Concerto (North Security 2)

The sensual haze slowly lifts from the reporter’s eyes, replaced with that shrewd journalistic instinct I should never have let into this house. “Because you’re seeing someone else?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might matter, if it’s something worth writing about.”

My eyes narrow. “You have an accusation? Come out and say it, Ms. Cox.”

“I’m a journalist. I only have questions.”

“I shouldn’t have kissed you because you’re here to do a story on Samantha Brooks, the prodigy, the soloist, who has incomparable talent and a hell of a bright future. You’re not here to take your clothes off for me. Unless that’s a perk that comes from Classical Notes Magazine now.”

She flinches, which makes me a true bastard. She’s done nothing wrong except be damn good at her job. It’s the only way I can get her to back off the damn story.

There is no story.

Nothing has ever happened between me and Samantha, and that can’t change. No matter how badly I want her. No matter how hard I ache for just one taste.

CHAPTER FOUR

String players, like violinists, tend to have larger brains. This is due in part to the complex motor skills and reasoning required to play the instrument.

SAMANTHA

The string vibrates on a C sharp, the note echoing in the chamber after my bow lifts.

Silence descends in slow degrees. I could be turning the page to my sheet music or tightening a string. I could be doing any number of things to continue practice, instead of sitting with my violin across my lap, the bow clutched artlessly in my fist. I have lived a thousand lives in the dramatic rise of a musical piece, feeling the intensity grow, the complexity develop. This moment in my life should have been marked by an entire orchestra, bodies moving in harmony, instruments an extension of bone and flesh.

Instead there’s only a curious quiet, so rare and therefore precious.

I feel the answering stillness in the room next door. He could be shifting pieces of paper, noiseless and precise. He could be examining numbers and tactical formations on the flat privacy screen, but I know he’s noticing the lack of music. We’re connected enough that I can tell he’s wondering what I’m doing.

I’m wondering the same thing.

Booted footsteps cross the gleaming parquet floor. Every aspect of this room has been designed to enhance sound, and it turns his approach into a military drum. He appears in the archway. The doors remain open every afternoon, even though my practice must disturb his work. Liam North takes his responsibilities seriously.

And I’m his responsibility.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, crouching in front of me, taking in every aspect of my body with an impersonal evergreen glance. This is the way he corrects my position—no slouching, no leaning. He treats violin practice like a drill, and I am his soldier. I must do it right, must do it again, do you want to give up? No, sir.

Mostly, mostly, I love this about him. Today I don’t.

What’s wrong? This crush on him. It’s wrong and taboo and completely unstoppable. “I don’t feel good,” I say, which isn’t entirely a lie. I don’t feel good, but I don’t feel bad either. Instead I feel… enervated. There hasn’t been room in my life for feelings before. Only music.

He studies me with the same impassive expression he would give a map. Around this corner and aha, there, through that mountain pass. Something he must traverse. “Since when?”

Since Kimberly Cox came to the house.

Since he kissed her in his office while I watched through a crack in the door. Though it would be more accurate to say she kissed him.

She stalked him through the house like a tiger over the plains.

And I followed her like a house cat, clumsy, copying.

She pressed her body against his. I heard his surprised inhale of breath, so quiet, so quiet. Heard the sound that came low in her throat. Her whole body moved in some purely feminine way, like water, so fluid. And he was a rock, solid and hard. Her hand reached between them, and he became somehow more still.

Until he grasped her wrist and pushed her away.

r /> Something became warm inside me. Warm and new. Seventeen years old means I know what sex is about but I’ve never seen it, not that close, not with a man I looked up to like a father. Well, not exactly a father.