“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be right outside the door,” he assured her. “I will wait for you there. Then we’ll go back upstairs and talk by the fire where it is warm and comfortable.”
She seemed placated by that information and nodded. She looked down at the shirt she held and absently smoothed the fabric with her fingers. “Liron?”
He took a couple steps toward her, aching to hold her in his arms until she stopped looking so lost and frightened. “What is it, Melody?”
“Thank you for everything, for being so patient. My mind is still spinning. You have been so kind and understanding.”
He smiled softly and reached for one of her hands. He bowed over it and kissed her fingertips. “It’s my pleasure. Now, change your shirt. I’ll be right outside.” He strode from the room before he actually made good on his desire to take her in his arms. He was sure that would not put her at ease, even though it would be coming from a good place in his heart. She had trusted him so implicitly. He didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. He wanted to talk with her, learn about her, find out what strange connection she had to him and his music. He didn’t want to alarm her by being bold.
But as he closed his bedroom door and leaned back against the stone wall to wait, the memory of the two times she had been in his arms already plagued him. In less than an hour’s time, she had thrown his entire existence off kilter. And he had to watch himself. She was a human, from the human world. He had no idea how she had ended up in his world, but she wanted to go home. And he couldn’t blame her for that. But he would be a stupid idiot of a man if he allowed his attraction for her to root itself into his heart. Once she went back home, that would be the end of it.
He had no pieces of his heart left for anyone else to rip out. He had to guard what remained of it carefully.
Chapter Six
Melody smoothed her trembling fingers down the silky length of the black shirt after she had buttoned it up. It was long and slightly baggy, but not horribly oversized. Now that she was alone in the room, she took a moment to try to gather her wits so she wouldn’t keep shouting at Liron like some kind of freak of nature.
She took a look around the room, which was cast in the sultry amber light of the candles. Whatever world she was in was messing with her brain. Liron lived in a castle with no electric light that she was aware of, but he wore modern-looking clothing. He had a pet falcon and tapestries adorned his bedroom walls, but upon closer inspection of the room, she found a bathroom with a real toilet and a tub. It was like she’d gone back in time, but not. Weird.
She wandered around the room, trying to see if it gave away any clues about the man who lived there. The tapestries were the only real decorations, but he didn’t need anything beyond them. They were beautiful and rich in color. One of them depicted several women dancing with flowers in their hair in lovely, flowing dresses. The other one was a menagerie of musical instruments amidst red rose petals.
His bed was colossal, something she would expect to see in a decorating magazine. It was a four-poster made of dark wood carved with intricate designs. As she studied them, she could see that even they were based on music. Clef symbols, measures, bars, and notes swirled around the spires as if music had been composed and written directly into the wood. She ran her fingers over it and sighed. So much for distracting herself with things that didn’t have to do with music. She was surrounded by it, even had a man waiting outside who filled her head with it when he touched her.
That should have freaked her out, but it didn’t. In fact, it did quite the opposite. Every time Liron touched her, she felt calmed, soothed, safe. It was completely bizarre. But even in the hallway after Siegfried had scared the ever-loving crap out of her and she’d crashed into Liron, she’d had no desire to move away from him. She had no idea what that meant. She wasn’t sure if she cared at this point.
She left the bed and went to the window. It was stained glass, full of reds, blues, and greens. The design was nothing specific, just a beautiful pattern that added a finishing touch to an already beautiful room. A little bit Gothic, a little bit medieval, but with indoor plumbing. She could work with that.
A soft knock on the door sounded and brought her out of her thoughts. She turned to look over her shoulder.
“Melody, are you all right?”
She smiled at his concern. The poor man probably thought she was in the corner sucking her thumb. “I’m fine,” she called.
“Can I come in?”
“Yes, I’m changed.”
The heavy door swung open and Liron entered. His eyes swept over her as if assessing her state of mind. “Something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No, I was just admiring your window.”
He glanced at it and smiled. “Oh. It opens.” He strode toward her and reached up to pull a latch at the top, then pushed the glass outward.
Melody was instantly blasted by fog and salty ocean air. The crashing of waves below drew her attention, and she peered down to see jagged cliffs and churning black water. “Oh my goodness,” she breathed. “You have quite the view.”
His smile grew and he leaned against the doorframe. “Nature’s most powerful symphony. It’s my lullaby.”
She glanced up at him, captivated by his words. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply as the sea breeze drifted over them and tossed a strand of his dark hair. The firelight from inside mixed with the silvery sheen of the full moon and played upon his face in the most amazing way, highlighting the prominent lines and shadowing contours. He was wickedly, brutally handsome, and when he turned his blue-eyed gaze to her, she lost her breath.
“Your music, that piece that brought me here somehow….” She shook her head. “It was so beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it before. Not in all the classical pieces that I’ve played.”
Darkness clouded his features and he averted his gaze. “I’ve never written anything since that.” It was a soft admission, the words tinged with pain.
She stared at him, at the way the ocean breeze continued to tug at his hair, at the muscle that worked along his defined jaw, at the sorrow etched into his face. She wanted to touch him so badly, soothe him when she didn’t even know what was causing the misery. “You haven’t written anything?” she murmured.
He shook his head. “Hurt too much.”
They were three words. Three very simple words that told her nothing and everything. It was a truth she understood all too well. It didn’t matter that she still didn’t quite know what he was or what was going on. It didn’t matter that she was unaware of what had caused him such profound pain. The only thing that mattered was that, in the simple acknowledgement of deep heartbreak, they were the same. Through a piece of music he had written in his pain and she had played in hers. It made no sense at all that she could be transported to an alternate dimension and, yet, it made all the sense in the world.
She reached for his hand and gently took it between both of hers. She trailed her fingers across his wrist, then smiled up at him. “I don’t imagine my touch has the same effect as yours.”
A brilliant grin lit up his face, chasing away the sadness that had been there a moment before. He brought her fingers to his perfect mouth and pressed his lips to them. “Melody, there is no music I could ever compose that would express the effect of that one kind touch.”
Melody’s cheeks burned and she bit her bottom lip in a girlish gesture she hadn’t done since high school. And if he continued to lavish kisses upon her hands the way he had been doing all night, she was going to lose her mind. They were so gentlemanly and chaste, yet they brought forth some kind of dormant inferno in her blood.
For a moment, the dismal look in his eyes was gone and his smile was soft. “Come with me. We will sit and discuss things.” He reached up to close the window and led her out of the room and back up the staircase.
Melody didn’t find the passageway nearly as disconcerting as she had before and she found he
rself taking in more of her surroundings, exploring with curiosity instead of wanting to run and hide.
Liron’s home, despite the Gothic dreariness brought about by the candle and torchlight and the stone walls and floors, exuded warmth and classic elegance. It could have very easily felt like a dungeon, but it didn’t. It felt more like she was walking in some kind of medieval work of art. Not surprisingly, it looked the way his music had sounded.
Once back in the main room, Liron indicated one of two large, black leather chairs that sat on an intricate Persian rug in front of the fireplace. “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Tea? Coffee? Another glass of wine?” A teasing smile lifted his lips. “A shot of whiskey?”
Melody laughed softly. “As tempting as that sounds, no thank you.”
He sat down across from her, gazed into the fire for a moment, then sighed and leaned back in his chair. “My marriage to Elizabeth was an arranged marriage,” he declared. “That is very common for muses. As a muse, our purpose is to connect with and inspire humans to create, to help make your world more beautiful. We can contact a human on a telepathic connection, usually in dreams. Our parents match us with a muse who will be a good complement. In my case, I was a musical muse, and Elizabeth was a lyrical muse. The idea is to match two muses of similar talents so that they will continue to inspire one another, thus being able to continue inspiring humans.”
Melody listened intently, her mind spinning with this extraordinary new world she had never imagined could exist. She watched the firelight play across Liron’s face, and noticed the sadness return as he spoke.
“I loved her instantly,” he continued after a brief pause. His voice was raspy with emotion, whimsical, and tinged with disappointment. “The second I saw her, with her midnight hair and bottomless dark eyes, I was lost.” He shook his head with a sigh. “She never shared the sentiment.”
Melody frowned. “She didn’t love you? I mean, she didn’t grow to love you? After you got to know one another?”
He shifted his attention to meet her gaze for a moment, and Melody clamped her mouth shut. What was the matter with her? That was none of her business and definitely not her place to ask. She was curious and intrigued, but that didn’t give her the right to pry into the man’s personal life. She should be happy he was explaining anything to her at all. “I’m sorry, Liron. That was rude of me. You don’t have to answer that.” She looked down at her lap and toyed with the hem of the shirt.
His baleful blue eyes stared at her for several moments before he reached a hand out to her. She scooted forward and slipped her fingers into his, relishing the way the gentle music filled her mind and soul.
“Melody, understand something. For whatever reason, my music provided a way for you to travel to this dimension. I didn’t know that was possible. For it to have occurred even in a smaller measurement, we would have had to share a very strong connection. And not only that, but when the gateway opened for you, you had to have the courage to go through it, to reach out to me.” He caressed the back of her hand with his thumb. “I have been isolated in this house for longer than I can remember. I don’t know what made you step through that portal, but you did. You can ask me anything you desire.”
He let go of her hand with a lingering touch and turned his attention back to the fire. “No, she never grew to love me. I did everything in my power to make her happy, but she never warmed toward me. She accepted me on our wedding night with a sort of grudging duty, I suppose, and after that, she slept in a different room. She would not come to me. Maybe I repulsed her. I don’t know.”
Melody snorted and he looked back over at her. She rolled her eyes. “Any woman who could find you repulsive is off her noggin,” she grumbled.
Her comment made his beautiful smile chase away the shadows again, and he chuckled. “You are good for my self esteem,” he said. He paused for a second before he added in a low voice, “You’d better be careful. I might decide I want to keep you.”
Heat flooded her body, and her heart skipped a beat. She didn’t know which was more unnerving…his bold statement, or the fact that she didn’t find it to be that unappealing of an option.
“Anyway,” he continued. “To make a very long, boring, and painful story short, our marriage was a sad excuse for a relationship. It was six years of me aching for someone I could not have, who lived with me, ate with me, tormented me with her beauty every time she walked into a room. We both continued to inspire humans the way my kind have always done, the way we were taught. We existed together, but separately. And one day, she came to me and told me she was leaving. That she had fallen in love with the human man she was inspiring, a classical composer.”
“Nice,” Melody muttered. “I guess they were going to make beautiful music together.” Her words were so sarcastic she could almost see them dripping acid. But she was rewarded with another chuckle from Liron, and it warmed her heart.
“You have a way with words, Melody, and a way of taking the dark stain out of this miserable part of my history. I thank you for that.”
She smiled and continued to toy with the hem of his shirt, wondering why it was she could go out with Rob over a dozen times and have him fawn over her, but only feel annoyed, yet have Liron say one line of praise and feel flushed and bashful. Rob…he seemed like he existed a thousand miles away, like he was only a small part of a distant memory. At this point, her entire life seemed like a distant memory.
“Was the classical composer she was hot for named Aaron Channing?” Melody queried.
Liron raised an eyebrow and looked at her. “Yes.”
She nodded. “When I went searching for who had written that music score, I did some research on Elizabeth and found out about him too.” She frowned. “But when I was looking up the information, everything said that Elizabeth had written that piece of music, that it had been the only score she’d ever composed.”
A different kind of shadow darkened his face. This one was not sadness, but anger. “When she told me she was leaving to go live in the human world, I begged her like a sad excuse for a man not to go. Living with her frigidness was better than not having her at all. She ignored me, as was her way. So, I wrote that piece of music. For her, so she would know how much sorrow and pain I felt, how much I still loved her. It was a gift and my last plea, the last amount of creative strength I had.” He scowled fiercely and his voice took on a bitter bite. “She actually had the audacity to kiss me afterwards, the first amount of affection she had shown me since our wedding night. Told me it was the most amazing thing she had ever heard. Hope surged within me like a living thing, and I went to sleep that night feeling like maybe there was a chance for us after all.
“The next morning, she was gone, and so was my music. Her connection with her human was strong enough to enable her to travel to the human world. So, she’d vanished in the night like a petty thief, and had stolen the music I had written for her.”
Melody gasped in outrage. “You mean she slapped her name on your music to make herself famous in my world?”
He snorted in disdain. “Apparently.”
“What a bitch!” she spat. Liron looked at her with a surprised expression and she stood, stabbing her finger at him in agitation at the turn of events the story had taken. “She friggin’ plagiarized you! If this had happened in my world, she could have been sued nine ways from Tuesday!”
Liron stood also and held his hands up. He smirked. “Melody, calm down.”
“I will not calm down! That is absolute crap, Liron. What an awful woman. I’m glad I never knew about her and her stupid husband in all my studies. If I found out that I had once played one of his stupid scores, I would have wanted to vomit.” She crossed her arms and tapped her foot in annoyance, angered that someone would intentionally hurt another person in such a calculated fashion.
“It happened a long time ago,” he said.
“Yeah, and you haven’t written anything since! She ripped your heart and your creativity
out! She stole your music and your life!” Suddenly, his words hit her with a rush of realization. It happened a long time ago. That girl at the yard sale had said the music had belonged to her great-grandmother. Melody blinked rapidly. “Whoa, wait a second; how old are you anyway?”
He raised an eyebrow at her sudden change of topic.
“This Elizabeth cow has been dead for decades! Like, a whole lot of them!” She wasn’t going to take the time to try and figure out exactly how many. That wasn’t the point, and she didn’t have enough fingers and toes anyway.
He smiled. “Time moves differently in the human world, faster. It was the one bit of satisfaction I was granted. To know that her time with the human was short, as opposed to how long of a life she could have had if she’d chosen me.”
“So, are you immortal?”
He shook his head. “No, not by any means. But a year to a muse would probably be more like five for a human.”
She stared at him. “Dang. That means you guys were actually married for…thirty-five human years?”
He dipped his head in a nod and stuck his hands in the pockets of his black slacks. “By estimate, yes.”
“And she ditched you after all that time?” Her voice went up in pitch again. “What a whore!” His rich chuckle warmed her blood from head to toe in a way that was different from the anger surging through her veins. He stepped close to her and ran his hands gently down her shoulders, causing a thousand tingles to surge beneath her skin.
“Your vehement defense of me is very flattering,” he said.
She snorted. “Well, I don’t care which way you look at it, that situation is just jacked.”
He didn’t move away from her and exhaled a soft breath. “It’s strange,” he said. “But I have carried such bitterness within me from all of that. For all these years, I have festered alone with it, along with my sorrow, my loneliness. But look what happened. Because she stole my music, it found its way to you. And you, in turn, found your way to me. I know it has been harrowing, but do you regret the experience? Because I certainly do not regret meeting you this night.”
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