Emily: Sex and Sensibility (The Wilde Sisters 1)

One way or another, she was going to make it on her own.

Which was why she was here, playing at a bar the Board of Health or at least the Board of Good Taste should have condemned.

Nine weeks ago, she hadn’t known the place existed any more than she’d known you could make a living playing piano. Well, not a living, exactly, but you could make enough to get by.

It had happened st

rictly by accident, the way a lot of things did in New York.

Her roommate, Nola, had invited her to a party. Though they shared an apartment, they were acquaintances more than friends. Emily didn’t know a lot of people. Nola knew everybody.

“This party’ll be fun,” she’d said. “Come on, Em. You need to get out more. Maybe you’ll meet a guy.”

“Thanks,” Emily had said, “but I don’t know if I can make it.”

Not true.

She’d had nothing to keep her from going, certainly not a date. She’d pretty much given up on New York men. Relationships with them tended to last not much longer than a New York minute, and she wasn’t into the latest crazes—one-night hookups or the weirdness of communicating via smartphone, you in one bar and a guy you’d met online in another.

Why party if you didn’t want to connect with a man? But Nola had kept urging her to go and at the last minute Emily had thought, why not? At the very least, you could always scrounge something resembling a free meal at a party.

So she went.

The party had been in an old brownstone in her own East Village neighborhood. The apartment was small, the rooms were jammed with people. She didn’t see a familiar face, not even Nola’s. There wasn’t any food aside from a bowl that held what appeared to be potato chip crumbs and a smaller bowl smudged with what she figured had been dip.

After twenty minutes, she’d headed for the door, but the route to it was crowded and instead of getting closer to it, she’d been pushed back and back and back until she’d almost fallen into an old Baldwin upright in a distant corner. To her surprise, a guy was playing it; the noise in the apartment had completely drowned him out.

He’d flashed her a smile. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I don’t suppose they’ve put out any food yet.”

“Not even a hot dog,” Emily had said, laughing. “I thought I was the only guest who’d noticed.”

The piano guy had assured her that he wasn’t a guest. He was the entertainment. “Not that anybody noticed that, either,” he’d added.

“You mean, you’re working?”

“Yeah. Hell of a way to make a buck, isn’t it?”

Emily, who had just lost yet another waitressing job, had assured him that playing the piano looked pretty good to her.

“So what do you do?” he’d said.

She’d slumped down on the bench next to him and sighed. “Nothing right now.”

“Yeah, that sounds familiar. Well, what can you do?”

“Good question. I wish I had an answer.”

It was the truth. What, indeed, could she do? She’d grown up on a ranch the size of a small kingdom, and sharing hostessing duties with her sisters at their father’s formal dinner parties had been a great learning experience if you were into folding linen napkins into swans, or knowing how to seat people so they wouldn’t end up glaring at each other, or being able to carry on polite chitchat in four different languages. She could talk about places in Europe, Asia and South America, thanks to visits she and her sisters had paid to the general.

Because of her otherwise useless degree, she could also write research papers on esoteric topics so deadly, you’d sooner eat nails than read them, or, conversely, speed read an endless document and boil it down to two cogent paragraphs. She’d long ago developed her own kind of shorthand, but then, that was what being a straight-A student did for you.

Perhaps that was the reason making a buck playing the piano had seemed, at the very least, interesting.

“You play?” the piano player had asked.