But she’d be planted six feet under, pushing up daisies and feeding the nightcrawlers, before she’d let it show. She thrust up her chin. “I think it’s time for you to go home.”
Face blank with—what? shock? relief, maybe?—he stepped forward, one long-fingered hand reaching out to her. “Peej.”
There was a sudden rap on the door, then the portal swung open and her manager, Ben McGrath, strode into the room. “There’s quite a crowd out there,” he said in his crisp New England voice, pocketing a cell phone on which P.J. knew he’d have just that moment concluded a call. “You ready?”
“Yes.” Taking a quick peek at her reflection in the makeup mirror, she rearranged a few strands of her new haircut, which curled just about chin length now, then shrugged at the bruising she’d thought to disguise. What the hell. Let the whole damn world see—what did she care? It wasn’t like she’d done anything to warrant the beating Menks had dealt her.
It was simply one more case of attracting the emotionally bankrupt. She seemed to have a real flair for it.
“Dammit, P.J.” Jared’s voice was urgent, commanding her to look at him, and once again he reached out for her.
Ignoring the demand, she dodged away from his touch and his fingertips merely grazed her forearm. Ignoring as well the heat that seared her skin where they had brushed, she looked at Ben. “Let’s go.”
She left the room without a backward glance.
SHE THINKS I SHOULD GO home? Gut feeling as if a host of maniac grasshoppers danced hip-hop inside it, Jared stalked down the hallway behind P.J. and Ben.
Hell, she was probably right. That’s exactly what he ought to do. In fact, that’s what he’d sort of assumed his plan was, anyway. He’d thought to see her recuperate, to see her settled, then blow this popstand and never look back.
Now that she’d told him to go, however—
Before he had time to follow that snippet of thought to a conclusion that didn’t involve him being one of those stubborn don’t-tell-me-what-to-do kind of idiots, they’d reached the stage.
It was like walking into a room you believed empty only to have someone flip on strobe lights and crank up the sound to ear-bleed level. Flashbulbs exploded like the blitz over London, blinding in their proliferation and blue-white intensity. A cacophony of voices shouted questions on top of overlapping questions, all of which seemed to begin with “Ms. Morgan! Ms. Morgan! Is it true that…?”
Blinking against the spots floating across his retinas, he put himself between Peej and the press until they reached a catering table set up at center-front stage. He had originally planned to observe the proceedings from the arena floor until Ben had insisted that he join them at the mics, stating that the press would likely have questions Jared could answer more easily than P.J. Recognizing the truth of it, he’d reluctantly agreed and now he was glad he had. Because the mosh pit swarmed with far more print reporters and TV crews than any of them had anticipated.
They settled themselves at the table and the grasshoppers hip-hopped with increased frenzy when Peej shifted unobtrusively away from him as he seated her. Ben opened the press conference by reading a brief statement.
It didn’t begin to satisfy the fourth estate. “Ms. Morgan! Ms. Morgan!” A dissonance of questions peppered them.
Ben, smoother than a White House press officer, fielded as many of them as he could. Most were directed at P.J., of course, and were worded in such a way that only she could respond. She did so with polite composure.
But from the corner of his eye, Jared saw her hands clench in her lap and knew it was costing her.
As Ben had predicted, Jared, too, came in for his share of attention. “So who are you?” demanded one bubble-haired blonde. “Mr. McGrath is Ms. Morgan’s manager, but why are you on the dais with her?”
“My name is Jared Hamilton, Ms. Grabowski,” he said, reading her press tag. Not about to share that P.J.’s label had hired him to protect their investment in the wake of the bad press generated by her mother, he fell back on the liar’s friend and offered up a partial truth. “I’m a security specialist from the Semper Fi agency in Denver. Ms. Morgan began receiving threatening correspondence and Wild Wind Records hired me to keep an eye on her.” Not necessarily in that order, but they didn’t need to know that.
The woman scrutinized P.J.’s discolored eye and still-bruised cheekbone, then glanced back at him with raised eyebrows. “You didn’t do a very efficient job of it, did you?”
“That’s very unfair,” P.J. said, giving the reporter a look of cool censure. “My label hired one man. How efficient can any one person be trying to be everywhere during every minute of every hour of every day? Mr. Hamilton did an outstanding job with the tools he was given. He’s the one who figured out that Luther Menks was my stalker. He’s the one who had fliers made up of Menks’s likeness and saw that they got passed out to every security team in every venue I played. And if he hadn’t arrived when he did I’d most likely be dead.”
He turned to stare at her for a second before remembering where they were and jerking his attention back front and center. But Christ on a crutch. She was defending him?
Never mind that she still angled herself subtly away from him—that big heart of hers just flattened him like a rockslide. P. J. Morgan was a bigger man than he’d ever be and he didn’t deserve her generosity. Because Ms. Grabowski had it right. He’d done a piss-poor job of protecting her.
Despite the fact that his old man had never hesitated to tell him he wasn’t worth the space he took up, he couldn’t complain about his life up until now. From his seventeenth summer he’d had a family to tell him he had value, people to comfort him when the idiots of the world believed he really had killed his own father. He’d had a strong male influence in John, had plenty to eat, money in his pocket, an elegant roof over his head and access to a first-class education.
P.J., on the other hand, had been dragged from trailer park to trailer park by a mother who’d disdained everything that made her special until Jodeen discovered she could make a buck off Peej’s musical gift. But had she turned bitter or self-pitying? No. She was sweet and talented and kind to everyone she met. And she was generous to a fault to give him credit for saving her life when it was his—what had she called it?—his lame game of emotional dodge-’em that had driven her to escape his company in the first place. That had left her vulnerable to a madman’s attack.
She’d had every excuse to turn into a stone-cold bitch like her mother, but she’d refused to cling to the past. Instead, putting the ugliness behind her, she had made the best of her present and was heading into one hell of a future.
Which begged the question: If she could put her past behind her, what the hell kind of excuse did he have to hang on to his?
Wonder beginning to suffuse his chest, he turned to look at her.
“Ohmigawd! My baby!” a voice suddenly bawled from the back of the arena. Then, only a shade more quietly, “Let go of me, you ham-fisted moron. My baby needs me!”
P.J. swore softly beneath her breath and Jared didn’t need to see the woman slapping at the security guard preventing her from getting near the stage to know that the infamous Jodeen Morgan had come to cash in on her daughter’s misfortune.
He surged to his feet, but before he could push back from the conference table to hustle her mother the hell out of there, P.J. leaned into the microphone. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “Please. Let her go.”
He sat back down as the guard promptly stepped back from Jodeen, the man’s hands going wide of his body in a you’re-the-boss posture.
Jodeen gave him one last slap.
“Mama, stop it. What are you doing here?”
“Oh, my poor daughter,” Jodeen crooned, rushing the stage. “I just hadda come see how my darling baby is doing after such a horrible ordeal—even if you did turn your back on your own flesh and blood.”
P.J. winced and Jared’s ire spiked. So this was P.J.’s mother. She was smaller
than he’d expected, which, considering her daughter’s petite stature, shouldn’t be a surprise. But where P.J. had a softness to her, her mother looked exactly what she was—a hard, self-serving bitch. And he wasn’t about to let her just show up and start putting her daughter down.
He leaned into the mic. “I wonder why she would do that, Mrs. Morgan?” he asked in an interested, non-confrontational tone. “Could it have anything to do with the fact that you stol—”
“And you are?” The older woman interrupted with saccharine sweetness even as her eyes narrowed in sour assessment. Then, without taking her gaze off him, she gave her brittle ash-blond hair a little pat and strode through the parting press until she stood in the pit directly below their table. “No, don’t tell me. You must be the new manager Priscilla replaced me with when she tossed her own mama aside.”
“No, ma’am,” Ben said, leaning forward. “That would be me.”
“Oh.” Hands on her hips, she turned her attention to the New Yorker, taking in his faultlessly tailored suit and patina of sophistication until the flashbulbs going off around her like paparazzi covering the red carpet seemed to recall her to her mission. The hard-edged calculation melting from her expression, she turned a tragic face toward the press. “Then who is this other man?” she asked piteously. “Is he some hanger-on, hoping to get his hands on my baby’s money?”
“Interesting question, coming from you,” Jared said. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I neither want nor need Priscilla Jayne’s money. And frankly I’m not sure why you would assume I’m after it in the first place.” She was drunk, he suddenly realized. Not falling down, sloppy drunk, but he recognized the exaggeratedly careful mannerisms for what they were. “However, please allow me to put your mind to rest. My name is Jared Hamilton. Your daughter’s record label hired me.”
“You!” For an instant unbridled hatred twisted her features. Almost immediately, she wrestled her expression back into her oh-so-sad poor-abused-mama look. “You’re that young man she mooned over—the boy who killed his own father!”
“Mama!”
Like Romans uncaring whether the gladiator or the lion won as long as it was a good, bloody fight, the press turned on him, shooting off questions right and left. They quieted, however, when Jared looked at Jodeen with a cool, shuttered gaze and said, “Careful, Mrs. Morgan. I doubt you can afford to be sued for slander.”
“I apologize,” she said hastily. “I meant to say the young man wanted in questioning for killing his own father.”
He had to hand it to her, that was pretty slick. She’d managed to cover her ass and still get that killing-your-own-father bit in twice in thirty seconds.
“Someone else was convicted of Jared’s father’s murder, Mama,” P.J. snapped. “As you very well know, since I told you all about it when you finally let me come home.”
“Don’t you take that tone with me, missy!”
P.J.’s jaw went up, but her pointed little chin wobbled for a second before firming up.
Jared’s heart clenched so hard that for a second he thought it was going to seize. Ah, man, she was killing him, sitting there taking it on the chin and refusing to let the world see how much it hurt. He was mad as hell at Jodeen for wounding her this way.
He was even madder at himself for having done the same. That didn’t stop him, however, from taking his wrath out on Jodeen.
“Don’t you take that tone with her,” he snapped. “Your daughter’s still recovering from a fundamentalist right-wing whacko who tied her up, struck her, cut her hair and threatened to kill her, which he would have done in a New York minute if he hadn’t been stopped. She’s been traumatized and she’s been hurt, and so far the only thing I’ve heard you ask, Mrs. Morgan, is if I’m after her money.”
“Well, of course I’m worried about her! Haven’t I said so a hundred times?”
“No. You haven’t. You’ve wailed about your ‘baby’ and you’ve claimed that you just had to see her after her ordeal. Yet not once did you ask her how she’s faring.” Taking off the gloves, he demanded in clipped tones, “Isn’t it true that your main concern here is to regain your meal ticket?”
Still playing the room, she fluttered a hand to her breast as she weakly gasped, “That’s a horrible thing to say!” But if eyes could morph into knives, hers would have eviscerated him.
“Yep, it’s pretty lousy,” he agreed. “Still, you kind of set yourself up for a few sticks and stones when you embezzled from your own daughter.”
“I never! You better watch yourself, sonny—that suing for slander can go both ways!”
“Except it’s not slander if you’ve got the books to back up the claim. And isn’t it true that you’re jealous of your daughter? That you’ve always been jealous because she’s sweet and has talent and is everything you never were?”
“I made her career! If not for me, she’d still be playing bars and honky-tonks. But when she started to get somewhere, what did she do? Dumped me like yesterday’s dirty dishwater for Mister Fancypants there.”
“So your contention is that it had nothing to do with your helping yourself to her earnings.”
“I deserved that money! Anyway, she was starting to make pots, so I don’t see what a dollar or two here and there matt—” She cut herself off, but more flashbulbs flashed and voices erupted and it was too late to take the words back.
P.J. pushed back from the table with a screech of her chair. Ignoring the pandemonium breaking out all around her, she strode from the stage.
Shit. Shit! What the hell had he done? He, too, pushed back. “Take over,” he said to Ben, who was all but rubbing his hands together in satisfaction over Jodeen finally having been outed for the crook she was.
Then Jared hotfooted it into the wings after P.J., covering ground as fast as he could without pulling attention to himself by actually running.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Rumor Has It” column,
Country Connection magazine:
What Mama’s Girl’s Mama’s Been Stealing Her
Baby Girl Blind?
“PEEJ.”
P.J.’s footsteps faltered at the sound of Jared’s voice.
Then she caught herself and picked up her pace once again. Just a few more yards and she’d be at her dressing room where she could close out the world, if only for a little while. “Go away, J.”
“I can’t. I can’t just leave you to deal with this all on your own. I think you’ve had to do way too much of that already.”
She moved even faster, but he closed the gap between them just as she reached the dressing-room door. Before she could open it he was behind her—crowding her backside, caging her between his arms, his hands spread on the wood entry on either side of her head. He bent to bring his lips close to her ear.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said in a low voice that sent goose bumps shivering down her spine. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of the press. I was just so pissed at Jodeen for all the crap she’s dealt you over the years. I hate that she doesn’t value you, but I should have left it alone instead of pushing her the way I did.”
“That would have been nice,” she whispered to the door. “I could have lived very nicely without the entire world knowing how little my own mother likes me.”
Still, honesty compelled her to admit, “But you know what? Humiliating as it’s going to be reading about it in the papers, I’ve moved beyond my need for Mama’s affection. It hurts and it sucks that she’s such a bitch, but I can survive perfectly well on my own.”
“P.J.—”
She turned to face him, pressing her back against the door to avoid brushing up against his hard body. Looking him in the eye, she said, “I deserve better than to beg for the crumbs of anyone’s affection.”
He stepped back, giving her breathing room. “I was an idiot.”
“Which time, exactly?”
Amusement lit his eyes and tugged up the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, that’s the quest
ion, isn’t it?” Stroking his fingers along her cheek with heartbreaking tenderness, he gazed down at her. Then he stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I was an idiot when you told me you loved me and I blew it off. A fool when I decided I knew better than you what you felt. But I was the biggest dumbshit of all when I ran scared from the one thing I want more than anything else in the world.”
Her heart began to pound with…well, not hope. No, sir, she wasn’t doing hope anymore; she’d finally learned her lesson on that score.
All the same, she mentally held her breath even as she scoffed at the notion he could ever be scared. “You’re not afraid of anything.”
“You always did give me way too much credit,” he said softly, easing near again. But his hands remained deep in his pockets. Then his gaze locked with hers and what she saw there sent a jolt clear down to her toes. “But everyone’s afraid of something. And my fear is that I’ll disappoint you. That you’ll see what a flawed man I am and think as little of me as my old man did.” His Adam’s apple took a slow ride up and down his throat. “That you’ll take off—like you did fifteen years ago—and I’ll never hear from you again.”
“That’s not how it was!” she denied instinctively. Then she shook her head. “That is, I guess it was, but not because I wanted it to be!”
This time it was Jared who made a skeptical noise.
“I didn’t! Look, I tried to explain this before, but I only made you angry by bringing up your wealth. But give me a break here, J—I was thirteen years old! When Mama finally let me come back home, I knew darn well it was only because Gert had somehow forced her to. You had come to mean more to me than anyone I’d ever known, but I’d seen the way you lived. So I was already intimidated by your big, fancy mansion and your cook and your maid and…and…the way you’d corrected my grammar! I mean, I know you did that sometimes when we were on the streets but when you did it in your big ol’ hotel of a house, I just felt…I felt so—”
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