Half Empty(9)

The screen had cracked to the point that bright globes followed the shattered glass and distorted the information. She tapped her messages but nothing happened. Instead of fighting it, she tossed it back in her purse and told herself to call her house phone later that night.

It might be nice to live without the distraction of a cell phone for a couple of days.

Shedding her clothes as she went, she made her way into her private bathroom and smiled at the size of the space. How many times had she stayed in hotels on layovers all over the world? None of which had rooms like this.

But this was how she lived now.

Penthouse suites and bathrooms you could throw a party in if you chose to.

She still packed light, even when going to Italy for an extended period of time. She had bought a few things along the way and simply shipped them home instead of dealing with the luggage. A luxury she never would have used in the past.

Her reflection in the mirror looked back. Her long black hair had stopped dripping down her back somewhere between checking in and taking the elevator to the top floor. Through her beige shirt, she saw the outline of her bra. Hardly wet T-shirt contest worthy, but it was close. To give Wade credit, he hadn’t noticed. Or if he did, he didn’t stare.

He seemed like a nice guy—therefore, she wondered what was wrong with him. If there was one thing Trina knew about herself, it was that she trusted them all way too soon. She thought they all said what they meant and meant what they said. She couldn’t read them before her fake marriage to Fedor, and she’d certainly failed with her husband in their brief time together.

Unable to stop her head from going there, she thought about the last time she saw Fedor alive. It was the night before he shot himself. Alice, his mother, had slipped into a coma, and he spent most of his time in the hospital, by her bedside.

Trina had found him in his den. In his hand were two metal balls that he often fiddled with when he was thinking. She wondered, briefly, what had happened to those balls. They were real silver. The only reason she knew that fact was she’d asked him shortly after she moved into his Hamptons home.

Trina closed her eyes and forced the image, and the memory, away.

It had been a year. Why was she thinking about it all again now?

She flipped off her thoughts and turned on the water in the shower.



“We could always find a swimming pool until it’s time for dinner,” Wade propositioned Trina, who was watching the rain fall in heavy sheets outside the windows of their room.

“First, I just took a shower, and second, the pools here are outside.”

“What about a hot tub?”

Trina glanced over her shoulder and sent him a look that women had perfected for centuries. It said, Are you kidding, Give me a break, and Stop, all at once. “You just want to see me in a bikini.”

As hard as he tried, Wade couldn’t stop his head from going there and his eyes from traveling down her one-hundred-percent-clothed body. “Yes, ma’am, there is that.”

“Do women ever say no to you?”

He paused and tried to remember the last time he’d been rejected for a drink, a date . . . or anything that might follow. He’d been on tour for six months, and there were plenty of opportunities, and perhaps more than just a couple of women along the way.

He shifted on his feet, tried to bring up the months before the tour.

“Oh my God.”

“What? I’m trying to think.”

“You’re a womanizer.” She called him out.

Wade was pretty sure she meant that as an insult. “I make it a rule not to see women I work with. It’s too complicated when things don’t work out.”

“How noble.”

“So that leaves me with . . .” The image of a concert venue filled with flirty eyed women wearing everything from jean skirts and cowboy boots to bras they used as shirts with tight shorts. Every once in a while, some backstage guest or a wife of a producer would come on to him.

“Thousands of adoring fans?” Trina finished for him.

Wade kicked his feet up on the coffee table and leaned back. “I’m not gonna lie, there are plenty of them who offer, but I don’t dip into that pond as often as you might think.”

Trina turned to watch the rain again. “If I was interested, I’d ask more about the ones you cast off, but I’m not.”

Yeah, he didn’t buy that.

“Being on that stage gives a lot of women the feeling they know you.”

“I can’t imagine.”

He pushed to his feet almost as quickly as he’d sat. “Well, we can sit in this room and banter for hours, or we can check out what this island does when it’s on lockdown. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had just about enough of the inside of a hotel room. As much as this one is nice.”

A hotel room was a lot like living in a stale, staged home. It had everything you needed, but nothing that fit you perfectly.

“I need to find a store to fix my cell phone.”

“Okay, then. We search for that and stop at whatever else draws our eye.”

Trina agreed with a shrug and disappeared into her room.

Wade cursed his eyes for lingering on her ass.

His mouth watered. Lordy, what was it about her that made him want to strut like a cock in a henhouse? It didn’t matter, he was strutting and doing everything possible to get this woman to agree to see him once their little adventure was over.

“Ready.” She appeared at her door, purse in hand, light jacket over her shoulders. Her hair was down and flowing over her back. He wondered what it would look like with her in her birthday suit.

You’re a womanizer.

Yup, he needed to change his thinking or the images in his head would be teleported into hers. Because if there was one thing he’d figured out about this woman so far, it was that she read him like an open book.

The concierge hooked them up with umbrellas and slickers that were nothing but glorified trash bags with a place for your arms and head. Trina pulled the plastic over herself without thinking twice.

“Aren’t you going to put it on?” she asked him.

He held up the folded plastic. “I’ll look ridiculous.”

Trina looked around the lobby, noticed several people wearing the rain gear. “You and everyone else.”

“I think I’ll just stick with the umbrella.”

She lowered her voice. “Look at it as camouflage. No one will recognize you if you’re wearing this.”

“I’ll risk it, besides, no one noticed me when we ran through earlier.”

“That’s because everyone was preoccupied with being soaked. That or you’re not as famous as you think you are.”

Wade lifted an eyebrow as if to say she would eat her words.

“Suit yourself.” She pulled the hood over her head and turned toward the door.

The second they were out in the rain, Wade thought twice about his decision to look good over being dry.

Two blocks down and one block over, they rushed into a storefront that sold and fixed cell phones.

It didn’t take long for the clerk to tell Trina her phone was jacked and she should probably replace it. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the iPhone she was using. “I can get one here in the morning. It’s on the other side of the island.”

“Are there any other stores that sell new phones?” Wade asked.

“Yeah.” The clerk smiled. “Mine, the one on the other side of the island.”

Trina looked at her damaged phone. “We’ll come back tomorrow, then.”

“Tell you what, leave it with me, and by the time you come and pick it up, I’ll have all the information transferred over. I just need you to fill out a few things.”

“You sure?” Trina asked.

“My sister will bring it tonight when she closes the shop.”

Trina filled out a few forms and paid the man for her new phone and told him they’d be back.

“Now what?” Trina asked as they stood under the eaves of the shop and managed to keep some of the rain at bay.

Across the street was an open-air bar, one where the walls were sheets of plastic and the patrons were already well ahead of Wade and Trina. “Happy hour?” he asked.

“Might as well.”

They ordered the house recommendation. Something rum infused that tasted a bit fruity for his liking. A three-piece reggae band was playing in the corner. Their music was loud enough to keep whispered conversations outside, but soft enough to talk somewhat normally inside.

“I assume this is nothing like what you sing?” Trina asked him.

“No, ma’am. But it’s nice.”

“Ma’am makes me feel old.”

He’d heard that before. “It’s not meant that way.”

“I know. I’ve heard it a lot since I moved to Texas. Which fits, since I feel like I’ve aged ten years in the past year.”

That last part was said without her looking up from her drink. Although he didn’t want to bring up her past, he couldn’t help but ask a few questions.

“Did your late husband move you to Texas?”

“No, no . . . we lived in New York.”

“The city?” She didn’t seem like a Manhattan kind of woman.

“The Hamptons.” She smiled. “Sounds snooty, but it was rather nice.”

He sipped his drink, decided he’d switch to something less sugary on the next round. “So how did Texas happen?”