Cursing the late night and the unaccustomed alcohol, cursing the alarm that hadn’t gone off on one of the most important days of her life, cursing the button that fell off her cuff and hair that wouldn’t stay in its damned clips, Jo parked her aging Fiesta in the far back field of the mill. Still fighting with the clips in her hair, with one sleeve dangling open, she dodged through a sea of parked cars, crossing trampled grass and cow patties toward the pounding rhythm of a band. She was beyond late.
Why was it that everything always went wrong at the worst possible times? She’d planned this outfit for weeks, the silky cream shirt with the flirty collar, the suede miniskirt to match Flint’s suede jacket, the knee-high suede boots with stout heels made for walking because she knew damned well she wouldn’t sit for twelve hours. She wanted to make an impression on Flint’s Nashville friends. And on Flint, she wasn’t too proud to admit. And now the damned cuff wouldn’t fasten, and she didn’t have time to sew on the missing button. She couldn’t even get the safety pin in it with one hand.
She’d tried calling Flint from the apartment to say she was on her way, but she’d only got his voice mail. She’d be there before he bothered checking messages.
Her heart beat frantically. She needed a chance to talk to Flint. By now, he probably thought she’d run off with RJ and the Nashville cats.
Maybe that’s what he wanted her to do—get out of his life.
The ghost of an old song whispered—too late to say you’re sorry.
She didn’t intend to be sorry. Through all the drinking and thinking, she’d made up her mind about how she’d handle this sue-or-settle thing. She hadn’t told anyone yet. She still had time to change her mind. She didn’t know if Flint would appreciate her decision. She was still scared witless that she was doing this wrong, but she knew what she wanted. If she was wrong, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
But right now, she didn’t want to miss the boys’ big chance. She glanced at her watch. The Buzzards should be starting their set. She’d listened to them play the songs of the finalists all week and had recognized one. Flint would be so proud.
Discovering the ambulance behind the barn set her pulse on fire. Mama?
She jerked open the employee entrance to the mill building and almost slammed into a stretcher on its way out. Holding the door, she stepped aside, and her heart stopped beating as she recognized Adam’s pale face. His eyes were closed.
She located Flint holding Johnnie’s hand as his son was carried out on a second stretcher. The boy was trying hard not to cry but released a pained sound when the cot bumped over the sill.
Flint caught sight of her and relief flooded his face. Jo’s heart did an inappropriate dance of joy. She’d never thought to see the day that he needed her.
“Thank God!” he cried. “Get out there and stand in for me. RJ is chomping at the bit for being kicked down the line-up. Keep him the hell away from the mike, or he’ll take over the whole CD.”
Caught by surprise, Jo blinked. She had no clue what he was talking about. Her only concern was for those two boys and Flint. “Wait a minute, I’m going with you!” she yelled as he hurried past without looking back.
She started to run after them, but then realized from prior experience that there wouldn’t be room in the ambulance. She’d left her car out in the back field. She glanced around, hoping to find someone with a car closer. Before she could act, Dave raced up with clipboard in hand.
“Joella, get the hell out there and do something!” he whispered harshly, grabbing her elbow and dragging her inside.
“Do what?” she protested in confusion, fighting him off and trying to escape. “I need to go with Flint. What happened? Will the boys be all right?”
“Broken bones, the medic said. Amy’s gone for her car to follow them. We need you here.” With panic clearly written in his eyes, Dave tugged with more strength than she’d realized the older man possessed. “It’s going to hell out there, Jo. You know these guys. Make them behave before they ruin everything. The whole town is counting on this concert.” He shoved her up the stairs toward the break in the curtains at the stage entrance.
The stage entrance. With terror for the boys already shredding her nerves, Jo stared through the gap in the curtains to the bright lights bouncing off the stage. She hastily backed away from the sight of an enormous sea of strangers on the other side. “What the devil are you—?”
Before she finished her question, Randy’s singing voice echoed over the top of the Buzzard’s raucous music. “Oh my word. What’s he doing out there?”
“Randy took over the minute Flint turned his back. Why in hell isn’t he singing the song the band is playing? The audience will be walking out any minute. He’s ruining everything.”
Randy, on stage—with the band that had every reason to hate his guts. Had Randy had anything to do with whatever had happened to the kids? Jo couldn’t believe that. He was a selfish jerk, but not a monster.
All the scary things that might be happening in that ambulance frightened her more than the bright lights, the audience, and the testosterone overload on stage ruining everything. She needed to be with Flint.
Amy was with him. Probably Sally, too. Flint hadn’t wanted her with him. She wanted to cry, but she was shaking too badly. If she couldn’t have Flint, then she’d made the wrong decision last night, and her future was out there on that stage. The town’s future was out there as well. She gagged on a swell of nausea. Had she been taking the easy road?
“You’re the only one who can sweet talk them into behaving. Get out there Jo.” Without giving her further time to question, Dave shoved her past the curtain.
Jo stumbled over a warped board into view of the entire barn filled with a standing-room-only crowd. The lights blinded her, and she froze, trapped in a time warp when hoots and catcalls had shamed her. She wanted to fall down and crawl out of sight before she threw up again.
“It’s a tired old love song,” Randy crooned into the mike on center stage.
Those were her words. She was hearing her song on stage for the very first time since she’d figured out she’d actually written a song—and Randy and the band were crucifying her baby.
Randy was singing Flint’s haunting version of her song, while the band was playing the line one my mammy used to play, in time to the original rocking composition the Buzzards had helped create before Randy deserted them.
Flint had given Slim and the band the new music. They knew they were playing the wrong tune. The Buzzards were getting their revenge by screwing with Randy’s head. At any other time, Jo would have laughed and enjoyed the joke, just as the local people in the audience who knew her songs were doing. They’d seen her entrance. They thought Randy was part of some prank she was perpetrating on them.
That was her song they were mangling!
Not only her baby, her ticket to fame and fortune, but the future of the town.
They were ruining the festival. She couldn’t let Randy’s ego bring down her friends and family, not if she had to crawl out there and heave her guts across someone’s loafers. Flint had made it clear that she couldn’t help Adam and Johnnie, but Dave was right. She knew how to make Randy and the boys behave.
Flint thought she could do this. He was counting on her. His future was riding on this concert, too. Those spotlights out there weren’t on her—they were on Northfork. Hell, looked at in the clear light of nausea, her whole life had been a rehearsal leading up to this. What would Erin Brockovich have done?
Sweat puddled under Jo’s arms, but the fury of righteousness shoved terror aside. The image of upchucking on Randy’s snakeskin boots carried her forward. With her loosely pinned curls already falling down, she staggered into the lights with Ratfink in her gun sights and the need for justice providing momentum.
She was taking Randy down. Randy was every damned man who’d ever hurt her, starting with her father, right through the yahoos in Atlanta, up to and not stopping at the unknown clerk who’d denied her mother disability, and Evan for deserting Amy. She would show them all that they couldn’t keep a good Sanderson down.
The band cheerfully switched to Flint’s melody as soon as Jo reached center stage. The familiar tune supplied her with a backbone when the spotlight hit her. Instead of freezing or staggering, she shot the Buzzards a glare that should have mowed them down like an AK47. Slim waved. She ought to barf on his shoes first. Randy was a closer target.
Turning from the Buzzards to study the audience waiting outside the cone of white light, Jo swallowed the sour taste in her throat, thankful she hadn’t had time for breakfast. Randy’s singing had finally fallen into rhythm with the band, but Flint was right. He couldn’t do justice to her music. And she was standing here like a shaky statue, afraid to grab the moment and run with it.
Her mama had told her she belonged here in Northfork, where people knew her, that she was pretending she was bigger than she was to want more. She’d already made a fool of herself twice trying to prove her mama wrong. She ought to run after Flint, prostrate herself at his feet, and pray he would take a silly waitress who wrote foolish rhymes.
But then she’d never know if she could have been more, a grown woman who could have saved the concert, and made the fortune to help her family.
Frozen in the spotlight, she could hear the audience, hear their rustle of expectation, the nervous coughs, the titters. She could crawl off now. It wasn’t as if she could do much when her mouth was so dry she couldn’t even speak.
The desperate desire to make the festival work welled up as Randy hit a flat note. They were taping everything sung here today, and he was butchering her claim to fame. Jo forced her fear so far down inside that only her hands trembled as she marched forward to snatch the mike away from Randy, who’d been blindly ignoring her entrance.
Now that she had the mike, she could either hurl or offer the audience her best sugary smile. The smile came first. The band lowered their volume.
“H-h-howdy, everybody!” she shouted, waving into the lights, doing her best to pretend she was in the coffee shop in front of friends while Randy glared. “Welcome to N-n-northfork, North Carolina,” she stammered, before closing her eyes so she couldn’t see the stage lights, “where the people are friendly and the music is crazy.”
Polite laughter agreed with her assessment. Something tight in her chest loosened, but the leers and heavy breathing still occupied the dark corners of her mind. She had to open her eyes again and do it right this time.
She could feel the sweat stains ruining her good silk shirt, but they wouldn’t be visible beneath her suede jacket. Now that she’d got the band and RJ to shut up, she lost the momentum of fury and had to search for words.
“What the hell are you doing out here, Jo?” Randy whispered, trying to recover the mike. “You’ll ruin everything.”
That was all the inspiration she needed. She held the mike tight and switched the sugary smile to him. The anger in Randy’s handsome face held her steady. If anything told her how little he regarded her, it was his inability to accept her out here with him. She’d bet her lawsuit money that with all his masculine self-confidence, Flint would have grinned and played for her without any fear of competition.
“This here’s RJ Peters, a hometown boy made good,” she simpered into the microphone. “RJ’s album will be out this month, but he ain’t anything without me.”
More laughter. Okay, she’d got this far without hurling. She had friends here. They would laugh with her, not at her. They were depending on her.
Flint was depending on her. If she thought too hard about what was happening with him and his sons, she’d scare herself even sillier, so she wouldn’t think.
“Let’s show the people how the song was meant to be sung, honey,” she oozed into the mike. She knew how to tame all that testosterone threatening to torch the show. She flapped her lashes and turned away from Randy to signal Slim. “Okay, boys, hit it!”
And they did, with Flint’s wonderful version of her song. She could sing this one number for him. They could do the contest next. The boys! They were supposed to sing their composition if they won. Punching down her anxiety, she belted out the song the way she had written it—the way Flint had meant it to be sung.
RJ stood there, gaping, as she let her voice soar.
Tickled that she’d stunned Mr. Big Mouth, Jo did a little dance wiggle just for him, adding a big smile so Ratfink knew what he was missing. She recognized the light in his eyes when it flicked on. Randy was a selfish turd, but not stupid. And he was still male. She flashed him a brief glimpse of her cleavage and chortled as his gaze drifted down instead of to the audience.
Satisfied that she’d showed him she was a little more than an insignificant country waitress that he could walk over, she forgot about the strangers in the audience, and sang out the joy and love she’d felt when she’d written the lyrics.
Realizing she was stealing his thunder, Randy attempted to reclaim the audience and the song. He strangled the fixed mike, glared at her, and picked up on the refrain.
Jo continued as if he wasn’t there. Her notes were higher, purer, and Randy didn’t have the talent to harmonize. She confused him by adding new words and changing the old. Caught up in her own bubble, she had the power, and inspiration flowed. Randy stumbled to keep up, and laughter tittered through the audience.
Confident that she had made the song hers again, knowing how it felt to be laughed at, Jo finally took pity on him and reined in her voice to complement his limited range. With a look of disgruntlement when he realized that she was singing down to him, Randy set the mike down and walked off.
Jo thought she heard him yell at someone offstage. Her voice was lifting to the rafters again, and she didn’t care. Remembering the night she’d sung for Flint in his cabin, how her notes had floated to some transcendental realm she might never conquer again without him, she closed her eyes and let the last bar soar.
The audience erupted in foot-stomping applause before the band played the last note.
***
“Along with the fractured right tibia, Johnnie has multiple contusions, and Adam has a possible concussion and a sprained wrist. I want to keep both boys in the hospital for observation overnight,” the doctor said as Flint paced up and down the narrow floor of the room to which the boys had been brought.
“Dad, no!” Adam shouted. “We’ve got to get back there! You promised.” He was struggling with the blankets and the sling for his arm and trying to stand up, even though he was whiter than the bandage patching the back of his head.
At sight of his older brother’s struggle, Johnnie was attempting the same, but he was looking pretty groggy. Flint thought his heart would carve its way straight out of his chest. He squeezed the bridge of his nose and nodded at the doctor’s instructions. He’d never seen so much blood in his life. He’d been pleading with God to take him instead of his boys. He wasn’t taking a damned chance of anything happening to them again now that he knew they would live.
“You’re not going anywhere, either of you,” he said in his best stern-dad voice, when what he really wanted to do was grab them and never let go. “There’s a whole week of activities ahead. If you don’t stay in those beds, you won’t be able to do any of them.”
“But Dad,” Johnnie argued, “we got to be there if we win. We’re gonna be rich.”
Flint ran a litany of every curse he knew through his head, nodded as the doctor raised his eyebrows and politely departed, and waited until the door closed before speaking. “What the f… devil are you talking about?”
“The contest,” Adam said insistently, sitting on the bed’s edge and looking for his bloodied clothes. “We wrote a song for the contest, and Jo said it was the best thing she’d ever heard outside your stuff. We’re gonna win.”
They might as well have taken a two-by-four and whopped him upside the head. Flint sat down abruptly in the hard hospital chair and pointed his finger at Adam. “Back in bed, right now, I mean it.”
He needed time to absorb the news that his sons were writing music, and that Jo knew about it. And didn’t tell him.
He needed time to come to grips with the knowledge that she’d got his sons all excited about a business he’d sworn to give up for them. And that she’d wormed her way into their hearts—just before she walked out and left them. Like he had. And their mother. They thought she was going to be there for them, but after today, she’d be gone with the Nashville suits. How the hell would he deal with that?
“But Dad,” Johnnie whined, “we gotta go.”
Flint rubbed his jaw and wished he knew how to hug them and tell them it would be all right. He might lie to himself occasionally, but he wasn’t too good at lying to his kids.
“You don’t need to be there if you win.” Were they good enough to win or had Jo just been feeding them bull? He couldn’t believe she’d do anything to hurt them, but she might not understand how easily they could be hurt. “And I’ll work something out so you can hear your song up there some evening, okay?”
“But they’re recording the songs today,” Adam protested. “And Matt and Sean are waiting for us.”
Flint had left the boys’ friends with Sally. He had to get back and look after them. He couldn’t leave his kids here alone. He needed to call his parents. He needed to clone himself. How the hell did single parents do it?
“You just don’t want us to have any fun,” Adam protested in that high-pitched voice kids used when they were just short of tears. “If we get rich, we could all go back to Nashville with Jo. She’s going to go off and leave us and it will be all your fault!”
Kids sure knew how to hit the nail on the head and pound it in. He was the one who had encouraged Jo. He was the one who had told her about RJ and sent his publisher her song. He was the one who hadn’t told her he loved her and needed her and didn’t want her to leave—because he knew he’d ruin her life if he did.
Try explaining that to kids groggy with pain pills. At least the boys were wise enough to understand she wasn’t staying. They weren’t helpless toddlers anymore. With a sigh, he got up and gently returned Johnnie’s broken leg to the bed. Sitting down beside his youngest, Flint wrapped him in his arms, while staring sternly across the space between the beds at his eldest. “It’s not your job to make it rich or follow Jo or get us back to Nashville, son. It’s mine. If that’s what you want, we’ll talk about it when you’re out of here. Right now, you just have to get better. Let me be the dad and take care of things, all right?”
Johnnie sagged against him, and Flint’s heart cracked when he felt a wet spot form on his best shirt from his trying-to-be-tough youngest’s tears.
Adam searched Flint’s face. “You mean that? If Jo leaves, you’ll go with her?”
He hadn’t thought that far ahead, but he’d obviously said something his kids wanted to hear. And if he let himself think about it, he’d said what he wanted to do—he wanted to be with Jo. His hand and the music and the café and the lawsuit were all just excuses. She’d been right. He was still walking away from his life, this time dodging something even bigger and scarier than failure.
He tried to stay honest. “It depends, son. You’re gonna have to trust us.”
Flint wished with all his might that Jo was here to help him out, but he’d been the one to cut her free. She deserved sunshine and rainbows, and he wouldn’t darken her big day with his woes. But when the day was over… What would he do then?
Amy popped her head in as the boys were settling into sleep. She glanced at their closed eyes and whispered, “I talked to the doctor. Do you need anything here? I can’t leave Mama with my ruffians much longer.”
Flint shook his head. Gently laying Johnnie’s head against the pillow, he rose from the bed and crossed the room so he could shake Amy’s hand. “I don’t know what I would have done without you, thank you.”
Amy was polite and quiet and had driven over here as fast as she could after the ambulance. She’d sat with him in the emergency room and patiently waited as he’d settled the boys in. She was a soothing presence, the kind of mother he’d wanted for his sons.
But he could never want maternal Amy the way he needed ebullient Jo. He knew now that he could handle his boys without a woman’s help if he had to, but he didn’t know if he could live with himself without Jo. Every fiber of his wicked soul cried for her laughter, her optimism, her hand in his to keep him happy on his new path in life.
Amy smiled without a trace of any of the doubts he suffered. “You want to come back with me? You can’t do anything else here, and they really need you at the mill. Mama and I can take care of the boys’ friends. Your dad and mom will be here in a few hours. I just called them.”
Flint shook his head. He might have lots of doubts about the steps that had brought him here, or his right to claim any happiness after he’d mucked everything up, but he didn’t have any doubts about his decision to skip the concert for his boys. “I’ve seen all those acts before,” he said, crooking his mouth up in a half-smile so she’d think he was okay.
“You’ll have lots of company once I get word around,” she assured him.
Not after he’d selfishly let everyone down like this, but he didn’t tell her that. He just nodded and let Amy go.
He longed for his guitar and a lonely place where he could put his blues to good use, even if he had to do it without chords. Now that he knew he had the strength to walk away from music for his sons, maybe he could let it back into his life, a little at a time.
Maybe if he learned to do it right this time around, he could teach the boys how to prevent the glitter from going to their heads. Telling them to stay away from music was futile, as he’d already proved. So maybe he could share the music with them. He’d like that. He’d like that a lot.
He’d like it with Jo even better.