Love Songs (19 page)

“I didn’t expect my little sister to beat me to the altar.” He winked at her when she gave him an irritated sister look. “I’m ready. I have the house. I have the ring. I almost have all the time in the world since I’m not going to play next year.”

“She’s a lucky girl.”

“I know.”

Clara laughed and slapped Christian on the arm. “I’m lucky too. Tori and Darcy for sisters. I won the lottery.”

“I’ll tell her you said that.” He ran his hand over his unshaven chin. “I guess I’d better go get a shower. She’s having me over for dinner with her parents. Her sister and Dave will be there with their kids. I guess if the mood hits me I’ll ask her to marry me. If I’m scared to death I’ll come home with this ring.”

Clara moved in and hugged her brother. “You deserve this. Don’t back out.”

“I’ll let you know how it goes.” He gave them both a nod and left the kitchen.

Clara dropped her shoulders and turned to Warner. “Long day, huh?”

“Sure was,” he said pulling her to him. “Congratulations.”

“To you too.”

“So what is she like? Savannah. I hear she’s the biggest country diva we have.”

Clara laughed as she rested her hands on her husband’s chest. “I’m not even sure she’s country. One minute she’s Shania Twain and the next she’s Lady GaGa.”

He laughed at that. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

Clara turned and walked toward the table. She didn’t sit down, but stood behind a chair with her hands on the back. “But why me? None of this makes sense.”

“Because this is how the industry works.”

“No. Not like this.” She pulled her hair through her hands and let it fall. “I found out she did hear me when I played with Randy. The night I sang your song.”

“That makes me feel better about it.”

“But other than on stage, I’m backup. C’mon you’re not going to sign someone who spent the last two month singing
West Side Story
.”

“But they did.”

“And they want me to sing your songs.”

He smiled. “That was the point right? You’d sing my songs and we’d sell them?”

“Right, but,” she gritted her teeth, “it still doesn’t make sense.”

Warner walked to her and put his hands on her hips, making her turn toward him. “Somewhere, someone is trying to see what kind of trouble we can get into. We’ve only fueled the fire by running off and getting married. The odds are against us.”

“What are you saying?”

Warner pulled out his phone and clicked on the browser. He enlarged the screen. “I did some digging at the stoplight on my way home.”

He handed her the phone.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Our Savannah is signed by Jordan Farr.”

“Master Records.”

“Patricia Little’s newest financial gain.”

She handed him the phone back. “I don’t understand any of this. Why does a woman who left your father and you after two years still hold this grudge?”

Warner stepped back and ran his fingers through his hair. He turned and looked out the window.

“Warner,” she said with her voice quivering.

“Clara, everything in my life has been ugly until you came along. You know that? Everything.”

“Warner, what is it you’re not telling me?”

He paced the kitchen floor and Clara’s heart began to race. What secrets did he have? Who was this man she’d married?

Warner paced some more and Clara finally stepped in front of him. “You are hiding something from me. Now spill it or get the hell out of my house.”

He stopped pacing and she could see the vein at his temple pulse.

“You’re like everyone else, huh? Warner needs a moment and you turn on him?”

“I don’t do secrets.”

“And I don’t do bullying.”

Clara stepped up closer to him. “I’m not bullying you. I’m trying to get my answer. My husband is hiding something from me.”

“He’s not hiding it,” he said and his voice softened. “He just doesn’t know how to tell you.”

Her heart rate kicked up even harder.

“You’re scaring me.”

He turned toward her, but he took a step back from her and not closer to her.

“Patty had a daughter. She was two years older than me.” He turned and placed his hands on the counter top and bowed his head. “Patty never had much to do with her. I only met her a few times while she was even married to my dad.” He sucked in a long, deep breath and let it out. “She hated Patty as much as I did.”

Clara felt her stomach twist. She didn’t want to hear about another woman. She didn’t want to know anything about Warner loving someone else, but she felt it coming. Why else would he mention her?

“When I was about fourteen I had decided that I was already too good for school and the day was better drinking behind the gym shed. I was usually drunk and passed out by the time my grandma got home. Drinking led to pot. Pot led to…”

Clara couldn’t help but gasp and Warner turned his head.

“You want me to stop?”

She shook her head, urging him to continue, but she wasn’t sure she wanted him to.

He turned and backed against the counter shoving his hands into his front pockets.

“I was at this party one night and my buddy brought this girl with him. I was trashed and she made me look sober. I didn’t recognize her, Clara.” He looked up at her. “It was Mindy and I had no idea.”

“Mindy? Patricia Little’s daughter?”

“Yeah.” He stepped away from the counter and walked to the table where he stood as she had earlier with his hands on the back of the chair. “We both ended up sleeping the night off on the guy’s couch. She knew who I was right away. She acted like I was the long lost piece of her life.”

Clara watched him search for the rest of his story. She wanted to stop him from continuing. It already hurt too much to find out who he really was.

“You and Mindy?”

“Me and Mindy.” He pulled the chair out and sat down. He clasped his hands on lap and hung his head. “When Patty and my grandma found out we were—well you know—Grandma shipped me off to Vegas to live with my aunt.”

“You were so young.”

“I was. Seems so long ago.” He sat up and pressed his back to the chair. “Anyway, sending a kid to the cesspool of Vegas when he already has a drinking problem and a drug addiction isn’t the smartest thing. But I was there for the next year or so. I made some
friends.
I was even in a band.” He laughed. “They’d sneak me into bars because I wasn’t old enough to be in the bar I was playing in.”

“How old were they?”

“Old enough.”

Clara realized her own hands shook as he continued his story, so she tucked them behind her.

“Anyway, I was just another low life on the streets of Vegas. My aunt usually didn’t know where I was or care. Then one day Mindy walks through the door. It was like my salvation. There was my woman.”

Clara thought she was going to be ill.

“She’d hitched a ride when she found out where I was. She was almost eighteen now. The guy she’d hitched a ride from had driven her for a few rounds in the back seat.”

“Oh, Warner. That’s horrible.”

“This was life, Clara. This was the norm. We didn’t have this perfect protected life you did.”

“And you’re holding that against me?”

“No, but it sounds like you’re holding it against me.”

He was right. She wouldn’t have married him if she thought he was bad for her. But she certainly hadn’t expected this.

“Mindy and I fell right back into our
routine.
Then she started collecting men. I was just who she ran back to when she had used them up to get what she wanted. I was young, but I had feelings. I didn’t want to just be her guy for sex or the connection for her drugs.”

“Warner, this is killing me.” Clara walked out of the kitchen and into the living room.

“Let me finish and then I’ll go.”

“You’ll go?”

“You can’t even hear the rest of my story without walking away from me. Clara, this is the way it works in my life. People find out who I was and they walk. I’m prepared for you to do the same.”

“I’m not like everyone else.”

“Then prove it and sit down and listen to me.”

Clara felt as though he’d kicked her in the gut. And worse, she deserved his anger.

She sat down on the couch and looked up at him.

“Anyway, I decided I needed to stop the drinking and the drugs. I was much too young to be having a woman in my bed when I woke up, especially one who was continually trashed. So I stopped doing drugs and eventually stopped drinking. I saved up enough money for a bus ticket to Nashville and one night I told her I was going home.”

“She didn’t want to come with you?”

“No. Her kind of life was right there. She threw the biggest fit I’d ever seen a woman throw, and mind you I was there when her mother threw some serious fits. But she got a few punches in on me. Blacked my eye and bloodied my nose. She even cracked a rib. I got on the bus and she went back to whatever guy she’d been with the night before and…”

He shook his head, swallowed hard, and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “Well they tied on the worst concoction of coke and booze ever. But I don’t think that was all.”

Warner walked toward the front window and looked out over the street. “Patty found out I was back in town and she came after me with a vengeance. She wanted to know where her daughter was and I told her. Looked her right in the eye, with my black one that Mindy had given me, and told her that her daughter was turning tricks in Vegas for drugs and booze.”

“What did she say to that?”

“She called me a liar. Said that if that was true I must have been the one that put her up to it.”

“She didn’t know her own daughter well enough to know what kind of person she was.”

“She’d never admit it.”

Clara wrung her hands together. “Did she find her?”

Warner walked back toward the couch and sat on the opposite end. “She found her. She was marked as a Jane Doe in the morgue. That last night of partying was the last one forever. The guy she’d run back to was arrested for her death.”

“So Patricia knows you had nothing to do with that.”

“She knows, but she still holds me accountable. She thinks I’m the one who started her drug addiction and drinking. She assumes that I asked Mindy to go to Las Vegas. And she will keep to her promise to ruin everything I ever try to do. Look at my teaching jobs, my performing opportunities, the only alliance I had at a record company.”

“Warner this was nearly fifteen years ago. She needs to let it go.”

“She’s not going to. Now she’s thriving on taking me down.”

“We have to make her stop. I have to get out of this contract on this tour. I can’t work on something with my heart when I know she’s behind it.”

Warner shook his head. “First of all, you don’t get out of contracts.” He chuckled, then looked back down at her hands. “I think it’s possible to make this work in our benefit. I really do.”

“Take the high road?”

“Right.” He finally turned his head and looked at her. He tucked his lips between his teeth and let his shoulders drop. “You have full access to my catalog of songs.”

“Thank you.”

“We’re married. What’s mine is yours. I’ll even sign over the rights if you need me to.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

He swallowed hard. “And now I’ll go pack my things.”

Clara felt her jaw tighten. “You’ll what?”

“I just dumped a whole lot of undesirable information on you. I’d understand if you needed some time to sort out who you just married.”

“I’ve seen you drink one beer since we’ve been together.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been in the entertainment industry long enough to know if you’re gay or stoned and neither seem to be the case.”

He chuckled again. “I’m not stoned or gay.”

“You’re clean, right?”

“Since I left Vegas that day.”

She felt her cheek twitch and she knew Warner saw it. There was doubt brewing in her and she hated that. He was willing to leave and she was the one holding him back from doing so. But she loved him and if she’d learned anything from being a Keller; it was that love always won.

“You’ll stay here. You’re my husband and I love you.”

“You didn’t know about my past. You didn’t know about Mindy.”

Clara shot her shoulders back and straightened her spine. “Fine, would you like to hear about my love affairs?”

Warner shook his head and smiled. “No. I really wouldn’t like to hear that.”

“Good, because I don’t want to talk about them.” She inched closer to him on the couch and took his hands in hers. “The worst thing to ever happen to me was my mom’s cancer and Alexander Hamilton trying to kill me.”

Warner lifted his hand to her cheek. “Oh, is that all?”

Clara let down her guard. “Yeah, that’s all. We can work through all of this. She can’t destroy you forever.”

“She’ll try.”

“And I’ll be here. I’ve got your back.”

“I love you, Mrs. Wright.”

“Back atcha, Mr. Wright.”

Clara believed every word her husband told her, but still she was sitting in the chair in the corner of their bedroom at two in the morning contemplating it all. Warner slept peacefully and Clara hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep.

Who was this man she married? His family was gone—that was the only way to look at it. How could a mother hate her child and turn him away? Or her for that matter. What made Patricia Little neglect her own daughter?

How could a grandmother send her grandson away and a father think it would be better if he were dead? None of this made sense to her.

Warner rolled over and Clara sucked in a breath and sat still. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore tonight. She was afraid, perhaps, there was more.

The thought of the young love affair with Mindy had her sick to her stomach. When she was fourteen her parents were happily married again and her mother was in remission. Sure, she had her one demon, but she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and she knew that.

Warner’s life sounded like it had all been times of wrong timing in wrong places.

She could let go the affair with Patricia’s daughter. What boy at that age wouldn’t have loved to have had an older girl want him at all times? But the drugs and the alcohol—she couldn’t wrap her head around it.