Tess went straight to them.
'Hey, Momma,' she greeted, and leaned over to kiss her mother first.
'Oh, honey, here you are. Say, that was some concert. I'm sure glad Kenny made me come.'
'So'm I.' She slipped her arm around Kenny's waist and smiled up at him.
He looked into her eyes and said quietly, 'I'm awestruck,' in a way that excluded everyone else in the room. His low-key compliment was all she needed to gild the moment. That and the arm he dropped casually around her shoulder.
But obligations still waited, so she told him privately, 'I've got things I have to do, but we're all riding back to the city in the same limo, so don't go away.'
'I won't.'
Louder, for the benefit of the press as well as the girl, Tess said, 'Casey, honey, you were sensational,' and leaned over and kissed her, too. 'Promise you won't sign any record contracts till I get back, okay?' Then, holding Casey's face, she asked softly, 'You happy, sugar?'
'Oh, Mac, you just can't know.'
'Me, too.' And after a pause, 'Gotta talk to some of these people, then I have to do the usual fan thing out front. If you want to come out there with me you can. I'll keep it short tonight though.' She caught Kenny's hand again,
When the song ended, there were tears in Tess's eyes and a great fist seemed to have seized her heart.
The audience response was thunderous. With a flourish of her hand Tess guided the sweeping spot to Casey at rear stage, so she could accept her share of the applause. Casey smiled and bowed, experiencing the most heady moment of her life, and Tess wondered when-if ever-she herself had experienced a moment this perfect.
The remainder of the concert seemed almost anticlimactic. Though the program included louder songs, faster songs, songs that had built her career and that were more familiar to the audience, none had the impact of the new ballad that showed where her heart was.
They did two encores, and when the curtain lowered and the house lights came up, Tess felt victorious. The adrenaline rush was still buzzing through her as the armed guards escorted her among a swarm of others to the same white-draped room where a hundred twenty-five people had been invited for a postconcert champagne reception. Tess was taken straight through to her dressing room, where Cathy was waiting with yet another bottle of chilled water, and to remove her gown and replace it with a tailored trouser suit and silk blouse of Tess's favorite midnight blue-not a sequin or rhinestone in sight. Cathy also had lower-heeled pumps, and her ever-handy makeup bag with her powder brush at the ready. She blotted Tess's hot face, dulled her shining skin with translucent powder, ran a lipstick brush.
When Tess's door closed, Kenny slung an arm over Casey's shoulders and walked her farther down the hall to her room, saw her inside, then took the elevator back down to the fourth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Tess's suite, a single lamp glowed softly in the sitting room at the far end of the sofa. She left it on and walked through to the bedroom where the maids had provided turndown service while she was gone. The bedspread had been removed, the sheets folded down from the center like a paper airplane. On each pillow waited a good-night wish: two chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil.
The sight of the bed, waiting, prepared, raised a fine and welcome tension within her, a sexual impatience that pressed up insistently, bringing his visage to mind-Kenny, in a sleek black tux, come to gaze at her across a crowded room with eyes that matched the suppressed desire in her own. Like water above the rim of a cup, she felt as if the mixture of emotions she held were more than the human vessel could contain. It trembled there, close to overflowing, as she removed the makeup from her flushed cheeks; as she showered and washed her hair; bound it in one towel and dried with another; put on a freesia-scented splash and stared at her dilated, dazzled eyes in the wraparound mirrors.
She touched the freckled hollow between her breasts, her trembling stomach… and assessed herself through his eyes, wanting to please him.
She put on the thick white robe provided by the hotel, dragged the towel from her hair and finger-combed her damp curls, impatient for his return.
In his room Kenny hung up his tuxedo jacket, removed his bow tie and cummerbund, washed his face, then sat down with a magazine and checked his watch. He'd give her ten minutes before going back up.
He lasted six before realizing he hadn't read a word or turned a page. Tossing the magazine aside he bolted from the chair and pocketed his key card on his way out the door.
The suites at the Regent had doorbells. When he rang hers it was 1:27 A.M.-a bizarre hour to go courting, he thought, but then her lifestyle was bizarre. He wondered how he'd get along blending into it once they were married.
'Kenny?' her voice said softly from inside.
'Yes.'
The door opened and there she stood, in bare feet and an oversized white robe, her damp hair rollicking around a scrubbed and shiny face, the smell of flowers coming to the door along with her. Without a touch of the artifice she'd worn onstage she was even more beautiful to him.
She said very simply, 'I thought you'd never get here,' and he stepped inside, against her, blindly swatting the door closed behind him. Their embrace was a collision with her up on tiptoe and his arms lashed hard around her, lifting her free of the floor. Their first kiss was a desperate thing without finesse-two starving people with mouths open and bodies straining to make up for all the time apart. Then he lowered her till her toes gained purchase again, and like bends of a knot they turned into one another, trying to make two halves into a whole. The kiss changed directions as they tried a new slant on an old pleasure. She made a tor-tured sound, burrowing upward as if close were not close enough.
There were words pressing to be spoken, but their lips scarcely parted. 'I thought I'd die before we could do this,' she said within the satin folds of the kiss. 'All those people…'
'And all I wanted to do was this.' He wandered her face, his teeth taking nips of her upper lip, the edge of a nostril, her eyebrow-illogical places that only a man in love would prize. 'I wanted to kick them all out!' he ranted. 'Every last one of them! I kept thinking they didn't have any right to you! You were mine, not theirs!'
She smiled, loving how he'd felt exactly as she had.
Enough talking. Talking wasted lips that had better things to do, randy, wild things they'd been imagining doing together. He found her mouth again and covered it, tasting, holding nothing back. His hands slid down her back and captured her low, like an inverted heart, hauling her high and hard against him.
The intensity, of course, could not be sustained. Like any glut, it filled them, and soon they needed something less. His embrace slackened and her heels touched the floor. They drew apart and their gazes caught at close range. One of them laughed-it was he, murmuring, 'We're awful, aren't we?'
She laughed, too. 'Yes, and isn't it wonderful?' His arms were doubled lightly beneath her shoulder blades while they took the time to gaze at each other as they had not when he first came in, to appreciate the face of the
