Beyond the Footlights, page 27
“You think?”
“Only thing is, if you’re going to be happy, you have to be happy, not wait for someone to make you that way.”
That little piece of advice fell into a silent void and stayed there for a few minutes. Kilmer just didn’t know how to respond to it.
Len shrugged and kept his back to Kilmer as he began to wash his dishes. “I don’t know, man. I just… I talk about this shit all the time, is all. Some days I feel like I actually have a handle on it all, and some days I yell at my friends and break shit.” He turned and there was a sheepish smile on his face. “I’m getting better at not doing that last part, though.”
“Therapy’s good, huh?” Kilmer asked, knowing he sounded like a sarcastic asshole.
Len ignored the tone. “It’s helped me.”
For a few heartbeats, there was more silence as Kilmer mentally switched gears and actually thought about the idea. “Think I should try it?”
Len gave him a speculative look. “If you think it will help, it probably will.”
“Maybe I’ll get the shrink’s number from you.”
Len turned back to his dishes. “Sure.”
29
MORNING SUN snuck in under the overhang as Tanner paced the porch of Kilmer’s house. The instant he’d arrived, he’d known by the lack of vehicles in the drive that Kilmer wasn’t inside. For some reason, Tanner had been pissed. The door wasn’t locked—again—so he knew Kilmer had been by sometime after he’d quit for the day yesterday, because Tanner had locked up behind himself. He didn’t know how long the house had been unlocked, and it annoyed him that Kilmer had left everything wide open.
Sure it was a small town and it was relatively safe, but construction zones were easy targets. Kids often snooped just on the off chance there were expensive tools lying around forgotten. Tanner knew better than to be that careless, but delinquents who didn’t find anything to steal often just trashed the place out of small-town boredom. It wasn’t worth taking the chance.
On their arrival inside, the dog had wandered through the rooms to look for Kilmer and yowled his displeasure at finding no one. He’d eventually settled where he could watch Tanner work and still see the front door.
It had been a short and fruitless vigil. Kilmer hadn’t appeared, and Tanner was too annoyed to concentrate on power-tool safety. He told himself he didn’t care that Kilmer hadn’t called, or texted, or answered any of Tanner’s messages. They’d spent some time together, but they weren’t a couple. There had been no declarations. Kilmer didn’t owe him an account of his whereabouts.
But he’d hightailed it away from Tanner, leaving his dog behind and making no effort to let Tanner know he was okay. Now the poor mutt was sprawled in a shady corner from where he watched Tanner’s progress with barely a tilt of his head from one side to the other.
It was past time for Tanner to get started on his day. He shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t matter, and he had work to do. He was making good progress on the renovations, and so far Kilmer hadn’t seemed to have any complaints. Tanner didn’t need him here for anything. But it would have been nice to hear what he’d thought when he came by to have a look.
It would be nice to hear his answer to Tanner’s invitation to play with the band.
It would be nice to hear any damn thing at all.
“Fuck!” He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck and turned on his heel to make another circuit of the porch. Catching a glimpse of his reflection in the front window, he grimaced. His hair stuck out from the fast and loose bun he’d shoved it up into, and he had three-day stubble over his chin. The red flannel he wore open over the gray tank top flapped in the morning breeze and he hadn’t properly tied up his work boots yet. The fringes around the rips in his old jeans flared around the tears. All in all he looked like an angry punk porcupine.
“And that matters why?” he asked the dog.
The dog yawned at him and plunked his head back onto the tops of his paws.
“Not helpful.”
Dog thumped his tail once and squeezed his eyes shut.
“You know what? Not doing this. He doesn’t get to vanish and keep me guessing. Come on. We’re going for a drive.”
The dog got up and followed when Tanner headed for his truck. He needed no urging to hop up into the passenger seat and sat quietly as Tanner headed toward the Texas Ex.
Three quarters of the way there, he passed a red Toyota pickup on the side of the road at the base of the moraine. The driver was stretched out in the bed of the truck, a tarp over his legs, and the spare tire propping him up. He jolted awake as Tanner drove past. The guy looked like death warmed over. Tanner had to wonder what he was doing on the side of the road instead of at home in his bed.
Closer to the top of the hill, around the bend, and just about going back down the other side, Tanner got an answer to his question. The tail end of a dark gray car stuck out of the ditch less than ten meters from the place where the land fell away from the road to the fields below in a steep fifteen-meter drop. Whoever had been driving the car was lucky. Had they been going any faster, or been just another three meters along the road, they would have easily missed the end of the leaning guardrail and been over the edge and possibly very dead at the bottom of that hill.
As it was, the car was nose down in the swampy ground at the bottom of the ditch. Tanner stopped to check and make sure there was no one inside. There wasn’t, but as he neared, the cold chill of recognition washed over him. This was Kilmer’s car. On the dash, spread there from the impact, was the shirt he had stolen from Tanner.
Tanner could see in the mud around the driver’s door that Kilmer had managed to climb out of the ditch under his own steam, but the impact had deployed the airbags and the front of the car was crumpled. It was probably a write-off.
“Fucking hell!” Tanner ran back to his car, pulling out his phone as he went. He punched Kilmer’s number on his recent-calls list and waited through the ringing. As soon as it went to voice mail, he hammered out an order for Kilmer to call him back, that he’d found the car, and if he was hurt, Tanner was going to fucking kill him.
It took all the willpower he had not to race the rest of the way to the ranch, and more still not to piss off the security guards who stopped him at the gate. He should have anticipated the guards. After all this was Vance Ashcroft and Lenny Stevens’s place. Tanner was an intruder, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d be an incarcerated intruder.
“Look,” he tried, in a more placating voice after one of the guards warned him to get back in his truck and drive away. “I’m only looking for Kilmer Hennessey. I have his dog, see?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the mutt watching from the front seat.
“He doesn’t have a dog, sir. If you’ll just get back in your truck, please—” His instructions were interrupted by Tanner’s phone, and Tanner held up a hand.
“One sec.” A glance at the screen showed him Kilmer’s number and he accepted the call. “Tex?”
“Hey.”
“What the ever-loving hell, Kilmer!”
“Calm down. Just—”
“Tell your guards to let me in.” He held out the phone to the guard, who was watching him with a look of supreme annoyance on his face. The man frowned, reached over, and hit the Speaker button.
“Mr. Hennessey?”
“Yeah, Arnie. You can let him in. He’s good. Put his name on the list or whatever, yeah?”
“I need authorization from—”
“Hey, Arnie.” Len’s lighter voice came over the speaker. “It’s good, man. Let him in. And put him on the list.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Stevens.” He met Tanner’s gaze. “I’ll get his information, let him in today with an escort. He only gets full clearance after we do a background check.”
There was a heavy sigh over the phone, and Tanner guessed it came from Len. “Do your thing, Arnie.”
“I will.” Arnie gave Tanner a sharp nod. Tanner took his phone off speaker and turned his back.
“Kilmer?”
“Yeah, hey. I’m fine. Sore. But fine.”
“What happened?”
“Come up. I’ll explain.”
Damn right he would. “I’ll be there as soon as Robocop lets me through.” He hung up the phone and gave the guard his attention. It took almost a half hour to jump through all their hoops, and when he was done, he was told to take the passenger seat as one of the other guards drove his truck up the long drive to the front of the house. A car followed them, presumably to back up the driver and offer him a return ride to the gate.
The first thing Tanner noticed was that the place wasn’t fancy. It was a working ranch after all, and it showed in the sturdy fencing and the attention given more to the outbuildings along the way than to the house itself, which needed a paint job.
That was about as far as Tanner’s attention got, though. Kilmer stepped out onto the porch as the truck pulled up, and Tanner’s attention riveted on him. The dog squirmed between him and the guard when he saw Kilmer, then tried to wiggle over Tanner’s lap.
The guard grinned and nodded. “You can let him out.” This guard was a whole lot less hardass than the one at the gate had been, especially now they were out from under the other’s scrutiny. “And don’t let Arnie freak you out. He’s got a boner for the rule book.”
“Probably makes him good at what he does,” Tanner observed.
“Very. But he can stand to take the stick out of his ass once in a while.” He put the truck in park and got out, waved to the car, which swung round and headed back to the gate, then folded his hands before himself to wait.
“You don’t have to hang around, Cade,” Kilmer told the guard.
“You want to tell Arnie that, sir?”
“Hell, no.”
Cade grinned. “Then I think I’ll just stand around, look intimidating for a little while, and report back once Mr. Jones has left the grounds.”
“Suit yourself.” Kilmer led Tanner back toward the house, and Cade followed a few paces behind.
“Is it always like this?” he asked, glancing back to find Cade still grinning. The guard winked at him.
“It is what it is,” Kilmer said. “Normally they stay at the gates and keep their eyes on the perimeter fences. They only come to the house if there are people here who aren’t on their list. Since Len moved in, there have been way too many reporters and asshole fans around. Country fans at least have some manners. Those grunge groupies are complete mouth-breathing maniacs.”
“Hey now.” Len playfully smacked Kilmer’s arm and gave him a slight push, which really only served to bounce Len off Kilmer and back a half step. “Hi again,” he told Tanner. “Guess he sort of freaked you out, huh?” he asked, jerking a thumb at Kilmer. “Me too.”
“Sort of?” Tanner rounded on Kilmer, who was patting his dog and carefully not looking at him. “Do you have any idea how close you came to the drop-off? And why weren’t you answering your phone?”
“Wasn’t my fault,” Kilmer protested, straightening with a wince and a groan. “My phone died last night. I forgot to plug it in until a half hour ago. Sorry.”
Tanner raised one eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Oh. Not the phone.”
“Not the fucking phone.”
“Some asshole—probably drunk asshole—almost ran me off the road.”
“No almost about it,” Tanner mumbled. “At least he seems to have scared himself enough to have stopped to sleep it off. I passed him about a half mile on, sleeping in the bed of his truck.”
Kilmer smirked. “Bunch of rednecks around here. You saw my car? It was dark. I didn’t get a good look at her.”
Tanner shook his head. “Totaled.”
“Shit.” Kilmer sank into a kitchen chair.
“You can use one of the ranch trucks,” Len told him. “No worries.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Just going to have to find something else for Janet to drive in to school, and should probably get her a new car seat. Not supposed to use them anymore after they’ve been in an accident.”
“Already done,” Len said. “I ordered one online this morning. Arnie’s finding her wheels.”
“Good.” Kilmer rubbed at his chest and winced, prompting Tanner to push his hand away, and then peel back the edge of his collar. “Leave it.” Kilmer tried to tug the shirt back, but Tanner glared and he stopped.
Tanner dragged over a second chair, sat, and proceeded to unbutton Kilmer’s flannel. The tank beneath slipped off his shoulder as Tanner eased the shirt away to reveal the dark mass of bruises where the seat belt had engaged.
“Seat belts worked,” Kilmer said. “Airbags too.”
“Good.” Tanner traced the outline of the marks. “Collarbone?”
“Intact.”
“You sure?”
Kilmer nodded. “Broke it falling off a horse once. I know what it feels like. It is sore but not broken this time.”
“You gonna be able to sling a guitar?”
Kilmer stared at him.
“Legit question, dude,” Len piped up from the sidelines.
“Not your business, dude,” Kilmer shot back.
Len just snorted. “Answer the man’s question.”
30
KILMER STARED at Tanner as gooseflesh popped up along his skin where Tanner’s fingers traced the bruising. His entire chest ached. Taking a deep breath hurt. The tingle of his skin under Tanner’s touch was a balm.
Tanner sighed. “All right. Forget about the bass strap for now. Come on.”
Kilmer furrowed his brow. “Excuse me?”
“You should have gone to Emerge last night. I’m taking you now.”
“So we can sit in the waiting room for hours to have the doctor tell me I got bruised up?”
Tanner glared at him, lips pursed and eyes blazing.
“I don’t need a hospital.”
“You will get in my truck, I’ll drive you to the hospital, and you’ll get checked out.” He looked past Kilmer to Len. “You should already have brought him there.”
Len paled and took a step back.
“Leave him alone,” Kilmer barked. “He hasn’t done anything.”
“Including get you to see a doctor.”
“I don’t need a fucking doctor!”
“You totaled your car in a ditch, Kilmer. You might have broken something, not the least of which is your fucking head. You should have gone to the hospital last night.” Tanner glared at Len again. “You should have known better. If he’d been concussed—”
“Hey!” Kilmer stepped between Tanner and Len, and even Cade took a step forward. “I said to leave him alone. You don’t get to yell at him. Ever.”
“I do if he’s not taking proper care of my b—you.” Tanner visibly reined himself in, then pointed behind himself toward the front door. “Get. In. The. Truck.” Tanner held his gaze, eyes blazing.
A wave of heat sizzled through Kilmer.
This wasn’t okay. He couldn’t just cave and do as ordered. He didn’t need another Jacko in his life. He didn’t need force and orders and implacability. Then Tanner touched his face, a warm palm against his cheek, and the heat fizzled to the surface, seared his skin, and Kilmer flushed.
“I can’t be reasonable right now,” Tanner said, voice gravelly and low. “Do this. For me. Then we’ll talk.”
They stared at one another as Kilmer tried to breathe. His head swam and he felt the tremors begin at his extremities.
“Please, Tex.”
The heat broke and a shiver traveled down Kilmer’s spine. “Fuck, I hate when you call me that.” He had no defense against the nickname, or a man who bothered to give him one. He rose and looked around for his dog, who appeared instantly at his side to press against his leg.
“I’ll—” Len hurried forward and took hold of the dog’s collar. “He can hang here.”
Kilmer nodded. “Thanks.” He glanced from one to the other of them.
“He’s right, sir,” Cade said after a stretch of silence. “Had we known of the accident, Arnie would have brought you himself.”
“As would I. How did I not know this?” Standing in the kitchen doorway, Maggie faced them all, a hand on one hip, the other arm supporting Janet’s daughter.
“Maggie!” Len hurried to her, and she whapped him lightly across the back of his head.
“Fool boy,” she muttered and thrust the child into his hands. “Take her. Kilmer, get over here.”
Kilmer marched over and stopped in front of her.
With a hand on either cheek, she pulled his face down to look into his eyes. He stared back while she evaluated whatever it was she saw. After a few moments, she let him go and harrumphed. “You let that man take you to see a proper doctor, Kilmer, and I’ll hear no more argument. Here.” She went to the fridge, opened it, then pulled out two apples and a handful of string cheese packets. “Take these so you don’t starve.” She shoved the snacks into Kilmer’s hands. “I’ll have a meal ready”—she faced Tanner with a piercing look—“so you call when you’re on your way home, here.” She pointed to the kitchen floor at her feet. “Both of you, understand?”
Tanner nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Now git.” She shooed them to the door, which Cade held open.
“Shall I follow, Mr. Hennessey?” he asked.
“No,” Kilmer muttered. “It’s fine.” And under his breath, “I’m fine.”
“Get in the truck,” Tanner ordered gently, and Kilmer did because he was vastly outnumbered, tired, and very sore.
Once in the truck and on the road, Kilmer spoke. “I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
“I need you to go. I need a doctor to look you over and tell me you’re going to be fine. I saw your car. You were lucky to walk away with nothing broken. This matters to me.”
“Then take me to the clinic here in town instead of the hospital. It’s closer.”
“And there’s no doctor.”
“Rhonda is a very good nurse practitioner. She can look me over and do the tests and tell me if I need to see a doctor.” He held up a hand when Tanner opened his mouth. “And if she says I need a doctor, I’ll go, no complaints. I promise.”
