American Diva Read Online Free PDF Page A

was. Incredibly sexy—he was tall and muscular, had thick black hair and pool blue eyes, and a very nice mouth.
    As he seemed to have gotten over his aversion to her, she stayed. She stared out at the moon-drenched ocean, squinting at the blinking lights on the horizon and trying to guess what sort of ships bobbed out there. They said nothing at first, until Audrey, in an attempt to sort through the weekend events, asked, “By the way . . . who is Marty Weiss?”
    Jack chuckled low in his chest. “Got me.” He looked at her, his eyes as blue as a cloudless summer sky. “Not a personal friend of yours, I take it.”
    Audrey snorted. “Never met or heard of him. He knows my business manager somehow, and my business manager spoke to my personal manager and convinced him this was a good thing. And he, in turn, convinced me I should perform at a private gig for a bunch of men important to my recording label.”
    She’d agreed—but then again, she usually agreed with almost everything Lucas said because she had discovered he was the only person in this world she could trust. She’d been through a lot of changes in the last two years, had discovered people would pretend to be her friend when they were really only using her. She’d already been through two accountants and was seeking damages from a former talent manager.
    But she didn’t want to think of all that right now, and glanced at Jack from the corner of her eye. “How did you end up on this island?”
    His grin was snowy white and made the corners of his eyes crinkle. “I’ve been asking myself that same thing every hour.” He gave her a sketchy account of his involvement in Thrillseekers Anonymous, and extreme sports in general. Audrey could imagine him doing extreme sports—he certainly had the body for it. When Jack cracked a second round of beers for them—without protest of her presence, she couldn’t help noticing—he asked her about her music.
    Audrey skipped over the part about how she had been around the music scene for a while, a Texas native who gained critical acclaim for some alternative rock and folk songs she wrote that other people performed. She started with the stupid pop album Lucas had urged her to write and record. “It’s the only way to the top of the charts, kid,” he’d said. His instincts had proven accurate—a friend at a radio station started playing the tracks, and the next thing she knew, she was getting calls from around the country.
    She told Jack how a dumb little pop song, “Breakdown,” had sky-rocketed up the charts a little more than two years ago, dragging her up into a different stratosphere along with it. She didn’t tell him that, seemingly overnight, she was being followed by the paparazzi and her face was on every magazine cover on every newsstand. Every day was suddenly spent in the midst of hair and makeup specialists, different handlers, and record label people who wanted to protect their investment. She was left without a spare moment to even think about her fame because she was suddenly playing to sold-out venues, appearing on television, and singing at the Grammys in front of some of the greatest recording stars of the decade. She flew so fast and so high that now she had to struggle just to keep a part of herself in the music everyone wanted her to produce and in the kind of star they wanted her to be.
    “So you burst onto the scene, huh?” Jack asked.
    Audrey smiled a little and shrugged. “I guess. Honestly, everything happened so fast, I never really got to decide if this is what I wanted,” she said, surprising herself with the admission.
    She obviously surprised Jack, too; his beer bottle paused midway to his mouth. “What are you saying—you don’t want to be a star?”
    Was she saying that? Her heart skipped a little—she could just see that splashed across the tabloids: AUDREY LARUE DOESN’T WANT TO BE A STAR! She felt safe with Jack at the moment, but for all she knew, he could be