“Like?” She sounded annoyed and glanced at her watch full of bling.
“Like who the composer was,” Melody interjected.
The girl glanced up at her. “All those old music sheets belonged to my great-grandma. There was a bunch of crap up in the attic from, like, a hundred years ago. Took me freaking forever to go through it. My grandma kept everything. It was ridiculous. Took me ages to get this place looking like a normal house and not some kind of relic.”
“Oh, this was your grandma’s house?” Nikki asked, no doubt trying to be friendly and make conversation.
The girl snapped her gum again. “Originally, it was my great-grandma’s. That’s why all of her crap was in the attic. My grandma just died and left the house to me.” She rolled her eyes. “Piece of junk. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, really. I’m thinking of just selling it once I get everything modernized.”
Melody’s stomach turned at the woman’s cavalier, insensitive attitude. “Well, do you happen to know of any of the composers your great-grandma liked?”
She made a face. “How would I know? I don’t listen to that crap. I listen to The Black Eyed Peas and Usher. You know, real music?”
Melody felt her eye twitch. Further proof that she was probably going crazy.
The girl waved her hand. “But all that crap in that trunk was stuff my great-grandma wrote. She was, like, this world famous classical musician. So that thing was probably her music.”
Melody blinked. Her music. Somehow, that didn’t seem right to her. She didn’t know why. It made absolutely no sense, but that piece of music did not feel like it had been written by a woman. No, of course not. It feels like it was written by some isolated man in a tower. What is wrong with you, Melody? You need a shrink, and pronto.
Melody sighed and banished her wandering thoughts. “What was your great-grandmother’s name, if I can ask?”
“Elizabeth Channing.” The girl glanced at her watch again. “Is that all? I have a tennis lesson in ten minutes.”
“Yeah…that’s all. Thank you.” Melody barely had a chance to get the words out before the girl shut the door on them.
Nikki snorted. “Nice.” She turned and met Melody’s gaze. “I hope you weren’t looking for anything other than that.”
Melody waved her hand and turned away from the door. “Nah. I know her name. I can look up the other information on the Internet.”
Nikki gave her a curious expression. “You really want to know about the composer. That music must have been special to make you obsess that way when you haven’t even wanted to look at music in over a year.”
The image of the lonely, dark-haired man flashed through her mind, and her heart skipped a beat. You have no idea. She gave Nikki a smile she hoped was convincing. She had no intention of telling her friend that the reason she wanted to know about the composer was so she could see if she could find some reason for the strange vision she’d had. Some reason that didn’t involve her checking herself into a mental hospital.
* * * *
Elizabeth Channing had been a gorgeous woman with pale skin, jet black hair, and smoldering dark eyes that looked like they could burn a hole through a person. And while her great-granddaughter had been right about her being a classical musician, she had failed to mention that she had only ever written the one piece of music; the nameless one that Melody held in her possession, which was probably worth a small fortune considering it looked like she had the original.
According to the trusty old Wikipedia, Elizabeth Channing, formerly Elizabeth Tabor, had actually been a classical singer and lyricist. Her husband, Aaron Channing, had been a composer, and had collaborated with her on a number of pieces that were still widely recognized and renowned, especially abroad.
Melody was baffled that, after all of her training, and with all the knowledge both of her parents had had, she had no clue who either one of them were. And there was absolutely nothing she could find online that linked Elizabeth to any man other than her husband. And he was definitely not the man Melody had seen in her mind. Not that she really would have felt better if he had been. She didn’t know which discovery would be worse. Finding out that she was going crazy, or finding out that she suddenly had some sort of psychic ability.
After exhausting her search Melody left her computer, no more enlightened as to what she had seen the night before than she had been when she started.
She made herself some pasta with meat sauce and garlic bread, having gone to the grocery store after her outing with Nikki, and opened up the bottle of wine Rob had brought over the night before.
As if the man had freaking radar, he knocked on her door as soon as she had finished pouring her first glass. Melody knew it was him without looking. He was relentless.
Melody went to the screen door and did her best to smile at him, even though she still kind of wanted to claw his face off.
“Hey, Mel,” he greeted. “Whatcha up to tonight?”
“I just finished dinner, actually,” she said.
He pouted in a way she imagined he thought would be cute. “Aw, that’s too bad. I thought maybe we could grab a bite.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, it’s already made and dished up. Can’t let it go to waste now.”
“Well, do you have enough for two?”
She sighed. Talk about presumptuous. The guy had no limits to his pushiness. “Actually, thanks for the offer to hang out, but I think I’m going to take tonight and relax. I kind of want to play piano for a bit.”
A strange expression crossed his face. “Oh, well…that’s good, I guess.” He scratched at the back of his head. “I thought you were done with that stuff.”
She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t think I was ever done with it. I just needed time to get over the memories it brought up.”
“Oh…are you going to go back to playing in the orchestra?”
She frowned. Why did he sound so weird? What did it matter to him? “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far yet. I’m just taking things one day at a time and enjoying the fact that I can play now. The orchestra is really the furthest thing from my mind at the moment.”
For some reason, that seemed to make him relieved. “Oh, all right. Well, have a good night then, Melody. You know where I am if you want me.”
She ignored the implication behind his words and forced another smile. “Thanks. Goodnight.” She closed the inner door and rolled her eyes, then went back to her now lukewarm dinner.
The food was mediocre. She had never been the best cook. The wine was rather exceptional, however. At least Rob had managed to get that right. She was about to pour her third drink when she decided to abandon the glass and go for the bottle. Who cared? She was a big girl. If she wanted to drink an entire bottle of wine all by her lonesome, it was her own business. Even her parents wouldn’t have stopped her if they’d been alive. They probably would have been there drinking right along with her.
She smiled at the thought of them, painful as it was, and migrated to the living room with her bottle. She stood in the doorway for a few seconds, staring at her piano. Taking a long drink of wine, she slid onto the bench, letting her eyes scan over the enigmatic piece of music on the stand.
Her mind was already hazy from drinking. She didn’t drink often, so it didn’t take much. Her usual anxiety about playing was diminished, an effect from playing the night before coupled with the alcohol. The man she had seen still tugged at her heart in a way she could never explain, or understand. But she wondered if it really mattered. She had been filling her life with distractions for the past year. Maybe this was just another one. At this point, who cared? She couldn’t deny that she’d rather distract herself with mystical men who appeared when she played music than with Rob, who appeared when he wanted to try and get into her pants.
She took another drink of wine and then set the bottle on the piano. She poised her fingers over the keys, drew in a soft breath, and began to play the haunting melody onc
e again.
It didn’t take long for it to enrapture her, to consume her, probably because the Cabernet she was drinking had lowered the barriers of her skeptical mind. She saw him again, alone at his own piano, and the volume of his sorrow was so staggering it almost made her fumble her playing. Each haunting note ached. Each measure bled loneliness. It echoed the pain within her own heart so perfectly that the line between his sadness and hers blurred, and she could no longer tell them apart.
Her eyes drifted closed as the music swept her away with its dreary beauty and perfect melancholy. The temperature in the room plummeted, and the hair prickled along her arms, the same as it had done the night before, only much more profound. She did not open her eyes to look around…she played on, wanting to make it through the piece. She wanted to know how the story ended, though she really wasn’t sure what the story was. She just knew there was one. And she wanted to figure it out.
Dampness touched her skin and she heard the distant crash of ocean waves as she neared the end of the piece, the piece she had played three-fourths of by feeling alone and not by reading the music. Slowly, she opened her eyes while her fingers danced across the last few measures.
She sucked her breath in sharply, and her hands stilled. As before, half of her living room looked the way it had in her vision, only this time, it was so much more. The music continued, played by the solitary, dark figure over by where the door should have been. Her hardwood floors and white, modern walls gradually turned into gray stone, and her electric lighting fizzled out into soft candlelight.
There was a surreal, dreamlike quality to the vision and she blinked hard, then glanced at her bottle of wine, wondering if maybe she shouldn’t have drank so much after all. She picked it up and stared at it, then raised the bottle to her lips and took another, rather lengthy drink. She half-expected the images to be gone once she lowered the bottle, but they weren’t. The misty vision remained and she found her gaze drawn back to the man at the far end of the room, playing the music with no name that portrayed so perfectly the emptiness in her soul.
Entranced, she stood and took a few tentative steps forward, still holding her bottle of wine. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she had fallen asleep at the piano and was actually dreaming. Either way, it didn’t matter. She had to see his face. And she couldn’t stand his painful isolation one more second. It was hurting her.
The sound of the notes became more resonant the closer she got, and the dampness she felt in the air intensified, as did the sound of the ocean waves. The room grew darker, and the highlights cast by the candlelight became brighter and more pronounced.
She stood behind him, watching the firelight play across his dark hair, watching his long, skilled fingers pull perfection from the keys. The haziness surrounding the vision began to dissipate, and the muted lines became clearer. Every note he played reverberated through her soul.
Slowly, she reached her hand out, moved by the beauty of the music and the fantasy she had fallen prey to. Her outstretched fingers parted moist darkness until they caressed the length of his shining hair. The silken realness of it startled her, for she had honestly figured the entire dream would vanish upon her attempt to interact with it, and he did something she hadn’t expected.
His hands crashed down onto the keys with a cacophonous sound, and he whipped around to look at her.
She jumped back with a little shout, stumbled over her own feet, and fell down hard on her backside, dropping the bottle of wine. It tipped over on its way down and dumped its contents all over the front of her. She gasped, and the shock of the liquid hitting her skin brought her rushing back to reality.
“Oh my goodness, are you hurt?”
Her gaze snapped to the owner of the voice—the tall, devastatingly handsome man looming over her—and she screamed. She scrambled into a standing position and turned, intent on running from this dream-gone-wrong and going straight to bed.
She screamed again. Her room was gone. Her house was gone. There was nothing familiar to her anywhere in sight. All she saw were stone walls, firelight, and when she whirled back around, the most beautiful man her eyes had ever had the privilege of looking at.
Her heart bludgeoned her rib cage with the force of its pounding, and her wine-fuzzy brain spun nauseatingly inside of her skull. She turned in a frantic circle, whimpering with bewildered terror. Upon seeing that nothing was going back to the way it should have been, no matter how hard she tried to search for her living room within the shadows of the dimly lit room, she decided it was a good time to scream again.
Chapter Four
“Oh man, oh man, oh man, I’ve really done it, haven’t I?” Melody muttered to herself after she’d finished screaming. She tangled her fingers in her hair and squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve really gone crazy. I’m hallucinating. This is bad. This is really, really bad.”
“Madam?” The beautiful man stepped toward her with his hand outstretched.
Melody gave a shout and jumped back, stabbing her finger at him. “You stay away, hallucination!” She spun around again, searching for a way back to reality. “This isn’t happening,” she continued to mumble. “Come on, Mel. Wake up, wake up, wake up!” She smacked herself in the forehead repeatedly with her palm. When that didn’t work, she closed her eyes and started to click her heels together. “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
“Madam, please.”
Melody’s eyes snapped open to see him coming toward her again. She opened her mouth to scream again and had every intention of bolting, but he snatched hold of her wrist before she had a chance to do anything. His warm fingers encircled her arm and pulled her forward slightly while he trailed the fingers of his free hand down the inside of her forearm.
Melody’s mind filled with the soothing sound of wind chimes and soft, tinkling bells. Tingles raced the length of her arm and calmed the frantic racing of her heart, replacing it with the lovely music of nature. She could hear the wind in the reeds while it stirred the chimes and it made her think of summer. Some clarity chased out the all-consuming panic that had been building within her; she let out a shaky breath.
She turned her gaze up into the man’s eyes, which were the most amazing shade of blue, not unlike the summer sky she would picture to go along with what she heard. She glanced down to where he still trailed his fingers in lazy circles over her wrist, then looked up at him again. “H-How did you do that?” she whispered.
The smallest of smiles lifted one corner of his perfect mouth and warmth filled his gaze. “A gift,” he replied simply. “Now, please, how in the world did you get here?”
She raised her finger and pointed at him. “No way! I will ask the questions!”
He raised his eyebrows. “All right.”
“You are a hallucination, aren’t you? My grief has finally done me in, and someone is going to find me in my living room, talking to someone who isn’t there. Right? Admit it!” She was practically shouting at him in her attempt to gain some sort of control over this bizarre situation.
He blinked in bewildered silence for a moment before he drew in a soft breath. “What kind of hallucination would I be if I told you I was a hallucination?”
She stared at him for a second, then frowned. “Good point.” She noticed he had let go of her wrist, and some of her spastic anxiety was trying to return. She felt it boiling up her throat and burning her eyes with tears she would have given anything to shed. She shook her head. “What is this? Who are you? Where the hell am I? How did I get here?” She fired the questions at him frantically while looking around her in an attempt to gauge her strange surroundings.
He reached for her hand, splaying her fingers so he could trace the lines in her palm. That wonderful, whispering calm returned, carrying with it the sounds of rushing water and rustling leaves.
“First question, this is strange. I don’t know anything beyond that. Second question, my name is Liron. Liron Tabor.”
Her brows drew toget
her in a quizzical frown. “T-Tabor?” she murmured. Elizabeth Channing, formerly Elizabeth Tabor.
He nodded, and never raised the tone of his voice from calm, gentle, and velvet soft. “Third question, you are in my home. As to how you got here….” He shook his head and looked genuinely puzzled. “I have absolutely no idea. I did not know it was possible for humans to come here. And I certainly never expected one to sneak up behind me while I was playing the piano.”
She blinked. “Human? You mean, you’re not human?” She swallowed hard. “What are you?”
“A muse.” His reply was simple, like she should have known what that meant.
“Muse?” she breathed.
He nodded and his gaze took in her features for a moment before his expression turned confused. “Do you have any idea at all how you ended up here?”
“I-I-My friend bought me this piece of music at a yard sale. I played it. It was beautiful. And when I played, I saw you. You were playing the same piece.” His expression went from befuddled to kind of ill-looking. “Um…my living room…it changed. I could see you, playing. I could feel…pain, sadness.” She frowned as all the color seemed to drain from his face.
“This music…who was its composer?” he whispered so quietly she barely heard.
“Elizabeth Channing,” she murmured.
“Channing.”
He averted his gaze to the floor and a wave of sorrow came off of him so strong she felt nauseous. His fingers had tightened around her wrist to the point of pain, and she tried to shake her hand to get his attention. “Um…ow.”
He snapped his focus back to her and immediately loosened his hold on her. “Oh!” he exclaimed softly. He feathered his thumb back and forth over her wrist and shook his head. “Forgive me for that.” He slowly raised her wrist and placed his lips gently over her pulse.
Melody sucked in a breath and closed her eyes as she heard the crash of the ocean, night birds’ mournful calls, all the sounds of the night, mystical and enchanting. Delicious shivers worked along her spine, and when he released her arm and she opened her eyes, something inside of her knew. As horrifying as the realization was, she just knew.
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