"Why is that?" her friend inquired in an equally low voice, pushing her glass across the bar for a refill.
"Well, we’re just delaying the inevitable, are we not? Bluey can control what happens in here because it's private property and he retains the right to evict anyone who gets out of line." Putting the soiled glass aside, she filled a new one with wine. "The minute I step outside that door, though, I’m gonna be fair game." She set the fresh drink in front of her friend. "And don’t think the vultures don't know it.”
She had relocated from the eastern seaboard to the western, had crossed an entire country in an attempt to get away from this very situation. She’d hoped if she removed herself from the heart of the turmoil the furor would die a natural death.
It should have. Yet here she was in a predicament too similar to the one she thought she had left behind. It dogged her footsteps as surely as it would have had she simply stayed in New Hampshire in the first place. She could try to ignore it; she could refuse to respond. But it was right here in her own back yard just the same.
Leaving her nowhere left to run.
Fourteen
"Give me your keys," Kurstin said a short while later, her voice pitched low to prevent anyone from overhearing.
"Why?" Hayley pulled her purse out from under the bar even as she asked.
"Because Jon-Michael and I are going to see if we can do something about helping you avoid the jackals when the bar shuts down."
Hayley, who had far more experience with media persistence than she cared to think about, bit her tongue to keep from blurting, I won't hold my breath then.
Good thing she did, too, for she had seriously underestimated the Olivet siblings' ingenuity. After the bar closed and the till was balanced, Kurstin exchanged tops with Hayley. Bending from the waist, her friend brushed her hair briskly upside down, then straightened, tossing it back and fluffing it out to get an approximation of Hayley's volume. She bound it loosely in a scarf and slipped on a pair of dark glasses. Then she eased out the back door.
Jon-Michael and Hayley waited by the front door. Faintly, from around the corner, they heard someone yell, "There she is!"
The media who had been hanging around the parking lot waiting for her to come out stampeded in a mass exodus from the front parking lot. Jon-Michael snagged her by the wrist and dashed for his Harley. Strapping his sax case to the back of the Soft Tail with one hand, he pulled his World War II German leather helmet free with the other. He tossed it to her and swung a long leg over the gas tank, straddling the bike. "Get on."
The engine turned over with its distinctive, deep throated growl and they peeled out of the lot. Hayley clutched his waistband with one hand while slapping the helmet to her head with the other and awkwardly manipulating the strap beneath her chin.
They roared through the quiet streets, flashed past the blink-and-you've-missed-it downtown district, then continued on to the only slightly more substantial industrial sector. Jon-Michael killed the engine and coasted down an alleyway, rolling to a stop behind a brick warehouse. They dismounted and he unlocked a door set deep in the brick wall.
"Come on." He pushed his bike inside and kicked the door closed behind them. After rocking the motorcycle back on its kickstand, he accepted the helmet Hayley silently held out to him and hooked it over the handlebars. Then he collected his sax case and ushered her to the freight elevator.
They did not speak until they had stepped inside and he’d tugged down the top half of a steel-mesh door. Its bottom glided up to meet it and the sound of heavy metal gates clanging together shook Hayley from her silent introspection. She turned to him as the elevator jerked and groaned its slow way up one floor. "Where are we?"
"My place."
"What about Kurstin? Are we abandoning her to the ravening hordes?"
"Yep. If she can shake free of the journalists, she'll meet us here. Otherwise she will go home or to the new boyfriend's place." He gave an indifferent roll of his shoulders. "Wherever she intends to spend the night."
The elevator ground to a halt and he manipulated the doors again. He ushered her out, then preceded her to a door a few feet away. Unlocking it, he stood back and waved her inside.
It was dark and Hayley took only a few hesitant steps over the threshold before she halted. In a distant part of the vast warehouse she could hear a rhythmic thumping and the muffled tones of a woman's voice. Behind her, she heard the door close and the ping of Jon-Michael's key landing in something. Then she felt his fingers, warm and rough-skinned, slide along her skin to cup her elbow. He steered her around a glass brick partition and deep into the gloom of a cavernous room whose ceiling soared into invisibility high overhead.
"Wait here a sec," he commanded and left her. In the stygian darkness, over the sound of his retreating footsteps, the rhythmic thumping was more pronounced and the woman's voice clearer.
"Oh! Baaby," the voice crooned. "Yes, right there. Harder, baby. Harder!" The rhythmic thump grew louder, more persistent. "Oh, God, yes. Yes! Just like that."
A lamp flicked on across the loft, illuminating Jon-Michael's left profile while casting his right side in shadow. One lean cheek was highlighted by the play of light as he straightened. He looked at her across the room and smiled wryly, accentuating the soft groove that framed his mouth. His way-beyond five o’clock shadow, where it curved down from his upper lip just inside that raised groove, was a dark slash that dissolved into shadow on the side farthest from the lamplight.
"Sorry about the sound effects," he said. "Carol-Anne has a new boyfriend, and they have been going at it hammer and tongs for three weeks now."
"Oh, bay-bee," Carol Anne growled. "OH. Bay-bee. Uh-huh. Uh-huh." The headboard pounded against the adjoining wall. "Oh, God, baby, yes. Yes, yes, yes!"
Jon-Michael cleared his throat. "I'd, uh, like to tell you it will be over any minute now, but the guy has prodigious stamina." Carol-Anne's enthusiasm rose yet another decibel higher and Jon-Michael, stared across the room at Hayley.
She had no doubt the heat she felt spreading upward from the scooped neckline of her borrowed top stained her chest, her throat, her cheeks a brilliant red, even in this low lighting. A fear she felt justified when he said a little desperately, "Music! I'll, uh, just put on some music. Make yourself at home."
A week ago, she might have cracked a joke and then pulled up a chair to critique the show. Well, with Kurstin she would have. Maybe not with Jon-Michael. At the moment she did not find all the rampant sexuality coming through the walls particularly amusing. It was too hard on the heels of the other night's debacle on the dock, and it made her feel flushed and uncomfortable. Edgy.
"Mind if I look around?" she asked as Jon-Michael toyed with a stack of CDs.
"Go ahead." More lights sprang on and the sound of John Coltrane's saxophone drifted out of speakers mounted overhead. Jon-Michael turned up the volume in an attempt to drown out his neighbor. He succeeded in submerging Carol-Anne's voice beneath the wailing sax, but the rhythmic pounding was not as easily ignored. It lent a carnal counterpoint to the music no amount of volume could alter. The knowledge of a whole lot of unleashed pleasure transpiring on the other side of the wall suffused the loft like a lush, musky perfume.