He called from David's every day, and with each successive call his voice sounded more impatient. 'What the hell is taking so long?' he'd exploded through the wires just this morning, and something inside Madeline had snapped.
'I have a life!' she'd shouted back, her knuckles whitening on the receiver. 'It takes some time to shut down a life, you know!' And then she'd hung up on him in a gesture of defiance so totally unlike her that even now, hours later, she could hardly believe she'd done it.
She sat, exhausted, on the couch in her darkened living-room, her hands curled around a coffee-cup long since empty, trying to muster enough energy to get up and drag herself into bed. She jumped when the phone rang on the stand next to her.
'Madeline.'
Her eyes fluttered closed at the sound of his voice and she answered quietly. 'Yes.'
'I called to apologise, Madeline. I was impatient this morning. I'm sorry.' After a moment's silence he said, 'Madeline? Are you still there?'
'I'm sorry about this morning, too,' she mumbled finally. 'I shouldn't have hung up on you.'
'Don't be silly. I had it coming. David's spent the entire day calling me four kinds of a tyrant for being so impatient, and he's absolutely right.'
One corner of her mouth turned up in a rueful smile. She'd spent little more than five minutes with him, and already David had become her self-appointed champion. 'Thank him for me,' she said quietly.
'You can thank him yourself. I'm sure he'll come up to Rosewood to visit us occasionally— unless…you haven't changed your mind about working for me, have you?'
The question startled her, because she had never considered changing her mind, but hearing it spoken aloud made her realise that she should have; that she was setting herself up for yet another disappointment. She was going to fall in love again with another place she had to leave behind.
Suddenly she straightened and grasped the phone even more tightly, and her expression grew hard. It didn't have to be that way. Not this time. All she had to do was remain detached—from everything—and she'd had years of practice at that. She did it very well.
'No,' she said at last. 'I haven't changed my mind.'
'How much more time do you need to wrap up your affairs here?'
She glanced at the stack of suitcases by the door, the completed list of things to do at her right hand, the cover on her piano that looked ominously like a shroud. 'I'm finished,' she said tiredly, anticipating one more night in her own bed, wondering if she'd lie awake for hours again.
'I'll be there in twenty minutes.'
He hung up before she could protest that it was already ten o'clock; that there was no reason to drive two hours in the dark when they could just as easily wait until morning…
She rang back immediately, but no one answered, and within an hour they were in the car and speeding north.
She slept all the way to Rosewood, and only woke up enough to stumble groggily up the narrow stairs of the gingerbread house, Elias supporting her with an impersonal hand under her elbow.
She never noticed the soft gleam of newly polished wood, reflecting the moonlight that streamed through the bedroom window; and she wasn't consciously aware of the fresh-air smell of sheets dried in the sun and wind; but she did smile a little as she burrowed her head deep into the feather pillow, and that night she dreamed of roses.
The next sounds she heard were terrifyingly unfamiliar—a harsh, croaking scream, a low, vibrant moaning that went on and on. Her eyes flew open and focused on the cross-hatched beams of a strange ceiling, and when the sounds came again she closed her eyes and laughed silently at herself. She would have slept through the wail of a siren or the blaring horns of traffic or the muted shouts of voices rising in anger from the street—but not through the morning call of a rooster or the lowing of a distant cow.
You're in the country now, she reminded herself, wondering if she had ever slept so soundly before. No street noises, no neighbours arguing through the thin walls of her apartment, no throbbing stereos jingling the glass bottles on her dressing-table… She flung the down duvet back and shivered when the cool air hit her body—and no nightgown, either, she reminded herself wryly, sitting up and rubbing vigorously at her arms. She had a vague memory of shaking her head when Elias asked last night if she had wanted her suitcase; an even vaguer memory of stripping down and crawling naked into bed. She turned to grab her clothes from the bedside chair, and then froze.
Elias was standing in the doorway, one leg stopped in mid-stride, a forgotten breakfast tray tipping dangerously in his hands. His eyes raced down and up the length of her body, then fixed on her face in mute surprise.
For a moment they were both part of a motionless tableau, two equally astonished human beings staring into each other's eyes, because they were afraid to look anywhere else. Madeline was the first to move, snatching the duvet up over her breasts.
He glanced at where her hands clutched at the duvet, then back up to her wide, startled eyes. 'Sorry.' He walked quickly over to place the tray on the bedside table.
Madeline sat with her mouth still open, her face so hot it felt like it was on fire, watching every move he made. When she finally managed to find her voice, she blurted out, 'You told me you lived in the studio, that the house would be mine…'
He lifted one shoulder in a casual shrug that seemed to dismiss her nakedness as barely worthy of note. 'A welcoming breakfast seemed appropriate for your first day.' He flicked a checked napkin from the tray, and the aroma of coffee and eggs filled the room. 'Sorry if I embarrassed you. I was sure you'd be up and dressed by now. Enjoy your meal. I'll see you downstairs.'
She lay motionless in the bed for a long time after he left, numbed by his reaction. Not that she expected any man would ever be moved to passion by the sight of her body, of course, but neither had she expected such monumental indifference from the first one who ever saw her naked.
It was worse than humiliating; it was like being negated right out of existence. He hadn't seen her at all. It seemed to substantiate that the one time he had been moved to respond to her as a woman, it had been almost unintentional.
It wasn't like Madeline to get angry—anger was one of the first emotions to go when you started discarding them all as counterproductive—and the truth was it wasn't even appropriate now. You didn't get angry because a man didn't attempt an assault; that was just plain sick. Still, the whole episode was unsettling. A lascivious leer would have been better than his chilling indifference, she thought; and then she blushed furiously for thinking such a thing at all.
Irritated at herself as much as him, she flung the duvet aside and got out of bed, attacking the suitcases that had somehow found their way upstairs to her room. Before she knew what she was doing, almost every article of clothing she owned lay crumpled where she'd flung it across the room. Appalled by her own behaviour, at the visible evidence of emotions she hadn't realised she had, she dressed in an old pair of jeans and a paint-spattered T-shirt she'd brought along to use as a dust rag. She'd be damned if she'd take any care to dress for a man who barely noticed her presence.
'You are a fashion plate, aren't you?' he asked, barely suppressing a wry smile when she stomped into the kitchen.
'I don't know why I bothered to dress at all,' she said sarcastically. 'Seems like a pretty pointless effort, if you're going to come popping into my bedroom all the time.' She slammed the breakfast tray down on the work-top and watched little balls of scrambled eggs jump from the plate. She hadn't even tasted them.
'Oh, for crying out loud,' he said, exasperated. 'I said I was sorry if I embarrassed you. So I saw you naked. So what? It's not as though I took pictures to sell on the street corner.'
She turned her back on him, ostensibly to pour herself a fresh cup of coffee, but actually to hide the confusion on her face. She wasn't a bit angry that he'd walked in on her; she was angry because it hadn't affected him, and what kind of a woman did that make her?
'Madeline?'
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br /> 'What?' Even when the silence became long and awkward, she didn't turn around to look at him.
'Madeline,' he repeated, and his tone was softer now. 'I didn't mean to offend you. The truth is I rushed you in the city, and I had no right to do that. Bringing up your breakfast was supposed to be a peace offering, not an invasion of privacy.'
Madeline released a long, frustrated sigh. He was trying to apologise, and it would probably be much better in the long run if he never knew he was apologising for the wrong thing.
She took her coffee over to the table and sat down opposite him. He was wearing jeans, she noticed, and the sleeves of his white shirt were pushed up to expose a muscular forearm. She wondered how one developed a forearm like that, sitting at a piano all day. 'It doesn't matter,' she sighed. 'I over-reacted. Let's forget it.'
The tight smile flashed on and off his face so fast she wasn't sure it had ever been there.
'I didn't know you cooked,' she said, looking out of the window so she wouldn't have to meet his eyes.
'Only under duress. We could have gone out for breakfast, but this morning I didn't want to waste the time. I'd like to get right out to the studio and get to work.'
Madeline's cup rattled in its saucer. 'Today? But I haven't even unpacked yet, or organised my room, and if I'm going to live in this place it's going to need a little cleaning.' She dragged her finger through the dust on the table and held it up for his inspection.
He shook his head. 'Becky will take care of all that.'
'Becky?'
He nodded and his smile warmed his face. 'You'll love Becky. She lives in the village, but she'll be out every day to cook, clean, do whatever needs doing…' He raised a dark brow at her troubled expression. 'Surely you didn't think you were coming up here to keep house? You won't have time for that sort of thing. We have too much to accomplish in too little time.'
Madeline watched him as he rambled on, noticing how rapidly he drank his coffee, how rapidly he did everything, as if life were too short to pause and savour its pleasures.
'We have to have a rough score, or at least the overture, ready for the producer by the month's end, and, if he likes it, that's when the pressure will really start. Another month, two at the outside, to finish the soundtrack, then record it; then we might be asked to do some publicity performances to promote the film, or even a full-scale tour, and that's just the beginning… Think you can handle it?'
She shook her head rapidly, horrified at the thought. 'I'm not a performer. I'm just a piano teacher. I told you that. I've never performed. I've never wanted to perform. I couldn't possibly do publicity spots or tours or—'
'You were born to perform.' He was looking directly into her eyes, making that deep, frightening connection she felt when she played his music; a connection that made a lie of his earlier indifference.
Suddenly he frowned, then jerked his eyes away as if he realised they might be revealing too much. 'Drink your coffee,' he said brusquely, 'and we'll go make some music.'
CHAPTER FIVE
Madeline stopped just outside the kitchen door, stunned by the change in the back yard in just three days. Like a tardy actress bursting upon the scene, finally remembering where she was supposed to be, spring had exploded on the stage of the country.
The lilac bushes she remembered as barely dressed skeletons were now fully clothed, lining the yard like an eager crowd on a parade route, proudly waving their glossy new leaves. Behind them, towering cotton woods poked greening arms into the serene blue of the sky, and, from somewhere close by, apple trees sent the sweet fragrance of new blossoms wafting through the air. Even the graveyard of roses seemed less stark, less black and white, as if the promise of life quivered there in a hint of colour barely seen.
Turn the soil, prune back a little dead wood, and the rose garden could be beautiful, she mused, mesmerised by the fantasy image of hundreds of flowers coming to life under her hands. How many years had she coddled stunted house-plants in her tiny apartment, dreaming of a garden just like this? It was all she could do to keep from dropping to her knees and digging her bare hands into the still chilled earth.
'Coming?' Elias had stopped a few paces ahead on the path to glance over his shoulder at her. She lifted her eyes from the make-believe garden and looked at him, and perhaps her expression reflected a fleeting trace of the beauty of her vision, because he caught his breath and froze where he stood.
The sun glanced off his dark hair in bluish flashes of light; it pierced the thin white of his shirt to outline the hard body beneath; and without any warning at all she felt herself taking possession of the man and the garden, as if they both belonged to her now, and always had.
Fantasy, her thoughts stumbled, trying to be realistic, but her eyes remained wide and fixed on his, her lips slightly parted, for it seemed that she was seeing at last the visualisation of that indefinable something that had first pulled at her from Rosewood; that vague promise of something wondrous that had compelled her to defy reason and bind herself to a man and a place she would have to leave eventually.
'You're lovely, standing there,' he said quietly, barely moving his lips. Then a shadow seemed to darken his features, and he turned slowly—reluctantly, she thought—and began to walk again.
She followed him, trance-like, along the path, through the naked roses to the break in the pines and across the field to the studio building.
She was hardly aware of arriving at their destination at all, so transfixed was she by the way his shoulder-blades shifted under his shirt, the way dark tendrils of hair lifted from his head to greet the breeze. The sun warmed her back through the T-shirt, the air cradled her in a fragrant envelope of new life, and Elias Shepherd thought she was lovely. The world seemed to be smiling on the first day of her new life, and, if omens could be found in things as simple as weather and environment, the future held nothing but promise.
And then they entered the studio, and everything changed.
The moment the door sighed closed behind them, Madeline sensed a subtle difference, as if the building itself were effecting a transformation on Elias every bit as powerful as that of spring upon the world. She glanced at his face and saw a strange sharpness there, and knew, without understanding how she knew, that the man in the garden—the man who had called her lovely—had not survived the passage through the studio door. The rigid, preoccupied man at her side barely resembled him at all.
Without warning he looked down at her abruptly, his eyes stopping on hers, the rich green flaring briefly with a dark light that made her tremble. Then just as quickly he looked up again and stared across the room at the piano, and suddenly Madeline felt herself start to disappear. 'I can almost hear the music,' he murmured. His gaze was still fixed on the concert grand, then, just when she was least expecting it, his head snapped around and he glared at her.
She frowned at the unfamiliar expression in his eyes, then paled when she recognised it as hostility. My God! What had she done to deserve that?
'Go on,' he said harshly. 'You're wasting time.'
She blinked once in confusion, as if the world had suddenly slipped out of focus.
'You heard me!' he barked when she didn't move. 'Don't just stand there gaping. We've got work to do. Now get over to the piano and warm up.' And then he spun on his heel and stalked across the room towards his living quarters.
Madeline just stared after him, totally bewildered by his behaviour; so bewildered, in fact, that she wondered if he had really spoken that harshly, or if she had only imagined it. She rubbed her hands slowly up and down her arms, feeling suddenly chilled, and made her way over to the piano.
Her fingers automatically found the keys and shattered the quiet with the comforting, familiar noise of minor scales pounded out in full octaves. She played harder and harder, faster and faster, eventually drowning out the echo of his voice in her mind.
She closed her eyes and let her stiffened hands range over the piano, striking like miniature two-l
egged tables until the very air around her shuddered sympathetically. Her head bobbed in jerky counterpoint, her lips melded into a thin white line, and only when the tension of rigid muscles screamed for relief did she free her fingers to race up and down in rapid scales that brought blood rushing into her hands.
'All right. That's enough.'
Her hands froze over the keyboard. She sensed his presence just behind her right shoulder, and wondered absently how he had got there without her noticing.
'Here.' A rectangle of white appeared in the blurred tunnel of her vision. 'Play this.'
She winced at the tone of command in his voice, and her grey eyes darkened to the colour of gathering storm clouds. Her hands remained motionless over the keys.
'Breathe.'
She jumped at the pressure of his hands on either side of her neck.
'Breathe, I said.'
For one crazy instant her resolve was firm never to breathe again, simply because that was what he had told her to do, but then she pulled in air with a gasp, frustrated that her body had betrayed her will so quickly. Her lungs filled, emptied raggedly, then filled again as his fingers pushed deep into the knotted muscles and began to knead.
'Don't do that.' She tried to shrug off his hands, but they just kept coming back.
'Hush. Be still. Relax.' His voice was husky, as hypnotic as his hands, and the hostility, if it had ever been there, was gone. Perhaps she had imagined it all, like a bad dream.
She felt the tension start to bleed away, felt her shoulders start to sag, and gradually her hands lowered to the keyboard, depressing the keys without making a sound.
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