old Cessna Grand Caravan, which he thought was brilliantly designed. But his had an engine problem. He was rebuilding the engine himself, in an old hangar he’d rented in Orange County. If he could get the plane up and running and pass all the FAA inspections, the next step was to infuse enough cash into a down payment to purchase the hangar and start up the school.

  That was a hell of a lot easier said than done. He did well with TA, but not well enough to have that sort of cash on hand. So Jack was biding his time, rebuilding his plane, and saving every dime he could make.

  Frankly, he didn’t need a woman around who would prompt him to spend his cash on stuff like flowers and weekend getaways and, God forbid, a ring. Which was why, when the rest of the TA guys and their significant others trekked to the other side of the island to catch the Audrey concert, he opted for some alone time on a moonlit beach with nothing but a bucket of beer and his iPod. It was the only way to avoid the matchmaking attempts of Leah and Marnie.

  He walked on a path lit with tiki torches, maneuvered one of the big double chaise lounges out from beneath the cabana, and dragged it down to the beach. When he had situated it just so—directly under the full moon, a few feet away from the receding tide but close enough he could still smell the salt—he dropped his bucket of beer next to the lounge, stretched his arms high above his head, and looked out over a Pacific Ocean whose surface was illuminated by the moon.

  Sweet.

  He’d been waiting for this for three full days and was going to enjoy the hell out of it. Tomorrow, they would pack up and move on, but tonight, he was going to lie under the stars and the moon on a private beach without a soul around and just chill.

  He started to sit down, but realized he’d forgotten his iPod. He left the chaise and the bucket of beer and walked back to his cabin to find it. Only he’d misplaced it, and it was another half hour before he made his way back to the beach, thirstier and even more ready to relax. But as he walked down the path, he noticed a movement on his chaise—some . . . some person was lying in his chaise.

  Oh no. Oh nonononono.

  Jack picked up the pace, striding across the sand until he was standing beside the chaise, staring down in disbelief at the woman who’d hijacked it.

  She was wearing a gauzy white top and dark Bermuda shorts. Her feet were bare, and her hair, blond and curly, spilled around her shoulders. As if taking his chaise wasn’t injury enough, she was holding one of his beers. No, wait—she was drinking one of his beers. And then she had the nerve to look at him as if he was bothering her.

  Audrey LaRue might be a huge pop star, but in this corner of the world, that was his chaise and his beer on his private beach.

  “May I help you?” she asked with a definite tone.

  Jack shifted his weight onto one hip. “Yeah, you can help me. You can get off my chaise and go somewhere else. Like maybe, the other side of the island.”

  “Your chaise?” She sat up, twisted around, and looked at the chaise. “I didn’t see your name on it. There are loads of these things on the island, so how do you figure this one is yours?”

  “Because I am the one who dragged it down here and set it up with my beer,” he said, gesturing toward the bottle she was holding, and the bucket, situated at a perfect arm’s length.

  Audrey looked at the bottle, took a deliberately long swig of it, then lowered it. “Finders, keepers. So if you don’t mind, I am in serious need of peace and quiet.” And with that, she settled back, shifting her gaze to the ocean.

  “Yeah, well, so am I,” he said, and nudged the chaise with his knee. “Get up.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head and the blond curls. “I’m not moving. You would not believe my weekend. I really need to just chill or I may explode.”

  “Get up,” he said again.

  She did not move a muscle, held as perfectly still as a marble statue.

  His pulse was beginning to pound at his temple. Jack nudged the chaise again, a little more forcefully. “Get up or I will pick you up and deposit you somewhere you won’t like,” he warned her.

  She glanced up at him, incredulous. “Is that a threat?”

  “Damn sure is.”

  She gasped—but quickly recovered with another drink of beer as she looked at him curiously. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Jack Price. And just who the hell are you?”

  He’d meant it only in the rhetorical sense, but Audrey LaRue, Superstar, blinked with great surprise. Then she snorted. “You know who I am,” she said with a flick of her wrist.

  He knew very well who she was—but he did not like her attitude one bit. “No, I don’t know who you are,” he insisted. “Other than a woman who has hijacked my chaise and my space and my beer.” Which, to his way of thinking, was about as low as any woman could go.

  But Audrey was obviously mesmerized by the idea that someone did not know her. She eyed him—all of him—skeptically. “You know who I am—you put me in that line thingy today.”

  “I put a lot of people on the zip line today. Are you getting up, or am I going to have to move you?”

  “Seriously?” she said, swinging her long legs over the side of the chaise. “You seriously don’t know that I am . . . Audrey LaRue?”

  “I don’t know you are Audrey LaRue or anyone else. Why should I?”

  Her mouth dropped open. She was clearly unable to fathom that there might be a person on the planet who didn’t know who she was. She slowly stood up, the top of her head reaching his chin on his six-foot-three frame. “Because I’m a singer,” she said, squinting up at him as if he were an alien subspecies. “I sing.”

  Jack shrugged.

  “Perhaps you have seen my picture on the cover of Cosmo? Seventeen? People?”

  Good lord, her ego was enormous. “No, but speaking of singing, I would like to enjoy some of my tunes,” he said, waving his iPod at her. “So you need to go somewhere else,” he suggested, and before she could speak, he moved around her, passing so close that his shirt brushed against hers, and flopped down on the chaise. “But thanks for warming it up.” He reached down for a beer. “Good night.”

  Audrey gaped at him. Then she glared at him. “Fine,” she snapped, slammed her empty beer bottle down on the wide wooden arm of the chaise, and stalked off, her arms swinging, her stride long and sure.

  Jack watched her go—or rather, watched her derrière bounce along—then smiled triumphantly, plugged in his earbuds, and cranked up his iPod.

  Diva. He’d worked too long in Hollywood not to know all the signs of a woman entirely too full of herself, and that chick was entirely too full of herself.

  It made him glad he only had four Audrey LaRue songs on his iPod.

  He settled back, drinking his beer, watching the ocean move like one living thing, thinking about his plane and the wiring specs for it. He was just opening his second beer when he was startled by a rap on the top of his head—a hard knuckle rap. “Ouch,” he said, and sat up, his hand on his head, and jerked around.

  She stood arms akimbo, her legs braced apart, her smooth, flat belly bared, and the small diamond in her bel
ly button winking at him only inches from his nose. He had an overwhelming and insane desire to press his face against that creamy flesh, but wisely looked up into her green eyes instead. “Yes?” he drawled.

  “Okay, Jack. I’m sorry I took your beer,” she said, as if that solved everything.

  “Apology accepted. Good-bye.” He turned away.

  “Okay, all right . . . and your chair,” she added. When that didn’t get a response, she dropped down on her knees next to him. “But the thing is, this chair is the only one I can find on this side of the island that’s on the beach, and this beach is really the only private part of the island, and I am desperate for some peace and quiet. So listen, I’ve got an idea. I’ll pay you for it.”

  “The beer?” he drawled. “Or the chaise?”

  “Both. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars for both,” she said, gesturing to the chaise and the bucket of beer next to it.

  This chick was whacked. She probably was used to snapping her fingers for whatever she wanted and having it magically appear. Jack shook his head. “Not on your life. Buh-bye now,” he said, wiggling his fingers at her.

  “Come on!” she cried, slapping her palms on the arm of the chaise. “One thousand bucks is a lot of money for a chaise that doesn’t even belong to you!”

  “No way am I giving it up,” he said easily, and wiggled his fingers at her again. “You’re wasting your time, LaRue.”

  “Okay. Fine.” She popped up and marched around to the end of the chaise to stand in front of him and his view of the ocean. “I’ll give you two thousand.”

  Jack gasped. Sat up. “Two thousand?” he squealed with false excitement. “Really?”

  She recognized that he was making fun of her and fell to her knees on the edge of the chaise. “Why not?” she demanded. “Is this really that big of a deal to you? Can’t you just get another chaise?”

  “I could. But I don’t want to. I am tired. I want to relax. I don’t think you have any idea how much work goes into a weekend like this. I have been looking forward to a little downtime to myself for three days. I laid this out, and I am not going to just give it up for a pretty smile or a mere two thousand dollars.”