Christmas Cowboy Duet Read online

  “I already gave you all the details,” she told Wilson.

  It was obvious by his tone that he’d thought she was just exaggerating. “Yeah, yeah. All I hear is that you’re slacking off.”

  “Slacking off?” she echoed, her voice finally rising. Wilson was pushing her to the edge of her patience. “I almost died yesterday,” she reminded him angrily.

  “Uh-huh. And if you don’t sign up that band, and several more really good ones, our label might be in danger of going belly-up, remember?” he said. “We’re only as good as the new artists we sign up.”

  Wilson had a tendency to exaggerate and dramatize everything. Ordinarily, it didn’t faze her and she just shrugged it off. But today it irritated the hell out of her.

  So much so that she heard herself saying, “Look, if you’re so worried about missing out on that band, why don’t you send Amelia to sign them?”

  “Amelia,” he repeated as if their cousin’s name was brand-new to him.

  “Amelia,” Whitney said with more conviction.

  “You’re serious.”

  She and Amelia had been competitors since preschool. The fact that they were first cousins had no bearing in their rivalry. From time to time, there was a marginal effort to get along, but what they really enjoyed was outdoing the other. Getting The Lonely Wolves to sign with Purely Platinum, the family label, would have been a decent feather in either one of their caps.

  Whitney sighed. She hated giving up this opportunity, but the recording label was more important than any one person, and that included her.

  “You need the band, or more to the point, you need a band or an artist to put you back on the map and I can’t very well hitchhike all the way to Laredo. So yes, I’m serious.”

  “Okay, just remember, you passed up on this,” Wilson told her.

  “I’ll get the next one,” Whitney responded, trying her best to sound upbeat.

  She heard Wilson grunt dismissively. “If there’s a next one for you. You know this business, Whit. You’re only as good as your next success. Barring that, you’re history.”

  She’d expected just a hint of support from her brother. After all, she had been there for him. Granted they were all competitive in her family, but when had it become cutthroat?

  “Wilson, after all the time I’ve put into the company—” But she found herself talking to dead air. Her brother had hung up on her.

  Frustrated, Whitney vented the only way she knew how. She let loose with a guttural cry that was a cross between anguish and anger. After having emitted the teeth-jarring sound, she hurled her cell phone across the room. It hit the door with a loud thud and then fell to the floor, miraculously still intact.

  Padding across the carpeted floor in her bare feet, Whitney stooped down to pick up her phone. She was still crouching when she heard a sharp knock on the door less than half a minute after her momentary tantrum.

  She thought of ignoring whoever was on the other side of the door, but since she was the only person who had a suite—or a room of any kind—in the hotel, she felt obligated to respond. It might be the contractor coming to tell her that she couldn’t stay here any longer.

  Holding her breath, she approached the door and asked, “Who is it?”

  “Liam Murphy. You okay in there?” he asked. “I heard a scream and then something falling and I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

  Whitney lost no time in flipping open the lock and opening the door to the suite. “Not really,” she said, answering his question.

  She was far from a happy camper at this point. She’d just lost out signing what might become a major new band, moreover she had lost out to Amelia, who would rub her nose in it for weeks to come—maybe even months. If she lasted that long.

  “Anything I can do?” he asked her, walking into the suite.

  He actually sounded genuine in his offer. She had already decided, after last night’s above-and-beyond performance, that Liam Murphy was not only exceptionally handsome, he was exceptionally kind and selfless, as well. If she was in the market for someone to share her life with—which she wasn’t—he would have made an excellent choice.

  But this was not the time to entertain any romantic thoughts. She needed instead to assess Liam’s appeal dispassionately. With his somewhat longer dirty blond hair and electric blue eyes, not to mention that easy, sensual smile, Liam would undoubtedly be the center of every female’s dreams from fourteen to ninety-four. She definitely wouldn’t do well against competition like that.

  As it was, she laughed softly at his offer. “How are you at laying your hands on a car and healing it?”

  “That, unfortunately, is entirely out of my league.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Then no, there’s nothing you can do for me.” She walked back toward the sliding glass door and looked out. In the distance, she could make out a range of foothills. “I need to be in Laredo today and it’s just not going to happen.”

  He came up behind her, his attention focused on her. He really wanted to help. “What’s in Laredo?”

  “A band. The Lonely Wolves,” she told him. What was the point of even talking about it, she thought, dejected. Amelia was going to sign them up and she’d suddenly be transformed into the lead weight that was being carried by the label. Temporarily.

  “You don’t look like a groupie,” he commented.

  The term caught her by surprise and she laughed shortly. “Good, because I’m not.”

  Something wasn’t adding up. “Then why all this angst about a four-piece band?”

  He’d surprised her again. She had him pegged as a fan of country music, not hard rock. “You’ve heard of them?”

  “Sure I’ve heard of them,” he acknowledged.

  He was keenly aware of most of the homegrown bands in the southern part of Texas. He didn’t see any of them as competition but as opportunities for a learning experience. His musical education came from all over and he soaked it up like a sponge.

  “They were the people I was going to be meeting with today. Actually, I wasn’t ‘meeting’ with them so much as auditioning them, but even that was just a technicality. Unless they didn’t perform as well in person as they did on the demo they had sent in, I was going to be signing them for the label I represent.”

  He stared at her, wondering if he was still asleep and dreaming. This was just too much of a coincidence to actually be true. What were the odds that he would wind up rescuing someone who worked for a music label?

  “You’re a talent scout?” he asked, doing his best to sound casual about it. Since he and his band were unknowns, he couldn’t push too hard—but he did want her to hear them.

  She nodded. “My grandfather founded Purely Platinum Records and my brothers, cousins and I all work for the label. My older brother, Wilson, runs the company these days after my father passed away at his desk two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Liam said with genuine feeling.

  She shrugged. “It happens.” She hadn’t been close to her father. He tended to favor her brothers, but in her heart of hearts, she still missed him. “We usually have at least a handful of big names signed at any one time,” she confided, “but times have been tough lately. Our star performers were lured away to other labels and Wilson’s trying to get fresh blood to bring us back to the top.”

  She looked as if she had just lost her best friend and it prompted him to ask, “If you’re trying to get the label back on its feet, why do you look so down?”

  “Because,” she said between clenched teeth, “I just had to tell Wilson to send my cousin Amelia to sign the group.”

  Liam still didn’t see the problem. “And...?”

  Whitney knew that this had to sound petty to Liam, but she wasn’t about to sugarcoat it. “And she’s been out to top
me since before we took our first steps.”

  “And I take it that whoever signs this band up first goes to the head of the line?”

  She shrugged again. It was pointless to talk about this. Whatever happened, happened. “Something like that,” she murmured.

  It took him less than a minute to make up his mind. It wasn’t his day to man the bar, so he was free to make this offer. “I can drive you to Laredo.”

  Struggling not to give in to feeling sorry for herself, she had barely heard what Liam had said. And what she thought he’d said was impossible. “Excuse me?”

  “I said I can drive—”

  She waved away the rest of his words as they replayed themselves in her head. “I heard, I heard,” she cried happily. “You’d do that?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” She had to know. “Why would you go out of your way like this for someone you don’t even know?”

  “Because it seems so important to you. And I did have a hand in saving your life, so that gives us a kind of bond,” he said. “I want you to be happy living the life I saved.”

  The man was practically a saint, she thought. Excited, relieved and feeling suddenly almost euphoric, Whitney threw her arms around his neck and declared, “You’re a lifesaver.” She said it a second before she kissed him.

  She only meant for it to be a quick pass of her lips against his, the kind of kiss one good friend gives another, because he certainly qualified for that distinction.

  But at the last second, Liam had turned his head just a fraction closer in her direction and somehow what began as a fleeting kiss turned into something that was a great deal more.

  Something of substance and depth.

  Something to actually sing about.

  Whitney felt herself responding instantly and before she could hold back—she didn’t. Instead, almost moving on automatic pilot, his arms went around her, closing in an embrace that pressed her body against his.

  That, too, brought a reaction with it, because every fiber of her being went on high alert.

  This, the thought telegraphed through her brain, is different. Everything in her life before this moment was just a stick-figure drawing, executed in crayon, and this, what she was experiencing now, was a rich oil painting that instantly captured the viewers and drew them in.

  It certainly did her.

  The kiss went on far longer than either one of them had intended, taking on a life of its own and changing their lives from that moment on.

  The exuberance she had initially felt, the exuberance that had generated this kiss in the first place, flowered and intensified, stealing her very breath away in the process.

  Whitney’s whole body suddenly ignited and had Liam’s arms not gone around her when they did, she seriously felt that she would not be standing up right now. A wave of weakness had snaked through her, robbing her of the ability to stand. Forcing her to cling to him in order to remain upright.

  And be thrilled about doing it.

  For most of her thirty years, Whitney had been focused on getting ahead, on besting her siblings and cousins, because that was the way she—and they, even her cousins—had been raised by her father. And that sort of sense of intense competition did not allow anything else to interfere, did not allow anything else to flourish, even briefly.

  She’d had a handful of dates so far, none of which were inspiring enough to turn her attention away from the family business and all the alert competitiveness it required.

  She’d certainly never encountered anything remotely like this—or even dreamed of its existence.

  But the longer the kiss continued, the less control Whitney realized that she had over her own thoughts, her own body.

  It was as if the very life force within her was being systematically sucked out of her.

  She couldn’t be doing this.

  She shouldn’t be doing this.

  With her last ounce of self-preservation, Whitney put the heels of her hands against Liam’s rock-hard shoulders and pushed him back.

  The force she exerted didn’t have the intensity required to crush a newborn ant, but it did get its point across to Liam.

  Mainly because he felt he shouldn’t have allowed it to go this far, at least, not this quickly.

  Not yet.

  Still, he couldn’t do anything about the wide smile on his face. There was absolutely no way he could wipe it away or camouflage it as he stood looking at her after the fact.

  The kiss made him feel like singing—as did Whitney.

  “If I had known it meant so much to you and that you’d react this way, I would have offered to drive you there five minutes after I rescued you yesterday,” he told Whitney.

  Shaken by what she’d felt, she did her best to seem nonchalant. Despite her performance, she had a feeling that she hadn’t convinced Liam that his kiss had no effect on her.

  Still, he seemed nice enough to pretend to go along with her charade.

  “Well, there’s no time like the present. Just let me make a couple of calls to update everyone,” she said, crossing back to the table, where she had left her cell phone.

  God, did her voice sound as squeaky to him as it did to her?

  Clearing her throat, Whitney picked up her phone and prepared to make her first call. She raised her eyes to his and waited.

  Liam took the hint. “I’ll just go to Miss Joan’s and get us a couple of breakfasts to go,” he offered.

  She nodded, barely hearing him. Had she heard, she would have again been struck by his thoughtfulness. But right now, she was struggling to regain some control over herself.

  The first number she dialed was her brother’s.

  Wilson answered on the third ring.

  “Wilson, it’s Whitney.”

  “Now what’s wrong?” he demanded wearily.

  Sometimes she really disliked his negative approach to everything.

  “Nothing. Just tell our illustrious cousin Amelia to put her broom back in the closet. She won’t be flying to Texas to sign that Laredo-based band.”

  She could hear her brother come to life. It was there in the very way he breathed. She could tell he was all ears now.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Nothing happened,” she said, deciding to play this out a little. “I just found a way to get to Laredo and since I’m already in Texas, there’s no point in her coming out, too. It’s as simple as that.”

  “She already said yes,” Wilson told her, as if no changes to the plan were acceptable.

  What had it been? Five minutes since she’d spoken to him? Talk about acting quickly...

  “Well, now you can say no. I’ll call you once the band has signed the contracts—if they’re as good as that demo they sent,” she said, and then it was her turn to terminate the call without forewarning.

  It was also before her brother could offer any more protests.

  Her second call was to the band itself, to tell them that the canceled audition was back on again, only she needed to schedule it for a slightly later hour than had initially been agreed to.

  “So you can audition for me at around three,” she informed them cheerfully.

  “No, I’m afraid that we can’t,” the lead singer replied.

  It was time to go into saleswoman mode, she thought. It wouldn’t be the first time. She’d started out as a somewhat precocious child and what she had going for her then was her innocent face. Now she had her looks and her innocent manner, both of which she used with expert precision.

  “Look, if you’re thinking of signing with someone else, I just want you to know that we have the better reputation because we’ve been in the business for over fifty years—not to mention that we have far better perks for our top dra
ws.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know all that,” the man on the other end of the line said, cutting her short. “But right now, we can’t audition for you because we don’t have a drummer.”

  Caught off guard, Whitney’s mouth dropped open.

  Chapter Eight

  Maybe she’d heard him wrong, Whitney thought. “What do you mean, you don’t have a drummer?” she asked the man on the other end of the call.

  “I don’t have a drummer,” Kirk, the lead singer of The Lonely Wolves, repeated. “The guy’s in the hospital.”

  This couldn’t be good. “What happened?” she asked.

  Part of Whitney was instantly sympathetic, but part of her couldn’t help wondering if this was some sort of ploy, either in a bid to make their signing price higher, or to keep her label at bay while they auditioned for another talent scout, trying to see who would come through with the better offer.

  “We were rehearsing, getting ready for the audition, and suddenly Scottie—the drummer—grabbed his stomach and doubled up. We all thought he was just clowning around and told him to get serious, but then he fell on the floor, still holding on to his stomach, except that now he was saying things like he feels his gut’s on fire and he’s dying, stuff like that. So we got him into my van and I drove like crazy over to the closest ER.”

  Kirk paused dramatically, catching his breath, then continued, talking even faster than he had been a second ago. “They wound up operating on him right there in the ER. Turned out Scottie’s appendix blew up or something like that.”

  “Is he all right?” Whitney asked, concerned.

  “Yeah. Takes more than a crummy appendix to take Scottie out. But he feels awful now,” Kirk added in a hushed voice.

  Whitney laughed shortly. By her calculation, the drummer had just been operated on less than twenty-four hours ago. “I don’t wonder. He went through a lot.”

  There was silence on the other end, as if Kirk was assimilating what she’d just said before responding. “What? No, I mean because he can’t play, which means he blew the audition for the band.”