Haunted Tenor (Singers in Love Book 1)

by Irene Vartanoff

  JC opened his door to my knock and pulled me inside. Then he shut the door behind us, giving us privacy. He was still in the leather trousers from his costume, but had taken off his jacket and all the outer robes. He’d removed his stage makeup, too. Once again, he was wearing one of those loosely constructed garments many people called pirate shirts. He looked piratical in it, with his dark coloring, his rather long dark hair, and tightly curled chest hair showing between the open edges of his shirt.

  I pulled my glance away to check out his dressing room. It looked exactly like what you’d expect. There was a dressing table with a well-lit mirror, and an adjustable spinning makeup chair in front of it. A private bathroom. A closet with see-through plastic doors so all his costumes were clearly visible. A chaise lounge. He also had a couple of comfortable chairs, and he motioned me to one and took the other.

  “What happened tonight?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that we were alone together in a small, intimate place.

  “You had no strange feelings, no yearning to be on the stage, perhaps warning the slave girl Liu not to kill herself for Prince Calaf?”

  Was he being sarcastic? Yes. He’d decided to be angry with me again. Why? I had wanted to be the princess when he kissed her, but that information was none of JC’s business.

  “No. Nothing unusual,” I said, keeping my voice and my expression bland. “It was all new to me, and interesting, but I never lost track of the facts.”

  JC, an actor himself, could sense that I was acting, and not very well. He stood and drew me to stand in front of him, too. His hands traveled from my fingers up my arms, sending a slow shiver across my body that went directly to my breasts. Uh-oh. This was about to get complicated.

  “Are you sure?” He leaned in, his chest almost, but not quite touching mine. “Didn’t you get excited when Calaf wins the princess with a kiss? Didn’t you want Calaf to kiss you?” he asked on a tantalizing breath.

  My eyes widened. I tried to draw back. He was playing games. “I—I’m not here to talk about romance,” I said, hoping he would back off.

  He didn’t. Instead, he did exactly what I had fantasized an hour ago, and kissed me.

  Did I remember ever being kissed before? This kiss, from soft lips that were insistent, determined, and then forceful, this was a kiss I would remember. The kiss went on for a long time, and deep within me there was a loosening and a sudden weakness. I wanted to lie down. With this man. On that convenient chaise lounge.

  “Isabella,” he breathed.

  “Carlos,” I replied on a sigh.

  The horror of it broke over me. I wrenched myself out of his arms and backed away. “You called me her name. Isabella is the Spanish form of Elizabeth.”

  I covered my lips with my hand, so he could not see how they trembled from his touch.

  “You called me Carlos,” JC accused, sweeping aside my words. His own revulsion was stronger. “I knew it. You’re a groupie, a stalker, a nutcase with a loose grip on reality.”

  “You kissed me to test that?” Something in my chest hurt. It was difficult to draw a deep breath.

  “You’re a liar like all the rest. You’ve been following me because you want a piece of me,” he said. “You want my body.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He took three steps and had me in his arms again before I had time to reckon with his intentions. He kissed me again.

  I lost it. I did. I completely lost it. I knew I should not give in to the touch of his tongue invading my mouth. I didn’t fight him. My own desire rose up and met his. Suddenly my clothes were too tight. My breasts swelled and pressed to be released into his hands. The skirt of my dress seemed to inch up of its own accord as my legs entangled temptingly with his, rubbing against him. I panted as his hands roved over me, caressing curves. I ached for his possession. Oh, this was so good. It could be so much better in a minute.

  Somehow I regained my senses. I pulled back and held up my hands to ward him off. I was too busy thinking about what my own face was giving away to register what was on his. Except that he had the knowing look of an experienced male. It was obvious that I had melted. That I wanted him. He had proved his point.

  He wanted me, too, but that wasn’t exactly a major compliment. Men could want women, even have women, without liking or respecting or caring about them in any way. Which was why I had stopped us from using his oh-so-convenient couch for some horizontal intimacy.

  Finally, I got enough breath back to speak. “You can’t accuse me of being a stalker and then have sex with me,” I said. As he opened his mouth to contradict me, I continued in a fierce tone, “All along you’ve been calling me names, accusing me of vile intentions. I’ve let you, because I’ve been confused. No more.”

  Right now I was very vulnerable to him. I shouldn’t stay in this private space with him any longer. I turned and attempted to walk out.

  Attempted, because of course he did not let me. He easily recaptured me, holding my upper arms from behind, drawing me back into an embrace.

  I didn’t fight him as his hands encircled my waist. In fact, I could not help relaxing my stiff back into his broad chest. Then his lips touched my neck.

  “I apologize,” he said, raising his mouth to my ear.

  My nipples hardened in longing for more of his touch. Deep within me, emptiness yearned to be filled. I turned in his arms, putting my hands on his shoulders. My eyes searched his face. I saw a new light in his expression. Was it only desire?

  He was so tempting. So supremely confident about his sexual power over me. Just as Calaf had been with Turandot minutes before. Whoa. Were we replicating another opera situation? Or was JC coming off the high of being an assured, princely suitor all evening?

  I frowned. “I’m not Princess Turandot, and you’re not Prince Calaf anymore,” I reminded him. “Do you often think you’re still playing the role after the opera has ended?”

  His brow darkened. “That’s quite an accusation,” he said. He dropped his hands from my body. He stepped back, too, suddenly showing distaste. “Is that how you think I operate?”

  “I don’t know. Is it?” The truth was I hardly knew JC. I didn’t want to have sex for the first time with him under these circumstances. Whatever they were.

  “You called me Isabella,” I reminded him. “You’re in this mystery as deeply as I am.”

  JC looked at me without replying, before he spared a glance around the dressing room. “Let’s talk about this, but somewhere else. We’re both too much under the influence of opera here.” He opened the door to the hall and pointed at nearby seating, the typical office couches for visitors.

  “If you’ll wait for me, I’ll finish changing and we can go somewhere for a late meal or just a drink. Whatever.”

  I headed for the door, relieved to have escaped from the pressure of desire. It would have been too easy to succumb in his private dressing room.

  He put his hand on my shoulder, turning me to face him. Was he changing his mind? Would he recapture me in the net of desire?

  “Will you wait out here for me?” He bent a serious look at me, evidently guessing that I might bolt. His hand rested lightly on my body, but heavily on my heart. I nodded, then turned away to move a few feet from the door and sit on a couch. He stared at me, visibly measuring whether I was going to get up again and walk out as soon as he’d closed his door.

  “I’ll be here,” I promised.

  He shut the door.

  Finally I could take a deep breath. What had come over me in the last half hour? Oh, sure, it was only a kiss. It could have been much more. I wasn’t morally against hookups, but he’d forced the kiss on me, just as Prince Calaf had forced his kiss on Princess Turandot. What was happening here? Having sex with JC in his dressing room under these circumstances would have been crazy. Yet JC had been blazing hot for me. I had felt the same passion for him, despite his insults only a few seconds before. Even though many of ou
r previous encounters had been hostile on his part and confused on mine, we’d both behaved as if none of that mattered. Crazy.

  JC reappeared in street clothes after less than a minute. He must have thrown them on. Perhaps he expected me to get cold feet and leave. He was still buckling his belt under his pullover shirt. I looked down at his feet. He didn’t have any shoes on.

  “You’re not going out like that, are you?”

  He smiled in challenge. “Want to help me finish dressing?” I shook my head.

  He stuck his feet into moccasins, and grabbed up his leather jacket. Then he checked his pockets and turned off the light, letting the door slam behind him. It seemed very intimate to me, as if we were leaving his apartment after hooking up.

  Oh, crap.

  He looked down at my feet, which were in skimpy ballet flats. “How are your shoes? I need to walk off the performance electricity. The restaurant I have in mind is in the Times Square area.”

  I’d already noticed how much walking people did in New York City. Although they didn’t call it New York City. They called it New York. “I’m good.”

  He threw me a semi-smiling glance, his dark eyes flashing. “Yes, perhaps you are.”

  JC led us out of the building, saying good night to various people, nodding at others.

  Suddenly, I was curious. “You seem very comfortable here. Your English is idiomatic American English, even though you have a British accent. Why is that?”

  “You haven’t Googled me or checked out my Wikipedia page?”

  “I prefer to stalk men I know nothing about.”

  He choked on a laugh. As we walked, he explained that his parents had sent him to an English boarding school, and then he’d gone to college in the U.S.

  “Juilliard?” That was where Sean had gone.

  “Oberlin. From there, to many master classes all over the world. The usual for any aspiring singer,” he shrugged.

  “What city do you feel is your home?”

  “Barcelona, of course. It’s where I grew up. It will always be home.”

  By now we had walked down to the lower fifties, and the brilliant lights of the Times Square area made night seem like day. JC pulled me onto a cross street and into a poorly lit doorway. It led to a vintage steakhouse, the kind that was a New York institution, all dark wood and autographed photos of famous people on the walls. The maitre d’ made much of JC without pouring it on too thick, getting us a good table where we could talk without being overheard. The waiter appeared instantly. JC ordered without consulting the menu for himself, then turned to me.

  “I usually eat a very light supper after a performance. Do you want anything? A two-pound steak? Oysters?”

  Now he was referring to our charged moments in his dressing room. I bent him a quelling glance and ordered a salad. “It’s too late at night for me to eat heavy foods.”

  Once the waiter had gone, JC started in on the topic that was at the forefront of my mind. “I do not agree with your ghost theory. If there’s a ghost, why doesn’t it communicate with me directly? Why pick you? You have no connection to this opera.”

  This one was the toughie. Yet tonight’s incident strengthened its likelihood. “I thought, well, uh, possibly—”

  “Spit it out.”

  “What if you and I formed some kind of psychic link, some connection that allowed the ghost to act through me?”

  He gave me a look of disbelief. “You’ve suggested that before.”

  I pressed on. “A mind link that makes us both vulnerable to a ghost’s manipulations might explain why we behaved so rashly in your dressing room an hour ago.”

  At his raised eyebrow, I continued, although I knew my face was pink with embarrassment. “You know. The instant passion thing.”

  That smug male look of satisfaction remained on his face. He clearly took all the credit for sweeping me off my feet. No ghostly link required. Men. We hadn’t felt that way on seeing each other before—or had we? Was hidden passion the reason that JC noticed me in the crowd at the stage door, and decided I was stalking him? Whose passion? His for me? Or mine for him? Did he sense passion emanating from me? See something in my eyes? And was my passion for him, or for the mythical Don Carlo of the opera in which JC sang?

  “By chance, today I read up about ghosts and ESP,” he said. “ESP isn’t a linking of minds.”

  “True. It’s supposed to be grasping facts through methods not recognized by science.” I had researched any aspect of the paranormal that potentially would provide a logical framework for these illogical events.

  “Why do you theorize a mind link, when mind links are not even in the typical ESP repertoire?”

  “Because only you and I experienced the weird event on stage?”

  He shook his head. “You can’t just make up a whole new category of paranormal communication to account for what happened.”

  “Why not? We’re already far beyond the normal laws of science. I’m surprised that an artistic person like you isn’t interested in deviating from the known.”

  “We aren’t going to find the answer if you keep coming up with wacky theories,” he said, lifting a shrimp on his fork.

  “Then suggest something. Being controlled by a weird compulsion that can strike me at any time is scary.” Plus, I didn’t want to keep arguing with JC over these baffling tricks I was supposedly pulling. I ate some of my salad.

  “Perhaps we should discuss the origin of the opera. The sources Verdi used. More about the true history of the real Don Carlos,” he proposed.

  We hashed that out as we ate, but nothing suggested itself as a solution. The facts of Don Carlos’s life were well known. Like most royal personages, his every move was under scrutiny by the court, but he received little love as a child. I’d read online that accounts of his vicious, childish eccentricities had even made their way to the Vatican. His death was suspected of being by poison, but could as easily have been the result of his last bizarre whims, which included lying on a bed of snow and eating an enormous meat pie. Eating was one of his few un-kinky pleasures. The real story of the historical Don Carlo was sad, but not a tantalizing mystery.

  Elisabetta died only a few months later, in childbirth. Philip promptly remarried, incestuously, a niece, and laid the foundation for more crazy descendants.

  As for the opera’s composer, Giuseppe Verdi, he’d created Don Carlos for the Paris opera in 1878, but everyone felt it was too long. Even then, audiences wanted to get home to the suburbs at a decent hour. So he kept revising it, and had it staged again as Don Carlo, in Italian, in his home country. Since then, opera companies around the world had chosen various versions. Some did the first act, showing Don Carlo and Elisabetta falling in love. Some didn’t.

  “Cutting that act would make the audience sympathize more with King Philip than with Don Carlo, wouldn’t it?” I asked.

  “Exactly so. When the audience does not see the lost love acted out, people do not care as much about Carlo’s pain.”

  “This production at the Nat is the complete opera.”

  He shrugged. “More or less. There always are cuts.”

  “Oh. Nothing important?”

  He shook his head.

  That futile area of knowledge lasted through supper, including tea and light desserts for each of us. He nibbled at a cheese plate and I had fresh fruit.

  “Forget about the historical, theatrical, and operatic Don Carlo. What about astral projection?” I asked. “That’s might explain me appearing as Tebaldo.”

  “You were on stage and yet still sitting in your seat?”

  “I know it sounds wild.” How else to explain the impossible?

  “Not credible. What about hypnosis? You hypnotized me into thinking you were there on stage?”

  Once again he’d dismissed the astral projection idea, which was neutral, to suggest a deliberate action on my part. Mentally, I went over the key moment in Don Carlo when I appeared as Tebaldo. “You were lying down as Don Carlo
, not looking in my direction. I was to your right, outside your line of vision.”

  JC frowned. He didn’t like that I’d shot down his idea.

  I pressed home my point. “How could I hypnotize you if you couldn’t even see me?”

  “Maybe you hypnotized me days before and gave me a posthypnotic suggestion.”

  “When would I get the chance? And why would I?” I asked, bewildered. He still was trying to make me the villain.

  “To see you on stage when you never were there at all.”

  “What would be the point?” I put a hand up to stop him answering. “No, before you impute some cockamamie motive to me, ask yourself this: If you somehow managed to put another person under a posthypnotic suggestion, what would you have the person do?”

  “Depends on the person,” he replied, with a devilish light in his eye that reminded me of our kisses in his dressing room this evening.

  “Right.” I smiled a little. At last he was beginning to see where I was coming from. “If you personally hypnotized the general manager of the Nat, perhaps you’d order him to give you the lead in an opera you’re dying to sing. If I was really a crazy stalker,” I finished, feeling pretty smug, “I’d order you to buy me a ring and tell everyone we’re engaged.”

  “Or take you out to dinner. Which I am doing,” he pointed out.

  I rolled my eyes. “Would you knock it off? Nobody has hypnotized you. You’re obviously far too stubborn to act out any posthypnotic suggestions.” I glared at him. What did he expect, a confession?

  JC gave me an equally frustrated look. “Your ideas are mere imagination.”

  “Some otherworldly, extrasensory power is messing with me,” I said. “I am not the author of these weird happenings. I’m the vessel.”

  By the sudden heat in his eyes, he was considering me as a vessel in a different manner. He signaled the waiter and paid the check. We retrieved our coats from the checkroom and JC showed his continental manners by first helping me into mine. His hands seemed to linger on me as he placed the coat on my shoulders.

  I dismissed the idea as wishful thinking. We’d been arguing. Why would he want to touch me? Although I wanted his touch. I had been aware all during our argument. There was an undercurrent flowing between us. Was I the only one who felt it? In his dressing room, he had kissed me passionately and we’d both gotten very carried away. I wasn’t sure if his macho behavior had been him, or a shadow of his opera role as a masterful prince.