Because this was wrong. This was just plain wrong. Priscilla Jayne lacked all reverence for her mother and she shouldn't be allowed to get away with such flagrant disrespect.
Well maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't. Because he had several weeks of vacation time coming.
And he just might use them to teach her a lesson in honoring her parent.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Headline,Country Billboard:
Priscilla Jayne Singles "Let the Party Begin" and "Crying Myself to Sleep" Lighting Up the Charts
"HEY, IT'S ME,"Jared said the moment his brother-in-law answered the phone. P.J.'s concert filtered faintly through the thick walls of the San Francisco arena behind him. "I need the name and number of the suit who hired us for this assignment. I've been leaving messages at Wild Wind for the past three days, but either he's dodging me, which doesn't make sense, or I'm not asking to speak to the right guy."
"We have a problem?"
"Aside from wasting our time playing watchdog for a clueless client, you mean?"
"O-kay." John's voice was slow and easy. "You wanna expound on that a bit? But make it quick, wouldja? Sympathetic as I am to the plight of the poor working stiff, I don't count myself among your number for the next fourteen days."
Jared felt the tension that had been building over the course of the past week begin to unwind at John's mellow voice and offbeat sense of humor. "You heading up to the cabin?"
"Yep. In about twenty minutes. Just me and Tori."
"No kids?"
"Well, okay, me and Tori and Grayson and two of his very large, always hungry and extremely loud friends."
Jared grinned at the thought of his nephew and his friends wreaking havoc with John's downtime. "Es staying in town?"
"Yep. Running her and Gray's and your future children's inheritance into the ground while I wet a fishing line or two. Which, in the interests of getting this vacation on the road, brings us back to your request. Why do you feel we're wasting our time accompanying P.J. on her tour?"
"It's make-work, Rocket. There's not a damn thing for me to do here-an illustration of P.J.'s face oughtta be next toconsummate professional in the dictionary."
"I'm not sureconsummate professional is actually in the dictionary," John murmured. "Not linked together, anyhow."
He ignored the interruption. "It's clear to anyone with eyes in their head that this tour is important to her. She doesn't need anyone to get her to her concerts, she sure as hell makes her sound checks without assistance and with the exception of the first show in Portland, where we had the only two-night engagement so far, she's been on the tour bus within a half-hour of each show's closing."
"So what do you think compelled them to hire us?"
"I honest to God don't know." Leaning against the arena's concrete exterior wall, Jared settled his shoulders more squarely to absorb the residual heat still stored from the day's high-eighties temperatures, enjoying the warmth that seeped through his T-shirt to the slowly relaxing muscles below. "Wild Wind has a bundle tied up in this tour and there's a lot of negative press out there making it sound as if P.J.'s unreliable. But it's common knowledge it's been stirred up by her mother, so why the hell would they take Jodeen's version of the situation as gospel?"
"Because people tend to believe where there's smoke there's fire and P.J. hasn't exactly been fighting to tell her side of the story?"
"Okay, human nature being what it is, I get that. But they don't once ask their new million-dollar baby what's going on? From everything I've seen so far they're doing a bang-up job on the logistics of this tour. Yet their approach with P.J. is friggin' passive/aggressive. They just slapped a watchdog on her without bothering to discuss the problem. Why hasn't anyone picked up a goddamn phone to deal directly with her?"
"Is that what you'd recommend?"
"Hell, yes. They could probably learn the real story and have a team of spin doctors slanting the sympathy factor back where it belongs in a heartbeat if they'd just take five lousy minutes out of their schedule to talk to her. I'd also warn them that this is no way to build loyalty in their performers. They're putting a lot of money into building P.J.'s career. But if they treat her like a rebellious teenager at the same time, why would she want to stay with them once the tour is done?"
"Yeah, I can see where she might find it insulting to go about her business in a professional manner only to have them sic the dogs on her anyway. So!" His voice turned brisk. "You clearly know what you're doing and you've got a game plan. You don't need my input, except to tell you the guy you want to contact is Charles Croffut. Call Gert in the morning to get the number to his direct line."
Jared grinned, for he could all but hear the sound of his brother-in-law rubbing his hands together in anticipation of his vacation. "Thanks, John. Kiss Tori for me and cast a line or two in my name. In fact, if I free myself up within the next couple days I just might join you."
"Good. You can be in charge of entertaining Gray and his friends."
He heard himself laugh for the first time in days. "I was thinking more along the line of getting in some fly fishing, but I'm always open to negotiation."
"Tell P.J. we're looking forward to seeing her concert when we get back to town. Or hell, just plant a kiss on her from me-whichever strikes your fancy. Me, I'm going fishing and getting in some serious snuggle time with my woman."
Jared was still smiling when they hung up an instant later. Warmth and acceptance were the gifts from Tori and John that kept on giving. They'd taken him in when he was seventeen and parented him with the same evenhandedness they'd used to raise Esme and, later, Grayson. Their support and love had turned around the remainder of his childhood. It was through their example that he'd learned how to become a responsible adult.
Before them, acceptance hadn't been a quality he'd experienced much in his life. He'd grown up with increasingly younger stepmothers uninterested in getting to know him and a father impossible to satisfy. Negativity had been his screw-you response. Not exactly a mature one, he knew, but at the time he'd figured what the hell. If he couldn't make his dad pay attention to him for the things he'd done right, he'd simply earn the old man's notice by smoking, drinking and getting himself pierced, tattooed and expelled from the series of boarding schools his father sent him to.
Not that anything he'd done had made a damn bit of difference, he admitted now, and even after all these years he couldn't prevent a grimace. His father simply hadn't cared about anyone but Ford Evans Hamilton. Not his son or his daughter. Not his granddaughter or any of his wives. And in the end his megalomania had gotten him killed.
For a brief, awful time during his seventeenth summer, Jared had thought he'd murdered him, because in a knee-jerk reaction to being told he should have been aborted, he'd lashed out and shoved his father, knocking him to the floor where Ford had struck his head on the corner of a marble hearth. Unable to find a pulse, panicked, Jared had run as far and as fast from his father's Colorado Springs mansion as he could get.
And, ironically, had been found by P. J. Morgan, the only other person ever to offer him wholehearted acceptance.
Being a homeless teen on the streets of Denver-of any city-was a precarious and terrifying existence. He and P.J. had lived hand to mouth, day to day, and he'd felt perpetually dirty, hungry and so scared it was a constant ache in his stomach, a churning in his bowels. Yet for the first time in his life he'd had a friend who'd allowed him simply to be:him. Survival might have been stripped down to its rawest, meanest form, but he hadn't felt the need to put on a front with P.J.-a state of affairs so novel and freeing he'd actually felt real moments of happiness in the midst of all the horror. Before that summer he'd found it necessary to keep his mask firmly in place to guard against people discovering who the real Jared Hamilton was. It just led to being shipped off or left behind, and he'd had enough of that shit.