Page 44 of Hotter than Wildfire

“Thanks so much, Nicole. Of course I’ll pay you back, just as soon as I can access my money.”

Nicole waved an elegant hand. “Absolutely not, my dear. I can’t tell you the fun I had this afternoon, shopping for you. I’m getting out of the habit of nice underwear, unfortunately.” She smiled and rubbed her belly. “I’m getting as big as a whale. Pretty soon I’ll just dress in sheets. Who knows if I’ll remember what nice underwear is like after giving birth?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re not as big as a whale,” he growled. “You’re pregnant. There’s a difference.” He lay his big hand over her belly, nearly covering it entirely. “And you’re more beautiful than ever.” She smiled into his eyes and silence descended on the room. Ellen could tell that she’d disappeared for Sam and Nicole. They were wrapped up in their own world.

Mike broke the silence. “Whoa.” He held his broad, callused hands up in a time out sign. “Major mush alert. Cut it out, you two. Come back to earth.” He turned to Ellen. “Okay, Nicole doesn’t want your money, but I know how you can pay her back.”

Harry glared at him. “Mike…”

“Shut up.” He smiled at Ellen. “Sing for us.”

“What?”

“Sing for us. And you can play, right? There’s a piano in the library. You’re this big-shot singer, right? I don’t know anything about music, but Harry here listened to you for about 48 hours a day, day in day out. So you’ve got to be good.”

Ellen looked around at everyone except Harry. If she looked at him, she’d just drop right down into his golden gaze and never come up for air. “Nicole? Sam? Is that what you want?”

“Oh yeah.” Nicole smiled. “I didn’t have the nerve to ask. It’s a good thing that Mike doesn’t know the meaning of the word embarrassment. But now that he’s asked…yes. We have a piano in the library. It was my mother’s and we had it tuned a couple of months ago. I took lessons on that piano for 10 painful years and all I have to show for it is the ability to play a truly awful ‘Für Elise’ on it. And I need a metronome to do it.” She beamed at Ellen, her smile lighting up the room. “Please,” she said softly, glancing at her husband, at Mike and at Harry. “We’d love it. Even Harry, who has forgotten how to talk.” He switched his glare to her and she laughed.

You could cut a steak with Harry’s jawline.

“She’s been wounded,” he said tightly. “She’s just out of bed. I don’t think it’s fair to ask her⁠—“

“I’d love to,” Ellen interrupted. She rolled her shoulder. She couldn’t even feel the stitches. “I’m a little stiff in the arm but my hands are okay. And presumably you guys are not going to throw me off the island for a missed note, right?”

These people had taken her in unquestioningly, Nicole had put herself out, shopped for her. Singing for them in return was nothing.

“Come on, then.” Nicole led the way into another huge room, this one lined with bookshelves. One thing for sure, this baby was going to grow up with room to play in. Sam was right by his wife’s side, followed by Mike. Harry walked in with her.

He bent down. “Are you up to this?” Tense and worried. As if she’d been asked to plow the back forty without benefit of mule instead of playing and singing, which she loved.

She smiled up at him. “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

He walked her to the piano and sat her down with as much formality as if she were about to sing at Carnagie Hall.

To her surprise, the piano wasn’t an old family upright, but a real grand piano. A Steinway, no less, and beautifully in tune she found as she tried a scale from C with her right hand.

Unlike Nicole, she hadn’t had formal piano lessons. The only lessons she’d had had come from Buzz Longley, an old honky tonk guy who’d lived with them for about eight months when she’d been twelve. He’d been an alcoholic and a skirt chaser and a deadbeat, but he knew his music. He’d have been famous if he’d been able to organize himself enough to show up on time and sober for gigs, but he was never able to master the art of reliability, or sobriety.

For some reason, he’d taken it upon himself to teach her how to ‘tinkle the keys’, as he put it. It hadn’t felt like lessons, but they were, she realized now. He’d casually corrected her fingering, made her do scales she hadn’t realized were scales because he kept her laughing telling bawdy stories of the Nashville circuit. But he’d taught. And she’d learned.

Buzz had been a man who travelled light. A duffel bag, his snakeskin boots and a keyboard. When he left in the middle of the night, she discovered he’d left her the keyboard.

So though she didn’t have formal training, she certainly knew how to accompany herself.

Without really thinking about it, Ellen put together a little RBK playlist. Songs that played well in a large room that didn’t have great acoustics, songs that the three men and Nicole might be familiar with and enjoy.

But first, one of her favourites, one that few people knew.

A chord, another chord, a riff, and she segued into an old Celtic song, Home of the Heart. Like most Celtic songs, it broke your heart, just ripped it in two. Ellen had always loved it because she suspected that the composer, like her, didn’t have a home of the heart. It wasn’t a remembrance of something lost but a dirge for something never known. Something eternally beyond your grasp.

When the last note had disappeared into the quiet room, she changed gears, plunging into the exuberant notes of Sweet Caroline. It wasn’t a song women sang often so her soprano rendering took people by surprise. She’d always loved the song, loved its hopefulness and verve.

Without missing a beat, she moved into Honky Tonk Woman, then Smoke Gets in Your Eyes then a song she’d composed years ago in college, where she’d stayed in her dorm every weekend studying because she couldn’t afford to let any grades drop, while her roommates were having fun outside. Listening at the Window. It was funny and bittersweet, with an undertone of regret. Followed by Bridge Over Troubled Water, New York State of Mind, River of Dreams and then, because she loved Billy Joel so much and couldn’t get enough of his songs, Piano Man.

While she sang, It happened. It didn’t always happen, so she was thrilled when it did.

She lost herself completely in the music. Totally. The entire world fell away. She forgot her troubles, the danger she was in, the fact that she was on the run and had found only temporary refuge here, the loss of her old life, her loneliness and despair…all gone.