“So brainless,” Olivia muttered because . . . how could she resist?
Thad overheard and leaned back in his chair. “Some of us are born to win.” He gave Olivia a lazy smile. “Others seem to keep dying on the job.”
He had a point. Olivia had lost count of how many times she’d been stabbed to death in Carmen or crushed to death as Delilah. In Dido and Aeneas, she’d expired from the weight of her grief, and in Il trovatore, she’d barely escaped a fiery pyre. None of which took into account the people she’d killed.
Thad didn’t seem to know much about opera, so she wasn’t sure how he knew about all the bloodthirsty roles she’d sung, but she suspected Google had a hand in it. She’d done some googling of her own and discovered that nearly every article about Thaddeus Walker Bowman Owens mentioned not only his physical skills and dating life, but the respect his teammates had for him.
She was beginning to understand why, and their four weeks together no longer seemed quite so long.
* * *
“You didn’t have to come with me, you know?” Olivia said, as they climbed the trail above the Griffith Observatory, not far from where the Uber had dropped them off. It was barely six in the morning, and the air smelled of dew and sage. “If I’d known you were going to be such a grouch, I wouldn’t have invited you.”
“You didn’t invite me, remember? I overheard you last night at dinner talking about hiking up here this morning.” Thad yawned. “It wouldn’t have been right for me to stay in bed while you’re working yourself to death.”
“I’m not the only one. Whenever we have any downtime, you’re either on the phone or on your computer. What’s that about?”
“Video game addiction.”
She didn’t believe him, although she’d noticed he never left his laptop open. “We’re leaving for San Francisco in a couple of hours.” She took in the Hollywood sign far above them. “This was the only time I could get any exercise.”
“Or you could have stayed in bed.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve been working out while all I’ve done is eat.”
“And drink,” he pointed out unhelpfully.
“That, too. Unfortunately, the era of the obese opera singer is over.” She stepped around a pile of horse manure. “In the old days, all you had to do was take center stage and sing. Now you have to look at least a little bit plausible. Unless you’re doing the Ring cycle. If I had the voice and the endurance to sing Brünnhilde, I could eat whatever I wanted. Let’s face it. You can’t sing Brünnhilde’s battle cry if you’re a sylph.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
She wished she could let loose with a little of Brünnhilde’s “Ho-jo-to-ho!” right here on the trail just to see if she could make T-Bo lose his cool, but she didn’t have it in her.
They were gaining elevation and moving at a fast enough clip that she needed to watch her footing. She remembered hiking up here with Rachel a few years ago. Whenever the two of them approached a steep ascent, Rachel, who was less fit, would ask Olivia a question requiring such an involved answer that Olivia would end up talking through the entire climb while Rachel conserved her energy. It had taken Olivia forever to catch on to her tricks.
“Enough about me.” She beamed at him. “Tell me your life story.”
He took the bait as they climbed. “Great childhood. Great parents. Almost great career.”
He began walking faster. She fell into his rhythm, at the same time keeping her distance from the drop-off to her left. “I need details.”
“Only child. Spoiled rotten. My mom is a retired social worker and my dad’s an accountant.”
“You, of course, were a star student, quarterback of the high school football team, and homecoming king.”
“I got robbed. They gave the crown to Larry Quivers because he’d just broken up with his girlfriend, and everybody felt sorry for him.”
“That’s the kind of tragedy that builds character.”
“For Larry.”
She laughed. The trail was getting steeper still, the city stretching below them, and again, he’d picked up the pace. “What else?” she said.
“I worked for a landscaping company during the summers. Played for the University of Kentucky and graduated with a degree in finance.”
“Impressive.”
“I was drafted and signed by the Giants. Also played for the Broncos and the Cowboys before I came to Chicago.”
“Why the two middle names? Walker Bowman?”
“Mom wanted her father honored. Dad wanted the honor to go to his grandfather. They drew straws to see which name came first, and Mom won.”
They were practically jogging, and she berated herself for that slab of chocolate truffle layer cake she’d had for dessert last night. This was what happened when you hiked with a competitive athlete. A leisurely morning climb turned into an endurance contest. Which she didn’t intend to lose.
No question he was the stronger of the two. Her thighs were starting to burn, and she seemed to be getting a blister on her little toe, but he was already breathing harder than she was. Any second now, he’d realize exactly how much breath control a professionally trained opera singer possessed.
“Married? Divorced?” she asked.
“Neither.”
“That’s because you haven’t met anybody as good-looking as you, right?”
“I can’t help the way I look, okay?”
He actually sounded testy. Fascinating. She was storing that information away as ammunition for future use when she came to a sudden stop. “Look at that.” Out of the corner of her eye, she’d spotted a small hole in the ground underneath some brush. And right in front of that hole . . .
An arm slammed around her chest, pulling her back. She yelped, “Hey!”
“That’s a tarantula!” he exclaimed.
“I know it’s a tarantula.” She wiggled free. “It’s a beauty.”
He shuddered. “It’s a tarantula!”
“And it’s not hurting a soul. Remember our agreement. I handle the bugs and snakes. You deal with the rodents.”
The tarantula scampered back into its hole. Thad pressed her ahead of him on the trail, away from the nest. “Move it!”
“Sissy.” She’d begged for a tarantula as a pet, but her staid, conservative parents had refused. They’d been older when she was born, dedicated musicians who’d preferred not having their lives disrupted. Still, they’d loved her, and she missed them. They’d died within a few months of each other.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know that female tarantulas can live for twenty-five years,” she said, “but once the male matures, he only lives for a few months.”
“And women think they have it tough.”
Her cell rang in her pocket. The number wasn’t familiar, probably a junk call, but her thighs needed a break, and she answered. “Hello?”
“Che gelida manina . . .” At the sound of the familiar music, the phone slipped from her fingers.
Thad, with his athlete’s reflexes, caught it before it hit the ground. He put the phone to his ear and listened. She heard the music coming faintly from the phone. She snatched it away from him, shut it off, and shoved it back in her pocket.
“You want to tell me about that?” he said.
“No.” They hadn’t reached the summit, but she turned and began heading back down the trail. Then, because she didn’t have to make eye contact with him, she said, “It’s Rodolfo’s love song to Mimì in La bohème.”
“And?”
“Che gelida manina . . . It means, ‘What a cold little hand.’” She shuddered. “I told him not to sing it.”
“Who?”
The sun was coming up, and so was the temperature. She fixed her eyes on the observatory in the distance. She didn’t have to say anything. She could clam up right now. But he was steady and solid, and she wanted to tell him. “It’s a popular audition piece for tenors, but Adam couldn’t manage the high C. He had to take it
down a half tone—high C becomes a top B-natural. But that only showcases a weakness. I tried to talk him out of auditioning with it, but I couldn’t.”
“Adam?”
“Adam Wheeler. My former fiancé.”
“And this is how the asshole treats you? He calls you up like some lunatic and—”
“You don’t understand.” She took an unsteady breath. “Adam is dead.”
5
Olivia shuddered. “That song . . . It’s a voice from the grave.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Thad phrased it as a request, but it sounded more like a demand.
“It’s not a happy story.”
“I can handle it.” They’d come to a bench on the trail, and he gestured toward it, but she didn’t want to sit. She didn’t want to look at him. She did, however, want to tell him. She wanted to let down the guard she’d been holding on to so tightly it was choking her and tell this man she barely knew what she’d only been able to hint at with Rachel.
She moved ahead of him so she didn’t have to make eye contact. “Adam was a good tenor, but not a great one. He was fine in the more undemanding comprimario parts—secondary roles. He had the will, but not the instrument to handle bigger parts.”
“Unlike you.”
“Unlike me.” She’d also worked harder than Adam, but she worked harder than nearly everyone, and she couldn’t fault him for not keeping up. “We had everything in common—music, our dedication to our careers. He’d go into schools and talk to the students about music. He was great with kids. Loved animals. A sweet, sensitive man. And he adored me.” She stepped over a rocky trench to a smoother section of the trail. “When he proposed, I accepted.”
“Did you love him?”
“He was perfect. How could I not?”
“So you didn’t love him.”
She hesitated. “I was happy.”
“Except when you weren’t.”
Except when she wasn’t. She slowed to keep from slipping on a patch of shale. “I knew it bothered him that I was at a place in my career he couldn’t reach.” She was ashamed of how often she’d attempted to make herself smaller so she didn’t hurt him. She’d turned down a role she should have taken, and when a rehearsal or performance had gone especially well, she downplayed it. But he always knew. He’d grow silent. Occasionally, he’d snap at her for something inconsequential. He’d always apologize and blame his bad mood on lack of sleep or a headache, but Olivia knew the real cause.
They rounded a bend. “I don’t like to fail, and I got very good at self-deception. Even though I was growing more and more unhappy, I wouldn’t admit to myself that I’d stopped loving him.”
“Since none of those rings you like to wear have a diamond in them, I’m assuming you came to your senses.”
“Too late.” Thinking about it still made her cringe. “A week before the wedding, I called it off. One week! It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The worst thing I’ve ever done. I waited too long, and I broke his heart.”
“Better than condemning him to a bad marriage.”
“He didn’t see it that way. He was devastated and humiliated.” She couldn’t dodge this next part, and she finally looked up at him. “He killed himself two and a half months later. Exactly nineteen days ago.” Her throat caught. “There was a suicide note. A suicide email, really. Modern life, right? He told me how much he’d loved me and that I’d ruined his life. Then he hit ‘send’ and shot himself.”
Thad winced. “That’s tough. Killing yourself is one thing, but blaming it on someone else . . . That’s low.”
She took in the vista around them without seeing a thing. “He was so sensitive. I knew that, and yet . . . I should have been more careful. I should have broken it off as soon as I knew it wasn’t right, but I was too stubborn.”
“The phone call you just had . . . The note you got yesterday . . . There’s more to this story, isn’t there?”
Thad was so much smarter than he looked. “There’ve been two other notes.”
“The one I saw said, ‘This is your fault. Choke on it.’ Were the others like that?”
“The first one said, ‘Don’t ever forget what you’ve done to me.’ The morning the tour started, there was another. ‘You did this to me.’” A helicopter chopped overhead. “Until now, I thought he’d written the notes before he died and found people to mail them for him. But that phone call . . . It’s from a recording he made.”
“Obviously, he wasn’t the one who made the call.”
“Whoever he got to mail the letters must have done it. I don’t know. He was never vindictive.”
“Until he sent you his suicide email.”
“It was wrenching. And these notes . . .”
“Either he planned this before he killed himself, got someone to mail the notes and make that phone call, or you have an enemy on this side of the grave. Do you have any idea who that could be?”
She hesitated, but she was already in this far, and she might as well go the rest of the way. “His sisters were devastated, and they blame me. Growing up, it was only Adam, his mother, and his two sisters. He was the golden child. They all doted on him. Every spare dollar any of them made went toward his voice lessons. After his mother died, it was just his sisters. When I came into the picture, they weren’t happy.”
“They were jealous of you?”
“It’s more that they were protective of him. They wanted him with a woman who’d put his career first. Definitely not one with a big career of her own. If they found out he blew an audition or didn’t get a part, they blamed me. They thought I wasn’t supporting him in the way I should—that I put my career ahead of his. But I didn’t!” She looked up at him, pleading for understanding and hating herself for needing it. “I did everything I could to help him. I recommended him for roles. I turned down some opportunities of my own so I could be with him.”
He shook his head at her. “You women. How many men would do something like that?”
“He was special.”
“If you say so.”
She rubbed her arm and felt the gritty trail dust on her skin. “There was an autopsy, so the funeral was delayed. I don’t check my email regularly, and I didn’t see it until a week after he died.”
“The suicide email?”
“I should never have gone to the funeral. It turned into a scene right out of Puccini. Two sisters mad with grief publicly accusing me of killing him. It was horrible.” She blinked her eyes against a sting of tears. “Adam was everything to them.”
“That doesn’t excuse them for blaming you.”
“I think that’s what they need to do to work through their grief.”
“Very self-sacrificing. I’m traveling with Mother Teresa.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it? From where I stand, it looks like you’re hauling around a truckload of guilt for something you didn’t cause.”
“But obviously I did cause it. I was a coward. I agreed to marry him, even though in my heart I knew it wasn’t right. And then I waited until a week before the ceremony to end it. How’s that for cowardly?”
“Not as cowardly as going ahead with it.” He drew her gently to a stop. “Promise to tell me if you get any more of these surprises.”
“This is my problem. There’s no need—”
“Yes, there is. Until this tour is over, whatever happens to you affects me. I want your word that you’ll tell me.”
She shouldn’t have said this much, but there was something about him that invited confidences. She reluctantly agreed.
On the way back, she checked the number on her phone and tried to call. A recorded message said it was no longer in service.
* * *
When they returned to the suite, Henri greeted them with the news that there was a weather alert for San Francisco. “I heard from the pilot. We need to leave quickly, or you’ll miss your afternoon interviews.”
Olivia took a fa
st shower, grabbed a clean pair of yoga pants, and put on a long white sweater. She’d pull herself together on the plane.
* * *
Thad had never seen Olivia without makeup. Even that morning when they’d hiked, she’d had on lipstick and maybe some kind of tinted sunscreen. Now, with a scrubbed face and her hair pulled into a ponytail, she looked younger. Less like a diva and more like a really hot barista working at the counter of a funky coffee shop where none of the mugs matched.
Mariel was already on the plane when they got there. She drew Henri aside for what appeared to be a volatile conversation that indicated a less-than-friendly relationship. Paisley was intimidated by Mariel in a way she wasn’t by Henri and spent the trip huddled against the rear bulkhead trying to make herself invisible.
Not long before they landed, Olivia emerged from the plane’s bathroom in one of her classic outfits. A charcoal power dress with a crisscrossed purple belt and a couple of her big jewelry pieces. It was stylish, elegant, and expensive. He missed the hot barista.
Mariel sent Paisley off to deal with the luggage and accompanied Henri to Thad and Olivia’s live appearance on a noontime news and talk show. Afterward, they taped an interview at one of the local cable stations. The photograph of Thad carrying Olivia came up, and this time Olivia dove right in with the bench-pressing story. The host laughed, the watches were spotlighted, and a good time was had by all.
Except Mariel.
“Olivia should not be so frivolous in her interviews,” the Frenchwoman told Thad later that day, as she escorted him to another radio station, while Paisley hid and Henri shepherded Olivia to afternoon tea with a group of fashion bloggers. “There is a certain dignity associated with the Marchand brand.”
Mariel’s imperious manner was getting under his skin. “It made good television. You’re trying to reach younger consumers, and dignity doesn’t count for much with them.”
Mariel gave one of her Gallic shrugs. She was an imposing woman—no doubt about it—but he was glad to see Henri waiting for him at their San Francisco hotel.
This time, he and The Diva were placed in separate smaller suites, and that night’s client dinner took place in the hotel dining room. Thad was growing to heartily dislike these dinners, which lasted forever and required too much small talk. Still, they were part of what he’d signed up for, and he was too well paid to complain.
When Stars Collide Page 7