Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Read online

  Danny never looked back. The music hummed and throbbed inside him, and he came alive in front of an audience. His music was his mistress, a siren far more seductive than any mortal woman. And unlike mortal women, this lady wouldn’t disappoint him. She was going to take him straight to the top. With a little help from Casey Bradley. Danny was a singer, not a songwriter, but he possessed an artist’s appreciation for a good song, and Casey wrote songs that sent an icy blue finger down the center of Danny Fiore’s cynical spine.

  He plumped the pillow behind his head, took a drag on his cigarette, and watched the smoke rise toward the water-stained ceiling of the attic bedroom where his buddy Travis had spent his adolescence. Drawing the ashtray across the night stand, he said, “Tell me about Casey.”

  Sprawled across the other bunk, Travis looked up from a tattered Star Trek paperback. “What about her?”

  “For starters,” he said, “how come you forgot to tell me she’s a knockout?”

  Travis blinked. “A knockout? My sister?”

  He drew deeply on the cigarette. Exhaled. “Christ, Trav, are you blind or just retarded?”

  Travis returned to his book. “She’s not your type. My sister’s too level-headed to look twice at a bozo like you.”

  Dryly, he said, “I didn’t say I wanted to marry the girl.”

  “Don’t go getting any ideas, Fiore. Casey is off limits.”

  Obviously. The rock she wore on the third finger of her left hand clearly advertised her status. But it didn’t diminish his curiosity. He knew instinctively that here was a woman who would never play games, a woman who would meet a man halfway, a woman who would demand as much as she gave. With Casey, a man would never wonder where he stood.

  She scared the hell out of him.

  And what the devil was she thinking of, marrying that Lindstrom character? Danny thought of her eyes, the color of jade: cool, but with a hint of fire buried somewhere in those smoky depths. He’d be willing to bet that Lindstrom hadn’t tasted any of that fire.

  He wondered why the thought gave him so much satisfaction.

  When he crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray and sat up, Travis eyed him warily. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  Danny pulled on his shoes and began lacing them up. “To buy your sister a cup of coffee,” he said.

  ***

  The Jackson Diner was deserted at this time of night, except for a lone trucker who sat at the end of the bar, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. Elsie Cameron was washing out the pie case with a wet rag, and from the kitchen came the scratchy buzz of Todd Whitley’s radio, tuned, as always, to a country station out of Portland. Their coffee sat forgotten before them as Danny Fiore traced a pattern on the chipped Formica with his spoon. “I tried to fit in at B.U.,” he said, “but I wasn’t like the other kids. Most of them came from money. I came from Salem Street. Little Italy. I was there on an academic scholarship, and I had a chip on my shoulder the size of the Tobin Bridge.” His smile was rueful. “I didn’t even dress like the rest of them. The other guys had ripped jeans, scraggly beards, hair down to their asses. I was the only one wearing chinos and a DA.”

  “So,” Casey said softly, “what happened?”

  “I lasted one semester. I had a straight 4.0 average, and I dropped out of school.” Playing with a packet of sugar, he said, “It wasn’t more than a couple of months before Uncle Sam caught up with me.” His voice grew tight. “I was one of the lucky ones chosen to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.” He shoved the sugar packet aside.

  “Vietnam?”

  “I wasn’t exactly what you’d call politically astute. Up to that point, Vietnam wasn’t much more to me than a name on a map. I never did figure out what we were doing there. Fighting Communism, they told us. I spent thirteen months in that hellhole.” He stared into the depths of his coffee cup. “When you come back from there,” he said, “everything’s out of sync. The whole world has moved forward, but you’ve stayed in one place.” He looked at her with those blue eyes. “You know what I mean?”

  Frowning, she nodded. He ran the fingers of both hands through his long hair. “And the worst thing is, it’s still with you. It’s with you when you close your eyes at night and when you open them in the morning and all the time in between.” He stopped abruptly and looked at her in surprise. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t want to hear all this.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

  “I didn’t mean to spill my guts. I never do this. You have a strange effect on me.” He studied her quizzically and cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “how long have you been writing music?”

  His abrupt change of subject startled her. “Oh,” she said, “since about forever. I come by it naturally. Mama was a concert pianist. A very good one. By the time she was sixteen, she’d already toured Europe. When she was eighteen, she came down with pneumonia, and her parents sent her to recuperate at her Aunt Elizabeth’s house. She met Dad when he came over one day to complain that Aunt Elizabeth’s sheep dog had gotten loose again and was chasing his heifers around the pasture. Trying to herd them.”

  Danny grinned, and she responded in kind. “Six weeks later,” she said, “they were married.”

  “And she gave it all up for love?”

  Casey smiled ruefully. “When I was twelve, I thought it was the most romantic story I’d ever heard.”

  “And now?”

  “Now,” she said, resting both elbows on the table, “I wonder how she could have given up that much of herself. Even for somebody she loved.”

  “I’m dead serious about this,” he said, leaning forward intently over the table. “I’m going all the way to the top. I’m going to be a star, and I don’t want just anybody’s songs, I want yours. I don’t intend to give up until you say yes.”

  I’m going to be a star. He spoke the words as casually as though he’d said he was going to be a doctor, or a plumber. If anybody else had uttered them, she would have laughed. But there was an intensity about Danny Fiore that refused to be denied. A shiver skittered down her spine. “I’m flattered,” she said. “Really, I am, but—”

  “You’re tremendously talented. Are you going to just throw it away? Give it all up for love, like your mother did?”

  The man was a steamroller. She should have been angry, but she wasn’t, maybe because in some hidden part of her, she knew he was right. She studied those blue eyes, so straightforward and determined. “I’ve written more,” she said.

  The gleam in his eyes intensified. “Can I see them?”

  “You could, if there was anything to see. But there’s nothing on paper that would mean anything to you.” She shrugged in apology. “I don’t read music.”

  He raised both eyebrows. “Your mother was a concert pianist, and you never learned to read music?”

  “I had a natural ear and perfect pitch,” she said. “I took the easy way out.”

  He tapped his fingertips against the tabletop as he considered the situation. “It doesn’t have to be a problem,” he said. “Rob’s brilliant at transcription.”

  “Who’s Rob?”

  “Rob MacKenzie. He’s a bloody genius, that’s who he is. He composes, he arranges, and he plays guitar like he was born with it in his hands. Here’s what I’m thinking. We can sit you down at a piano with MacKenzie and a stack of manuscript paper. You play, he transcribes it onto paper. The end result would be the same.”

  “I’m flattered,” she said. “Really. But I’m getting married in four weeks.”

  “Come to Boston with us. Just for a few days. I’ll introduce you to Rob, see if the two of you can work together.” He smiled, and something happened deep inside her, something sudden and unexpected and startlingly beautiful. Her heart began a slow thudding as she thought about Jesse. About missed chances. About her wedding, just four weeks away.

  And about her father, who would heartily disapprove of her taking off for parts unknown with this blue-ey
ed stranger. In all her eighteen years, she’d never done anything Dad would disapprove of.

  But Danny Fiore believed in her, believed in her talent, when nobody else had ever given it a second thought. She was eighteen years old. Old enough to decide for herself what she wanted to do with her life, instead of what Dad or Jesse wanted her to do. And what she wanted was to follow this ride as far as it would take her.

  “Mr. Fiore,” she said, “you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  chapter three

  Ziggy’s was a dark, dank cellar hole near Boston’s Kenmore Square, marked by a chartreuse neon sign and a heavy wooden door that belched waves of music onto the sidewalk every time it opened. Danny Fiore whisked her past the bouncer and into the turmoil within. She’d never seen so many people crammed into so little space. Squeezing between bodies, she put her trust in Danny’s navigational skills and followed those broad shoulders toward an unseen destination.

  “The place is packed,” he said over the steady boom-boom of a Doobie Brothers recording. “Do you mind standing?”

  Casey looked out over a sea of occupied tables. “I guess I don’t have a choice,” she said. “Is it always this crowded?”

  “It is,” he said, raising one corner of his mouth in a wry grin, “when we play here.”

  He left her leaning against a splintered wooden support beam carved with graffiti. Lizzie loves Jeff. TE & PF 4-ever. Impeach Nixon. She flagged down a waitress and ordered a Coke, then studied the people around her. They were for the most part college kids, dressed in jeans and an abundance of hair, and they congregated in noisy groups whose boundaries were continually shifting.

  The Doobies wailed their finale. Into the ensuing silence rushed the clink of glasses and the steady buzz of conversation. The lights went out abruptly, plunging the room into a blackness so palpable she could taste it. Conversation skidded to a halt. A smattering of applause rippled through the expectant hush, and Casey’s fingers tightened on her glass.

  Sound and light erupted simultaneously, and Danny Fiore stood in a pool of amber, all long silky hair and skintight jeans, one booted foot tapping accompaniment to the familiar driving rhythm of a rock anthem immortalized by the McCoys. The gold chain around his neck sparked and caught fire, and he tossed back all that tawny hair and jumped in headfirst.

  And the bottom dropped out of the world.

  As he wove the story of a girl named Sloopy, that dark, velvet voice caressed the lyrics, slow and deliberate and naughty, infusing them with meanings never before intended. She should have been prepared for the power of that vibrant tenor. But she wasn’t. She should have expected to be swept up and torn into pieces. But she hadn’t. She should have run from that blatant, smoldering sexuality. But she didn’t. Casey’s heart ricocheted off her ribs like a ping pong ball out of control as those blue eyes captured and held hers for a single instant. And even though she knew it was an illusion, part of the act, for that instant she truly believed he was singing just to her.

  With a deliberate toss of his head he sent all that silky hair flying to surround him in a golden halo before it fell, in slow motion, to his shoulders. Casey tried to swallow, but all the moisture was gone from her mouth, and her hands were trembling so hard she couldn’t raise her drink to her lips. With the last shreds of her rapidly disintegrating sanity, she realized that she was seeing the first budding shoots of greatness, the beginning of a legend, a phenomenon.

  His words came back then to haunt her: I’m going to be a star.

  Oh, yes.

  She joined enthusiastically in the thunderous applause. Danny paused to catch his breath. “Thanks,” he said, trying to be heard above the commotion. “Thank you.” He gave up then, scooped the long hair back from his face with one hand and waited for the noise to subside. “I really want to thank you all for coming here tonight,” he said. “We haven’t played here for a while, and we thought it would be fun to let you get into the act. So give us your requests, and if the boys here can play ‘em, I’ll try to sing ‘em.”

  A blonde near the stage yelled, “Your phone number!”

  “My what?” He flashed that billion-dollar smile. “Come on, lady, give me a break.”

  There were titters from the audience, then a voice from the back of the room shouted, “Sing something dirty!” There was a burst of laughter from the area surrounding the woman who had spoken, and Danny shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to see past the lights and the crowd.

  “Sing something dirty?” he said in mock disbelief. More titters from the audience. “I must be in the wrong town,” he said. “Somebody told me this was Boston!”

  He turned to the lanky blond lead guitarist. “Hey, Rob, do we know any dirty songs that won’t bring the cops in?”

  Rob grinned and mumbled something, and Danny turned back to the audience. “How about Brown Sugar?” There was immediate cheering and foot-stomping. “And if that’s not dirty enough for you, honey,” he said, “you haven’t listened to the words!”

  Forty-five minutes later, amid boisterous applause, he left the stage and made his way through the crowd to where she’d finally snagged a seat. He grabbed an empty chair from the next table, pulled it up beside hers, and straddled it, arms dangling over the back. His hair was damp from the intense heat of the spotlight he’d been under, and he swept it back from his face with one hand. Rattling the ice cubes in his glass, he watched them swirl around. “So,” he said, still examining the contents of his glass, “what do you think?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you how good you are.”

  “I know what I think.” His level blue gaze met hers, and Casey felt a shock run clear through her. “I want to know what you think.”

  She looked into those incredible blue eyes and wondered just what she was getting herself into. “I think,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “that you’re too good to waste your time singing in places like this.”

  He raised his glass and took a sip. “It’s called paying your dues. It’s a necessary evil, like death and taxes.”

  “And how long do you have to pay before you start getting something in return?”

  He crunched an ice cube between perfect white teeth. “You work your ass off and hope and pray for a lucky break.”

  She frowned. “I believe in making your own breaks.”

  “That’s a lovely theory, he said, “but it doesn’t work well in practice.”

  “Do you have a manager?”

  He snorted. “So I can pay him ten percent of nothing?”

  “Maybe all you need is someone who can focus you in the right direction.”

  “My focus isn’t flawed. It’s more a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

  “Where do you get all your confidence?” she asked him.

  His grin was devastating. “It’s all a front,” he said. “Inside, I’m a quivering mass of Jell-O.”

  “You terrify me,” she said. “You make me hungry for things I’m not sure I have a right to want.”

  Bluntly, he said, “Nobody has the right to tell you what to want.”

  Why did she have the feeling they were no longer talking about his singing, her songwriting? He stood up, and she realized that the band was already back on stage, tuning their instruments and sending pointed looks in his direction. He held out his hand. “Deal?”

  For a moment, she lost herself in those blue eyes. Then she gripped his hand firmly. “Deal.” Already, she knew it wasn’t enough. But she had no right to ask for more. She would have to settle for what she could get.

  She felt as though she’d spent her entire life settling for second best.

  ***

  With one hand buried in the tangle of golden curls and a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Rob MacKenzie studied the penciled notations on the paper in front of him with total absorption. He was silent for so long that at last, unable to bear the suspense any longer, Casey spoke. “Well? What do you think?”

/>   He looked surprised, as though he’d forgotten she was in the room. And then he flashed a grin. “You’ve got a winner here, kiddo,” he said.

  Her pulse quickened. “You really think so?”

  He flicked an ash from his cigarette. “I know so.”

  She liked Rob MacKenzie, liked the strong Irish jaw and the sunshine smile and the devil-may-care attitude. Tall and gaunt and bony, he reminded her of a young golden retriever that hadn’t yet grown into its feet, and she had felt an instantaneous rapport with him.

  Danny clattered down the cellar stairs. “Careful,” he said, handing her a mug of coffee. “It’s hot.” He passed one to Rob. “This should jack you right back up.” He perched on the arm of Casey’s chair. “What do you say, Wiz?”

  Rob stretched out lanky legs and took a sip of coffee. “If all her stuff is this good, Dan,” he said, “we’ve hit the motherlode.”

  “Let’s try one more before we crash.”

  Casey tried to stifle a yawn, but wasn’t quite successful. Rob dropped his cigarette into a nearby ashtray. “Give the girl a break, Fiore. It’s five-thirty in the morning.”

  Danny looked surprised. “No wonder I’m starved,” he said. “I’ve been running on adrenaline for the past twelve hours.” He leaned toward Casey. “I have this friend,” he said in a conspiratorial tone, “who just happens to make the best pizza in Boston. And there’s even better news. His place is open all night.”

  Her smile lingered and warmed. “Don’t say pizza, Mr. Fiore, unless you mean it.”

  “Wiz? Want to come with us?”

  Rob shook his head. “This boy’s headed for bed. You would be, too, if you had any brains.”

  “I’m too high. I’ll come down eventually.”