by Cassia Leo
Georgie stared down at her spidery hands hanging over the black and white piano keys. “I can’t.”
He walked around the piano and stood beside her, his slim hip right beside her cheek. A faint, masculine scent wafted from his clothes, a cologne, something soothing like green herbs. She was acutely aware that she could lean about six inches over and unzip his fly with her teeth.
Alex said, in a low, soft voice, “Play the middle C.”
She laid her thumb on the white key right in front of her waist and held it there, but she didn’t push down.
Alex stroked her arm from her elbow to her wrist with the back of his hand, soothing her. “Play it.”
She told her finger to push down, and she let the weight of her arm fall on her finger that was curled above the keys.
Her finger collapsed and wouldn’t press the key.
Alex shook his head, and his long hair swished over his shoulders. He turned his hand over so that his palm was on her wrist, and then he slid his hand over hers, covering her fingers on the keys with his own. The calluses on the pads of his fingers felt hard on her knuckles.
He stepped behind her, still not moving his fingers over hers. Warmth from his body drifted out of his suit jacket that opened around them, spreading over her bare back, and his cologne filled her nose like she was walking in the fields around Tanglewood.
He leaned over her, stretching his arms on both sides of her, caging her.
His whisper brushed the skin on her neck. “I’m not forcing you to do something you don’t want to. I’m letting you have what you want most, what you crave, but you dare not admit, even to yourself.”
“I’m afraid,” Georgie admitted, her voice breathy from fear at pressing that note and from his body so close to hers.
“Everyone is, in the beginning,” he said. “It can be terrifying to have an experience so desired, so primal, that you lose yourself. You have to trust me to take you through the place that terrifies you, to keep you safe, and to hold you until you emerge on the other side.”
Georgie couldn’t seem to catch her breath or move away from him. “We’re still talking about the piano here?”
Alex chuckled.
“Just the piano,” she said, but she leaned back, almost imperceptibly, maybe an inch, so that his mouth was so near her skin that his breath was a hot circle on her bare shoulder, and the scent of champagne in his mouth rolled down her skin.
“Let me do it for you, first,” he whispered.
Georgie closed her eyes, and the weight of his finger forced hers down.
A single note, a C, rang out of the piano and jarred against her skin.
She jumped, trying to flinch back, but Alex’s strong back was behind her and she only succeeded in pushing herself against his body.
His throaty chuckle beside her ear focused all her attention on her skin and her body, not on the piano.
She felt his other hand find her hip, and Alex rolled her pelvis forward, scooting her to the front of the bench. He climbed onto the bench behind her, straddling his thighs around her and pressing his chest to her back.
His business suit was very fine wool, and his white shirt was silky. The smooth material rubbed Georgie’s bare spine. The light chains that dangled down her back rolled against her skin.
Even just feeling with her back, his body was hard under the blue suit, rounded with muscle, and tight in the waist. His thighs pressed her hips and were thick with sinew under the thin fabric.
He leaned back and straightened the silver chains dripping down her back, and she thought that he held them for a moment because the band around her neck tightened across her throat. The chains fell against her bare back, and his body warmed her skin again.
He stroked his hand down her arm again, back down to the keyboard, and his strong fingers pressed three of hers down in a simple C-major chord. The notes vibrated through her until she was trembling.
“Shhh,” he whispered, his chin above her shoulder. She hadn’t realized that he was quite so tall, but he was. Georgie was five-feet-eight and used to being nearly the height of most men, but Alex was a lot taller than she was. Even his hands, lying over both of hers, were bigger and stronger than hers, and she had strong fingers from so many years of playing the piano.
He lightened his weight on her hand and released the chord, and her arm floated up with his. He moved their hands up the keyboard and pressed her hand down into the keys again, forcing her fingers to play a G-major chord.
This time, the shock of the loud clang and the panic in her blood almost drove her to her feet, but Alex slid his other arm around her waist, locking her body to his.
“You can do this,” he whispered.
He pushed her hand down again on the board, a G-minor this time, a sad note that tugged at her heart.
Breath dove into her lungs, and she gasped, looking at her hand on the keys with Alex sitting right there behind her. Her body wanted to run.
Georgiana Oelrichs was the pianist, not Georgie Johnson. Georgiana Oelrichs was absolutely terrified of being discovered. These loud chords that drew attention made her feel like she was being choked.
Alex moved their hands back to middle C, pressed the thumb of her right hand, then her pinky on the G, then each finger going down through the C-minor chord, a theme from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, and he lightened his hand.
Georgie played the next few measures with his hand hovering over hers.
“Beautiful,” Alex murmured near her ear, and his lips brushed her shoulder. Georgie closed her eyes. “Keep playing.”
Her left hand crept up, and she played the next few lines of the sad, wintry music with her eyes closed, Alex’s lips grazing her neck and shoulder, and his strong arm pressing her body to his.
When her hands slowed and the music began to trail off, Alex nipped her neck with his teeth, a bright blossom of pain, and he growled, “Keep playing.”
And she did.
Georgie played all the way through the end of the movement, almost fifteen minutes, with Alex’s hand first above hers, then retreating to her waist, then lying on her thigh, still. Her fingers hesitated at first between measures, then smoothed in their playing, and then she played and was lost in the music and Alex’s warm body all along her backless dress.
When she was done, she lifted her hands from the keyboard in astonishment. “I did it.”
“It was incredible,” Alex said, still sitting around her. “Play something else for me. Play whatever you’re working on.”
Her fingers found the keys, and even though her heart fluttered in her chest while Alex’s breath heated her neck, she played the short art song that she had been practicing in the private music rooms at Southwestern State that week.
Alex’s smooth cheek rubbed her shoulder, and his soft lips nibbled her skin.
Somehow, she made it through.
Somehow, she finished it.
She lifted her hands from the keyboard. “Oh, my God. I did it.”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice whispered over her neck, “you did.”
“But I can’t do that in front of all those people.”
“Just look at me,” Alex said. “Every second, I’ll be thinking about stroking your arm,” he ran his fingers down her arm, “or pulling you against me,” his arm around her waist drew her closer to him, pressing her bare back more tightly against the silky fabric of his shirt, “or biting the back of your neck.” His teeth scraped the nape of her neck.
Shivers ran over her skin. “I really don’t think I’ll be able to play a note if I’m thinking about that.”
“Yes, you can. I insist on it. Now, let’s discuss what song we shall sing for Her Royal Bossypants.” He stood and unwrapped himself from around her. “Do you know anything by Killer Valentine?” he asked.
“Not really. I don’t listen to pop,” she demurred, still stroking the keys in wonder that she had played with someone listening.
He walked back around the piano, and his
eyebrows raised like she had said something shocking. His hand clutched his tie over his heart. “They’re not pop. They’re rock. They’re practically metal. They started off as East Coast Grunge.”
“Sorry,” and she shrugged. “I listen to so much classical that it’s pretty much all I listen to. I listen to modern stuff, though, stuff influenced by modern music, like Rhys Chatham.”
“Oh, well, Chatham,” Alex mocked. “A contemporary of Ozzy and Nine Inch Nails.”
“And I listen to Phillip Glass, although I like New Simplicity better than the atonal works. Wolfgang Rihm is good.”
Alex smiled. “I admit, it would be amazing to talk to someone about Wolfgang Rihm. After this little performance, we should have a drink and talk.”
“It didn’t sound like you want to get up there, either,” Georgie said, her hands still touching the keys.
“Pierre promised that he wasn’t going to ask me to perform last night because they had an orchestra, which was fine by me. But, new day, new rules. Evidently, Flicka’s rules.”
“Even royals music-mooch off their friends,” Georgie quipped, stroking her fingers over the piano keys.
“Quite. I think she’s needling her brother, one of her favorite pastimes. I’m not even supposed to be here. I was supposed to leave town early this morning, but I stayed when Pierre told me that Wulfram was eloping today. I wouldn’t miss that for the world. I have lost a hundred Euros on him because he married before Harry, and I had to see this with my own eyes.”
“Yeah, I know him from somewhere else, and I’m shocked, too. I didn’t think he was the type to ever get married.” Georgie couldn’t imagine what Rae had done to trap him, but she bet it was kinky.
“I thought he was a kindred spirit, but oh, how the mighty have fallen.”
“So you don’t plan to get married either?” Georgie asked, and she felt her smile widen on her face.
“Music is a bitch mistress, Georgiana. I don’t think she’ll share me with anyone else.”
“Are you a professional musician, then?”
“Not to speak of,” Alex said. “And you? Are you married, and am I thus another victim of foot-in-mouth disease? I didn’t see any rings.”
“Oh, Hell, no,” Georgie said. “Marriage is the last thing on my mind. I’ve got far too much to do, and my life is already a mess without a husband or a relationship of any kind. I’m already working on my law school applications, and I’ve got some pretty serious other responsibilities.”
Alex grinned at her from across the piano. “Good. It’s nice to not feel like a freak. With all the weddings going on, one sometimes feels an odd pressure.”
“Oh, my God, yes. I hate that. With each one of my friends who falls to the mighty institution of matrimony, I feel like everyone’s staring at me, trying to figure out when I’m getting married or if I’m a freak who won’t.”
“That’s it exactly,” Alex said. “We should pal around at these things, when we see each other, to fend off the matchmakers.”
“Deal.” Not that they would probably ever cross paths again. Georgie’s fingertips rested on the keyboard, and her fingers felt heavy, wanting to press the keys and make music. “What do you want me to play?”
“I didn’t bring any sheet music with me,” Alex confessed. “My guitar is in my room. I could play, but that would not satisfy Her Imperious Majesty. You know that she will not relent until she hears you play, and it will be today.”
Flicka had convinced their piano coach at Tanglewood to let her change the concert program at the last minute because she was bored with Chopin and wanted to play something modern, Abiya by James Erber, and they had set up a specially tuned piano just for her piece.
Georgie said, “Yeah, I can see how that will happen.”
“We could establish just a few chords as an introduction, and I can sing a cappella.”
“I can play by ear,” Georgie said. “If you sing something for me, I can fake it.”
He scrutinized her again, his dark eyes evaluating everything about her, from her expression right through to her brain. “You can do that?”
“It’s not that hard, especially for popular music. It’s not like it’s complex or anything.”
“Right. I have a song, something I was fooling around with. You want to hear it?”
“Okay. Refrain first.”
Alex drew a deep breath, glanced at her, and sang, “Because while I live, Because while I breathe, Because while my heart beats in my body, I will love you like we live in Alwaysland.”
He still sounded a little hoarse, like his voice had seen rough use lately, but the dark timbre had a masculine sound, and when he reached for the higher notes, his voice took on a clear, open tone, all the hoarseness gone.
Every note he sang was dead-center on key. Listening to his voice was like listening to a perfectly tuned piano or a ringing trumpet.
Georgie managed to keep her mouth from hanging open and analyzed the song instead of gawking at his voice.
The song had a nice melody line, and the harmonies were obvious.
When he was done, she asked, “What key do you want it in?”
“G is fine.” Alex leaned on the top of the piano, waiting.
“How about this?” She played a harmony line back to him, just simple accompaniment with some flourishes between the lyrics to layer in some sound.
His glance at her over the piano was shocked. “That’s entirely different than how I wrote it, but it’s interesting.”
“If you don’t like that one,” Georgie felt the need to show off, a stupid, stupid need, “I could play it like Chopin wrote it.” She clanged dramatic harmonics on the piano and ran the arpeggios hard and fast, syncopating some of the notes to increase the tension.
Alex laughed the full, ringing laugh of a singer with an over-developed larynx. The peals echoed off the marble floors and thick plaster moldings around the white ceiling.
“Or like Rachmaninoff.” Georgie turned everything down and played a sumptuous, romantic melody, filling the notes behind where his voice would be with floating harmonies.
Georgie watched his lips part. An impulse to grab him and kiss those luscious lips roared through her, and she lifted her hands from the ivory piano keys.
Alex said, “That’s gorgeous. Should I know who you are?”
She pulled her hands off the keyboard. The silence filled the air around them like thick smoke, like she couldn’t see through it to look at him. “No. I’m nobody.”
“You’re a professional musician, stage fright notwithstanding.”
“Nope. I’m a pre-law undergrad at Southwestern State.”
“Bullshit.” Alex stared at her, looking hard at her. She felt like he saw entirely through her when he did that. “If you’re not a professional classical musician, someone has profoundly missed your talents. You should have been auditioning for soloist roles in symphonies for years.”
Georgie folded her fingers in her lap. “Nope. I’m going to be a lawyer. Pianists do not make the fat stacks.”
“How old were you when you started playing?”
“Four.”
His dark eyes had turned very intense as he watched her, like he was noting every little finger twitch and flicker of her gaze. He asked, “Your parents, were they very strict about practicing?”
“Oh, yes. Two hours a day or else I couldn’t watch TV.”
“Two hours? And just television?”
“Once I was ten or eleven I practiced for four or more hours a day by myself.”
“But the way you played that—” He gestured to her hands on the keyboard.
“Was nothing,” she finished for him. “Sing the verses, so I can figure out how to accompany that part of your song.”
“Do it like Rachmaninoff. That was amazing.”
Georgie nodded. At least he liked Rachmaninoff.
“I’ll do my best,” she said, but even she could hear that her voice had started shaking again.
Georgie looked up into his warm brown eyes, exotically long with long, rich lashes. They practically glowed with dark fire.
Alex said, “You know what I’ll be thinking about.”
GEORGIE’S FIRST PERFORMANCE
Georgie
Georgie sat at the piano in the corner of the wide room, her skin prickling from everyone staring at her.
Alex stood beside the piano, but where he should have been looking out at the audience clustered around their dining tables, he looked straight at her, his dark eyes blazing.
The music flowed through her head, and her hands drew it out of the piano.
But all she saw was Alex watching her, singing to her, telling her that he would love her like they lived in Alwaysland.
His eyes, his voice. Georgie was fascinated down to her core. Even though he stood across the piano from her, she could feel his hands on her waist holding her against his body, and on her leg, his fingers spread and almost sliding her dress up.
Rae and Wulfram von Hannover watched from the head table while Lizzy held up her phone and the other wedding guests watched him, but Alex sang to her.
Camera flashes lit Alex from the side and blotted out her vision for a moment, but his voice never faltered. Georgie held on. The padded piano bench felt firm under her thighs, and Georgie leaned forward to depress the pedals while her strong, limber hands danced over the keys, leaping between octaves and pouncing on the light notes.
In a few moments, the song was over, and Alex was holding his hand out to her. She reached over the piano, and her fingers found his. Alex led her around the piano, and dear God, people clapped.
Georgie kept her expression composed, a chilly New Englander who was unmoved by such emotional expression, but Alex’s slow smile and the fire in his eyes made her smile. The room wavered around them, almost ceasing to exist, as she stared into his eyes.
Charisma was not a strong enough word to describe how he endlessly fascinated her when he sang.
Alex led her back over to Flicka, and they sat at the round table crowded with china and crystal.