Authors: Jennifer Echols

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Family Life, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #Girls & Women, #Love & Romance, #Performing Arts, #Music

Dirty Little Secret (35 page)

The crowd’s unenthusiastic reply didn’t faze her, though. She was a professional musician. She murmured into the microphone, maybe more to herself this time than to the crowd, “It’s good to be home.” The audience roared. She cut them off as she started her first song.

I jumped a little at the noise as the drums kicked in. I hadn’t expected the music to be so
loud,
like a real concert. Then Julie’s clear, strong voice sang the tune she’d started with at the Grand Ole Opry. My doubts fell away. Maybe the song didn’t make a lot of sense, but the tune was catchy, the beat was infectious, and she sounded like a pro.

In the instrumental break between verses, Charlotte leaned around Ace and Sam to shout, “She’s so good!” Ace nodded. I nodded, too, smiling. She
was
so good.

“She’s the real deal,” Sam said in my ear. “She’s going to make it.”

Several songs later, as she waited for her rhythm guitarist to switch from electric to acoustic, she asked the crowd, “Is everybody excited about all the great singers you came to hear tonight?”

The crowd gave her an enthusiastic answer this time. Maybe they were responding to the idea of the bigger acts who would follow her, but I thought they were more into Julie herself now that she’d shown them what she could do.

“Me too,” she said. “And after that, if you’re on Broadway, be sure to stop by between nine and eleven to see my big sister’s band, Redneck Death Wish.”

This time the roar of the crowd was unmistakable. The hair on my arms stood up and my heart raced as if Sam were kissing me. There must be a lot of locals in the audience, and they must have stumbled into our sets in the last week. Either that or they were responding to our awesome name.

“I told her I’m not sure about this band name,” Julie said, laughing, “but my sister has been my rock for sixteen years. She’s an incredibly talented musician and songwriter. Do yourself a favor and go hear her play.” Reading what she’d inked in her palm, she named the bar and its address.

Nobody sitting in the first four rows had turned around to look at us. Nobody had recognized us. With all the spotlights in her eyes, even Julie couldn’t seem to see me close to the stage. But I felt my face flush anyway, like I was the one in the spotlight instead. I turned to my band.

Ace was gaping at me. Charlotte was grinning—
Charlotte was grinning!
—and giving me a thumbs-up. Sam looked slyly over at me as he rubbed his hands together like he finally had Nashville exactly where he wanted it. Dipping his head, he whispered in my ear, “You asked her to mention us. I’m glad you did, but I promise you didn’t have to.”

“I didn’t ask her to,” I admitted, looking at Julie again, who was talking about why she loved the next song so much. And then she announced it: “A Lady Antebellum tune called ‘Dancin’ Away with My Heart.’ ”

“Hey!” Sam exclaimed over Julie’s guitar intro. “That’s one of our songs about finding and losing each other.”

“That I
did
ask her to do,” I told him. “I asked her to play it for you and me.”

Here in the comparative dusk away from the bright lights onstage, no one else could see the look he gave me. His lashes cast long shadows across his dark eyes as he looked over his shoulder at me. He was wearing the red T-shirt I’d decorated with a heart on the sleeve.

He surprised me by standing, moving in slow motion as though Julie’s music were water around us. I took the hand he offered me. He led me past Charlotte and Ace, into the aisle. I didn’t ask what he wanted. He didn’t ask me to dance. That’s just what we did. I laid my head against his shoulder. He slid his hands down around my waist tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure how to hold me, or whether I wanted to be held. One of his hands found one of mine. I pulled his hand close and tucked it under my chin.

He bent to whisper, “Maybe we should dance only the first part of the song. The finding each other, and not the losing each other.”

I kissed his knuckles and looked up at him. “Maybe we should enjoy it and feel lucky we’re together. I feel very, very lucky.”

And for the first time, I did.

Jennifer Echols
is the author of teen romantic dramas for MTV Books and teen romantic comedies for Simon Pulse. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family. Please visit her online at
www.jennifer-echols.com
.

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Other Romantic Dramas by Jennifer Echols

Such a Rush

Love Story

Forget You

Going Too Far

Available from MTV Books

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Designed by Aline C. Pace
Jacket design by Laywan Kwan
Jacket photograph © Maren Becker / Trevillion Images; violin © Alberto Rigamonti / Alamy; hands by Masterfile
Author photograph by Mark Oxley/Studio 16

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Echols, Jennifer.

Dirty little secret / Jennifer Echols.—First Gallery Books hardcover edition.