Once a Rebel...

Envy.

Someone behind them coughed. Someone else murmured as the orchestra quietly turned to the next piece. To them this was just another performance. Seven minutes of top-shelf proficiency.

To Shirley it was one of the most extraordinary things she’d ever done.

The audience murmuring grew loud enough that she risked a whisper. But while she might have been able to coordinate her lungs to push air through her voice box, she couldn’t quite make the sounds into a meaningful sentence.

‘Hayden …’ she got out.

He seemed to understand, but his eyes glanced to the stage and then back at her as the conductor called his performers to order with a dramatic flourish and a man she hadn’t been aware of stood and walked to a piano she’d barely noticed.

And then it happened …

The first sombre note of the Moonlight Sonata. It wasn’t called that on the programme so she was taken unaware. Her eyes were still locked on Hayden’s when recognition hit. The music that had played when they’d carried her mother’s coffin out of the chapel. The emotional elation of just moments before plunged dramatically as the first haunting notes filled every crevice in the concert hall. She gasped.

Sorrow held her rigid and all she could do was hold Hayden’s eyes, his fingers, as the warmth leached slowly from her face.

That horrible, horrible day.

His eyes darkened and his fingers curled around hers in support. She might have cried alone at her mother’s funeral ten years ago but this time Hayden Tennant was here with her. Holding on to her. The only other person in the room who knew what this music meant.

Her chest heaves increased as she fought back the tears she could feel forming.

In vain …

Her eyes welled as the beautiful music unfolded in isolation of every other instrument on the stage. The rich, saturated tones of the expensive piano formed a thick private blanket of sound to hide her grief beneath. From everyone but Hayden; he had an unexpected stage-side seat to her pain.

She let her lashes drop to block even him out.

From the sublime to the tragic in the space of two beats of silence. He’d been captivated by Shirley’s ecstasy in the face of the music. It had been so long since he’d felt anything, he was quite prepared to feed off her evident joy—her total absorption—like some kind of visceral vampire. He’d been able to stare at her for seven whole minutes unmolested as she reached some place high above the real world.

Buffeted and carried by the music.

Her eyes, when the first famous piece came to a powerful crescendo and she’d gifted him with her focus, had looked as they might in the throes of passion.

Bright, exhilarated, fevered.

And for one breathless heartbeat he’d imagined putting those expressions there, of inciting this strong, unique woman to cast aside the veneer of control that she always wore.

Possession had surged through him, powerful and unfamiliar.

But now those same eyes were off-limits to him, a fat tear squeezing out from under her long dark lashes and rolling down blanched skin. He knew what this music meant and he remembered how Shirley had looked—so small and bereft—the last time he’d heard it.

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