“Well, that’s not going to happen. I have a competitive streak a mile wide. I have to know if…”
She met his eyes, and the fire in them surged. Would rendering her defenseless with ropes cause that fire to burn brighter, dampen it, or extinguish it completely? He predicted she’d ignite under his meticulous attention as he included her body in one of his creations—where bondage became art. And he doubted she’d be the only one to ignite if he played with that particular fire. He took a deep breath. He needed to find focus, which was entirely impossible with her looking all defiant and tense. He wanted to draw both the defiance and the tension from her body and teach her how to relax.
“You have to know if you’re the best,” he completed her sentence.
She used her spatula to eject a perfect piece of French toast from the skillet onto a plate and then added a raw slice to the pan. It sizzled and hissed. Kellen inhaled the scent of vanilla and warmed bread. His mouth watered.
“I don’t need to be the best at everything,” she said, her attention on her task. “Just at what I’m most passionate about.”
“Would that be composing or playing piano?”
“Both,” she said.
“And does it make you happy to pursue perfection?”
Her gaze darted upward to find his.
He hid a grin. Another of her buttons found and pressed.
“That’s a very personal question,” she said, her voice a bit louder than necessary. “And how did we end up talking about me? I asked you about your band.”
“We’re talking about you because you’re more interesting than I am,” he said.
“I guarantee that I’m not.”
“We’ll see.” He chuckled. “I started playing guitar when my grandfather caught me fooling around with the vintage Les Paul that he’d won in a bet. I snapped one of the strings and thought he was going to skin me alive, but instead he punished me by forcing me to take lessons from a friend of his who played in a local band. I was thirteen. That’s the same year I met Sole Regret’s bassist, Owen. He wasn’t into music much. He liked to follow me to my lessons and watch, but he didn’t want to learn to play himself. Not until a couple years later when the girls started hanging around me because I was cool. So Owen learned to play in an attempt to attract girls. He’s very shallow that way.” Kellen winked at her.
“So you didn’t learn to play in order to attract girls?”
“Music is my escape,” he said. “I quickly became addicted to producing sound. It’s like a drug I can’t get enough of.”
He met her eyes and they gazed at each other. “I feel the same way about the piano,” she said. “I just would have called it a compulsion instead of an addiction.”
Sara had never understood this part of him. She’d thought of music as something that took him away from her. She seemed to think she was competing against music for his affection, not that it helped make him the man she loved. It was nice to meet a woman who understood how vital music could be to a person.
Dawn flipped a second piece of French toast onto a plate before adding a third to the pan. While it cooked, she set a tub of butter, a bottle of maple syrup, and his plate before him. He inhaled deeply.
“This smells heavenly.”
“My grandmother’s recipe.”
Kellen’s first bite had his eyes rolling into the back of his head in delight. “This is amazing. What’s the secret?”
“Vanilla,” she said. “And day-old, fresh-baked bread.”
“Lucky I happened along the day after your trip to the bakery.”
Her cheeks went pink, and she paid extra close attention to the toast sizzling in the pan.
Had he discovered another button? He wasn’t sure where to push. “Is there a bakery nearby?”
She shook her head. “I baked it,” she said. “Baking is a huge stress reliever for me.”
“Lucky me,” he said. “What are you stressed out about?”
She hesitated for a long moment and then let out a sigh. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m supposed to turn in a completed composition tomorrow,” she said. “I was commissioned for a piece to be used as the main theme in some feel-good summer blockbuster. I’ve been working on it for months and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it right.”
“Maybe that’s your problem,” he said, trying to remember his manners and not talk with his mouth full, but the French toast was so delicious that he couldn’t stop shoveling it in.
“My problem?”
Oh, another button? Poke. Poke. Poke.
“One of many, I’m sure,” he said.
She leveled him with a heated glare, and he warmed from the inside out. He hadn’t even realized he’d been cold.
“Maybe you’re just trying too hard,” he said. “Sometimes the best inspiration hits when you aren’t paying attention. Let your subconscious write the music. It’s purer that way.”
“And what would you know about writing music?” she said, flipping her piece of French toast to an empty plate. She turned off the burner and reached for the tub of butter. He couldn’t resist moving it out of her reach.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Why did he get the impression that she was counting backward from a hundred so she didn’t slap the shit out of him with her spatula?
“I’ve written a few songs,” he said. “The band’s lead guitarist, Adam, is our main composer, but he allows the rest of us to come up with a note or two.”
“What do you know about writing piano music?”
“Absolutely nothing,” he admitted.
She collected her plate and moved around the counter to sit beside him.
“I’m sorry I’m so testy tonight,” she said. “I’m under a lot of pressure. I just… I don’t want to fail at my own dream.”
“You’re not failing,” he said. “You’re just a little stuck. It happens to everyone.”
She shook her head as she slathered butter on her French toast. “It doesn’t happen to me. I can’t permit it to happen to me.”
“Reality check, Dawn. It already has.”
“I can still finish the composition tonight,” she said.
“And if you can’t?”
Her lower lip trembled and she refused to meet his eyes, even though he was staring her down like a panther watching a tender young deer wander unknowingly beneath his tree.
“I’m not allowed to fail,” she said. “Absolutely not allowed.”
Allowed? Why would she say it that way? He placed a comforting hand at the base of her spine and she jerked so hard, she nearly launched herself straight off the stool.
“I can’t promise you anything, but I will help, if I can,” he said. “Relax, okay?”
“Easy for you to say,” she mumbled under her breath.
He removed his hand from her back, cursing himself for touching her as he could still feel the tension in her muscles against his palm. She picked at her French toast and after a moment of appearing defeated, straightened her shoulders and turned slightly to look at him.
“So you and your friend Owen became guitarists to seduce naive young women. What about the rest of your band? Did they also suffer from an inability to pick up girls based on their looks and personality alone?”
He sighed at her obvious subject change. “Owen didn’t really like guitar, so he switched to bass, which is the rock-band position least likely to get you laid.” Owen, however, had stopped having that problem soon after they graduated high school. “We’re not as shallow as I make us out to be.”
“Why didn’t Owen like guitar?”
“I’m not sure he was being completely truthful. I think he claimed that he didn’t like the guitar so he wouldn’t steal my thunder. He’s actually a good guitarist, but he has this way of putting everyone before himself. Especially me.”
“So he didn’t want to beat you at your own game.”
“Something like that.”
r />
“How many are in your band?”
“Five. Jacob is the lead singer, and Adam plays lead guitar. They’ve been friends since they were young. They’re a couple years older than Owen and me. They’d started up a band with a drummer named Quint and were looking for a bassist to make up the fourth member of the group, which was called Desperation Normal. When Owen answered their ad on a bulletin board at a bar in Austin and agreed to join as their bassist, they had no intention of including me; they weren’t looking for a second guitarist. But Owen has a way of getting what he wants, and he refused to be a part of anything that didn’t include me, so they let me play along. Turns out two guitarists can be better than one. I couldn’t outplay Adam Taylor as a soloist, so I switched to rhythm guitar and let him have the limelight.”
“Are you satisfied playing rhythm guitar?”
“Yeah. I guess. I’m satisfied being a part of Sole Regret.” He never really thought much about why Adam played lead and he continued playing rhythm. It just worked best that way. “And then Quint met a girl, got married, and left the band. And Jacob recruited our current drummer, Gabe. Well, more like kidnapped him.” Kellen chuckled at those early weeks with Gabe and his constant whining about not having enough time to study for his quantum physics midterm. Perhaps the world had missed out on a fantastic engineer when Gabriel Banner had eventually dropped out of school after struggling to do everything for a semester—school, work, the band, and his girlfriend at the time. Missed out on an engineer, but gained one of the most skilled drummers to ever pound the skins. “We changed our name to Sole Regret a couple of weeks after the band was fully formed.”
“Why do you regret your souls?” she asked.
“Huh?” He looked up from his plate, which had somehow become empty while he’d been running off at the mouth.
“Your band’s name is Soul Regret. Why do you regret your soul?”
“Sole Regret. Sole meaning one or single.”
“Oh, one regret.” Dawn speared the final bite of her French toast. “You only have one?”
“Well, at the time. I was young.” He smiled sadly. He had dozens of regrets now, all centering around the things he should have done with Sara. He even regretted that he’d respected her too much to grope her early in their relationship. Maybe if he’d given in to those urges, he might have found the lump in her breast in time. Maybe her treatments would have been more effective. Maybe they could have saved her. Was it strange to regret not being after only one thing with the love of your life? Maybe, but he couldn’t help it.
“Kellen?” Dawn said after she’d swallowed her final bite.
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you want to go home?”
He hesitated. How had she managed to pick up on that? “What do you mean?”
“Earlier when you said you would leave me alone and go home, you didn’t sound like you wanted to go.”
He shrugged. “There’s nothing there for me anymore.”
“But there’s something for you here?”
He dabbed his finger into a puddle of syrup and brought it to his tongue. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s you.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh.”
“And your song,” he added, before she got the wrong idea. “Are you going to play for me now? You’ve already spoiled my hungry belly with your fantastic French toast; why not treat my ears to something just as sweet?”
He winked at her and after a moment, she nodded.
“I think I’m ready,” she said. “Just don’t expect a miracle.”
“I won’t.” Kellen had given up on miracles five years ago.
Chapter Four
Dawn placed her hands on the keys and closed her eyes. The first notes of the piece came easily, and her fingers found them in natural succession. Music poured from every particle of her being as she gave herself over to the melody.
As the first crescendo built, her muscles began to tense tighter and tighter until she reached the dam beyond which she could not create. She froze. Her hands stilled. Her eyelids clenched tight. Anxiety churned in the pit of her stomach.
The piano began to play of its own accord. The notes that sounded weren’t the correct ones—Dawn instinctively knew when the notes were right—but it wasn’t silence. Thank God, it wasn’t silence. Her eyes popped open, and she watched the long-fingered masculine hands move across the black and ivory keys. They went still suddenly, and she looked up at Kellen, wondering why he’d stopped.
“Well, that sounded better in my head than in reality,” he said with a wince. “Did I offend you by messing with your song?”
She supposed gawking at him like an idiot might make him think that she was offended, but she wasn’t. Surprised, yes. Grateful the sea had seen fit to wash him into her life, yes. Offended? Never.
“That wasn’t quite right,” she said.
“It was horrendous,” he said. “I follow your masterpiece with that load of crap? You must think I’m a talentless hack.”
She shook her head and touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. Sparks danced along her nerve endings, and her belly fluttered with nerves or excitement or just plain silliness. When he drew his hand away and rested it on his thigh beneath the keyboard, she could have cried.
It sucked to be attracted to a man who held no reciprocating interest.
“Play it again,” he said. “I won’t interrupt this time, I promise.”
“You didn’t interrupt. I always freeze at that exact spot. I’m afraid I’ll never get past it.”
“So instead of stopping, just play something—any crap that comes out—until the right notes finally find you.”
She laughed. “I don’t know how to play crap.”
“Lucky you,” he said, his white smile flashing in his strong, handsome face. She wanted to prop her chin up on her hand and stare at him dreamily. She needed to get a grip.
“Ninety percent of my work is crap,” he continued. “Another nine percent is mediocre, and then there are those rare gems that are actually useable.”
“It’s not that I can’t play crap. I’m just afraid to.” She diverted her gaze to the keyboard. “I’m sort of a perfectionist.” And it wasn’t a trait she’d been born with. Her mother had ensured she’d paid for every mistake until the thought of making one crippled her. “What you played wasn’t bad,” she said.
“Liar,” he said, still grinning, “but it was a little better than—”
Blam! His hands slammed on the keyboard as hers had so many times over the past week.
“Just a little better than—” She hit the keys with her fist. Blam!
“Shit, even your”—Blam!—“sounds better than mine does.”
“Maybe you should just give up on music writing.”
“Ouch! My ego isn’t made of steel, you know?”
“I’m just teasing.” Couldn’t he tell? If not, she was sorry to have damaged his pride. “Let’s try it again. Maybe something that comes out of you will complement something inside of me.”
He groaned. “Don’t say things like that. I’ve been abstinent so long, I’m likely to take it the wrong way.”
Why would he ever so selfishly resort to abstinence? Dawn wondered if he’d like to break that dry spell, because she had her own abstinence thing going on, not that she’d planned it that way, and maybe they could end the drought together. Of course, for a gorgeous, virile man like Kellen, perhaps a week was a long stint of abstinence.
“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. Please, continue.”
But he had brought it up, so she had to ask. “Why have you been abstinent? Surely you have hundreds of women standing in line to get you into bed.” Having just met him, she might be at the end of the line, but she was definitely in it.
“But not the one who matters.”
She caught the anguish in his expression before he turned his face away and began to play a completely disjointed string of notes.
She covered his hand with hers to stop his playing.
“Are you being intentionally mysterious? Or does driving me insane with curiosity come naturally to you?”