"Because people tend to believe where there's smoke there's fire and P.J. hasn't exactly been fighting to tell her side of the story?"

"Okay, human nature being what it is, I get that. But they don't once ask their new million-dollar baby what's going on? From everything I've seen so far they're doing a bang-up job on the logistics of this tour. Yet their approach with P.J. is friggin' passive/aggressive. They just slapped a watchdog on her without bothering to discuss the problem. Why hasn't anyone picked up a goddamn phone to deal directly with her?"

"Is that what you'd recommend?"

"Hell, yes. They could probably learn the real story and have a team of spin doctors slanting the sympathy factor back where it belongs in a heartbeat if they'd just take five lousy minutes out of their schedule to talk to her. I'd also warn them that this is no way to build loyalty in their performers. They're putting a lot of money into building P.J.'s career. But if they treat her like a rebellious teenager at the same time, why would she want to stay with them once the tour is done?"

"Yeah, I can see where she might find it insulting to go about her business in a professional manner only to have them sic the dogs on her anyway. So!" His voice turned brisk. "You clearly know what you're doing and you've got a game plan. You don't need my input, except to tell you the guy you want to contact is Charles Croffut. Call Gert in the morning to get the number to his direct line."

Jared grinned, for he could all but hear the sound of his brother-in-law rubbing his hands together in anticipation of his vacation. "Thanks, John. Kiss Tori for me and cast a line or two in my name. In fact, if I free myself up within the next couple days I just might join you."

"Good. You can be in charge of entertaining Gray and his friends."

He heard himself laugh for the first time in days. "I was thinking more along the line of getting in some fly fishing, but I'm always open to negotiation."

"Tell P.J. we're looking forward to seeing her concert when we get back to town. Or hell, just plant a kiss on her from me-whichever strikes your fancy. Me, I'm going fishing and getting in some serious snuggle time with my woman."

Jared was still smiling when they hung up an instant later. Warmth and acceptance were the gifts from Tori and John that kept on giving. They'd taken him in when he was seventeen and parented him with the same evenhandedness they'd used to raise Esme and, later, Grayson. Their support and love had turned around the remainder of his childhood. It was through their example that he'd learned how to become a responsible adult.

Before them, acceptance hadn't been a quality he'd experienced much in his life. He'd grown up with increasingly younger stepmothers uninterested in getting to know him and a father impossible to satisfy. Negativity had been his screw-you response. Not exactly a mature one, he knew, but at the time he'd figured what the hell. If he couldn't make his dad pay attention to him for the things he'd done right, he'd simply earn the old man's notice by smoking, drinking and getting himself pierced, tattooed and expelled from the series of boarding schools his father sent him to.

Not that anything he'd done had made a damn bit of difference, he admitted now, and even after all these years he couldn't prevent a grimace. His father simply hadn't cared about anyone but Ford Evans Hamilton. Not his son or his daughter. Not his granddaughter or any of his wives. And in the end his megalomania had gotten him killed.

For a brief, awful time during his seventeenth summer, Jared had thought he'd murdered him, because in a knee-jerk reaction to being told he should have been aborted, he'd lashed out and shoved his father, knocking him to the floor where Ford had struck his head on the corner of a marble hearth. Unable to find a pulse, panicked, Jared had run as far and as fast from his father's Colorado Springs mansion as he could get.

And, ironically, had been found by P. J. Morgan, the only other person ever to offer him wholehearted acceptance.

Being a homeless teen on the streets of Denver-of any city-was a precarious and terrifying existence. He and P.J. had lived hand to mouth, day to day, and he'd felt perpetually dirty, hungry and so scared it was a constant ache in his stomach, a churning in his bowels. Yet for the first time in his life he'd had a friend who'd allowed him simply to be:him. Survival might have been stripped down to its rawest, meanest form, but he hadn't felt the need to put on a front with P.J.-a state of affairs so novel and freeing he'd actually felt real moments of happiness in the midst of all the horror. Before that summer he'd found it necessary to keep his mask firmly in place to guard against people discovering who the real Jared Hamilton was. It just led to being shipped off or left behind, and he'd had enough of that shit.

To this day he had a tendency to keep his guard up around everyone except family. Where once it had been from necessity, however, now it was mostly out of habit.

And entirely beside the point,he thought, giving himself a mental shake. The salient point here was that while in the end P.J., too, had left him behind, she'd still saved his life. If she hadn't attached herself to him the way she had, he wasn't sure he would have survived. It wasn't simply because she'd been on the streets longer than he and knew more about the resources available to them. She'd given him her wholehearted, unconditional admiration, hadbelieved in him, and that had meant the world to him. It had kept him going.

So he'd repay her once and for all by getting Wild Wind off her back. Then she could get on with her career and he could get back to his life.

And if that struck him as just the tiniest bit boring, so be it.

 

P.J.PICKED UP HER PACE , sprinting the last hundred yards of her late-morning run. Then, slowing to a walk, she rounded the corner of the somewhere-in-California arena she was scheduled to perform in that night and found Jared slouched comfortably in a lawn chair on the tarmac outside the tour bus.

"Hey," he said as she began her cool-down walk from the front of the bus to its rear and back again.

"Hey, yourself." Covertly eyeing him as he lounged in the webbed chair sipping something tall and refreshing-looking, she yanked a hand towel from the waistband of her shorts and paced past him dabbing at her forehead, temples and throat. She didn't know how he managed it, but no matter what he wore he always looked as if he'd just stepped off the cover of some upscale men's magazine. He'd been like that during their time on the streets, she remembered. Even homeless he'd looked like a prep-school boy half the time-especially the days they'd been able to cadge a shower at Sock's Place, the church drop-in center catering to kids in jeopardy.

She, on the other hand, always seemed to be sweaty or disheveled. She shot him a sour look. "My run just didn't seem the same this morning," she sniped. "What with you not breathing down my neck and all."

He merely raised a dark eyebrow, then reached down and picked up another tall glass that had been on the ground next to his chair. He held it out to her. "Lemonade?"

She accepted it with a suspicious look. "What are you up to, Hamilton?"

The grin he flashed her was all white teeth. "Trusting as ever, I see."

"I know you, remember?"

"Yeah, you do. So you have to know I'd never deliberately hurt you. I have some news, in fact, that's just the opposite."

For some reason a silky little ribbon of disquiet unfurled in her stomach, and she changed the subject. "Where the hell are we?"

"What?"

"What town are we in?" she asked impatiently. "I know it's southern California, because there's palm trees all over the place. But we've played so many cities this week and I slept like the dead during the drive last night, and I've lost track. I can't recall offhand where we're supposed to be playing tonight-but it doesn't feel the way I imagined L.A. would."

"We're in Bakersfield."

"Ah. Inland, then. No wonder it's so hot." She blotted up more sweat, chugged down half the drink he'd given her in one long swallow, then lowered the glass. Touching the back of her wrist to her lips, she gazed at him and inhaled. Then quietly she exhaled. "So what's the good news?"

"I'm leaving."

No.

She swallowed the protest unsaid, but her heart began to bang in her chest and she couldn't quite catch her breath. "You're:? Why? Is it because Hank's been giving you a bad time?"

"What? No, of course not. It's because you're right. You've behaved like a professional and your label is treating you like a kid who needs to be sent to her room."

"So you're-what?-handing me off to the devil I don't know?"

"Huh?"

"You know that expression 'Better the devil you know'? Well, that would be you. I don't necessarily see replacing you with an unfamiliar devil as a huge improvement."

"Aw, I'm touched." He flowed up out of his chair and crossed the short distance separating them to stand in front of her. "Except there's not going to be a new devil. I talked to them, Peej. And I made them understand how insulting it is to just accept your mother's propaganda as fact without so much as checking with you for the real story."

Great. Her heart pounded harder yet. "I'm not talking to them or anyone else about my mother."

"I figured that might be your stand, so I told them she embezzled money from you."

"You didwhat? " The sudden ice lining her gut battled for supremacy over the flames of fury licking through her veins and, pushing up onto her toes, she went nose-to-nose with him. "You had noright! My private life is just that and now Wild Wind's gonna splash it all over the goddamn media."