Playing With Her Heart (Caught Up In Love #4)(24)
Author: Lauren Blakely

He nods. “I’m not a virtuoso. But I play enough.”

He plays a bit of Für Elise. Perfectly. “Not well, my ass,” I say, because I do far better with Davis when I can tease him, like that first night at Sardi’s. If we’re going to get past our awkwardness, I’ll need to treat him like a buddy, like Reeve. I have plenty of guy friends, and there’s no reason he can’t move into the friend zone. Because when he’s all serious and intense, I feel as if I’m walking on unsteady ground. “I bet you speak French too. And you’re probably a pilot as well.”

He laughs once. “No. I don’t speak French. Nor do I claim a seat in the cockpit when I fly.”

He seems to enjoy saying the word cockpit. Fine, he seems to enjoy saying one syllable in the word cockpit. He watches me from his post on the bench, his dark blue eyes like magnets. He stares hard but with a playful glint, as if he expects me to flinch first. I swallow and look away.

“Nor am I a gourmet cook,” he adds. “In fact, I can’t cook at all. I prefer takeout. I also don’t own a yacht, or know how to work a yacht, or a schooner, or any type of sailboat.”

He’s playing me now. I know he likes to dress people down, to put actors in their place. Part of me thinks he may be berating me for talking back or sassing. But yet, he’s never treated me badly. Still, I go with my gut and keep up the banter since it’s easier than the alternative. “But do you like opera?”

He shoots me the barest of grins, then coaxes out a quick few notes on the piano. I recognize the music. It’s from Carmen by Bizet.

“Habanera. Love is a rebellious bird,” I say, tossing back the common name for the aria he’s playing. “Though, I’m not an opera fan.”

“I don’t care for opera either. I like Carmen though, and the way she moves. I’d like this song better if it were played like this.”

I lean on the piano and watch his hands move over the keys. He has a scar across his right hand, a long jagged worm from the wrist all the way to his ring finger. Like someone cut him. Or he cut someone. I wonder if he even tells anyone how it happened. If he’d tell me if I asked.

His fingers move quickly on the keys, and he’s turned Carmen’s aria into a rock tune, changing the speed, mixing it up, so it’s got this low, sexy beat that sounds like the song he was playing in his office a month ago.

The song I told him I loved. The song he turned off. Now he’s shifting from Carmen to Muse, and it’s as if he’s playing “Madness” just for me, telling me something, using music instead of words. My cheeks feel hot as he plays, his eyes on me the whole time.

He says nothing as the music fills the room, and it feels like it’s spreading through my body, and I have this strange sensation of being his instrument, as if the notes he’s hitting are being played in me. Neither one of us speaks, there is only music between us, but I know the lyrics behind every note, and when he reaches come on and rescue me, it all becomes too much. “You lied. You said you didn’t play well.”

He shakes his head. “I said I’m not a virtuoso. I didn’t say I didn’t play well. But I don’t want to talk about me anymore, Jill,” he says in a commanding voice. He’s turned from playful to powerful. I straighten my spine in response, standing taller, no longer leaning on the piano. He’s all business. I need to let go of my overwhelming need to lighten every situation.

“I want to talk about Ava. And I want to talk about you. I want to talk about how you can become her, find the truth of her, and hold onto it so tightly as you perform that no one doubts for even a second that you’re her. You won’t doubt it, I won’t doubt it, and the audience won’t doubt it. And so, I want you to think of Carmen and Habanera when you work on your part.”

He’s shifted, leaving Muse behind us. I follow his lead, serious in tone too. “Tell me why.”

“Ava is a rebellious bird. She resists Paolo. She resists his teaching, his way of making art. She resists his love too,” he continues in his clear, determined way of speaking. His eyes never stray from mine, and his gaze is so intense it could burn. Then he lowers his voice, softens to a lover’s whisper. “But then she transforms. Love changes her. Love without bounds. Love without reason. She becomes his, and that changes her.”

Those last few words make me feel light-headed and woozy, so I reach for the edge of the piano, holding on.

She becomes his, and that changes her.

“I love that sentiment,” I manage to say and I’m only vaguely aware that I sound a bit breathy. I quickly catalogue my reaction—there are goose bumps on my arms, and there’s a tingling in my belly, and my lips are parted.

It hits me what’s happening.

Because he’s doing it to me again.

He’s f**king me with his words, and I am turned on beyond belief.

My body is responding faster than my brain can apply the brakes—my skin is hot all over, and heat is flaring through my veins. I know this feeling. I usually only feel it when I’m reading a hot scene in a novel. But now I’m feeling it in real life, and not in my imagination, not from pretending or picturing a make-believe session in the sheets. This is real and it’s legitimate and it’s borne from the fact that I’m craving something I haven’t let myself have in years.

Contact.

My vision blurs for a moment, and I dig my fingers into the side of the piano so I don’t fall.

“Which sentiment, Jill?”

He says my name like it’s dessert. Like it’s something he wants to eat. Even though it’s only a simple question he’s asked, I’m unhinged by my body’s reaction to the way he talks. By the way it feels as if my body is no longer my own, that it’s responding to someone else’s cues.

His cues.

For no good reason.

Because there’s no good reason at all why my head should be so cloudy and my body so hazy, and my pulse racing like a getaway train. I can’t let myself get carried away. That would be unbearably foolish, so I remind myself that he’s good with words, he’s good with people, he’s good with ideas. He has to be. He does what Paolo does. He takes nascent, unformed clay and transforms it into something alive and wondrous, with a heartbeat, with a life force. That’s the only reason there’s an aching between my legs. Not because my director is turning me on again. The only reason I am a tuning fork now is because he’s making me feel like Ava, and Ava is turned on by Paolo.