Chapter 5
Chance never would have let Swanson rattle him if the bastard hadn’t put his hands on Naomi. The instant she’d cried out in pain, memories flooded his mind. Years of hearing his mother’s cries and not being able to help her. Not being able to protect her or himself.
He wasn’t that helpless little boy anymore, and he would not tolerate any man hurting a woman.
“I shouldn’t have talked you into this.” Archie kicked a discarded bottle cap down the sidewalk.
“You were trying to help.” Chance ran a hand through his hair before leaning against the cool brick wall. “It was a good idea until Swanson pulled his shit.”
How could Naomi go out with an asshole like that? Chance may not have been boyfriend of the year, but he’d treated her with respect. Except for that sleeping-with-her-boss thing. On second thought, maybe he wasn’t any better than the dickhead inside.
Naomi reappeared, wrapped in a white shawl and carrying a small red purse. “I’ll call Clay on my way home to give him a heads-up and discuss damage control.”
Chance shook his head. “If there’s fallout from this, I’ll handle it.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, but handling your messes is now my responsibility.” She smacked the purse against her thigh. “And since I like my job, I hope there will be no more unnecessary attempts to defend my honor.”
“He was hurting you.” Callused hands curled into fists at Chance’s side. “That made things necessary in my book.”
“Do me a favor. Put all that knight-in-shining-armor crap into a song and let me take care of myself.” She crossed her arms, revealing deep red marks around her wrist.
“What is that?” Chance stepped off the wall. “Did Swanson do that?”
Naomi covered the marks. “It’s nothing.”
Fury flashed behind his eyes as a fire ignited in his gut. “That isn’t nothing, Naomi. He hurt you when you went back in there, didn’t he?” Chance took two steps toward the Songbird before she cut him off. “Get out of my way. I’m going to teach that son of a bitch a lesson.”
“You’ve done enough.” Hazel eyes snapped with challenge. “There’s nothing in that bar that’s worth losing what little you have left of your career. Now do us both a favor and go home.”
Chance didn’t give two shits about bad publicity after seeing her wrist. “He needs to pay for what he did to you.”
Without missing a beat, she said, “That’s ironic, coming from you.”
The reminder hit hard, but he deserved it. Chance paced away. “Are you going out with him again?”
Naomi pulled a set of keys from her purse. “From now on, our conversations are business only. I’ll let you know if we decide to draft a response to this incident before Monday.”
That didn’t answer his question. “Tell me you won’t see him again.”
She met his gaze without flinching. “Michael and I are through.”
“Good.” Chance cracked his knuckles. “If he bothers you again, let me know.”
“Not likely.” She stepped to the curb and checked both ways before crossing to her car.
Chance watched her climb in and drive off without a backward glance, and within seconds, the Songbird crowd began filtering out the door in search of country music’s notorious bad boy. Heads down, the two men headed toward the parking lot on the corner.
“I’m gonna guess you two have a history,” Archie said.
“You could say that.”
“She doesn’t seem to like you very much. What’d you do to her?”
There were some things he didn’t share with anyone. “We need to get out of here.”
“Fine. Don’t tell me.” They crossed against the light. “Was she always that fierce?”
“Yeah.” Chance grinned as he remembered the time she’d lit into a teenager they’d caught bullying a smaller kid behind his old apartment.
The younger Naomi had been determined. Ambitious. A born problem solver. But she’d never worn anything like that dress. Damn.
“Then you really screwed up.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Ten minutes into the drive home, lyrics materialized in Chance’s mind. He’d hummed through the first couple of lines four times before realizing what he had.
“Switch the radio off, will ya?”
Archie glanced to his passenger. “Why would I do that?”
Chance did it himself. “Because I’ve got something going in my head.”
The truck rolled to a stop at the light at Old Hickory. “You’ve got a song?”
“Maybe.” The idea was too fresh to know for sure, but a few lines was more than he’d managed in months.
They rode the rest of the way in silence while Chance tapped out a rhythm on his thigh. More lines fell into place, and by the time they pulled up his drive, he had a full verse and the start of another.
Archie parked next to the porch. “Good luck, brother.”
“Thanks, Arch.”
The truck made the turnaround and disappeared down the drive. Chance slipped the spare key off the top of the door frame and let himself in. Shelly had lectured him more than once about leaving a key in such an obvious spot, but when he’d lost his license, Chance had stopped carrying any keys at all, which had resulted in him locking himself out of the house three times in a matter of weeks.
The key had been over the door ever since.
After crossing the great room to fetch a notebook and pencil off the dining room table, he snagged a Gibson guitar from the collection next to the fireplace. Once settled on the black leather couch, he transferred the lyrics from his head to the page.
I swore off being the good guy,
It never got me anywhere,
But when she came back into my life,
I couldn’t back down from the dare.
The new guy didn’t deserve her,
But then again neither did I,
She was too good for the both of us,
And I’d already made her cry.
Reading the words aloud gave birth to a melody, and Chance strummed the chords, setting music to the first song he’d written in more than a year. Possibly the first song he’d ever written totally sober.
With the tune clear in his mind, he leaned over the guitar to write the chorus.
Sometimes you’ve gotta man up
Be the rescuer she needs
Ride headfirst into battle
Ignore the blows that bleed.
’Cause the right one’s always worth it
Don’t give up without a fight
Drag out that rusty armor
And this time get it right.
He played it again from the beginning, figuring out the right inflections and phrasing. Liking what he had, Chance leaned back on the couch, woozy with relief. Of the six number-one singles to his credit, three had been inspired by Naomi. That she’d once again served as inspiration didn’t surprise him at all. He had no idea if she ever saw herself in the songs, and prideful man that he was, Chance never named the source behind the tunes.
When his career took off, he’d made a choice. Focus on the music, and let others speculate about the man. The Internet had revealed certain facts. That his dad had died when he was five. That his mother had remarried, and that Chance had gone into the service after high school. But no one knew he’d spent the majority of his childhood enduring both verbal and physical punches from a man unfit to lick his father’s boots. They didn’t know the scar on his forearm came from a lit cigarette. Or that the one on his forehead was courtesy of a flying ashtray.
Keeping those demons under lock and key wasn’t easy. That’s where the liquor had come into play. Liquor wasn’t an option anymore, but maybe Naomi was. At least she’d nudged him off the starting blocks. He leaned forward again to tackle the rest of the song and hoped this one would be the first of many.
Thanks to a quick text sent on Naomi’s way home, April opened the door, ice cream in hand and spoon at the ready, before Naomi had gotten the key in the lock.
“I am never going out with another man in my life.” Naomi took the open pint of frozen consolation, kicked off her heels, and walked into April’s open arms.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. The right guy will come along someday.” She squeezed tight before releasing her heartbroken best friend. “When you least expect it, he’ll fall right into your lap.”
“Nope.” Naomi schlepped to the couch. “I don’t care if a prince shows up at my door with diamonds and a gleaming white carriage. I’m done.”
“If that prince is a redhead named Harry, your ass better get in that carriage.” April retrieved her own carton of ice cream from the counter. “And then you’ll stop and pick me up on the way to the airport.”
“What did I do to piss off Cupid this much?” Naomi asked, ignoring her friend’s royal fantasy as she dropped onto the sofa. “I’ve been cheated on. Stood up. Stolen from. And now physically abused. That’s a lot of bad karma for one person.”
April sat down beside her. “Let me see your wrist.” Naomi shook the shawl off her shoulder. “Holy shit, woman. That looks awful.”
“It doesn’t feel so great, either.” She shoved a spoonful of cold goodness into her mouth. Chocolate chocolate-chip. April knew her so well. “For a second, I thought he was going to break it, and then I’d have broken his nose. The jerk. I should have let Chance beat the crap out of him like he wanted to.”
The spoon whipped out of April’s mouth. “You didn’t tell me Chance was there.”
Naomi had been crying too hard on the phone to share the details. Thank God she’d managed to hold back the tears until safely in her car.
“He came in as the music was about to start. I assumed he was going to do something stupid and went over to suggest he leave.” Suggest. Demand. Tomato. Tomahto. “Michael saw us and went all caveman.”
“So your current boyfriend saw you talking to your former boyfriend, and shit went down. Talk about a country song.”
April was the only person on the planet who knew about Naomi’s relationship with Chance. Come to think of it, they’d been eating ice cream on this exact same couch the day she’d found him buck naked with Martha Reynolds. Funny how her life kept repeating.
“Chance didn’t know I was there with Michael, and there’s no way Michael could know that I ever dated Chance. So there was no reason for either one of them to be so freaking stupid.” She stabbed her spoon into the ice cream with a huff. “Though Chance didn’t technically do anything violent until Michael shoved me out of the way. I slammed into a stool and the next thing I knew, Chance had him against a wall.” The memory played back in her mind, sending chills down her spine. “I really thought he was going to hurt him. I had to get up in his face and beg him to let go.”
Everything had happened so fast, the fear had hardly registered at the time. Not for herself, but for Chance. He could have ruined the rest of his life. And for what? A bump on her hip? The man had no sense of self-preservation. Which wasn’t easy for her to say, since she’d condemned him as a selfish bastard seven years ago.
“That’s a pretty strong reaction,” April whispered. “A guy has to care a lot about a woman to attempt murder on her behalf.”
As the suggestion sank in, denial blossomed. “Don’t be ridiculous. This was about ego, not me. Two idiots beating their chests to see who’s the bigger man.” Chance didn’t care about Naomi. Not in that way. And if he ever had, sleeping with her boss had been a sick way of showing it.
April twirled her spoon. “If you say so.”
Naomi wanted to put the whole thing out of her mind, but remembered another call she had to make. “Crap. I have to tell Clay. If he reads about this on the Internet before hearing it from me, I might not have to worry about saving Chance’s reputation. Clay will fire me first.”
“Maybe you should let him,” April suggested.
“Excuse me?”
She amended her statement. “Not fire you, but let him find someone else to save Chance. You shouldn’t have to work with the guy who broke your heart. Let someone else deal with him.”
That was absolutely not an option. Naomi had been shaping the Chance Colburn plan of attack for months. She’d made the calls. Kissed the necessary butts to get him the best interviews with the widest audience possible. She wasn’t putting Chance in a stranger’s hands. What if they dropped the ball? Or convinced Clay to drop him from the label the first time Chance messed up?
And he would mess up. The man was a walking train wreck, for heaven’s sake. Shooting Stars had invested too much in Chance for her to let anyone else take the wheel on this. It had to be her.
“I’m a professional, April. Not a jilted middle schooler. Chance is my responsibility, and I’m going to turn his career around if it kills me.”
April pointed to her wrist. “At the rate you’re going, it just might.”
Chance’s phone rang at ten till midnight. He considered not answering but saw no reason to piss her off more than she probably already was.
“Hey, Shell.”
“Would you like to tell me what the hell you did at the Songbird Cafe tonight? I’ve got a complaint from the restaurant owner, and your face is all over social media looking like a rampaging lunatic.” She took a breath to reload. “By all that is holy, if you went out and got drunk I’m going to come over there and beat you with a goddamn stick. Start talking. Now.”
He would have started talking sooner if she’d shut up. “I haven’t had a drink. I slammed Swanson against a wall for hurting Naomi. And I’ll call Percy and apologize tomorrow.” Chance had known Percy Covell since he’d bought the Songbird five years before and had no doubt he’d be forgiven on that front. There wasn’t much he could do about the rampaging lunatic part.
Shelly’s tone changed. “Did you say Michael hurt Naomi?”
For someone who didn’t like the publicist, Shelly sounded pretty damn concerned. “Yeah. He came after me for talking to her, and she put herself between us. Swanson shoved her. Hard. You know I couldn’t let that pass.”
“No,” she said, sounding stunned. “You couldn’t.”
Rubbing a hand over his face, Chance leaned up on his elbows. He’d been working on the song for hours and must have dozed off. The cat on his chest dug its claws into his skin before leaping away.
“I didn’t go there to drink.” He swung his feet to the floor. “And I sure as hell wasn’t looking for a fight. But I suppose none of that matters.”
Even sober, he couldn’t keep his ass out of trouble. Not that he regretted a thing. Putting the fear of God in Swanson’s eyes had been the highlight of Chance’s year.
“We’ve dealt with worse in the past. I’m sure we can mitigate the damage.” A child cried in the background. “That’s Tristan. I probably woke him with my tirade.” The sigh came down the line loud and clear. “This will likely come up in the meeting on Monday. I’ll handle the problem then.”
Since Chance was the problem, he wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “Shell—”
“I’ve got to go before he wakes up Izzy. Talk to you tomorrow.”
The line went dead, leaving Chance staring at the cell in his hand. Handle the problem? What was she going to do? Make Shooting Stars pay for a handler? He probably needed one, but hell if he’d agree to a babysitter anytime soon.
Rubbing his chest, he spoke to the cat. “You’re getting fat, dude. We’re putting you on a diet.”
Willie blinked with disinterest.
“You’re right. Screw it.” Chance rose to his feet. “Time for a midnight snack.”