by Sienna Blake
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Professor’s Kiss
An Irish Kiss Novel
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Sienna Blake
Professor’s Kiss: a novel / by Sienna Blake. – 1st Ed.
First Edition: May 2018
Published by SB Publishing
Copyright 2018 Sienna Blake
Cover art copyright 2017 Giorgia Foroncelli: [email protected]. All Rights Reserved Sienna Blake. Stock images: shutterstock
Content editing services by Book Detailing.
Proofreading services by Proof Positive: http://proofpositivepro.com.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Contents
Professor’s Kiss
Playlist
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
Epilogue
Dear Reader
Books by Sienna Blake
Excerpt of Irish Kiss
Excerpt of Beautiful Revenge
Acknowledgements
Professor’s Kiss
Sienna Blake
Danny O’Donaghue.
Indie rock god.
Ladykiller.
The devil with midnight hair and blue-flame eyes.
After six years I thought the pain of what he’d done to me had faded.
Guess not.
Because I’m standing in this crowded lecture hall of the most prestigious music school in Ireland, staring at the person who healed me when I was broken. Right before he shattered me beyond repair.
And I still feel everything.
My ex-best friend.
My first love.
My tormentor.
…is now my professor.
To those of us who wear shields.
And to those who inspire us to take them down.
Playlist
Ed Sheeran & Beyoncé – Perfect Duet
Ellie Goulding – How Long Will I Love You
Christina Perri – A Thousand Years
Camila Cabello – Never Be the Same
A Great Big World – Say Something
Calum Scott – You Are the Reason
Passenger – Let Her Go
Prologue
Give Up All the Stars
Written by Danny O’Donaghue
Don’t want to leave you,
But I must, she said.
One last hug, one last kiss, before
I lie down in this bed.
Where you’re going, I can’t follow.
Trying to be brave despite the sorrow
That I carry around, carry round with me
Now that you’re dancing over the sea.
I’d give up all the stars
Live in an endless night
Just to have you come home.
I don’t need the sun
We’d be each other’s light
And we’d never be alone.
1
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Ailis
Ailis [say: AY-lish]
Late.
I was late to the audition that was going to affect my entire future. And it was raining. What a surprise, it was raining in Ireland. Again.
To top it all off my bus didn’t show up. Typical. Fuck you very much, Dublin bus.
I couldn’t really spare the money for a cab. But I had no choice, did I?
I paid the cabbie my last twenty and brushed my wet strawberry-brown hair out of my face, the front building of the Dublin College of Music, one of Europe’s most prestigious music schools, looming up over me.
I was going to walk in there looking like a drowned rat, making the worst impression in history. I sighed.
Chin up, Ailis. Be thankful you got an audition at all.
Hopefully my playing would blow them away so they’d completely forget about what I looked like.
I adjusted the strap of my worn satchel, brushed down my simple black skirt and white blouse under a jacket that didn’t quite match, and prepared myself.
I should have just walked straight into the building. I shouldn’t have hesitated.
But for some reason—fate, kismet, seven years bad luck for breaking that mirror the other day?—I glanced over to my right.
It was one of those movie moments. Those moments that never really happened in real life, at least not in mine.
A cluster of birds took off at once.
And the crowd parted.
Revealing a tall, broad-shouldered figure standing at the traffic lights waiting to cross the road.
The sight of him in the flesh after six years hit me like a punch to the solar plexus.
Danny O’Donaghue.
The boy with the voice from both my dreams and nightmares.
Except he wasn’t a boy anymore.
He’d become a man.
I knew from social media—no, I had not been stalking him…much—that he’d moved back to Dublin six months ago so he could complete his first solo indie album. I would be lying if I hadn’t considered I might run into him here.
To actually see him in the flesh was shock to the system.
An even bigger shock considering how goddamn gorgeous he’d become. He’d always been beautiful, but now as a man, his face would make angels cry. Make painters beg him to be their muse. His jaw had grown harder, sharper. I could almost imagine the twitch of his cheekbone as he ground his teeth, creating his trademark resting glare face. Stormy hair as black as raven’s feathers to match his broody mood.
He looked like he was posing for a photo shoot with his hands shoved into the pockets of his dark jeans, a long black overcoat hanging off shoulders that had always been broad but had now filled out with muscle.
His intense glare, bordering on fury, was fixed across the road, making me wonder what injustice he was raging against the world for now.
Damn him. I didn’t care what he was scowling about. I didn’t care about him.
Perhaps his mind was lost in a new half-formed melody, tr
ying to conjure the right notes from the ether like letters in an alphabet soup.
Or perhaps he was contemplating how to ruin someone else’s life.
Bitterness mixed with longing, making it a ruinous and intoxicating cocktail in my stomach. It could eat me alive from the insides.
Beautiful hatred.
I could never forgive him.
And yet, the girl inside of me wanted nothing more than to run over to him and wrap her arms around his waist and rest her cheek against that spot on his chest, the one that she used to think was carved out just for her.
Stupid girl.
I shook my head, breaking the spell he’d somehow cast over me without even needing to look my way. I scrambled into the college building, almost knocking over another student in my haste. I mumbled my apologies, my cheeks flaming at the thought that I might have drawn attention to myself.
I needn’t have worried, though.
When I pressed my face into the closest window, Danny was gone from where he’d stood on the sidewalk. A quick scan of the rest of the street revealed no Danny.
Disappeared as if he never really was there.
Or perhaps he’d been a ghost.
Figment of my imagination.
I let out a long sigh of relief, despite the patter of disappointment inside of me.
Danny O’Donaghue was the lead singer and lead guitarist of The Untouchable, singer-songwriter and international sex symbol, and son of mega rock star Dillan O’Donaghue of Irish rock legends, The Dublin Jar.
The Untouchable broke onto the music scene two years ago with a self-titled album that hit the commercial charts, a radio-friendly pop rock band. The charts loved it but I always felt like it was a watered-down version of Danny’s talent.
Rolling Stone Magazine did a piece on him last year. I’d purchased that issue even though I didn’t have the money for such an outlandish extravagance. I’d shoved it into the bottom of my bag like a porno mag, sneaking it out in the dead of the night and reading it under my covers with a flashlight, drinking in every single word, memorizing every single fact about him.
Danny was the pure talent in The Untouchable. He was one of those musicians who bled into his songs when he performed them. The other guys in his band were just window dressing, playing the other instruments that he couldn’t on stage. Not that Danny couldn’t have played them. He played acoustic and electric guitar as well as the greats—the next Eric Clapton, Rolling Stone had called him. He could play bass guitar and drums, too. But on stage there was only so much one man could do.
He had a voice like an angel and a devil wrapped in one. The kind of voice that could make good girls forget their morals. The kind of voice that made mothers weep. A voice that seemed to fist in the root of my belly every time I heard it on the radio.
Last year he stunned the world when he left his record company and announced he was going to branch out as an indie solo act and write his own songs.
He spent time in London where he self-released his first single, “Give Up All the Stars,” a melancholy ballad that sounded somewhere between Jeff Buckley and Portishead.
The world loved it. And we were waiting impatiently for the full album, one he was working on now.
He did all this since he left school and I… I’d spent the first few years waitressing at the local bar, eventually playing backup with a local band on Friday and Saturday nights.
Finally, I’d gathered the courage and saved up enough money to start my music studies.
Music wasn’t a choice I made. It had chosen me. There was nothing else I wanted to do. There was nothing else that I was good at.
“Ms Kavanagh,” a woman’s sharp voice cut through my reverie.
Right.
I smiled at the three interviewers-slash-judges-slash “the ones I had to impress if I wanted any sort of career”.
Focus, Ailis.
My focus had not come into question in the last three years I’d been studying music at University of Limerick. That unwavering focus had been why I’d even gotten an audition for a final year exchange program at the Dublin College of Music, or DCM as it was often shortened to.
Just the brief glimpse of Danny had knocked all of that focus out of me. Even now I felt unbalanced, tipsy.
Good thing it was only a brief glimpse. I’d hate to see the effect he’d have on me if I had to actually talk to him.
“We’re ready for you to start, whenever you are,” Mrs Prim said.
She was the matron of the three interviewers, the headmistress of DCM, with over forty years as a classical concert violinist before “retiring” to take this post.
I recognised another judge as Richard “Rickie” Craven, a guitarist from Danny’s father’s old band, The Dublin Jar. In his fifties, he wore his white hair in a long ponytail. He had deep smile lines, an eyebrow piercing and a twinkle in his green eyes.
I’d read in that Rolling Stone interview that Danny called this man his mentor. He said that Rickie had taken him under his wing while Danny was travelling around with his father’s band one summer.
I wonder if Rickie was who Danny had been here to see.
The other interviewer was a member of the school board, an accomplished classical conductor in his own right. He barely said a word after introducing themselves to me.
I nodded and took a deep breath, tucking my guitar closer to me.
I began to play the opening chords of my own acoustic version of Danny’s “Give Up All the Stars”.
I know. Stupid me. But I loved that song. It had nothing to do with the man who wrote it.
As the notes wound their way around my senses, the rest of the world fell away. Even Danny’s presence slid into the background.
Then I opened my mouth and began to sing, pouring every drop of emotion from the well inside my heart.
I sang for the dreams I had buried deep inside me.
I sang for the girl I was and the woman I wanted to be.
I sang for the love I once lost.
My fingers came to rest at the end of the song, my last note trailing off into silence. I felt like I was waking up from a dream state, a soft ethereal feeling of what I had played lingering on my cotton mind, a feeling I always had when I played well, when I had slipped into that magical crack between time and space, between mortality and immortality.
I blinked and became all too aware that none of the interviewers were speaking, their faces now blank. Even Rickie, who’d I’d felt the most connection with, showed nothing on his previously expressive face.
I thought I did well. Well enough to warrant a reaction. A clap. A well done. Something. Anything.
I shifted at the stool, wondering if I should break the silence, if I should stand or…
“Thank you, Ms Kavanagh,” Mrs Prim said.
And like that I was dismissed.
That evening in my hostel, I couldn’t get Danny out of my head. I tossed and turned, unwinding all those knotted strings between us that I managed to put away years ago but had never managed to let go of. Like that childhood toy still sitting in a toy box.
Danny had been my best friend.
Until he wasn’t.
What had really happened between us?
Why did it all go so wrong?
I turned over on my bed, the clock flashing 3 a.m.
Damn him. Even now I was losing sleep over him.
It’s fine.
I’m fine.
I’m nobody to Danny. And he is nobody to me.
Besides, I doubted I’d ever see him again.
2
____________
Danny
Fucking fuck.
I could break this goddamn guitar against a wall.
I let out a sigh and threw my pencil across the room instead, almost hitting Rickie as he walked back into my living room in my Dublin city apartment. My fingers traced over the guitar in my lap—named Casey, after my mother. I silently promised Casey that I was only joking about the wall thing
.
I raised an eyebrow at the two glasses of whiskey neat in Rickie’s hands before looking at him.
“You know I don’t drink when I’m working. Trying to work,” I added at the end with a mutter.
Rickie snorted. “What makes you think one of them is for you?”
He settled down on my black leather couch and pursed his lips as he stared around my basically empty apartment. “You should get some more furniture for here. You’ve been back for six months already. You really expect your guests to place their drinks on the floor?”
“Furniture shopping takes time.” I stared at the lined papers on the music stand beside me. “Time I don’t have because I’m working. Trying to work.”
I shot Rickie a meaningful look as if to say that my creativity would be flowing if it wasn’t for him being here to distract me. The truth was, I hadn’t written a song in months.
Rickie being here was comforting. But I’d never tell him that.
“And secondly,” I continued, running my fingers over Casey’s long neck, silently pressing down chords and hearing them only in my head, “I don’t have guests over.”
“I’m here.”
“You’re not a guest. More of a pain in my ass. Throw me back that pencil, will ye?”
Rickie gulped at his whiskey and smacked his lips, completely ignoring my request to retrieve the pencil that almost took out his eye earlier.
“You need a change of scenery,” Rickie said.
I snorted. “Is that why you’re here? No, I’m not coming to Majorca with you to pick up girls. Or any other Spanish island, for that matter.”
Rickie held his hands out like, who, me?
I rolled my eyes. Rickie was a late-fifties bachelor and he loved it that way. There was a certain breed of pretty young thing who would give it up for any aging musician, as long as he’d been famous or at least relatively famous. Rickie and my father had been of the former, famous as fuck during the height of their popularity a decade ago.
“So why are you here if not to try and recruit me?” I said. “You know I’m not good at that wingman shite.”