LOL #2 Romantic Comedy Anthology - Volume 2 - Even More All-New Romance Stories by Bestselling Authors (LOL Romantic Comedy Anthology #2)

by Anthology

  It was better this way. Less fanfare. More heart. He slid his hand into his pocket and grasped the black velvet box.

  Natasha slid a bite of blue velvet cake between her luscious lips and sipped her wine. “So, you want to come back to my place?”

  “Or you can come back to mine. I splurged and rented a bungalow at the Pink Palace.”

  Natasha smiled, but concern showed in her lovely eyes. “The Beverly Hills Hotel a lot of splurge, Xan. Playing rock music at small clubs can’t be that good to you.”

  He smiled, contemplating their first night together while engaged. “You’re worth it.”

  “We went to conservatory together, buddy. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Just for tonight.”

  She set down her fork and reached across the table to hold his hand. He flipped his hand over to take her muscular fingers in his, running his fingers over the musicians’ calluses on the tips of her fingers, below her blunt, trimmed-back fingernails. She said, “I’d like that.”

  “It doesn’t have to just be tonight.” He leaned over the cake, still holding her hand in his right and grasping the velvet box in his pocket with his other hand, and he watched for her reaction. “Come on tour with me for the summer.”

  Her blink, startled and pained, cut him. “Oh, God, Xan. I can’t. I’ve meaning to talk to you about something.”

  Xan let one eyebrow dip in a mildly quizzical reaction, not letting her see that his whole body had broken a cold sweat. He had a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve, but he had gone to boarding school in Switzerland from the time he was five years old through high school. He could snap himself closed when he needed to. “About what?”

  “I’m going to be traveling a lot as first chair, and I’ve gotten an opportunity to play with the China National Symphony Orchestra this summer. I’m going to be gone for three months. The L.A. Phil released me for the summer season.”

  “I’ll wait. You can come on tour with me after that.”

  She asked, “And give up first chair for what? Are you going to write a cello part in—what’s that song of yours—‘Nine Levels of Tortured Souls?’”

  “Actually, a string quartet in that one would sound pretty damn cool.”

  “But then the season here runs Fall through June. Music is my life, Xan.”

  He sat back in the chair, still holding her hand. “Just music?”

  “I’m a nun, Xan. I’m a high priestess of music and its Vestal Virgin. When we signed on the dotted line for Juilliard, we signed our marriage licenses.”

  Xan slid his hand out of his pocket, leaving the ring box inside. “We can go on as we are, respecting one another’s art and commitment.”

  “Music is a bitch mistress. It takes everything that I have, every speck of energy and time. People look at me and assume that I got here because I’m a token or something, but the very first time we had blind auditions, I moved up to first chair. I’m in there every day, fighting as hard as I can, and I’m good at it.”

  “Of course you are. You don’t get a full scholarship to Juilliard and first chair at the L.A. Phil if you’re not excellent.”

  “It’s still so hard, but I can be the Misty Copeland for music, I think. Maybe I can break out and make it cool to be a classical musician again.”

  “She is a genius. She also has excellent PR.” Xan had been learning a hell of a lot about public relations and publicity from Jonas. “She also lives with her boyfriend.”

  “But she’s already at the top of her career. I’m still fighting. I’ve got a long way to go. So do you.”

  Xan nodded, conceding that point. Killer Valentine was playing small clubs and, to be perfectly honest, despite the brilliance of each member, hadn’t quite gelled into a cohesive band yet.

  “This is tying us down. We shouldn’t string each other along, and we’re both doing it. We’ve got to face facts, and the fact is that our first love is music. If we reserve this for each other,” she shook his fingertips, still wrapped around hers, “then we’re not dedicated to art. We have to let this go, Xan. It’s not possible to be in love with two things at once, to be so divided. We shouldn’t live in this fantasy anymore. We don’t live in Never-Never Land.”

  His heart vibrated like a harsh, minor chord had been struck inside. “Did you meet someone?”

  “No. There’s no one else but the music, but meeting like this is killing both our careers. You can’t tell me that your first priority should have been flying here to visit me tonight.”

  Xan broke eye contact because he couldn’t stare into her deep, dark eyes any longer. His guitar case leaned against the wall beside him like a dark shadow that followed him everywhere. “Cadell is going to be pissed at me for skyving out.”

  “Right now, I should be at Hannah’s house with her, working on that second movement for a couple of hours. She’s shaky, and I had a responsibility to her to help her.”

  “The viola is always the weakest link, anyway.”

  “The weakest link breaks the chain,” she insisted.

  He nodded. “Several members of Killer Valentine are beginning a downward spiral into substance abuse. If they weren’t geniuses at their art, they would have brought us all down by now.”

  “Killer Valentine? Is that the name of your band?”

  He nodded.

  “Catchy.” Her tone almost didn’t sound like mockery.

  “It doesn’t have the same panache as The L.A. Philharmonic or The Valentine String Quartet, but it serves its purpose.”

  “You were gorgeous tonight, Xan.” Her bare toes stroked his ankle under the table. “There could be a Valentine String Quartet,” as string quartets were often named after the first violinist, “or I could get you an audition with the L.A. Phil, if you wanted to stay here. I can tell you right now that you’d be in the first row, and within a year of being back on your instrument, you’d be first chair.”

  He appreciated her last-ditch effort to save their relationship. “That’s not me, anymore. It never really was.”

  “At Juilliard, it was.”

  He shook his head, and his hair, growing out just past his chin, swished around his jaw. “No. It wasn’t. I was trying to break away from the classical track even then, desperately. I just didn’t know it yet.”

  “No one gets into Juilliard for violin without a serious commitment to music. Your playing was incredible.”

  “They took me for violin, but I was just trying to get out of Europe.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Your mother?”

  “No,” he said. “Composers. Conductors. Other violinists. The pressure was enormous. Juilliard scouted me, and I jumped at the chance to leave.”

  “Even though it was for violin.”

  “I couldn’t do anything else at the time. I took the core violin track and everything else that would have me: guitar, voice, composition, even theater.”

  “You could have just stopped playing it.”

  “The violin is like heroin. It calls me back even when it’s destroying me.”

  “You never told me this,” she said, confusion in her voice.

  He knew that his sadness was showing through his smile, but sometimes, he could not entirely snap off his emotions. “I thought you wouldn’t understand.”

  She drew a sharp breath, but the sympathy in her eyes told him that she knew it wasn’t meant to be a blow, merely a statement of truth. “I guess you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t come over tonight.”

  “Do you want to?”

  She hesitated far too long. If she didn’t want to, she would have said so.

  “Then come,” he said. “One last night. A memory, a moment to reconcile, for both of us. A coda for our symphony.”

  “You aren’t mad?”

  His heart clenched. “I can’t be angry with you for being right.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was nearly midnight, and checking into the hotel took Xan a few minutes. Natasha kept fidgeting with he
r purse in the wide, pink lobby of The Beverly Hills Hotel, unchanged since the Art Deco days, because she was probably anxious about leaving their instruments in her car. They drove around to the bungalow, which was the size of a decent house, and stowed their instruments in the living room. The number 4 on the door left a yellow afterimage in Xan’s mind.

  As Xan turned from securing his guitar case, once again feeling the guilt for his slacking on practicing the guitar that day, and Natasha flung herself into his arms, kissing him.

  That was one way to avoid any more conversation that would certainly end in hurt feelings. It was for the best, and this night could be for the best, too.

  Xan slid his arm around her and opened his lips against hers. The tip of her tongue touched his, warm and wet, and he stroked her tongue with his, trying to be gentle where she seemed desperate.

  Her hands on the back of his neck kept him bent to her, and he walked her backward a few steps before he decided to hell with it, it was worth the risk, and he lifted her in his arms.

  This time, she let him carry her to the bedroom, and he kicked the door out of the way before he laid her on the bed, curtained by gold drapes at the corners.

  She kissed the callus that the violin had left under his jaw. Even though he cushioned his violin’s chinrest with a cotton pad while he practiced, he still had a violin hickey.

  He stripped her clothes off and his own tux jacket and shirts, watching her as she lay naked on the bed in the searing lamplight. Her body was all soft lines and curves against the white sheets, strong in her shoulders and arms from playing and carrying her cello.

  He left the lights on, and she didn’t say anything.

  These several transgressions elated him. There were a few more that he craved, and perhaps, tonight, he could finally have them.

  He crawled above her, cradling her in his arms and kissing down her neck, and mouthed her breasts until she was panting while he tongued them to hard peaks in his mouth.

  Then, he kissed lower.

  Her breathing changed under his mouth on her stomach, from rough with passion to a catch as she realized where he was going, but she didn’t stop him.

  He nipped and licked her stomach below her navel until he reached her folds, and he spread her thighs wider.

  She didn’t protest.

  He could have anything he wanted tonight.

  Anything except her, tomorrow.

  He kept his tongue and his lips gentle on her, tasting the sweetness of her juices and flesh—a tawny orangeness and hint of velvet on his palms—and stroking her to greater heights, until she writhed under his hands and his mouth, crying out, “Please! Xan!”

  Like music to his ears.

  He wracked her with his mouth, driving her over the edge of her orgasm until she clawed at the bedcovers and pulled away, nearly sobbing.

  This loss of control must be destroying her, and it was only the beginning. Sex with Natasha had always been fun, sometimes a little kinky, but her limits always kept him at an arm’s length. Tonight, he was going to have her, body and soul.

  He wiped his face on the sheets and slid off the end of the bed, pulling off his pants and the rest, finding the condom packet in his pocket, and then he crawled up her body, feeling her satin skin against his body.

  Under him, she was still shaking from the intensity of her climax, and he gathered her close to him. He dipped his knee between her legs. She whimpered from having to part her legs too soon, and he drove himself inside her swollen flesh.

  Her body arched against him as he slipped inside her, and he stopped. If he rammed into her now and took his pleasure, it would hurt her, and while a distant, hurting part of him wanted to rip her apart until she felt the pain that he did, Xan held back. He kissed her, holding himself buried inside her body, and said, “Open your eyes.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, and her deep, dark eyes begged him not to do this. “Xan—”

  “One time,” he said, and holding her eyes with his, began to slowly move inside her.

  She gasped, not a breath of pain, but of terror. “I can’t—”

  “You can,” he said, and he pressed himself into her. He laid himself on her, letting his weight subdue her as much as he penetrated her with his body and his gaze and his breath on her lips.

  She opened her eyes, and Xan could see himself reflected in their dark shine.

  After only a few strokes that pressed against her clit and inside her, he felt her core tightening again. Her eyes glazed as she started to turn inward, feeling the pleasure that he was winding up inside her, but he whispered, “Natasha, look at me.”

  Her eyes focused on him as much as she was able, a mist of passion covering her sharpness.

  He felt the moment that she opened to him, when she surrendered to his body and gave up her control to him.

  His movements were as graceful as the music they heard in their heads, and he lifted her to another peak, until no matter how he coaxed her to open her eyes, her eyes fluttered closed and she cried out again, wrapping her arms and legs around his back.

  Xan bowed his head to kiss her shoulder and thrust up into her, releasing himself. His climax shuddered through his body, and his arms tightened around her.

  When it receded, he kissed her neck, and she was still trembling in his arms.

  Near the sensitive skin of his ear, she whispered, “Xan—”

  He pushed himself up to his elbows to look into her eyes one last time. “I love you,” he whispered. “I always will.”

  And there was the final taboo, the one that he had never dared cross before.

  Tears filled her eyes, shivering crystals on her lower eyelids. Her breath caught in her throat like she couldn’t speak. “Oh, Xan.”

  “I know,” he said, brushing the tears off her cheeks.

  “I do, and this is tearing me up.”

  “But you’re right. It’s the only way.”

  She nodded and pulled him down to her, holding him, stroking his hair and his back, and they had broken that barrier, too.

  Chapter Nine

  About five in the morning, even though Natasha was still asleep and so warm in his bed, and yes, that was the first time she had slept in a bed with him all night, Xan lifted the covers, pulled on his pants from the floor, and snagged his guitar case on his way out the front door. He sat on the front step, making sure the door was closed behind him, and he leaned against a porch pillar to limber up his fingers on the fretboard of the guitar, barely strumming the strings.

  He practiced arpeggios and glissandos, his fingers slipping faster as the small muscles in his hands warmed and stretched.

  When he closed his eyes, ribbons of color unfurled behind his eyes with the music. When the notes were right, the colors harmonized. A wrong note was a violent red splotch against a watercolor swirl of cool blues and violets.

  A song took shape in his hands, a melody he was working on but hadn’t found the words for yet.

  Time, he just needed time. It would come.

  Hopefully soon. Jonas needed those songs in six months.

  Xan finished playing the song, and the color streams swam away. His eyes had adjusted to the dark some time ago, but with the music running through his vision, he hadn’t noticed Natasha’s slim shadow leaning against the doorframe.

  He said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “That was beautiful.” She closed the door behind her and sat down on the step with him. “Play something else for me.”

  Xan played a song from their first album, “Follow Me to the Light,” his fingers plucking the melody and chords from the steel strings, though he didn’t sing.

  By the time he finished, she was snuggled against his back, her long arms twined around his waist. “I heard Stravinsky’s Orpheus in there.”

  He cleared his throat, because his muscles there had grown tight. “I used it as a theme.”

  “What other songs have you written?”

  He played his repertoire for
her, all the songs off their first album and anything else he could remember, and she rubbed her cheek against his spine, asking for more.

  Eventually, the sun rose, shining pale pink streams through the darkness, and it was time for Xan to pack to rejoin the tour.

  Chapter Ten

  Xan stepped out of Natasha’s black car at the airport, and he kissed her goodbye with a long, deep kiss, her body pressed against his from their knees to their shoulders, her presence a prism in his mind, perfect as always.

  This time, he rested his forehead against hers for just a moment, holding her to him, loathe to let her go, but he had to. He had a flight booked to take him back to the tour. She had orchestra rehearsal in an hour. Exhaust from the cars zooming through the kiss-and-fly swirled around them, and horns blared like trumpets on a battlefield.

  “Goodbye,” he whispered.

  Natasha’s arms slid down his shoulders to his chest. “Goodbye, Xan.”

  For another minute, he held her before he had to turn away.

  He took his guitar case and garment bag from the trunk of her car and walked into the airport.

  He made it through security in a daze, handed his guitar case and garment bag to the first class cabin staff, and made it to the wide leather seat before his legs gave out.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that he might come back alone. Such an arrogant ass, he was. Something must be genetically wrong with him, that he hadn’t anticipated that possibility. He could blame his ancestors, maybe the crazy ones, maybe the ones too closely related, maybe the ones so arrogant that they had driven armies to conquer countries, or maybe the damn poets.

  If Natasha were wrong, this would be easier. They had lived in Never-Never Land for too many years and built a cocoon of denial around themselves, but that fantasy could only end in pain.

  Music is a bitch mistress, indeed, and he had pledged his soul to this particular jealous goddess years ago. He was trapped by it. He had always been trapped.

  He needed to leave these childish infatuations behind him and pour his life blood into music. Yes, he was violently rent open, but an angry, purposeful freedom coursed through him because music was his first love, his whole life, and always had been.