Something is about to happen.
I know it before the bar does. I’ve known it from the moment he walked us to his truck. Beside me, Cassidy puts her hand over mine on the table. Tanner meets my eyes and grins.
They know too.
And then the band stops its warm-up chatter. One by one the instruments go quiet, and that quiet spreads outward from the stage, table by table, conversations trailing off mid-sentence, all the way to the back wall.
Walker steps out of the shadows at the back of the stage.
And then his eyes find me at the table.
He gives me that smile. The private one. The one that’s never once appeared in any concert footage or interview or photograph. The one that’s only ever for me.
And I forget everything else but the man in the black cowboy hat on stage, looking at me like I'm the only girl in the room.
The only girl in the world.
Chapter 33
Red Headed Woman
SADIE
There’s a whine of microphone feedback and John Sutton, owner of the bar that bears his family name, steps up to the mic and taps it.
“How we doin’, folks? Dog days of summer here. But I got a hell of a treat for y’all tonight.”
There are whoops and hollers in response.
He grins. “We got a surprise special guest here. One who got his start on this very stage twenty years ago. I remember this tall, skinny kid coming up to me with his guitar and asking to play a song and I was like, yeah, kid, knock yourself out. Expecting nothing. And then he starts playing that guitar, and I stopped cold in my tracks. And then…”
He looks into the crowd, building the anticipation.
“Then he starts singing, and the pipes on that kid…” He shakes his head.
“Sometimes you just know right there you’re looking at a baby superstar. Well, he ain’t a baby no more, but he’s a superstarall right. Welcome to the stage Marble Falls’ hometown boy, Walker Rhodes.”
The crowd explodes.
Walker saunters up to the mic, casual as anything, looking sexy as hell. He closes a hand around the mic, looks out at the room.
His gaze finds mine at the table again. His mouth doesn’t smile, but his eyes do.
“Ladies. Gentlemen.” His voice echoes throughout the bar, and there’s a cheer. “Got a couple questions for y’all. Who came here tonight to drink?”
Another cheer.
“Yeah, that’s an easy one,” he says. “Who came here tonight to dance?”
Another cheer, very female. A feminine wolf whistle.
“That’s what I thought. And who came here tonight to have the best fucking time they won’t remember tomorrow?”
An even louder cheer.
“Fucking degenerates,” Walker tells them, smirking, and the crowd eats it up. “Let’s play some music.”
He opens on one of his biggest hits. It’s from his fourth album, when his career was peaking. The opening chord rings out through Sutton's and the crowd reacts like a live wire has been touched.
