Regrets Only (19 page)

The
guy she’d heard the least from tossed his chips into the center of the table.
“I’m out.”

“Come
on, Jeff,” someone said. “We won’t tell your wife if you stay another hand.”

“Hey,”
Jeff said. “She’s not my wife yet, and if I don’t get up there, she might
change her mind about it. Then I’d be stuck married to you jerk-offs for the
rest of my life.”

He
clapped Dylan on the shoulder. “’Night, brother.”

Dylan
gave him a nod. “We’ll look at the tour schedule at lunch tomorrow.”

It
struck Suzanne how enmeshed everyone’s work and personal lives had become in
this world. Jeff was Dylan’s drinking buddy, promotions manager, and future
brother-in-law all at once. The seriousness of running a business that
sustained several families was entwined with the debauchery and abandon going
on downstairs. It was little wonder so many musicians succumbed to this
lifestyle.

“What
about you, Miss Scarlett? You play?” Suzanne looked up to see Grey Poupon
gesturing to Jeff’s empty seat.

“Oh,
no, thank you. I’d rather just watch.”

 “What?
They don’t play Texas Hold ’Em at the Junior League soirees?” Dylan’s crooked
smile was baiting. He’d done his homework on her.

“No,
we ladies prefer the classic five-card stud. You know, while we’re drinking tea
in the drawing room, talking about beauty magazines.” Her accent dripped with
exaggerated condescension, and she batted her eyelashes for effect. The guys
laughed in approval.

“We
can do that,” Eddie said, patting Jeff’s empty seat in invitation.

Why
not?
Suzanne
thought.
What else am I going to do in the middle of the night, in the
middle of nowhere?

She
won the first two hands easily, feigning beginners luck and shock at winning.
By the third hand, however, the guys had figured out she knew what she was
doing. For years as a little girl, she had hidden in the butler’s pantry of her
parents’ large colonial home and watched her father play poker with lawyers
from both sides of the aisle, judges, and even a senator or two. It had been a
better education than all the charm classes her mother dragged her to put
together.

“Careful,
boys,” Eddie said as they began the fourth round. “I think we have a shark on
our hands.”

“I’ll
bet you have a professional poker player on that list of yours, eh, Scarlett?”
Dylan said, sounding drunker than he had a few minutes before. He looked around
seriously at the other men at the table. “See, what y’all don’t know about
Suzanne is, she’s dated just about every kind of guy there is to date. She’s
got a big list of ’em. Which one of them taught you poker, Scarlett?”

Her
chest tightened painfully, and she fought hard to bury the anger and hurt
welling up inside. “Actually, I learned from my dad,” she said, working hard to
modulate her voice. She kept her eyes on his. They were a soft green, if a
little red around the edges at the moment. Some emotion was behind them, but
what it was, she couldn’t tell.

The
other guys at the table were all looking down at their cards in intense
concentration, not wanting to meet either Suzanne’s or Dylan’s gazes. After an
uncomfortable minute of silence, Dylan looked down at his cards, and then
dropped them face down on the table. “I fold,” he said.

“Read
’em and weep,” Eddie responded, laying out a straight flush.

Suzanne
didn’t need to look at her cards. She knew she had a royal flush and could take
the fourth hand and probably the game. “I’m out, too,” she said, tossing her
cards in face down. She got up, stretched, and took her empty beer bottle
toward the kitchen. “Thanks for letting me play, boys.”

When
she got back, Dylan had disappeared, presumably to the bedroom where Misty
waited for him. The rest of them murmured and dispersed. Eddie must have had
the privilege of one of the guest bedrooms, because he went upstairs. Suzanne
followed the other two down to the basement. Quiet now, the three picked their
way around sleeping bodies and party debris: the guys, to an air mattress that
waited for them in what served as a community bedroom, and Suzanne out to the
back patio to the cottage path.

The
hot tub lovers were gone now, and she wondered vaguely whether they had gone
their separate ways or were curled up somewhere together. Given the scene
inside, she was now officially grateful to Yvette for sticking her in the guesthouse.

She
was halfway down the path, using her cell phone for a flashlight, when
something made her look over her shoulder. Most of the lights were out now, but
there was a faint glow coming from the master bedroom. From this angle, she
couldn’t tell much about the room except that it appeared to have a large
poster bed, of which she could see a single ballast.

Then
she noticed him, an outline in the dark, leaning against the railing next to the
open bedroom door. She waved nervously and Dylan returned it, not moving
otherwise. She continued on, feeling his eyes on her until she had closed and
locked the cottage door behind her. When she glanced out the window a moment
later, the master bedroom light was off, and she could see no one in the inky
black night.

Suzanne
was utterly surprised when she awoke again, this time having put on pajamas and
climbed under the quilt, that only a few hours had passed since she returned to
the cottage. Her phone had informed her it was 3:26 a.m. when she turned it off
to go to sleep, and it was just after seven when she awoke. Oddly, she felt
fine and was up and into her yoga pants almost immediately. Yvette must be a
morning person, because she’d left a note in their tiny kitchen that she had
gone into town and would return in the afternoon.

With
nothing to do or eat down at the cottage, Suzanne made her way back up the
hill, hoping that Kate might also be up early and they could even finish their wedding
work before noon. Suzanne was surprisingly eager to get home. Her life at home
may not have been anything to be excited about, but the sense of disconnect
from all reality up here at the Party Lodge was unsettling in its own way.

In
the morning light, the lowest level of the house made for a pathetic scene. Litter
was everywhere, glass was shattered by the hot tub, and an empty plastic vodka
bottle floated on the water. Although some people had clearly made it to bed
during the night, accompanied or otherwise, others had simply slept where
they’d fallen—bodies were strewn across the floor as well as the available
furniture. She was surprised that no one had curled up on the pool table.

One
sad little couple had apparently passed out while attempting to make a last-ditch
mistake together before the end of the night. The girl, who might have been
twenty, lay on the couch with her blouse unbuttoned to reveal a lacy pink bra.
The guy slept with his close-cropped head on her bare stomach, legs hanging off
the end of the couch, and the little soldier who had failed to report for duty
still dangling out of his open fly. Suzanne suppressed a giggle at this as she
sneaked past them to the stairs.

The
main floor was silent, too; though without all the carnage of the night before,
it was more peaceful. All the doors were still closed, so Suzanne tiptoed to
the kitchen to look for Pop Tarts and discovered that someone had already made
coffee. Yvette maybe?
I seriously need to do something with my life so I can
hire someone like her
, she thought as she poured a cup and went outside.

Dylan
was sitting at a small patio table on the observation deck at the end of one of
the piers, his back to the house. A coffee mug was standing sentinel next to
him, and what looked like a legal pad was nearby, but he seemed to be simply
staring into the distance. She tried to slip back into the kitchen so as not to
disturb him, but there was a beer bottle she hadn’t noticed at her feet. She
kicked it by accident, causing a clatter on the boards. Dylan turned, put his
finger to his lips dramatically, and waved her over.

“Have
a seat,” he said, when she got to the end of the platform. “Best one in the
house.” It really was breathtaking. Although you could see the mountains in the
distance from nearly any window in the house, the little decks were far enough
out that they gave you the feeling of floating above the forest, far from the
solid ground just a hundred yards or so behind you. The view from here was
nearly a full circle, and in the morning light it was a lovely combination of
soft pastel sky and blue mountains covered in a deep gray mist.

“That’s
why they’re called the Smokies,” he said, following her gaze, without a hint of
his usual condescension. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Suzanne
nodded. Her family had spent some time in the mountains as a child, but she didn’t
remember them being quite this awe-inspiring. She took the seat across the
table from Dylan and sipped her coffee in silence.

“I
owe you an apology,” he said suddenly, just as her mind was drifting far away.

“What?”
she stammered.

“For
last night, the comment I made about…you know.”

“Oh,
that,” she said, going pink at the ears. “It’s fine. Late-night poker game,
everyone had been drinking…”

“No,”
he said firmly, turning to look at her. “That’s no excuse. Whether you meant to
or not, you trusted me with something personal about yourself and I betrayed that.
I should have apologized last night, in front of the guys, but I was ashamed. I
just ran away. I am really sorry. I’m going to talk to them today.”

“That’s
not necessary.” She meant this. His apology seemed genuine and frankly, the
last thing she wanted was to have that brought up again.

“Yes,
it is.” His tone brooked no argument. Then, he apparently decided the topic was
closed and moved on. “How’s the coffee?”

She
made an approving noise. “Good,” he said. “Everyone complains that I make it
too strong.”

They
were silent again for a while, watching the mist slowly evaporate from the
mountains into an increasingly crisp blue sky. Suzanne had never been the type
to get star-struck—she’d known enough powerful people in her life to recognize
that people were people, famous or not. But it did strike her as surreal,
sitting in midair over a mountain, casually drinking coffee with someone she
barely knew, who sold out stadiums when he performed in concert.

“Can
I ask you a question?” she said, breaking the silence.

“Sure.
If I can ask you one back.” The crooked little grin again. Her insides
fluttered. She ignored them.

“All
right. What’s with the camo hat?”

“What
do you mean? You don’t like it?”

“No,
it’s not that. It’s just…such an interesting choice. I wondered how you picked
that as your thing. You know, your trademark or whatever.”

“‘
Interesting
choice’
sounds like a nice way of saying you think I look like an idiot,”
he said, grinning.

“It’s
not that—” She fumbled for the right words. “It’s just I think you look so nice
without it, like now. I wondered why you always wear it. I mean, you have great
hair.”

He
laughed now. “You thought I was bald under there, didn’t you?”

“No!”
she protested. But she
had
wondered that, before the gala.

“You’re
not doing some kind of secret interview for
Vanity Fair
or something,
are you?” Then he considered her for a minute, and answered his own question.
“No, you’re not. You’d be a terrible spy.”

“Never
mind,” she said flatly. “Let’s just drink our coffee and look at the
mountains.”

“Relax,
Scarlett, I’ll tell you.” He leaned back and clasped his fingers behind his
head. “But you’re going to be disappointed.”

“I’ll
be the judge of that.”

“It
was, I don’t know, five years ago, maybe? We were still playing dive bars and
high school dances, all of us kids trying to break into the business. Couple of
those guys are inside now. Eddie is the only one still playing with me from
back then, but we’ve all stayed tight. Anyway, we got this chance to play at a
big festival up in Virginia Beach, a huge break. Another band had to cancel
last minute and my dad knew someone who knew someone…you know how it goes.

“So
we went up the day before and like a bunch of idiots, got hammered and went out
to the beach looking for girls. We didn’t find any girls, as I recall, at least
not any that were willing to talk to us, but I did fall asleep in the sun. I
had sunscreen on, but my head wasn’t covered, so by the time those idiots had
the courtesy to wake me up, my scalp was totally fried. Hurt like hell. I had
to have a hat for the festival, because it was outside, but we stayed up so
late the night before I had no time to go to a real store. So we went to a
convenience store and my choices were ‘Female Body Inspector,’ ‘Virginia is for
Lovers,’ or the plain camouflage one.”

Suzanne
smiled. “Gotta go with plain camouflage on that one.”

“It’s
funny,” he said. “These days I probably would’ve chosen ‘Virginia is for
Lovers’ and sort of worn it ironically, but my sense of humor wasn’t as
sophisticated then as it is now.”