When Stars Collide by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

She saw herself as he was seeing her, with wild eyes, bare feet, and tomato sauce smearing her white top. The steam from the boiling pasta water had unleashed a frizzy tangle around her face. She was a mess—a lunatic—and ambushing him like this was a terrible mistake.

He’d made his intention more than clear, but she’d ignored the direct message he’d sent by ghosting her. She’d shown up at his friends’ homes, his agent’s office, and—God forgive her—his parents’ front door. Now, with him standing stone-faced in front of her, his fists hard curls at his sides, she realized too late that she was no better than the stalker who’d once hounded him.

Her hand flew to her mouth, horrified with herself. She fled down the hallway into the kitchen and out the back of the house.

The security lights came on. She looked at the keys she’d snatched from the counter on her way out. Not hers. This was the key to Clint’s black Cadillac Escalade parked in the drive. She threw herself in and peeled out of the driveway.

*  *  *

Thad had pushed her too far. He hadn’t intended to ghost her forever, just long enough to build up his reserves before he had to listen to another of her apologies—time enough to be able to put on his game face and convince her that she hadn’t meant that much to him in the first place. Time to pull himself together just enough so he could tell her she didn’t need to feel guilty about dumping him. Now he realized he’d made a horrible mistake.

That stricken expression on her face . . . It didn’t look anything like guilt. It looked like—

He raced after her toward the back of the house. One of the rear doors stood open. The security lights shone on the swimming pool and beds of spring-blooming plants. He followed the twisting paths around the garden fountain, past the pool, and through the shrubbery calling for her, hearing nothing in return.

He hurried to the front of the house. Her car was still here. He wasn’t leaving until he found her.

Half an hour later, Garrett pointed out that his Escalade was missing, and Thad realized she’d gotten away.

*  *  *

Olivia waited in the dark shadows of the adjoining street with the Escalade’s headlights turned off until she saw Thad drive away. She rested her cheek against the window. The raindrops splattering on the windshield seemed like tears from the gods. The only way she could make up the distress she’d caused him was never to contact him again.

*  *  *

Thad drove to her apartment and parked on the street near her building’s parking garage. He jumped out of his car into the rain. The orange barrier gate arm was down, but he could see inside. Garrett’s black Cadillac Escalade was missing. She hadn’t come home.

The wind whipped through his hair. Rain pelted his face. He’d screwed up big-time. Something was very wrong. He’d seen it in her face. He headed for the Starbucks across the street to keep watch.

*  *  *

Thunder boomed outside the sliding doors that led to the balcony patio of her apartment. She sat at her piano picking at the keys. Her clothes were still damp from the soaking she’d gotten when she’d returned Clint’s car and sneaked inside his house to get her own keys. Fortunately, she hadn’t seen Clint. She couldn’t bear facing another person she’d inflicted her insanity on.

It was too late for a courteous apartment dweller to play the piano, but she played anyway. Something soft, Bach’s Prelude in C Major. But the music did nothing to soothe her.

It was ironic. She had her voice back, and with Thad out of her life, no more messy personal entanglements stood between her and her ambition. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat. Nothing held her back from greatness except hard work and dedication.

A tear trickled down her cheek. The concierge had rung half an hour ago to tell her Thad Owens was in the lobby. She wouldn’t let him up. She needed him to understand he was free of her. No more texts. No more visits to his friends and his family. She would give him the gift of knowing he was free of her harassment.

A sob tried to escape. She squeezed her lips tight to keep it inside. If she started crying now, she might never stop.

A boom of thunder vibrated the piano bench, followed by a bang against her balcony doors. She spun around and gasped.

A man, silhouetted in a flash of lightning, stood on the balcony of her twenty-second-floor apartment. Tall. Lean. Arms pressed to the glass.

She raced for the door and fought with the latch. When it finally gave, she was hit with a blast of rainwater and the smell of ozone.

“What are you doing?” Terror made her push past him to the balcony rail. She looked down, expecting to see—a ladder? Ladders didn’t extend this high, and a fifteen-foot gap stretched between her balcony and her closest neighbor’s. The street lay far below. How had he—?

She looked up into the rain. The elderly, white-haired woman she’d once seen in the elevator leaned out the window directly above, oblivious to the rain, gaily waving. Thad pulled Olivia inside and shut the sliding door.

Everything went quiet.

They stared at each other. His wet, dark hair lay perfectly against his head. Rainwater dripped from the tip of his nose, and his shirt stuck to his chest. Her terror at the risk he’d taken—what could have happened to him—blocked out everything else. “You didn’t!” The words were hoarse. “You didn’t jump down here from my upstairs neighbor’s window.”

“She’s a nice lady. I met her in the lobby.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck as he swallowed. “She’s eighty-four, a widow. She invited me up.”

He was here, in her apartment. She couldn’t take it in. “She let you jump out her window? You could have killed yourself.”

“She gave me the cord from her bedroom drapes.” He sounded both nervous and apologetic. “I rappelled part of the way.”

“An eighty-four-year-old woman let a man she didn’t know into her apartment and helped him rappel out her bedroom window? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I might have told her it was your birthday surprise,” he said. “And in her defense, she thought I was her dead brother.”

“Dear God.” She suddenly noticed the trickle of red running down his arm. “Your arm is bleeding!”

“It’s only a scratch.”

She dug her fingers into her eye sockets. “You didn’t have to do this. You’re free of me. No more text messages or phone calls or showing up at your parents’ house. No more setting deadlines and then breaking them. I’m sorry! I don’t know what I was thinking.” She couldn’t stop herself. “Well, I do know what I was thinking. I thought if I could finally talk to you, maybe we’d have this big reconciliation. You’d realize you were in love with me after all, the same way I’m in love with you. We’d fall into each other’s arms, and everything would work out, and the curtain would come down on happily-ever-after.” She wrung her hands. “But that’s not reality. You’re a more casual person than I am. My life is too big and too complicated for a man like you to put up with. That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me, but instead of listening, I harassed you. And now, I’m going to apologize for the last time, swallow my humiliation, promise never to bother you again, and let you out.”

He looked so sorry for her. She couldn’t take his pity. She blinked hard and headed for the door. “I understand. Really, I do. You care about me, but you don’t love me, and you especially don’t love my drama and my career. Just the idea of you being seen as Mr. Olivia Shore would be a humiliation for both of us.”

“So that’s it?” he said from behind her. “You’re bailing?”

She reached for the doorknob. She wouldn’t cry. Would. Not. Cry. “What else am I supposed to do?” she whispered. “Keep torturing both of us?”

His hand settled over hers on the knob. “Amneris fought for what she wanted.”

“And ended up killing him!”

“That’s opera for you.” His face was soft, inquisitive, achingly tender. “The night I pulled you out of the river—the night I thought you’d drowned. It was the worst moment of my life. It took you almost drowning for me to realize how important you are to me. How much more important you are than winning a ball game or being a starter. How much I love you.”

“You love me?” Her own words sounded as if they were coming from the far reaches of the orchestra hall.

“How could I not love you?” He searched her face as if he couldn’t get enough of it. “You’re everything. Smart and beautiful and funny and gifted. Sexy. God, are you sexy. When I couldn’t find you in the water, I wanted to die myself.” She’d worked so hard not to cry, and now he was the one with tears in his eyes. “I love you, Liv. I love you in more ways than I can count.”

She’d always known he had a sensitive heart, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. She lifted her hand and gently brushed her thumb along his cheekbone, catching a tear, not saying anything, listening.

He searched her face, taking in every detail. “I need to know I’ll always come first. And you need to know I’d never make you choose between me and your career.”

Anyone else might have been confused by this statement, but she understood, and it made her dizzy with love.

He took her hand and gently kissed the pulse point on the inside of her wrist. “No more deadlines, Liv, okay?”

“No more deadlines,” she whispered. “Ever.”

They kissed. A kiss she would remember forever. Deep and sweet and yearning. Everything a woman could want. The kind of kiss dreams were built on, that lives were built on. A kiss that was a forever pledge.

The sweetness of that kiss changed its timbre, becoming hot and fierce. They dragged each other into the bedroom, pulling at their clothes, at the bedcovers, desperate to seal the words they’d spoken with their bodies.

They came together ferociously—two athletes, champions in their own worlds, their bodies moving together, soaring together, hitting that perfect crescendo, that perfect rush. The perfect joining of body and soul.

*  *  *

Later, sated in each other’s arms, he brushed his lips across her hair. “We have a busy couple of years ahead of us.”

She ran her fingers across the delicious cording of his abdomen. “Yes, we do.”

“You’ve already signed contracts for the next two years, and I have two more years left on my own contract.” He stroked the curve of her hip. “I know what I’m going to do after that. I never thought I’d say this, but I can’t wait. Still, nothing is for sure. These next couple of years are going to be important ones for us. They’ll be our training camp.”

It was a perfect analogy. “The time when we work out the logistics. Find out how to make our lives fit together,” she said.

“We’ll make mistakes.” He took her hand and kissed her earlobe. “It’ll be trial and error.”

“It’ll be a mess.” She gave him a watery smile, not caring if he saw her tears, because they were happy ones. “We’ll need lots of open communication.”

“Something we’ve been good at up until these last few days.” He rose onto one elbow, gazing down at her. “Fortunately, we’re both disciplined. We know how to set goals and work toward meeting them.”

“We do,” she agreed, nuzzling his shoulder.

“You have Wednesday and Thursday off between performances next week. Does Thursday work for you?”

She lost herself admiring the dark arch of his eyebrows. “Thursday?”

“Or Wednesday if you’d rather. For us to get married.”

His words finally registered, and she shot up in bed, clutching the sheet to her chest. “You want to get married next week?”

He tugged the sheet from her hands. “Isn’t that what I said?”

“No, it’s not what you said! We were just talking about taking the next two years to figure things out.”

“Right.” He kissed the top of her breast. “After we get married, we’ll definitely need to figure things out.”

She grabbed for the sheet, launching into their first postcoital argument. “We’re not reckless people! We don’t just jump into something this big. We’re systematic. We take our time. Prepare.”

He laughed and pulled her back down beside him. “Liv, sweetheart, we’re already prepared. We know exactly what kind of mess we’re jumping into, and we also know that—with our work ethic and big egos—we’ll have to make it work because neither of us can handle failure.”

That was true, but . . .

He stroked her temple. “You’re slippery, honey, and I’m not taking any more chances of losing you. I need a commitment. A real commitment. Enough of a commitment so I know you won’t go crazy again and tell me that you’ve decided you can’t sing Figaro or whoever else you’ve taken a fancy to sing while I’m in your life.”

Figaro was a man, but she understood his point. She tunneled her hands through his hair. “I’d never do that to you. I promise.”

“Good. Next week then.”

*  *  *

And next week it was. On a Thursday night when the Muni had no performances scheduled, the two of them stood onstage with their friends and family seated around them. The bride was deliriously beautiful in a long, Egyptian-style gown that was an updated copy of Aida’s costume. The groom was resplendent in a perfectly cut tuxedo with a square pocket handkerchief made from his beloved’s favorite flamenco shawl.

Thad’s parents had raced up from Kentucky. Coop was best man. Clint walked the bride down the makeshift aisle as Rachel sang, and neither the bride nor groom—both of whom were used to working under pressure—could make it through their vows without choking up.

It was a beautiful ceremony. The flowers, the guests, the music. As Thad and Olivia exchanged the kiss that sealed their union, Cooper Graham leaned over to the man sitting next to him and whispered, “One marriage. Two divas. This is going to work out just fine.”

Clint Garrett couldn’t have agreed more.