Free Playing Dirty by Jennifer Echols Page B

thought if I was still listening to my dad,” he admitted. “But my granddad had just died a few months before. I could see his whole career, this long span where he almost made it big. I could hear him in my head, talking me into it, telling me a little showmanship never hurt nobody.”
    “Uh-oh,” Sarah said.
    Quentin nodded. “We decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If people wanted a hot mess with their country music, that’s what we’d be. We started getting drunk and staging a fight at every concert.”
    “Staging a fight?” she repeated. “You mean the table in the pool?”
    He took a deep breath, watching her, realizing he’d given something else away, and calculating how to back out of the admission.
    She raised one eyebrow.
    He sighed, giving in. “Have you ever heard of Mad ‘Red’ Mud?”
    “The professional wrestler?”
    “Yeah. He used to work at the steel mill over in Fairfield with Martin’s uncle. He taught us some moves. We just try to keep Erin from getting hurt.” Quentin shrugged. “Usually it goes more smoothly than last night. I told them I shouldn’t get drunk while you were here. I tend to start laughing and lose my threatening scowl. Watch.”
    He showed her such a ridiculous scowl that she laughed herself.
    “When we started setting up fights,” he said, “our local fan base increased, because we weren’t just getting the country music fans anymore. We were getting the monster truck fans, too, the kind of folks who pay cash money to watch shit crash. That’s when thelocal paper started a column called the Cheatin’ Hearts Death Watch. Have you seen it?”
    “Yes, I’ve seen it. You act like you’re proud of it.”
    “I am ,” he insisted. “That was a big break, because it got Nashville’s attention, and then Manhattan Music came calling. Don’t look at me like that. Put your eyebrow down.” He reached out to touch her brow.
    His other hand already held her hand captive in a tingling dance. But something happened when he reached toward her face and touched her gently. His own expression changed. His green eyes turned serious and dark.
    Then he was kissing her. Astonishingly, she was kissing him back. She couldn’t resist. His mouth took her mouth. His tongue tangled with her tongue and slicked across her teeth. She was embarrassed that she gasped a little. Natsuko most likely had made out with someone else this year and was used to this sort of thing.
    He rolled on top of her, pinning her beneath him with his weight. She started to push him off, remembering that she hardly knew him and he could be dangerous, despite how he’d reassured her last night—and then his glasses fell onto her forehead. He laughed, sounding embarrassed for the first time. He seemed so young and vulnerable at that moment that she laughed, too, to make him feel better.
    He moved her wrists close together above her head so he could hold them with one hand while he tossed his glasses onto the bedside table with the other.
    “So we got the contract with the record company,” he said, and pressed his lips hard on hers again.
    “But it was a tough fight,” he whispered, biting at the corner of her mouth.
    “And then we had to reneg—What’s the word?” Through his cotton boxers and her silk shirt, his cock moved against her belly.
    “Renegotiate,” she breathed. “Stop the act. You know the word renegotiate .”
    He grinned like the devil. “We had to reneg—what you said—between the first and the second album.” His tongue was inside her mouth again. Between this insistent pleasure and the pressure of the bulge shifting against her down below, Sarah had a hard time following what he was telling her.
    He stopped kissing her to say, “And we’re damn tired of giving the lawyers all the crumbs Manhattan Music throws us. We want to seem crazy enough that the record company is scared to mess with us. But not crazy enough that the record company sends you down here to spy