A Cowboy For Christmas

“What do you think? Is it like a dirge?”

That popped her head up. “Not at all. It’s melancholy, but a beautiful melancholy. It’s kind of like...” She hesitated. “I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t know music.”

“Most of the people I play and sing for don’t know music. They know what they like is all. I’m not asking a technical question. I want to know how it makes you feel.”

She rolled her head a little more. “Play the melody part again. With the chords.”

So he did, letting the notes ripple through the room. It stopped too soon.

“So?” he asked.

“It makes me feel like I’m drifting on a warm, slow river all by myself. It’s pretty, but kind of lonely.” Making those statements seemed awfully bold, but they were as true an expression as she could find.

He nodded. “It’s not my usual,” he admitted. “But it’s my heart.”

Touched, she felt an unexpected sadness for him. So he felt lonesome, too? But then she wondered if everyone didn’t at times. As if something was lacking or missing. She gathered her courage. “It’s like looking for something you can’t quite remember.”

His smile grew. “That’s it. That’s what I was trying for.”

“Then you succeeded because I think it’s going to follow me into my dreams. It’s...haunting.”

“It’ll drive my manager and agent crazy.” He sighed and turned back to the keyboard, running through it again, his fingers delicate on the keys. A rippling current of music and magic ran through the room.

“There’s a part of me,” he said as he played, “that vanished a long time ago. That’s what I came back here to find.” As he spoke, his baritone began to echo the music. Not lyrics, not yet, but she guessed they were starting to come to him.

He stopped playing and held out an arm toward her. “Come sit over here with me,” he said. “I think we’re both a little mournful and wistful.”

Nervously, but feeling a kind of hope anyway, she rose and walked over. He drew her down on the bench beside him until their shoulders were touching.

“Lost long ago. Homesickness for something we can’t quite remember. Dreams?”

She wasn’t sure how to answer. He began playing again, and she watched his hands glide over the keys. This time he played the haunting melody more strongly, and this time he didn’t pause as missing notes seemed to spring from his fingertips. When he finished, the last notes trailed slowly away.

Then he smiled at her, causing her heart to leap. “You’re a great Muse,” he said. “And I’ve stolen your evening. Sorry.”

“You just gave me a wonderful gift. I loved it.” The words came straight from her heart. She felt blessed to have shared this with him, to have entered however briefly into his creative process and to have been one of the first to hear a truly incredible piece of music.

Much as she didn’t want to, she rose to go to her rooms. She sensed he wanted to be alone now. The haunting notes of the melody followed her all the way down the hall to her quarters. She was reluctant to leave them behind, but since she’d taken to leaving her door open a few inches since Regina’s arrival, she didn’t entirely close out the music.

Changes had begun to happen inside her, she realized. They frightened her a bit. Little by little she was exposing her heart again, to a man and his daughter.

She ought to know better after Porter. She thought she had known better, but apparently not. Somehow she had to quell her growing desire for him.

If there was one thing she was sure about, it was that there could be no future with Rory McLane, so why have a messy present?

* * *

Rory was sorry to see her go, but he knew he’d intruded on her evening. He’d never meant for her to be at his beck and call round the clock, and considered her evening hours to be sacrosanct. Yet tonight he’d intruded.

It wasn’t just the music, although that had been part of it. He occasionally liked some feedback from a naive listener, and from what she’d said, he gathered Abby didn’t know much about who he was or his music.

That was fine by him. Running back to Conard County he had hoped to escape a lot of that. Oh, he had friends in the business, people who shared all the highs and lows, the stresses, the good times and bad. But it was like a closed loop, and one day he’d realized that it had closed him in and cut off part of him.

Maybe it was ridiculous of him to want to reach back in time to a boy he’d once been. After all, life happened to everyone, changed everyone, and twenty years had happened to him, for better or worse.

But that feeling of being homesick for something you couldn’t quite remember—that was a powerful feeling. Abby had nailed that one. It had been troubling him more and more until he had decided that he needed to get away for a while.

But even here in his hidey-hole, life wasn’t what it had been when he was sharing a ranch with his parents as a kid. No, he was surrounded by luxury, living a self-indulgent life. How many people had the choice of throwing over their work for months to take a sabbatical? Not many.

He was a lucky man and he knew it. Luckier now that he had custody of Regina. Lucky that for the first time since the divorce he’d have her for both upcoming holidays.

At least Abby hadn’t seemed to mind being called upon to be his audience for a while. He wondered if the song was going to be about her, because he sensed in her many of the same discontents and sorrows he knew. Undoubtedly a different degree, undoubtedly not exactly the same, but still he felt an emotional recognition of something in her.

The little bit she’d said about her marriage made him wonder about her. Deserted by her husband for her former boss? Ugly. Wounding. He couldn’t imagine the skein of bad feelings that must have left her with. At least with Stella, he hadn’t been either surprised or especially wounded when she decided to move on. Except for Regina it would have been a clean, cheerful split.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.