Small Town Girl by Patricia Rice Page B

he'd ask her about those reasons. She was a woman meant to be loved—by someone more stable than him.
    "Smart girl, but I'm telling you this to explain what happened. We married young and in Just. The music business is lousy for relationships. My divorce lawyer talked her lawyer into taking a lump-sum settlement instead of draining me dry for the rest of my life. I figured I needed to be home for my sons. If I didn't tour, my income would decline. Paying her off from the big money I'd earned touring seemed a fair move to all concerned."
    Jo was sorry she'd asked. Flint sounded casual enough, but she heard pain bleeding from every word. She'd known heartache. She could relate. She just didn't want to. But she'd started this, and he seemed to need to talk.
    Besides, she was enjoying having the big hunk beside her. If Flint shifted half an inch, their hips would rub. His broad shoulders filled all the space, and she had to turn slightly to avoid bumping elbows. That position gave her a better picture of the way his muscles worked over his taut jaw. Despite his sexy charm, he was one unhappy man.
    "You gave up a group like the Barn Boys for your kids?" she asked, pretty much in awe of such a sacrifice. She could see him up on that stage. He belonged there. No wonder he was unhappy.
    "The money from the albums and touring was real nice, but I was just a backup guitarist. They're a dime a dozen. It's my composing talents that they appreciated."
    She was starting to like sharing space with this complex cowboy who was all toughness and pain, even if she had vowed not to have any truck with men these days.
    Besides, to prevent upchucking onstage, she hadn't eaten any supper, and the fight had gone out of her. "You figured you could stay home and write songs. That makes sense. So what went wrong?"
    Given their closeness, it was kind of hard to miss his shrug. "Turns out I know the music business fine, but I don't understand diddly about people. I'd made a bundle over the years, socked away what Melinda didn't spend, but when I tried to raise the cash, I didn't have any. I had a music manager, a business manager, and a lawyer to keep up with investments and accounting statements. All I ever saw were the big dollars under assets. Turned out there were even bigger dollars called things like 'FICA Payable.' My business manager hadn't paid the Feds in years, and the cash didn't exist."
    "I hired auditors and lawyers and sued, but there's no sucking blood out of turnips. And of course, the IRS came along with their hands out. By the time the Feds were done socking on penalties and interest and whatnot, they wanted trifle what I was worth. And I still had to pay off Melinda."
    "Wow." Jo tried to imagine the mansions and cars he must have owned, but she couldn't, not any more than she could calculate the sum he'd had to pay. "That doesn't seem fair. If your manager stole the money, they should have got it from him."
    "I owed it. I didn't pay it. I neglected my fiscal responsibility. That's how the law works. I had lots of lawyers explain it to me."

"Divorce lawyers, lawsuit lawyers, IRS lawyers." She counted up the woe and hit staggering sums. Just asking Fritz to send a letter to the IRS explaining her tips really were less than 10 percent had kept her in fear of jail for a year.
    "And insurance lawyers," he added. "After the divorce, I had to go back on the road to pay my bills. I was getting by on no sleep some nights, operating on empty the rest, and drinking too much. About a year ago, I stupidly borrowed a friend's Harley after a few drinks and crashed it into an ice cream stand. Lucky for everyone concerned, it was closed, but people crawled out of the woodwork to sue me."
    Oh, dang, and here she was thinking she'd found a man with a head on his shoulders. That's what happened when she fell into sexy eyes. "With all that going on, when did you have time to write RJ's music?" she asked with just a hint of scorn. She had no sympathies