Whoa, she told herself, hold on! You haven't even heard her in the studio yet! But with Carla out of commission for at least one month, possibly for years, Tess needed a replacement for the tour that would begin in late June.

Frowning, Casey said, "What's wrong?" Tess relaxed and answered, "Nothing. You're amazing though, memorizing all those words so fast." "Heck, I know the words to all your songs." "You do?" "Uh-huh. I've been playing some of your albums since before there were CDs." "All the words?"

"What? You doubt me, woman? You don't believe that you were my idol since I was old enough to operate a record player?"

Tess decided it was time to let the subject rest for the time being. "Come on," she said, rising. "Let's put our dishes in the dishwasher, then you'd probably like a little time to unpack or kick back, or maybe take a swim."

"A swim! Wow! You mean it? That'd be great!" Carrying her dishes across the kitchen, Casey recanted, "I really should call Dad first though. I promised him I would, the minute I got in."

"Go right ahead. There's a phone in your room, if you want privacy."

"Why would I need privacy?"

Casey dialed on the portable kitchen phone, and Tess listened while putting away the salsa and wiping off the tabletop. The conversation was the usual got-here-just-fine sort. Then Casey added, "Hey, Dad, you should see this place. It's like a palace! Everything's painted either ivory or white. She's got a cream-colored grand piano in the living room, and a sound system piped into every room in the house, and there's this huge dramatic open balcony that looks down into the living room from the upstairs hall, and I have my own bathroom, and she put flowers in my bedroom, and all this fancy stuff in the bathroom-you know, like little bottles of stuff. And she's got a swimming pool! And you know what? I'm talking on a portable phone! Gol, Dad, it's way too cool."

The conversation continued for a couple more minutes, then Casey said, "Yeah, she's right here. Hey, Mac, Dad wants to talk to you."

Whereas Casey had not felt the need for privacy, Tess could have used some. But it would have looked strange, her holing up to talk to Kenny, so she took the phone from Casey's hand and spoke while the girl listened at close range.

"Hi, Kenny," she said brightly, trying to act unaffected in front of Casey. This was the first time they'd talked since they'd had the tiff on the phone the other night.

"Hi, darlin'," he said, and her heart went ka-boom with relief. "You still mad at me?"

"No."

"Well, that's better. My daughter likes your house."

"Yes, but she's easy to impress."

"It sounds like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous over there."

"I suppose it is. I thought you might drive Casey down and see it for yourself."

"I might have if I'd been invited."

She didn't know what to say, so she changed the subject. "Pretty nice Bronco you bought this girl."

"She loaded it to the hilt. I told her that was too much stuff for her to take to your house-she should wait till she found an apartment of her own. But you know teenage girls. She said it was all stuff she couldn't live without." "There's plenty of room here, don't worry about it." Casey wandered off into the living room, so Tess asked, "How you doing, Kenny? I mean, with her gone?"

He waited a beat before answering, dropping his cheerful banter. "Worst day of my life."

She felt a surge of empathy and drew a mental picture of how he used to walk Casey to the house with his arm slung over her shoulder. "I can imagine."

"I can't seem to stop myself from walking into her room and looking around at the empty spots. Where her guitar used to be, all the stuff off the top of her dresser. Hell, she even took her bed pillows."

"Is Faith there?"

"No, not tonight."

"Why don't you call her up and be with her for a while?"

"Because I don't feel like being with Faith. Funny thing is, I've felt like it less and less since you went away. I was thinking I might go across the alley and visit with Mary for a while. Maybe see if she wants to play a hand of cribbage or something."

"She'd love that, I'm sure. Well, listen, I should... I should go. Casey and I might take a swim or something."

"Yeah," he said, forlorn.

"I'm sure she'll call you again tomorrow after the recording session and tell you all about it."

"I told her she can call anytime, collect. I'm getting her an AT&T credit card of her own, but it isn't here yet."

"That isn't necessary, Kenny, she can dial direct from here whenever she wants to."

"No, no, you've done enough, taking her in, giving her this break with her music. She doesn't need to run up your phone bill, too."

"Well, let's not argue about it." Casey had returned and was listening again.

"If she needs anything, you'll let me know, won't you?" Kenny asked.

"Of course. Now, you take it easy, and don't stay around the house moping. I'll put her back on so you can say goodbye."

"Hey, Tess, wait!" Casey was standing right beside her waiting to reclaim the phone when Kenny said, without warning, "I love you."

Tess was so stunned, she froze, staring at Casey while his words drove her heart into a backbeat and threw heat into her face. Just like that-when she was least expecting it-"I love you." With as little compunction as he'd say "See you around." She stood rooted, gripping the phone, unable to respond with the same words. They were not words one took lightly, or spoke without absolute certainty, and she certainly wasn't going to say them the first time with his daughter standing four feet away. She struggled to come up with some fitting response without giving away how flustered she was.

"I think it's just the loneliness, Kenny. It'll get better with time."

"Is Casey listening?"

"Yes, she's standing right here."

"All right, then, I'll hope that the next time I say it, you'll say it back."

What could she say? She took the easy way out. "Here she is..."

Casey frowned at her, and whispered, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Tess mumbled, handing over the phone and turning away.

It was harrowing trying to hide her overwrought emotions from Casey when her deepest instinct was to talk about the whole situation with her, which Tess could not do yet. They swam, and looked forward to tomorrow, and Tess answered questions about what it was like in a recording studio. They went back inside and played a bunch of other artists' CDs that Tess had gotten free at a trade show, and she told Casey about that type of promotion and how it helped a career to meet the big distributors who handled your products. They talked about when and where Casey should look for an apartment, and about Fan Fair, coming up soon, and about the concert schedule and when it would begin and where it would take Tess, but she never mentioned the possibility of Casey singing backup on the tour.

They retired near eleven, and only then, after the house was quiet and dark, while Tess was lying wide awake in her own bed, did she examine what Kenny had said. She drew his words, like polished stones, out of the secret satin drawstring bag of her memory, and with them the image of his face as it had been the last day she'd seen him, in his office, rising and coming toward her wearing the tortured look of good-bye. "Hey, Tess, wait!... I love you." She heard again his words coming over the phone in that offhand fashion that had caught her off guard. In her imagination she kissed him again as she'd kissed him then, and wondered if this was love, this underlying emptiness that marked each day spent without him, this feeling of jubilation upon hearing his voice at the other end of a telephone line, this urge to go back into her stored memories of him and draw them out into the light to be examined, then filed carefully until next time.

Hey, Kenny... maybe I love you, too.

Or was she idealizing him simply because he'd spoken the words? She didn't think so, for she was not an idealizer, but a realist, always had been. So, realistically speaking, what hope was there for any sort of relationship with Kenny when he staunchly refused to get rid of Faith? When Tess was committed to her career and he to his? When they lived in two different places with two wholly different lifestyles?

And what about the difference in their incomes? Was there even the remotest possibility he was pursuing her because she was rich and famous? No-she felt absolutely certain about that. But perhaps the opposite was true. Perhaps he was the kind of guy whose pride would not allow him to live off a woman's income. And did she have the right to ask him to?

She hadn't even admitted she loved him and already she was suffering some of the pangs that poets wrote about. Her disappointment today when he'd failed to show up with Casey had been sophomoric and uncharacteristic, not at all the kind of thing she was accustomed to doing: building something up in her imagination, then suffering a letdown when it turned out differently than she'd hoped. If that wasn't idealizing, what was?

Simply being with Casey presented its own peculiar pang, a little more difficult to psychoanalyze, but a pang, nonetheless. It sometimes felt as if being with her was a substitute for being with her father. Sometimes Tess saw a reflection of Kenny in Casey's facial expressions or body language. Sometimes the things the two women talked about narked back to Wintergreen, where Tess had spent time with Kenny, and kept those memories green. Also, being Casey's benefactor practically assured Tess that she'd see Kenny in the future, away from Wintergreen. Did all this make her a schemer? Unworthy of the trust both Casey and Kenny had placed in her? Was she using the girl to woo him?

Disturbed by her thoughts, she turned onto her stomach in bed.

The moon was up, painting the window frames the faded purple of the irises that her mother had grown when Tess was a girl. And in Wintergreen, Missouri, that iris purple moon was shining on Kenny's house... and on Momma's house. Had the two of them played cribbage tonight? And was he back home now, maybe lying awake, too, feeling the emptiness of the house without Casey in it? Was he missing Tess McPhail, and wondering what she thought of his bold admission of love? Was he waiting for her response?

At eleven-fifteen she could resist no longer. She picked up the phone and called him. He answered on the first ring, in a clear, unsleepy voice. The mere sound of his hello raised a clamor within her, which she schooled her voice to hide.

"Hi. Did I wake you?"

"No. I was lying here awake."

"Me, too."

"Casey in bed now?"

"Yes. We swam, and talked, and listened to CDs, and she had a thousand questions about what it's going to be like in the studio tomorrow. Did you go to Momma's and play cribbage?"

"Yes. She whupped me three games out of four, then fed me rhubarb pie and ice cream and sent me home."

"Did you feel better after getting out of the house for a while?"

"Temporarily. It's awfully quiet here."

A lull fell while she pictured him in his old-fashioned upstairs bedroom with the window overlooking the backyard and alley.

"Kenny, about what you said earlier..."

She hadn't planned exactly what she was going to say, and stumbled into silence.

"It just sort of slipped out," he said.

"Is it true?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure it's not just that you're lonesome tonight?"

"Some, maybe, but the groundwork was laid down long before Casey left."

"Then maybe it's because I'm different from Faith, and because I'm helping your daughter, and because I'm rich and famous and supposedly unattainable, and-"

"Of course it is!" he interrupted, his anger flaring. "It's all those things! If you expect me to deny it, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I can't divorce myself from the knowl-edge of your fame and success any more than you can undo all that for your sister Judy. But if you're suggesting that's all I'm in love with-Mac, the public persona-you're wrong! And by the way, if you think it's easy being an ordinary guy falling in love with a multimillionaire recording star, guess again. It's pretty damned terrifying because of everything you just accused me of. But I've been doing a little sorting out of my own, and examining my motives, and what I come back to time and again is this great big lump of emptiness that's lodged in my gut since I said good-bye to you in my office. Tess, it's like... it's like... hell, I don't know." His anger was gone, and in its place borderline misery. "I have to push myself to go to work in the morning, and there doesn't seem to be any point to my day. Every day's the same-no highs, no lows, no laughing, no anticipation. I miss you. And every day I think about driving down to Nashville and ringing your doorbell, and then I think, that's dumb, because what would happen then?"

"Then we'd probably go to bed together, and that wouldn't solve anything, would it?"

"No, but it would sure feel good."

The line hummed while both of them realized they were laying their wishes bare for the other to see.

"I never told you," Tess confessed, "that I went out with that guy I'd been dating, Burt Sheer, and I tried kissing him, hoping it would chase you from my mind, but it didn't work. Kissing him was just awful compared to you, and I don't know what to do about it any more than you do."

She heard him draw a deep, unsteady breath, then he asked, "Do you love me, Tess?" He paused, and added, "I'd like to hear you say it if you do."

She lay in the dark, staring at the black ceiling, afraid to say it, knowing it was unfair not to, feeling as if her heartbeat were punching the stuffing out of the mattress beneath her. Saying it was inviting all that turmoil into her life.

"I do... I must, because I'm feeling the same as you, like my life is this chord with one note missing that wasn't missing before. I always thought... I thought my career was enough, that it would satisfy me in so many ways, and bring so many fascinating and talented people into my life that I wouldn't need one specific one. But since I came back to Nashville... it's..." Her throat got thick and she had to stop talking.

"Since you came back to Nashville..." he prompted.

"I miss you, Kenny."

"But you still didn't say it."

No, she hadn't. She was deathly afraid to let the words out of her heart, because once she had she might begin those insufferable daydreams again, and what if they didn't turn out the way she imagined? How could they turn out the way she imagined?

"All right," he said, sighing, sounding tired, "I'll let you off the hook. It doesn't mean anything anyway if it's forced. Well, listen... it's late. We'd better say good night."

She rested the back of her hand across her eyes and felt tears gathering in her throat, disliking herself for withholding the words. The minute he hung up it would get worse, and she'd probably roll over and bawl when she had her Hie just the way she wanted it. Just the way she'd dreamed it when she was clear back in high school! Mac! Superstar! Millionaire! In absolute control of her career and her future! Mac, who didn't want to be derailed by a husband, or marriage, or a family, or any of the baggage that went along with them!

"Kenny, I don't mean to hurt you."

"It's okay, I said."

"But I feel like such a shit."

"Hey, are you crying again? You are, aren't you?" She heard a sad smile come into his words. "Well, that's something anyway."

"Kenny..." There was appeal in her voice, but she didn't know what she was pleading for, so how could he answer? "You were right before. It's time we said good night."

"Good night, Tess," he said, "I love you."

Then the line clicked and she rolled over and did exactly what she'd feared she'd do. Mac... superstar... millionaire... with her prized life mapped out before her, bawled into her pillow.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

It was quarter to two the next afternoon when they arrived at Sixteenth Avenue Sound, a converted bungalow not far from Music Row. Tess led Casey inside through a small, unimpressive reception area to a room with sofas, tables and chairs, but no windows. A Pepsi machine threw red light over the L that served as a canteen, and the coffee warmer sent out the smell of burned coffee. Country music played softly from some unseen speakers. A huge man with a receding hairline, flowing gray beard and streaked gray ponytail sat on one of the sofas extracting an electric bass from its case, whistling to the music.