Love Songs for the Road (12 page)

Ryan lost what was left of her cool. “I’m not falling for a rock star, Mom!”

She looked up. The woman was now directly in front of her, her arms folded in a bossy, imperious way that made it obvious she wanted Ryan’s immediate attention. “Mom, I need to go. There’s somebody here.” She hung up right away. Her mom wouldn’t be happy—that wasn’t the way the Evans family did things—but she could explain herself later. “Can I help you?”

“Is that room 2110?” The lady wore a smug smile.

“It is. But we weren’t expecting visitors.” The woman was beautiful: flawless porcelain skin; catlike, chestnut eyes; full, languorous lips. She was the kind of person Ryan thought would be perfectly comfortable strolling on the beaches of St. Tropez, wherever that was.

“Are you Rachel?” She pulled out a piece of paper and crinkled her nose at it. “Sorry. Ryan? Ryan Evans?”

“I am. Who are you?” She clutched the room key with her hand, so tightly that it hurt. She imagined wrestling the woman for control of the key, engaging in a battle to the death while Miles, a potential kidnappee, cluelessly watched Nickelodeon only a few feet away.

“Bianca,” the woman said. “Bianca Troy. I’d like to see my son.”

Chapter Fifteen

Symptoms

Marcus didn’t have a lot of good memories of Los Angeles. He’d gotten married in LA, but he’d been divorced here, too. He’d loved their first three years in the city, living in a ramshackle three-bedroom house with an infinity pool overlooking the gritty, then-Hispanic neighborhood of Echo Park. But the last four, in the cloistered Hollywood mansion he’d bought only to pacify Bianca, had been hellish. His ex-wife had pushed him so hard that when she’d finally left him for another man—this was before she’d gotten the best lawyer in LA County and eviscerated him in the custody battle, before he’d hired Cynthia—he’d felt something close to gratitude.

Marcus recognized the irony of complaining, even silently, while living his childhood dream of playing three consecutive sold-out nights at the Hollywood Bowl, his favorite venue. Microphone in hand, singing his lungs out to yet another capacity crowd, he tried not to think about the possibility of losing the kids a second time. Nobody, not his friends in the crew, not even Smitty, wanted to hear about a wealthy rock star’s problems. Marcus knew the deal: because he was rich and and famous, he wasn’t allowed to complain. To the world, it was inconceivable that he would have any real problems, so it was best not to share any worries or misgivings, even with his closest friends.

Then it hit him: keeping his feelings to himself, bottling everything up—that was the old Marcus. The new Marcus, the one who actually wanted to open up and share the intimate details of his life, pleasant and painful, had recently been awakened. Was it Ryan? Was she the one he wanted to share his real feelings with? He thought it just might be.

It angered Marcus that he couldn’t explore this new possibility in his life without a bunch of dicks on Twitter weighing in on whether he had the right to feel what he felt. Even at this concert, where presumably everyone without press credentials had spent a good chunk of their hard-earned money on a ticket, a few people up front were heckling him between songs. “Where’s the nanny, Troy?” shouted one. “If she’s not with you anymore, I’m single!” yelled another. “Great tits!” a third Neanderthal roared. He’d have an easy time ignoring these trolls if they didn’t have such a big impact on his life. But they processed the gossip about him, tittered over manipulated images and text that portrayed him in an untrue light, and spat back the information until it came to resemble the truth, a new, restrictive, and damning truth that caused him tremendous hurt and pain.

Marcus felt faint and hot and uncomfortable. His guitar seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He needed food, or water, or something, but it would have to wait until the end of this song. He realized that, these last few days, he’d been missing Ryan almost as much as Miles. He knew it was stupid to pursue her, to obsess over her like this. She wasn’t just his employee; she was the employee he needed to rely on the most. If there was even a possibility that his relationship with Ryan distracted her from being the best nanny she could be, he was cheating his own kids and sabotaging all the groundwork he’d laid for the summer. Worst of all, he was proving Bianca right: even though they’d done nothing but hold hands a couple of times, and the images on the web told a wild, exaggerated tale, Bianca
was
right.

But the heart felt what the heart felt, and Marcus had long ago stopped trying to control his emotions. Despite himself, he had already begun to think about the possibilities that might open up after the tour ended. Ryan had only agreed to work for him for the summer. She would be going to school somewhere—he couldn’t even remember where, maybe in the Midwest or the South?—to get her Master’s, right after the tour ended. Marcus wished she were planning to stay near Bigfork instead. Sure, it might have been cheesy, but he would have loved to take her out on a proper date when all of this was over. He’d pick her up in the El Dorado and drive down to that new gourmet pizza spot by the ski resort. Or better yet, before it got too cold, he could take her out for a canoe ride down the Swan River, pack a picnic and drink a glass of wine as the sun set…

These fantasies came to him, of course, during “Love of My Life,” the song that had gotten them into so much trouble in the first place. So when he started to feel faint and giddy, he figured it was his emotions getting the best of him. But after the third verse, his stomach lurched, and he knew he wasn’t flying high on his dreams for a future with Ryan. He was hovering dangerously close to getting sick, right here onstage, right in front of 20,000 fans. He finished the verse and staggered behind the drum kit.

Smitty, vamping while the keyboardist filled in with a flashy solo, sauntered over to him, and said, “You doin’ okay, there, boss? You don’t look so hot.”

Marcus couldn’t answer. The nausea was coming on him tsunami-style, and, realizing he wasn’t even going to make it all the way backstage, he vomited as discreetly as possible behind Smitty’s treasured blackface Fender Twin amplifier. Employee or not, Smitty would kick his ass if he damaged that amp; it was his baby. But it couldn’t be helped.

A roadie, seeing what had happened, rushed to Marcus with a damp towel and that bottle of water he’d been pining after. Smitty, knowing he needed to kill some time, began a long, wild solo while Marcus wiped his face with the towel. Then, he gargled a mouthful of water, spat it out, and returned to the stage. He finished the song, a bit weakened, but the crowd was none the wiser. The show had to go on. And it did.

…

Ryan couldn’t take the quiet anymore. Not a minute after she’d gotten into the back of the limo with Bianca and Miles, the boy had fallen asleep, his head in his mother’s lap, knees jabbing Ryan in the ribs, and silence had descended over the vehicle. They hit brutal traffic on the 101; Ryan swore she could hear the limo driver’s slow, even breathing. She couldn’t believe she was going to be sitting next to Marcus’s ex, the mother of the children she’d been hired to look after, for God knew how long. What did Bianca know about Marcus and her? Or, more importantly, what did Bianca
think
she knew?

Had she been alone, Ryan probably would have welcomed a bit of quiet after the commotion that had erupted when Bianca had introduced herself an hour earlier. What a mistake it had been to leave Miles alone, even if she was just on the other side of the door. And what bad luck for his mother to arrive just as he was about to be sick again. They opened the door to find Miles barfing right on the coffee table, the horrible mess, and Miles’s misery, making one hell of a first impression of Ryan as a caregiver.

Horrified, she’d run into the bathroom to dampen some towels and clean up the atrocity. On her hands and knees, she let Bianca do the comforting. Miles, happy enough as he’d curled next to her a few minutes earlier, looked exhausted. A single tear rolled down his cheek, though he didn’t make a sound. He had probably drifted to sleep until the nausea had given him a rude awakening. She knew she shouldn’t have given him those damned Saltines.

In the limo, Bianca finally spoke. “This is so typical of Marcus. He’s always been irresponsible, but this time he’s really done it.” She petted her son’s hair over and over in what Ryan thought looked like an obsessive-compulsive pattern (she had been taking too many psychology courses…two years ago she would have just said Bianca seemed like a nut). She also wondered whether or not it was appropriate for Bianca to discuss Marcus’s faults in Miles’s presence. “He says he wants the kids on tour, but when one of them gets sick—and believe me, this one is
always
getting sick—he goes right on and packs up for the next town, and leaves him with the nanny? No offense, Rachel, but that’s just cruel. Especially when I’m less than two hours away. He could have dropped
both
kids at my house. Wouldn’t that have made more sense?”

Ryan said nothing—she even let Bianca call her Rachel—but of course, she hadn’t even known Bianca lived in the area, and even if she had, the decision wasn’t hers to make.

With an air of total certainty, Bianca explained that Miles would stay with her until he was feeling 100 percent again. Awkward though it was, Ryan had insisted on calling Marcus to make sure the new plan was okay—he’d sighed and said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore,” and said good-bye before explaining what that meant—because, last she checked, she was Marcus’s employee, not Bianca’s.

After Ryan hung up, Bianca tilted her head and coolly assessed her, as if pulling some designer garment off the rack for closer examination. “Can I give you a piece of unsolicited advice?” Bianca asked Ryan, who couldn’t help cringing.

“Go ahead. Shoot.” Ryan braced herself. The phrase
unsolicited advice
meant, of course, that Marcus’s ex had seen the videos and pictures, read the stories, and come to the same conclusions Ryan’s mother (and the rest of the world) had.

“You seem like a nice girl, but you’re young—very young. And I know Marcus might seem like this incredible catch. He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s handsome.”

“He’s all right.” Ryan was going for levity, a little joke to lighten the mood, but either her delivery was way off or Bianca didn’t have a sense of humor. She decided to return to her silent nodding routine. Just let this woman speak her mind and be done with it.

“Let me just say this to you, woman to woman. That man does not know how to be a partner. Not to me, not to you, not to anyone.”

Who said anything about “partners”?
Ryan wanted to scream, though she followed her own advice and STFU.
All the man did was hold my hand!

“He’s a textbook narcissist,” Bianca continued. She seemed to have done some psychology coursework of her own, or at least turned the pages of a few self-help books. “He puts all this love and compassion in his songs, so the world will think he’s this amazing guy. He puts so much of himself into his music, in fact, that there’s nothing left for the rest of us. He’s got no time for his kids, and he certainly didn’t have time for his wife.”

“He has time for me, Mom,” Miles said meekly.

“Aww, hon, I didn’t know you were awake.” Bianca was acting like she’d just been talking about the price of butter or landmarks on the side of the road, not the most important man in her son’s life. And incredibly, Miles’s injecting himself into the conversation didn’t make Bianca realize that the subject at hand was maybe, just maybe, inappropriate. “Marcus lives in his own world, and no woman is going to change that. The music has always come first, and it always will.”

It takes two to tango
, Ryan thought.
Talk about being lost in your own world.
She looked at Bianca and tried to picture what the woman had been like before Marcus’s successes had altered her life forever. Had she always been this self-centered, or had her wealth and fame by association changed her forever? Ryan knew one thing: she would never want that to happen to her.

“So, Rachel, enough about us,” Bianca said. “Tell me something about you.”

Chapter Sixteen

Full-On Paradise

“You’ve done some stupid things in your life, Marcus Troy, but this one beats them all,” Bianca said, not two seconds after entering the suite.

He didn’t say,
Stupider than marrying you?
Instead, he went with, “Nice to see you again, too, Bianca.”

Behind her, Serena seemed to be willing herself to become invisible. In silence, she gathered her laptop and charger and tiptoed out of the room. She looked at Marcus with a benevolent sadness. He smiled and shrugged. This was Serena’s first Bianca encounter, but it surely wouldn’t be her last.

“Really, Marcus,” Bianca continued. “What did you do to drive Mrs. Janssen away? She was fantastic, and the kids loved her.”

Marcus found himself tongue-tied; Bianca had never even met the tough old Swede. But he knew there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t further provoke her, so he just stood there, rubbing the five o’clock shadow on his chin, a nervous gesture he resorted to under stress.

“Say something!” she yelled. But he just raised his hands. It wasn’t only that he was following his therapist’s indisputably wise advice—never engage Bianca when she’s in a rage, don’t start a battle you can never win, you’ll only add fuel to the fire, etc.—but also, he had just recovered from a spell of sickness, and was simply too weak to put up a fight.
Small blessings
, he thought.

“Maybe you and your nanny are the perfect fit, then. She sat in the car with me for two and a half hours and didn’t say more than ten words. The two of you can live happily ever after in stone-cold silence, for all I care.” She shook her head in dismay, and he wished she could see what he did—that she was still grieving the end of their relationship, somewhere in that mysterious heart of hers, and instead of healing herself, was taking her frustrations out on the kids. “Well, Charlotte and Miles are coming home with me. This tour was obviously a huge mistake. I should never have agreed to it.”

“Bianca, we reached an agreement. We
signed
an agreement.” The ten-week custody contract had weighed about as much as his first record deal, but he was sure glad he had it now.

Bianca sighed. “That agreement is going to be voided, rest assured. And you’re going to be served within forty-eight hours.”

“With what, a subpoena? Another custody hearing? Please, Bianca, don’t. This kind of instability hurts the kids even more than it does us.”

“You leave me no choice. We agreed that you would allot time in your schedule to care for—”

“I
have
allotted that time.”

“—and that you would hire a trained, professional caregiver when you’re not.”

“Ryan
is
a professional.”

“I’ll say she is. A professional climber. How long did it take her to crawl into bed with you?”

“Just…don’t. Please. Nothing of the kind has happened.”

“The photos are everywhere. People who are not involved, they don’t look like that together.”

“I comforted her, that’s all,” he said. “I touched my employee’s elbow, for God’s sake.” He hoped no judge would entertain such subjective “evidence” and use it to justify taking the children from him.

“You’re a celebrity, Marcus. You should hold yourself to a higher standard.”

“I was just trying to be, I don’t know,
compassionate.
”

Bianca shook her head. “Well, at least let them stay with me until Miles is healthy again. Until everyone in the crew is on their feet, so it doesn’t wear the kids down. Regardless of what the court rules, they can’t tour the country in a bus with you if they have to pull over to the side of the road every five minutes to be sick.” She slung her
Commes Des Garcons
handbag over her wrist with an air of finality.

In moments like these, Marcus didn’t know if Bianca was crazy or just crazy-strategic, but she did have a habit of calmly following her frothing-at-the-mouth tantrums with a single morsel of common sense. It was disconcerting, but Marcus would consider this one an olive branch.

“Fine, they stay with you, but only until the tour starts again. Most of the crew is going to be here at the Hyatt, but Smitty and a few of us are going to Canyon Ranch for a bit. I’ll come back to LA in five days, or as soon as everyone is fully healthy again. Does that work for you?”

“You’ll be served by then, and I can’t predict when the hearing’ll be scheduled.”

“Fine.” He didn’t want to resort to cliché, but it was hard not to say, “
I guess I’ll see you in court.
”

Bianca nodded, her mouth still a dour, straight line that cut across her face like a blade. But, unreal as it was, he and his ex-wife seemed to have reached an agreement. When she turned and
click-clack
ed out of the room in the four-thousand-dollar Louboutin heels she’d bought with his alimony money, he felt so faint, he had to brace himself against the wall. He didn’t know whether he was feeling nausea or just relief. He stood there in a daze, taking deep, even breaths, hoping he wasn’t about to be sick again.

Three hours later, a knock on his door. At first, thinking it was Serena, he ignored it, cocooning his head into an ultra-plush hotel pillow and willing the sound to go away. It was no fun being sick, but this deep, dreamless nap was a sweet consolation prize he didn’t want to give up just yet.

“Marcus? It’s me, Ryan.”

“Oh, hold on just a second.” He reached for a glass of water on his bedside table, and downed the whole thing like a man dying of thirst. Then he gave his cheeks a couple of light slaps, sat up in bed, and pulled the sheets to his neck. He was not feeling very sexy at the moment. “Okay, come on in.”

Ryan entered the room and walked the ten feet to the foot of his bed. She stood there, looking like she didn’t want to come any farther.

“Good,” he said. “Stay there. I don’t know how you’ve managed to avoid this damned virus, but let’s keep it that way. We need
somebody
on this tour to stay healthy.”

Marcus struggled for a moment to remember that they were in Los Angeles. Because they always stayed in Hyatts, the blueprint for his suite never changed—same four-poster California king-sized bed with six-million-thread-count sheets, same “living area” with overstuffed blue-velvet couch—so they could have been in any number of cities. The tour had just begun, but he found himself longing for his own bed in Bigfork. As he looked at Ryan, who for once was wearing not a T-shirt and jeans but a pale green skirt that ended just above her knees and a fitted, short-sleeved blouse, he thought,
God, she’s amazing
. But then he remembered the video, and the photographs, and even worse, the subpoena he was supposedly about to receive, and his heart sank. Relationships brought nothing but trouble. Bianca had once been “amazing” to him, too. Now they couldn’t even be in the same room together without fighting. Things with Ryan would sour in much the same way eventually, he was sure.

“So, Serena tells me we’re going to some kind of ranch?” she asked.

“Well, it’s not really a
ranch
ranch. Not to a Montana girl like you, anyway. It’s more like a retreat, a wellness center. They’ve got yoga classes, Pilates, meditation, all kinds of stuff. The food is low-calorie but absolutely delicious. And it’s on this fantastic property, right smack in the middle of the desert. It’s an incredible spot. You’ll love it.”

“Yoga classes? You’re sick as a dog. Why would you want to do yoga?”

“I’m not going to be doing many vinyasas or downward dogs, not at first, anyway.” He chuckled. “But Canyon Ranch will be an awesome place for us all to recuperate for a few days, before the tour gets up and running again.”

“You don’t think it might just be a twenty-four-hour flu? Miles seems better already.”

“Well, I hope so, but once a virus starts kicking around on the bus, it winds up hitting just about everybody in the crew eventually. It’ll probably take a few days to cycle through that. Maybe even a week.”

“The Bus of Not Quite So Awesome.”

“That’s right.” Marcus paused and readjusted the pillow behind his back. He felt a little odd having Ryan this close to him when he was sick in bed—not exactly a rock-star setting, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Ryan, listen, about Santa Barbara…”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to go out there, it’s just that Charlotte—”

“Oh please,
you
don’t have to be sorry. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I should have been more careful, with those paps there.”

“But how could you have known touching my stupid
elbow
would turn into an actual scandal? It’s completely ridiculous.”

“I probably should have explained to you what life is like on tour, huh?”

“If you had, I wouldn’t have believed you.” They both laughed.

“So, listen,” Marcus said. “The real reason we’re going to the Ranch is this: it’s not a pretentious environment, but it
is
exclusive. People who go there expect privacy; they demand it, and in return, they respect the privacy of everybody else around them. No one’s going to be snapping cell-phone pics or tweeting about us, so we can all take a breath and relax. And by the time we go out on the road again, the gossip will have lost some of its luster, and we can get back to business.”

“God, Marcus, your life…” Marcus braced himself. He’d heard women complain about “his life” before.

“What? Go ahead, say it.”

“…sucks. Sometimes, anyway. How do you deal with it?”

“I don’t know, day by day?” He felt Ryan slipping away. They all slipped away, every woman he’d ever cared for. Was this the price he had to pay to live his dream—that he’d have to live it alone?

“Is it worth it, though? Having people follow your every move like this, sticking their noses into your business?”

Marcus thought for a moment.
Is it worth it?
He hadn’t asked himself that question in a while. “This is the price I pay for being successful at doing what I love. I suppose I could just stop writing, stop recording, stop touring, but that’s never going to happen. I need to keep making music, for my mind, my body, my spirit.”

“No offense, but you kind of sound like a hippie right now.”

“I guess all of us musicians have a little hippie in us.” Then Marcus drawled in the scratchy, over-earnest stoner accent of one of his roadies, “We know how to tap into our
emotions
, man. That’s where, like, our
art
comes from.”

“Wow, dude,” Ryan shot back at him with her own version of the stoner voice. “Like, that’s so profound.”

Marcus started to laugh, but the laughter made his stomach muscles hurt. “Ow, stop,” he said. “You’re killing me here.”

“You’ll be all better once we get to this heaven-on-earth hippie yoga thingy.”

“You make fun, but you won’t once we get there. Canyon Ranch is paradise. Full-on paradise.”

Marcus had never met anybody like Ryan before. He had never met a woman who could be so sexy
and
so funny, and he’d never laughed so hard with anybody he’d known for such a short time. In fact, he couldn’t remember any of his lovers cracking him up, not like this. In an ideal world, one without celebrity culture and ex-wives and subpoenas, he and Ryan could really have something special together, couldn’t they?

“One more thing, Marcus,” Ryan said. She inhaled sharply. “You’ve either gotten used to living in the spotlight, or the way you were built, you’re just plain better equipped to deal with it in the first place…” She hesitated and bit her lip, which despite the difficulty of the moment, Marcus couldn’t help but notice was very sexy.

“Yeah? Go on.”

“I don’t think it’s for me. I don’t want my every move dissected by people who don’t even know me, and I don’t want my mom to see me on
Entertainment Tonight.
”

“Oh Ryan, you’re not quitting on me, are you?” Marcus didn’t want to lose her, for so many reasons.

“No, no, it’s not that!” she said. “It’s just that if you could—well, the world already knows my last name, and there’s nothing we can do to change that—but if you could just help me keep myself in the background a little, I would really appreciate it. I think I’ll do better if I stay behind the scenes, you know? That’s more my style.”

“You mean, you don’t like guys catcalling to you as a football stadium’s worth of people watches?”

“That is
exactly
the kind of thing I’m hoping to avoid.”

“Not a problem. No more shout-outs to Ryan Evans. I’ll just deliver my thanks privately.”

“Oh, Marcus…” Ryan stepped toward him, close enough to touch. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

Maybe she
wasn’t
slipping away. He would have killed just to hold her in his arms right now. No one was with them; the door was locked. Marcus felt like if he could feel her skin against his, her body pressed against his, even for an instant, everything would be all right. But instead, he said, “Don’t you take a step farther. I’m officially quarantining myself.”