“What’s goin’ on, darlin’?” Dixie asked in the Texas drawl she mostly saved for him alone these days.

Rhett ran a hand through his hair-a habit he’d tried hard to kick and seldom indulged in anymore, except in private family moments like this. “Not sure,” he said, frowning. Figuring out his son never had been easy for him; times like this it seemed well nigh impossible. “You know Ethan. He doesn’t say a whole lot. It’s hard to know what in the world is going on with him.”

“He called,” Dixie pointed out. “There must be something. Something big.”

Rhett nodded, still feeling bemused. “He wants me to pull some strings-see if I can get some information for him.”

“Wow. Must be something really big. If that boy is even willin’ to acknowledge he’s related to the most powerful man on the planet, much less take advantage of that fact…” Dixie was laughing when Rhett leaned over and kissed the top of her head.

“Hush, woman. Wait’ll I tell you what he wants me to find out.”

“Do tell.”

“It’s about a woman.”

“Oh, my Lord. A woman.” Dixie’s eyes were wide. “You’re kiddin’ me.”

Rhett was solemnly shaking his head. “God’s truth. He wants me to find out everything I can about…are you ready? Phoenix.”

“Phoenix? You mean the singer?”

“That’s the one. Remind me to ask Mrs. Oxford tomorrow, will you? She’ll know how to go about it.”

“I’ll take care of it, if you want me to,” Dixie offered-as he’d hoped she would. Well, it was more or less her bailiwick, after all.

Rhett put out his arm and Dixie came into its curve with the sweet ease of long habit. “Didn’t we meet her?” he asked as he reached with the other arm to turn off the lights.

“Yeah, we did. In Dallas, remember? Mama and Daddy’s ‘Feed The World’ benefit. I thought she was…” she searched for the word “…dynamic.”

“Hmm. Not at all Ethan’s type, I wouldn’t think.”

“Hmm…well,” Dixie murmured, “I know a whole lotta people wouldn’t’ve thought I was your type, either.” She giggled, and he felt a surge of familiar delight as his mouth found hers.


Ethan had chosen to go back to the studio on Thursday. He told himself that. He told himself he had no reason not to, his evening was free, and, he thought, he might even get some more information to pass on to Frank and his committee. He told himself it was simply the sensible thing to do. That it was also the adult thing to do; staying away just because Phoenix had all but ordered him to come was the kind of childish game-playing he abhored.

He told himself those things over and over again, repeating them in his mind like a difficult formula he wanted to commit to memory. He said them also like a mantra, trying to block out the other reason-probably the main reason, possibly the only real reason-for being there. Because. He wanted to.

He’d wanted to see her again. She was in his mind, and he couldn’t get her out. She’d invaded his solitude like the noisy neighbors who’d lived downstairs during his student days, playing music at all hours of the day and night, never loud enough to warrant a complaint, just loud enough so that it was always there, eating away at his concentration, robbing him of the sleep he’d needed like an addict needs his drug. She tried to invade during his working hours, too, and the effort it took to hold her at bay left him feeling drained, every bit as exhausted as he’d been back in those nightmare med school days.

Her face hovered like a specter on the edges of his consciousness; her eyes mocked him, haunted him with memories of the little girl he’d been allowed to glimpse for one brief moment in their depths. Her voice, her husky laughter…they played unendingly in his head, like one of those annoying bits of song.

He’d thought-he’d hoped-that by taking some sort of definitive action he’d at last be able to put her out of his mind. So he’d called his dad. My father-the president of the United States. He, Ethan Brown, had called on the leader of the free world to get information for him about…a rock star. It made him cringe to even think about it. What had he been thinking?

But…it had been late at night and he’d been desperate for sleep. Afterward, relieved, he’d finally drifted off with her words I don’t give out personal information echoing in his mind, only to wake up with her scent lingering in his memory, as vividly as if she’d just risen from his bed, as if she’d just that moment stepped beyond his line of sight. So vividly, he’d almost expected to find the imprint of her head on the pillow next to his, and the sheets beside him still warm from her body, to hear her voice, singing in his shower.

Phoenix in his bed? What was he thinking?

Oh, she wanted him in her bed, of that he had no doubt. And how, he couldn’t have said, but he somehow knew that the two did not amount to the same thing. Not the same thing at all.

So. He’d come back to her studio tonight of his own free will, because it was the grown-up, sensible, logical thing to do. And because he’d wanted to see her again. Needed to see her, if only to remind himself of all the reasons why he’d be a fool to choose to do so again.

Now, standing in the darkened recording studio watching Phoenix work, Ethan could only wonder what kind of fool he’d been to think he’d ever had a choice at all.

She didn’t know he was there, yet. She was alone in the soundproof booth, and what he could see of her, from the waist up, was dressed in a tiger-print halter top that left her entire back bare, with her hair twisted and looped into a coil on the back of her head to keep it out of the way of the headphones. She seemed to him like some rare and exotic specimen in a museum case, a creature so fragile it must be protected even from the air, so delicate it might not survive the slightest touch.

He felt a sudden and extraordinary sadness, seeing her like this, isolated in her tiny glass island of light. Somewhere, he knew, a technician manipulated banks of controls, experimented with sound levels, adjusted the mix-terms he’d heard somewhere but didn’t really understand. Knowing that didn’t change the impression he had, of utter and complete aloneness. With her eyes tightly closed and headphones clamped over her ears, she was in her own private world…a place where, he realized with a deep sense of sorrow, he-and perhaps no one-could ever follow.

“She should be wrappin’ it up soon.” Ethan gave a start at the sound of a voice so close by, prompting a cackle of laughter and a raspy, “Didn’t mean to make you jump.”

He nodded at the man who’d come silently to stand beside him-a black man with close-cropped gray hair and a frosting of white beard stubble, sinewy flesh hung on a frame that had once been for a larger man but was now in the process of shrinking. Something about the way those yellowed old eyes studied him told Ethan there was no need to explain.

“Just me, old Doveman.” He offered his hand and Ethan took it; it felt papery but strong.

“Hi, I’m Ethan Brown.”

“I know who you are.” The piano man sounded amused. He jerked his head toward the recording booth. “She’s been at it all afternoon long. That song been giving her fits. Just won’t come the way she wants it.” He shook his head in a resigned sort of way. “Well…she’s a perfectionist, always has been. All the great ones are. And she’s definitely one of the great ones.”

Ethan didn’t bother with a reply; the comment needed none. What he was thinking was that the statement had a certain irony, coming from Rupert Dove, a man who’d qualify as one of the greats in his own right.

It also occurred to him that standing here beside him was the one person who’d been with Pheonix since her beginnings, and of all the people in the world, just possibly the one who knew her best.

Impulsively, he asked, “How long have you known her?”

The piano man laughed softly. “Long enough.”

“Since before she was Phoenix?” Ethan paused, conscious of the risk he was taking. “Did you know her when she was Joanna Dunn?”

Doveman turned his head and gave him a sharp look. “Be careful, boy. There’s three people in this world knows about that.”

“I wondered.” Ethan let out a rush of breath as the significance of that sank in. “Why me?” he said in an angry whisper. “Why did she tell me, do you know?”

Doveman shrugged. “Who knows why any woman does what she does?”

“Especially this woman,” said Ethan with a wry smile. He paused, and after a moment added in magnificent understatement, “She’s a hard person to get to know.”

The piano man acknowledged that with a cackle of rusty laughter, and then was silent, his gaze fixed on the lonely figure in the lighted booth. After a while he spoke in the slow, thoughtful way old people sometimes do, taking up just where they’d left it. “Hard on the outside maybe. But…that woman in there-” he nodded toward the booth while he turned his eyes to Ethan “-there’s somethin’ you got to know. Oh, she’s done a lot of livin’, that I know. A whole lot of livin.’ But what you got to understand is, her heart’s still a virgin. You know how you handle a virgin, don’t you, boy? You take it slow…you go gentle. And you got to expect some resistance.”

Chapter 7

Doc and Doveman-they’d been talking about her, Phoenix could tell. They had that “male bonding” look-and how men managed it was a mystery to her-a look that was at the same time superior and guilty as hell.

In a way, she was glad to have an excuse to be annoyed. An excuse to ignore the leap of-Oh, God, what was it-joy? Excitement? Whatever this terrible thing was that made her stomach drop and her heart lurch headlong into a new tempo when she stepped out of the booth and saw the two of them standing together. How long had they been there in the shadows? she wondered. Watching her.

A shiver that was not all displeasure raced along her skin, rousing senses and awakening nerve endings. Muscles and tendons coaxed her body, almost against her will, into a new and more sensual alignment.

“Hey, Doc,” she said as she joined them. And she hid both the annoyance and excitement behind lowered lashes and a purr so blatantly sexy it could never be taken seriously. “So, you decided to come back and see me.”

Oh, but that little half smile of his…how could she stay mad when he looked at her like that? Suddenly feeling like a high school kid hoping this cute boy was about to ask her to the dance, she slapped on brusqueness to cover her vulnerability in much the same way she might put on a baseball cap to hide her hair. “Too bad-I don’t have any information for you-Patrick hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

The doc merely shrugged, no more affected by her curtness than by her come-on. “So, I guess I came for nothing, then.”

Panic and pride fought within her, anger hovering on the sidelines: What’s he going to do, walk out on me again? Well, God help him if he does. Nobody walks out on Phoenix twice. Nobody.

Panic won, though there was no sign of it in her voice when she purred, “Oh, I don’t think so, Doc.”

And after that there was silence. Phoenix realized all at once that they were alone, she and the doc, alone in the empty studio. At some point Doveman had faded into the shadows and left them there, and she hadn’t even noticed. She wondered if the doc had. In the stillness she could hear her own heart beating, feel his solid presence less than an arm’s length away. She felt a sudden and intense desire to reach out and touch him, to lay her hand on his chest, to feel the beating of his heart. She wondered if-oh, she wanted it to be-his heart was beating as hard and fast as hers.

She didn’t touch him. Instead she heard a scratchy voice say softly, “Where do we go from here, Doc?”

Even in the dim light she knew he’d narrowed his eyes in that way he had of doing when something had hit home. She knew, too, that his voice would be even quieter than usual when he answered. It was-she almost had to strain to hear it. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

She turned to stroll without intent across the empty rehearsal hall, and he kept pace with her. Her stomach felt like a lump of lead and her heart as though it was in her throat, so she took special care to make her voice airy, her tone light. “The last time you were here, I asked you to stay and have dinner with me. You turned me down, Doc.” She gave a low chuckle; he’d never know how it felt to her-like rocks tumbling in her chest. “That doesn’t happen to me too often. I guess I’d like to know why you did it.”

She could feel him there so close beside her, feel the heat of his body, his solid quietness. How strange, then, that when he spoke he seemed so far away, as if his voice had reached her from another dimension. “I guess I didn’t see any point in staying.”