Page 11 of The Oscar Escape
His phone hummed yet another text. They were stacking up. He should have expected it. In all honesty, he was surprised he hadn’t gotten these messages a few weeks ago. He flicked ash out the window, then tapped the screen.
Inez Gordon: I know you can see this message, Oscar Abrams Elliott.
Inez Gordon: I’m going to call you, and you’re going to answer, you damned blue-eyed vagabond. If you don’t, I’ll send you a box full of dog shit because I can. Rest assured, I will get ahold of you, young man. I might be an old broad, but I ran a half marathon last week. Not to mention, I drank three dirty martinis at dinner tonight. That makes me fast, feisty, and as surly as ever. Do we understand each other?
Loud and clear.
Oscar took another drag off his smoke. It was never a good sign when Mrs. Feisty-As-Ever used his full name and dropped ayoung manto boot.
And who was this—as she put it—martini-pounding broad?
Inez Gordon.
A seasoned agent and public relations expert, he’d known Inez since he was a kid. Now in her eighties, she remained to this day a grade A ball buster. Inez represented his stepmother with her photography and still did PR for his dad’s cooking career. Although, over the last decade and a half or so, his father had dedicated most of his time to training chefs how to run their own food truck business.
Buzz.
Buckle up. Inez was on a texting tirade.
Inez Gordon: Turn on your ringer. I’ll be calling in five seconds, young man, and like I said, you better answer! I wasn’t kidding about the box of shit.
He was relatively sure no one could gift him a box of canine crap. He’d gone radio silent and had been on the move. He took another pull off his cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. The hit of nicotine helped, but Christ, what he wouldn’t give for a flask of whiskey.
He turned on his ringer. “Five, four, three . . .”
“Gotta believe in who you are, know yourself, know your heart.”
The lyrics—and the voice singing them—caught him off guard, and his pulse quickened. He’d forgotten that his little sister had made Aria’s hit song “Believe” his ringtone a few weeks ago when he’d passed through Denver to photograph the fall colors.
“Jesus,” he muttered, needing to take a second. He pinched the bridge of his nose before answering the call. “That was three seconds, Inez,” he offered in lieu of a cheery greeting.
Inez huffed. “Good, you can count. I was worried that part of your brain had stopped functioning since you haven’t returned my lastsixcalls.”
He rested his elbows against the steering wheel. “Sorry, I lost track of time.”
“For the last two weeks?” she lobbed back.
Oscar stared at the cigarette’s glowing tip. “I’m working on a . . .”Dammit!What the hell was he supposed to call what he’d been doing? He cleared his throat. “I’m working on a project.”
There! He could blame his behavior on being a tortured artist. That’s who he was in his group of best friends. Phoebe Gale was the tech genius. Sebastian Cress was their resident business maverick and athlete, and Aria was . . . the star, a brunette bombshell—the woman who walked into a room, and every pair of eyes was glued to her. Aria Paige-Grant could also be as stubborn and as surly as a mule. Strike that. Mules were downright easygoing and reasonable compared to the rock star. The woman pushed herself too damned hard and wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best when it came to her work. From the second he’d laid eyes on her as a boy, he could see that she was tough as nails—or at least that’s what she wanted everyone to believe. And she was able to convince most of the people in her life that she was a take-no-prisoners kind of gal.
But he knew better.
More than that, he knew that she was keenly aware that he could see what most people couldn’t. Call it having a photographer’s eye. Call it a near lifetime spent in her presence. He could sift through the layers of makeup and plastic smiles and see the restless girl beneath the glitz and glam. Had he told her this explicitly? No, not exactly. They’d been dancing around this fly in the ointment for the last couple of years. He also knew something else about her that she certainly couldn’t see or, more like, wouldn’t acknowledge. He glanced into his open camera bag resting on the bench seat beside his laptop. He’d bet his prized possession—his old-school Polaroid camera—that she was a breath away from losing control of her contrived pop star persona.
“What project are you working on?” Inez asked, pulling him out of his Aria haze. “I represent you,” she continued. “I know your schedule. And I know you’re not on a job. Is this some off-the-books endeavor?”
That was one way to put it.
He sat back and rested his head against the seat. How could he frame what he’d been doing in a light that didn’t make him sound like a lunatic stalker? “It’s an artistic project—an in-depth case study.” He cringed and was grateful Inez couldn’t see him. He hadn’t lied, per se, but he wasn’t exactly telling the whole truth, either.
“A case study? Could you elaborate?”
He cleared his throat. “There’s not much to elaborate on . . . yet.”
Again, not exactly a lie, but not exactly the truth either.
“Do you have a timetable? I ask because a music label reached out to see if you’re available to document a band on the road.”
