You'd Be Mine(34)

She releases a breath, but grins. In the weeks since her panic attack, we’ve been able to ease more into the media attention. I’ve heard a few of Annie’s interviews, and she fields questions about us like a pro. I figure if the ball is in our court … “I can work with that. As long as I can be me onstage and not some dressed-up icon. Imitation makes me uncomfortable.”

“Fair enough,” Trina agrees, already pulling out her phone. “No bouffant this time. Just Annie Mathers and Clay Coolidge. I’m going to call us a town car.” She looks around. “Or two. Grab anything you’ll need for rehearsal and meet me down here in fifteen.”

Before we can disperse, however, the glass lobby doors swish open once more to reveal Connie and Patrick in deep conversation with a tall man wearing a fitted black suit and a black cowboy hat. The man raises a hand to tip his hat at our group, and Annie gives a small wave back before the trio moves through to the elevators.

I glance back at Annie. She’s studiously avoiding Trina’s wide-eyed stare, but from my angle, I can see her grip tighten on the roses, still hanging at her side.

“You went to church with Roy Stanton?”

Annie shrugs.

“The Roy Stanton?”

“I didn’t know he would be there today. He used to be friends with Cora.”

“Not Robbie?” I ask, grasping onto the first question that pops into my brain. I’m not sure who this Roy guy is, but Trina is practically radioactive.

Annie’s eyes flick to mine. She shifts the roses to her other hand, flexing the first. “No, not Robbie. Robbie hated Roy. Roy is the president of Southern Belle Records, Clay.”

I swallow. Holy hell. No wonder Trina’s flipping out. Southern Belle is SunCoast’s rival in every way. How could I forget? The story is the stuff of Nashville legends. Roy broke off with SunCoast, stealing Cora Rosewood and starting his own label with her as his top act.

It was a gigantic scandal in the late ’90s. Completely rocked Nashville, because Stanton decided to base his enterprise on the West Coast. There’s still a lot of contention about it.

Lora’s with Southern Belle. It’s not unheard of to have acts from different labels share a stage, but I doubt SunCoast would be super-happy with me if Annie and Willows jumped ship after the tour wrapped; not after all the trouble they went to in sending me to secure her in the first place.

“Did he talk shop?” Trina asks evenly.

Annie shakes her head. “No, nothing like that. I mean, of course he mentioned it, but I have zero desire to be courted by Roy or his label. I’ve made it very clear. I’ve been avoiding his calls, but then there he was, right in the sanctuary, holding a dozen roses.” She snorts. “Called it ‘divine providence.’”

Trina’s shrewd eyes follow the numbers lighting up over the elevator. I’m sure she’s replaying the scene in the lobby—the familiar way Connie and Patrick spoke with Roy and then left to talk in their room with him. They were likely old friends as well, but still.

I turn back to Annie in time to catch her shaking her head at some silent entreaty from her cousin.

“So,” I say, clearing my throat. “You were calling our cars, Trina?”

Trina shakes herself, clutching her phone in her hand. “Absolutely. Get your things. We have a show to get to.”

No one brings up Stanton again, but when we return to the lobby a few minutes later, I notice a bunch of stems sticking out of a trash bin. Annie catches my eye, the corner of her mouth lifting in a half attempt at a grin. “Cora loved roses. I hate ’em.”



* * *



That night when we perform, the cosmos shifts. I knew it might happen. It’s why I haven’t offered to share my stage with Willows yet, despite Fitz and Trina mentioning it a thousand times. Once this happened, we couldn’t go back.

It’s not just chemistry. Lora and I have chemistry. If you’re a good-enough performer, you can create believable chemistry with anyone. Even in still photographs, Annie and I have chemistry that leaps off the page.

No, what we have is something more; we have magnetism. Chemistry is give-and-take; magnetism sucks you in like a black hole. Annie sucked me into her universe back at the fairgrounds last summer, and her hold has yet to release me. And I’m not being cocky when I say I have a similar effect, albeit on a smaller scale.

So putting us together singing a classic for all the world to see? I knew we’d never come back from that. Still, I couldn’t refuse. For as much as everyone else wanted to see what would happen, I needed to feel it for myself. To confirm what I already suspected.

I’ve never been able to turn down a dare.

As planned, I start in with “Some Guys Do.” Annie creeps onstage about halfway through, and I don’t have to see her to know the exact moment she’s there. Barefoot and dancing to my song. She doesn’t have a mic and doesn’t plan to sing along. She’s just there to dance and be a fan, and I’ve never wanted to sing so well in my entire life. She and Kacey are bobbing along, mouthing the lyrics and laughing as if they were in the front row and not standing alongside Fitz.

Goddamn.

At the end, I pass off my mic, and Kacey takes her fiddle from a stagehand. Jason kick-starts into “Coattails,” and while I don’t take off my boots and dance like Annie did, I don’t leave the stage either. In fact, I take a second mic on a stand from a stagehand, and when she gets to the line about not being a Carter to (my) Cash, I give Fitz a nod. We start low and quiet, leading into an overlay of music we planned backstage as a surprise: a little taste of Johnny’s “Walk the Line.”