She stiffened.
“It was very kind of you to bring me home but if you think that entitles you to—”
“It does,” he said solemnly.
“No. It does not. I am not about to—”
“What were you doing on that street corner?”
“Huh?”
“That is the cost of my assistance. I want to know what happened to you tonight.”
Emily stared at him. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Well…” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “I was fired.”
“You were fired?”
“Uh-huh.”
“From what?”
She could hear the bewilderment in his voice, see it in his eyes. Who could blame him? It sounded unreal; if their positions had been reversed, she wouldn’t have believed the story either.
“From a bar. The Tune-In Café. It’s a couple of blocks from where you found me.”
His eyebrows rose. “Are you saying that you are a bartender?”
“A bar…?” She laughed. It was, he noticed a very nice laugh. It went with her eyes—light blue, he could see now, in the faint glow of light in the hall. “No,” she said, “I play piano.”
“Ah. A pianist.”
“Pianists play at Carnegie Hall. Piano players play at places like the Tune-In.”
She was smiling. He smiled back. His tigress had a nice way about her. She was very pretty, too. Not the type of pretty he generally saw. Her face was bare of makeup. Her hair was the color of gold. The heat of the car had dried it and it fell down her back in a drift of soft curls.
He wanted to reach out and touch one of them. See if it would wrap around his finger. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched a woman’s hair that had not been sprayed, shellacked or cemented into place.
“And what did you do to deserve being fired?”
She hesitated. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He folded his arms over his chest. It was either that or succumb to the desire to play with one of those curls, and he suspected that would not be a good idea.
“Try me.”
Her voice took on a defensive edge. “A guy ask
ed me to play a tune. I refused.”
“Was it something you didn’t know?”
“I knew it, all right. It was that old Sinatra thing. “New York, New York.”
“But aren’t requests part of a pianist’s—scusi—a piano player’s job?”