Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
T here were still two hours until everyone would arrive, and Lily didn’t know how she was going to contain her nervous energy for that long.
“Everything is perfect, Lil,” Harrison said, sliding his arm around her shoulders.
“Look at what you pulled off, and mostly on your own.” He’d been looking around the place, same as she was, but he looked down to meet her eyes then.
“I’m impressed by you, little sister. Blown away, as a matter of fact. ”
She lowered her head, smiling hard and fighting an actual giggle that bubbled up into her throat. “Thanks, big brother. That means a lot, coming from you.”
“Ooh, smell that?” he asked.
Their father had started cooking, if the aromas were anything to go by.
Her brother’s bride was in the kitchen, too, and Cat Shaw was taking her first shift behind the bar.
Turned out she was an experienced drink-slinger with some time to kill, plus she loved working with Hyram.
Seeing them together…well, she was pretty sure her mom was smiling down and egging them on.
Just then the kitchen doors opened, and Maria thrust her head out. “That’s what was missing! The smells!” She waved a hand toward her own face as if to inhale them all the better and vanished back inside.
“She’s probably driving Dad crazy,” Harrison said.
“Are you kidding me? He adores her. But don’t be surprised if he puts baby notions into her head.”
“Baby notions?” Harrison’s eyebrows shot up almost to his hairline, which made Lily burst out laughing.
“You should see your face!”
“Well, it’s just…we have a five-year plan.”
“You have all the time you want,” Lily said, “I’m just saying, the old man’s been making noises about it. You don’t have to grant his every wish, you know.” But then she rolled her eyes. “Five years, though?”
“Well, yeah. Maria’s taking over the vet clinic from her mom, and that’s gonna be an adjustment.”
“Huh.”
“What, you disapprove?”
“Oh, gosh, no! I just—hope I don’t have to wait five years for one of my own.”
Her brother looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t know you had baby wishes, Lily.”
“I didn’t either, but all Dad’s yammering about you and Maria making him a grandpa got me to thinking about it, and I realized, I really want to be a mom. I want to be the kind of mom our mom was.”
“You’ll be even better,” he said, and he leaned down to kiss her cheek.
A white van pulled into the new driveway that curved around the building, past the main entrance, to the big parking lot in the back. It looked like a re-purposed delivery truck. “That’s Dirt River.” She bounced on the balls of her feet in excitement.
“Dirt who, now?”
“The local band I booked! I want them onstage before everyone arrives. I can’t wait to hear what they think of our setup.
They’re going to use our built-in amps, our microphones, the whole shebang.
” She’d had a crash course in operating all of the above from the installers.
Ethan would be better at it, though. He worked with those things all the time.
The thought of Ethan sent a wave of something both delicious and terrifying through Lily from her toes on up, as she hurried through the addition past the stage, through the backstage area to the brand-new stage door.
She opened it and waved at the four young men who were already out of their van, unloading instruments, and carrying them across the pristine black parking lot that was twice size of the old one.
Tomorrow, Ethan would be home, she thought. And her heart clenched. Tomorrow, in time for the grand opening.
Harrison went outside to lend the guys a hand, and then they trooped in with guitars, keyboard, and several parts of a drum set, all of them greeting her as they passed.
They were excited to perform in Ethan Brand’s new honky-tonk during its opening week.
And the higher Ethan rose on the charts, the more excited they got.
She hoped the exposure would help them out.
When the last of their stuff was in, she closed the door and returned to find the guys on the stage, setting up, plugging in. They didn’t need her to tell them what was what.
“What do you guys, think?” she asked, pushing a button to extend the solid retractable wall over the glass, then stopping halfway. “Open or closed?”
“It’ll still be light out at seven,” said Lupé, a drummer with a neck as thick as his bulging biceps. “I think closed.”
His three bandmates nodded, so she pushed the button again and close the barrier all the way.
Harrison said, “Way better. Much more intimate, and we still have the view from the side windows. It’ll give everyone time to take the place in, before you dazzle ‘em with even more.”
“After dark, I can flip on the party lights and turn on the fire-and-water feature from in here.” She pulled a remote out of her apron pocket and wiggled her eyebrows. “Then I’ll open the slider for the big reveal.”
Another vehicle pulled in, a gray mini-van with a florist’s logo on the side.
“I didn’t order flowers,” she said. But she unlocked the side doors, their new main entrance. The vehicle hadn’t pulled all the way around to the parking lot but had stopped right in front of them.
A smiling woman with gray hair in a pixie cut got out from the driver’s side and a younger woman from the passenger side as the rear hatch rose. Lily stepped out, and the older one came her way with a clipboard.
“You’re the owner?”
“Co-owner, sort of.” No paperwork had yet been done. Everything really depended on Ethan’s return, how things were between them, and whether she felt like she could keep working with him without being in a constant state of heartache. Wanting him and not having him might be easier from a distance.
But lately, it kind of seemed like he might feel the same way she did. And yet, he wasn’t here. And he hadn’t said a word about having changed his stance on things, or altered his belief that he couldn’t live in Quinn, in the shadow of his noble family.
“We can set them up for you, no extra charge,” said the older of the two.
“I don’t even know what—I didn’t order flowers.”
Frowning, the woman brought the clipboard back around.
“Ethan Brand ordered them. Two lilies for each table, one red, one white. Special emphasis on each one having some of the other’s color in it.
There’s a crystal vase for each set. We managed to get enough for fifty tables, as requested. That sufficient?”
“Oh…my gosh. Ethan did that?” Lily opened the sliding door wider, and the two women began carrying in long slender boxes with lilies lying inside beneath a layer of clear plastic just tucked around the edges all the way through to the original cantina. The dining room, she reminded herself.
Lily helped, impressed by how tenderly the women handled each stem, and hurried to the kitchen for a pitcher of water. After she’d filled all the pretty crystal vases, she checked her watch thinking she’d killed an hour, but only twenty-four minutes had passed.
Willow’s SUV pulled in next. There wasn’t room for it to pass the parked van, so she pulled out around onto the grass. Lily tapped the voice memo app on her phone and said, “Widen the entrance strip so it’s never blocked by a stopped vehicle.”
“That’s a very tiny problem,” Harrison said.
“May that be the only flaw we find the entire night,” Lily replied, and then she heard a crash and some shouting from the kitchen.
The roar of the crowd was deafening when Ethan wrapped the show, held up his guitar and took his final bow.
And while they kept on cheering as he crossed the stage, he didn’t have any intention of coming back out for an encore.
The lights shifted all at once, from him to the crowd, and it was a relief to have them out of his eyes.
He looked out, just before he reached the curtain, just to take it in once again.
He’d been doing that after every show, gazing out at the crowd once the lights went out and he could see.
Trying to really appreciate the folks out there.
It was hard to believe that many people had paid money just to watch him stand on a stage and sing his songs.
He was writing every night. He’d already told Ang there’d be no need to buy songs elsewhere.
He gazed out from the darkened stage, feeling great, and then suddenly…not so great. A large sombrero was moving through the mostly empty space in front of the front row.
Ethan stopped walking, narrowing his eyes, trying to see the face beneath the hat. Instead, a hand tapped the front brim, like a greeting.
It was him!
He moved fast, tapping down the concealed stairs, through the partitioned runway to his trailer, dropped his guitar there, and kept going, veering forward.
He pulled his hat low over his eyes, hoping not to be recognized when he moved back through the dispersing crowd toward where he’d seen the hat.
But he needn’t have hurried.
It was on the head of the fellow who stood in the secure parking lot to the right of the audience. He was leaning against Ethan’s big red pickup truck.
Ethan had been moving fast, and came to a clumsy stop when he saw the stranger there. Then he moved more slowly until he stopped right in front of him. The other man’s head was still down-tilted, his face still hidden beneath the sombrero’s brim.
So Ethan said his name. “You Jeremiah Thorne?”
He lifted his head, revealing a bushy, untrimmed beard and blue eyes that were vivid and dark. “Yeah. And your brother,” he replied. He watched Ethan’s face, his eyes unflinching.
“So I been told. Same father, different mother.”
“Different mother, same ending.”
Ethan’s breath hitched in his chest. He had to swallow before he could speak and when he did, his voice sounded strangled. “De Lorean killed her?”
“She killed herself. But he caused it, yeah.” He broke eye contact, looked around them instead.