American Diva

by Julia London

  “Ha,” she said, swiping at more tears. “I’ll give you a million dollars if you can find a place like that.”

  “As tempting as that is, I’ll settle for just seeing you happy,” he said, and started the Cadillac again. “Let’s go say good-bye to your mom and Allen and Gail and get the hell out of here.”

  Audrey had to admit—the prospect of getting the hell out of here sounded divine.

  Twenty-one

  Mrs. LaRue did not try and persuade Audrey to stay. She stood in the kitchen, methodically wiping her hands on her apron and nodding as Audrey explained she had to get back to work. When Audrey had completed her apology—in which she seemed to be pretty hard on herself, considering how they had treated her—Mrs. LaRue shrugged.

  “I’m sorry you have to rush back.” And then she walked to the stove and put a pot on a burner, as if she was going to make something.

  Audrey seemed to shrink a little. “Okay. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days to see how things are going, okay?”

  “If you got time,” Mrs. LaRue said without turning away from the stove.

  Audrey gave Jack a helpless look, and he gestured for her to follow him. Audrey hesitated; she looked at her mother once more and then suddenly walked to where her mother was opening a can of soup. Mrs. LaRue did not turn, but continued doggedly to open the can of soup. Audrey put her arms around her mother and pressed her cheek to her mother’s shoulder, then let go. “Bye, Mom.”

  “Bye now,” Mrs. LaRue said without turning.

  Jack worried they wouldn’t be able to find Allen, but Audrey knew exactly where to look. Off the main square, in a coffee house that she said had once been a pool hall, Allen was sitting outside with two other men, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes.

  Audrey got out of the Cadillac and walked up to Allen. He smiled. “Hey, Audie. Want some coffee? You guys know my big sis, Audrey LaRue, right?” he asked, and then laughed. “Yep, this is Audrey LaRue, the one LaRue who escaped Redhill.” He took a long swig of his coffee as his friends shook Audrey’s hand and gushed that they loved her music.

  Audrey graciously thanked them, then turned to Allen. “Think we might have a word before I go?”

  “What, are you going?” he asked. “I thought you came to save me from myself.”

  “Doesn’t look like I can do that,” she said. “Can I speak to you a minute?”

  Allen glanced at his friends, then nodded. “Sure, Audie. Whatever you want.” He slowly came to his feet.

  Jack watched the pair as they walked to the corner of the building. They looked a lot alike, he thought. Allen shoved his hands in his pockets and looked everywhere but at Audrey. Audrey, on the other hand, looked so earnest and concerned that his heart went out to her. Her desire to help was visible . . . just as visible as Allen’s desire to be left alone.

  In his lifetime, Jack had known a lot of guys like Allen—hell-bent on self-destruction, trying to erase something with drugs or booze. Someone like Audrey, who was driven to succeed, could not fathom how someone could be so motivated to fail.

  Jack didn’t understand it, either.

  After about fifteen minutes of Audrey talking and Allen shrugging, she hugged him and walked away. With hooded eyes, Allen watched her leave, and as she climbed into the Cadillac—waving at Allen’s pals, who were calling out to her—Allen shifted his gaze to the sky a moment, then wearily pushed away from the wall and walked back to his friends.

  Audrey turned as Jack pulled away from the curb and looked back at her brother until she couldn’t see him any longer, then finally turned around and settled back with a sigh. “Get me out of here, would you?”

  Jack did precisely that. About an hour and a half later, having made one stop at a roadside fruit and vegetable market, they entered the lake resort of Possum Kingdom, much to Audrey’s delight. “We used to come here when we were kids!” she exclaimed happily.

  “So did we,” he said. This is where I learned cliff diving.”

  “You’re kidding!” she exclaimed. “So what are we going to do, rent a cabin?”

  “Nah,” he said with a laugh. “You’re Audrey LaRue—only the best for you, sweet cheeks,” he said, and pulled over before a length of chain that roped off a dirt drive. In a box beneath a rock, he found the key, and let down the gate. When he got back in the Cadillac, Audrey gave him a curious look.

  “Just hold on,” he said, and drove onto the dirt drive. They bounced down the drive, winding around native mesquite and oaks, and finally came to a halt before an old double-wide trailer house. It had been cared for—the shutters looked to have a new coat of blue paint, and geraniums lined the decking around the front door. The lake was just below the house, a short walk down a cliff where steps had been carved from the limestone, to a boat dock.

  Audrey gave him a skeptical look.

  “It’s not the Ritz, I know,” he said quickly. “But the Price family has spent some happy summers here.”

  Audrey’s face instantly lit up and she squealed. “Oh how wonderful!” she exclaimed with delight and got out of the car, hurrying up the steps to the door.

  The place smelled a little; no one had been up for a couple of months. As Jack walked around and opened the windows, Audrey investigated the place. It was comfortably decorated for a lake house—a pair of La-Z-Boys and couch, a big flat-screen TV. The kitchen was surprisingly large. Jack, Parker, and his dad had spent one summer refashioning a sliding glass door on the back side, which opened onto a sizable deck. Over the years, the two weeping willows Jack’s sisters had planted had grown up and now provided shade against the sinking afternoon sun.

  “This is fabulous, Jack!” Audrey said.

  He had worried that she would be disappointed—it was hardly the sort of accommodations she was accustomed to—but she seemed genuinely thrilled to be here.

  “Can we swim? The lake looks so inviting. When we were kids, before Gene and Leanne began to hate each other,” she said with a laugh, “we would go to the Cliffs.”

  “Know it well,” he said. “My folks bought this lot when we were little. We always liked it because it’s away from the tourist spots and is a little more private.”

  “Let’s swim—oh, but I don’t have anything to swim in!”

  “Let me see what I can do,” he said, and walked into the back, where the bedrooms were. He riffled through a dresser and produced one of his sisters’ old swimsuits, which was well worn, but serviceable. Audrey laughed when he handed it to her—it was green with big white polka dots. “How stylish,” she said with a grin.

  But when she appeared a few minutes later, wearing the suit and one of his old shirts as a cover-up, Jack was fairly certain that suit had never looked so good.

  “It’s a little small,” she said.

  He let his gaze slowly sweep the length of her. “I guess that depends on your perspective.”

  Audrey laughed and gave him a sexy smile as she brushed past him and opened the sliding glass doors. “Are you coming?” she asked him over her shoulder.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’ll meet you at the lake.”

  When he met her there a few minutes later, he was wearing some old shorts and flip-flops and was carrying a small cooler in one hand, an inner tube in the other. Audrey was already in the water, paddling around. He stood on the boat dock, watching her a moment, his thoughts in places they shouldn’t have been—on her body. Inside her body, moving long and slow inside her body. What could he say? The woman was sexy to begin with, but awe-inspiring as she floated on her back.

  “What’s that?” she called up to him.

  With a grin, he fit the cooler into the small tube, then got on his knees. “Come and get it,” he said, and handed it to her.

  In the water, Audrey opened the top of the cooler and laughed as she withdrew a beer. “Perfect!”

  “Not yet,” he said, and walked back to the little shack they kept on the boat dock. He turned the combination lock until it clic
ked open, then reached inside for two tractor-trailer inner tubes. He rolled them back across the dock.

  “Oh, gimme!” Audrey cried, waving a hand. Jack rolled one off the dock and watched her swim to catch it. The other, he swung out with one arm at the same moment he jumped, landing perfectly within it. Audrey grabbed his foot with one hand and the cooler in the other and tossed him a beer.

  Jack tethered Audrey and the cooler to his tube, and they spent the afternoon bobbing in the wake of passing motorboats as the rest of the world floated away from them. They drank beer, waved at passing skiers, and lied to each other about the heights from which they had jumped at the Cliffs when they were kids.

  Audrey told Jack how she and Allen had commandeered a small outboard motorboat one year and had puttered across the lake, only to run out of gas. It was night before anyone found them, and she laughed when she told how much trouble they had been in. “Dad whipped Allen,” she said. “But Mom saved me and told him she was going to punish me with kitchen duty the rest of the trip. I think I did it once,” she said, laughing. “Allen never forgave me.”

  Jack told Audrey about the year he and two of his partners, Eli and Cooper, graduated from high school and had come up here, built a catapult on the dock, and used it to shoot cantaloupes from Jack’s father’s garden at passing boats until the lake patrol had come and taken their catapult away.

  They laughed together like two people from the same neck of the woods who spoke each other’s language. Their chatter was comfortable, their friendship easy. And it didn’t hurt that Audrey was so damn good-looking. Every time Jack looked at her, he felt something stir inside him, something that wanted desperately to be inside her. But he felt something else just as strong—a genuine, full-fledged attachment.

  Who would have thought he could feel that for the woman who, just a few short weeks ago, he thought was the world’s biggest diva?

  When the sun began to creep behind the house in preparation for its descent, Jack rowed them to the steps leading up to the dock. He went first, taking the cooler up with him. On his second trip, he managed the tubes. And on his third trip, he laughingly hung a slightly inebriated Audrey over his shoulder and climbed up.

  She laughed when he put her down on the deck, and wrapped her hands around his biceps. “Dude,” she said, squinting up at him, “you’re so strong.” She caressed his arm for a moment. Jack was about to caress her back, but then she said, “I am starving.”

  “Great,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulders. “Chef Jack showed up to cook for us.”

  Inside, Jack showered first, donning another pair of shorts and an old camp shirt that belonged to Parker. “Your turn,” he said when he came out of the bathroom. “Turn the knob toward cold to get hot.”

  She blinked up at him.

  “Plumbing job gone bad,” he said. “Just do the opposite of what it says.”

  While Audrey showered, Jack checked on the steaks he had taken out of the deep freeze and left on the deck to thaw. In the storage room, he found a couple of bottles of cheap wine. With the fresh green beans and squash he’d picked up at the roadside market, there was enough to make a decent meal.

  By the time Audrey emerged from the shower, he had snapped the beans and cut up the squash. He glanced up as she walked into the living room, wearing a pale blue slip of a sundress that shone against her skin. Her blond hair, still wet, curled around her face. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but she didn’t need to—her eyes were large and sparkling. He couldn’t remember a time he’d ever seen her look so totally relaxed . . . or sexier.

  She paused at the table that held the flat-screen TV and the various framed pictures there. “Oh wow,” she said, picking one up. “Is that you?”

  Jack squinted at it—it was a picture of him at the age of twelve or thirteen, a skinny thing in short bathing trunks and with his hair sticking up in several directions. Standing next to him was his sister Paige, who, at that age, had been in her strike-a-pose phase, and Parker, still a little runt. “Yep. That’s my brother Parker and my sister Paige. My other sister, Janet, must have been behind the camera.”

  “It looks like you have a nice family,” she said, picking up a picture of his folks.

  “I do,” he said. “They’re great people.”

  “Must be nice,” she muttered as she put the picture down and wandered into the kitchen. “Can I help? It’s been ages since I did anything in a kitchen.”

  “Sure. You can open the wine.”

  Audrey picked up the bottle and laughed, then unscrewed the top.

  “Yeah, that’s the Price family all right—only the best from the discount aisle for us.”

  Still grinning, Audrey poured the wine. She held it up to her nose, then to Jack’s as he put the vegetables into a skillet to be sautéed. “It’s good!”

  He didn’t know about that, but he was more than willing to drink it.

  Audrey poured him a glass, then sidled around the bar and sat opposite him, sipping her wine as she watched him cook. “I have to thank you for today, Jack,” she said with a soft smile. “I can’t remember the last time I was so relaxed.”

  “Me either,” he said, and grinned when she flicked the screw-off wine top at him. “I was thinking of you when I was showering.” When Jack lifted a very curious brow, she giggled. “I mean, I was thinking that you . . . you were really cool today. My family isn’t easy to deal with.”

  His gaze absently dipped to her breasts. “It was no big deal, sweet cheeks. Everyone’s got a few whackos in their family.”

  “Really? Do you?”

  He lifted his gaze to her glittering green eyes and realized he couldn’t lie to her. “No,” he said with a sigh. “We’re disgustingly normal.”

  “I noticed,” she said, nodding. “Pictures of the entire family, everyone smiling. You look really close, all of you.”

  “We are,” he said.

  “I would kill for that. I can’t tell you how many times in the last two or three years, since I started getting so famous, that I just wished I had someone to talk to. Someone who really knew me and could advise me what to do, someone whose opinion I could trust implicity. That’s what is hard about this job—I don’t know what to do half the time. Do I endorse a line of jeans or not? Should I make a big deal over the cover art they came up with for my next release because I hate it? Do I go pop, or stay alternative?”

  Jack knew what she meant. When Parker had moved into the major leagues of baseball, he’d called Jack many times for advice on how to handle various aspects of his fame, and his brother’s fame was nothing compared to Audrey’s.

  “I feel like I am swimming blind sometimes,” she said. “Even Lucas . . . sometimes I don’t know if he has any better idea than I do.” She laughed and shook her head. “Do you know that once we handed over fifteen hundred dollars to a guy who promised us he’d record an album with me? No contract, nothing but this guy’s word. Of course he skipped town with our money. God, we were stupid.”

  He preferred not to think of the prick Lucas, and said blithely, “At least you won’t make that mistake again.” He picked up the platter of steaks. “I’m going to throw these on the pit,” he said, and walked out onto the deck.

  Audrey followed him and stood beside him as he placed the steaks on the grill.

  “You’re lucky,” she said thoughtfully, her gaze on the steaks. “You’re lucky just knowing you can trust your family. You’re lucky you don’t have to worry about them making up something about you to make a quick buck, or to tell the media your darkest secrets.”

  She looked away, out over the lake. “That’s the hardest part about this fame business, knowing who you can trust.”

  “You can trust me, sweet cheeks.”

  She turned around, a smile on her face, her eyes sparkling. “Oh yeah, I know,” she said playfully. “You made that perfectly clear from the get-go—not interested in the drama.”

  “That’s right,” he said as he flippe
d a steak. “Put down the stiletto and move away.”

  Audrey tossed her head back and laughed, giving Jack a glimpse of the young woman she might have been had she not been thrust so hard and fast into the spotlight. She looked happy and free, full of life and youthful beauty. Her eyes were glittering, the laugh lines around them telling of her personality.

  Jesus, he wanted to kiss her, to make love to her. He forced his attention back to the steaks and said, “Still hungry?”

  “Famished.”

  They dined on the deck as the sun sank on the horizon. They polished off one bottle of wine and laughed as Jack unscrewed the top of the second. When they had finished the meal and put the dishes in the sink, they stood out on the deck, illuminated with a strand of Christmas lights.

  “I could live out here, you know?” Audrey said wistfully.

  “Nah,” Jack said. “It’s too remote. You’d be lonely.”

  “What’s new? I’m always lonely.”

  Jack looked at her. “How can you be lonely?” he asked. “You’re surrounded by people twenty-four/seven.”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense. But honestly? I never felt lonelier in my life.”

  He wanted to take her in his arms and promise her she’d never be lonely. He wanted to kiss that look from her face. But Audrey’s cell phone rang. They both looked at the glass doors. “Don’t answer it,” he said.

  She hesitated, but then shook her head. “It might be Allen.”

  Twenty-two

  It wasn’t Allen; it was Lucas. “Where are you?” he demanded. “I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

  “You have?” she said, and glanced over her shoulder as Jack walked into the house. “I guess I didn’t hear it.”

  “Your mother says you left today, said you had to get back.”

  Audrey’s head began to swim from the wine and the sun and the niggling guilt at having such a lovely time today. “Oh yeah. Yes, I told her that,” she said, and put a hand to her temple. “But I just said that to get out of there because she was driving me nuts.”