Page 1 of Naz & Roz

ONE

Music lit up the soul.

It certainly lit up Rosalynn’s.

“Roz!”

Ivory keys of the piano felt the best under her fingertips when Rosalynn Puzza could shut out the rest the world, and focus on only the music she was making. Currently halfway through a ballad of her own creation for an upcoming audition, she had no intention on paying any attention to the voice calling her name from down the hall of her parents’ home.

Didn’t they know what she was doing?

“Roz, could you step away from the piano fora bit?” her father, Zeke, shouted. “We have to go!”

To nothing important.

Nothing that would make music.

Nothing like this.

Maybe that wasn’t entirely true. The dinner party for her father’s best friend’s daughter and her fiancé was important to Zeke, and her mother, Katya. Roz remembered her father’s best friend always being around from the time she was a baby. Or, as far back as her memories could go, anyway.

But that was the thing about Roz when she sat down at a piano and got to work. The rest of the world faded away, and nothing else mattered. She put her fingers against ivory, and became an extension of something beautiful.

Someone had put her in front of a piano when she was a toddler. She vividly remembered that moment standing on the bench in a poofy Sunday dress with matching yellow shoes that she’d loved because they looked like her ma’s heels. The hands on her waist had kept her steady as she leaned over the keys, and smacked tiny palms into the ivory.

It made the best noise. There was something about the way the ivory felt under her hands, and the sounds the piano made when she kept hitting those keys that had clicked in her brain. It took very little time for her to realize if she did it a certain way, those noises became something else entirely.

No one had been able to keep her away from the piano since then. Oh, she got better, of course. She learned to make music instead of simply noise.

They called her a prodigy because she could hear notes, and mimic them perfectly by ear alone. They called her a genius with the piano because she could compose music in her mind, and translate it to the keys without having ever written it down. They said she was going to do amazing things because it was her destiny.

Roz just liked the music.

“Hey, can’t you hear them calling for you?”

A hand landed on her wrist, and the second someone touched her while she was playing the piano, Roz’s concentration was broken. She lost that focus because someone had to come into her space. Oh, sure, the ballad still played on in her mind even after the piano had stopped echoing her racing thoughts … but still.

Glancing up with a scowl, Roz found her brother, Luca, standing next to the bench. He grinned in that way of his. A way that made her want to punch him right in the throat because it said he knew exactly what he had done.

It wouldn’t be the first time she hit him. At only a year older than her seventeen, Luca was the typical big brother that liked to both overprotect, and annoy the fuck out of her. He took great pleasure in doing those things. She suspected it was because he was bored, needed to get laid, liked bothering her, or a mixture of all three things.

“What the hell?” Roz asked. “I was almost finished!”

She was running out of time to finish this original piece before her audition in Australia. She’d been enrolled in a private academy for the musically gifted from the age of eleven, but now she had a chance to be a part of an orchestra in Australia that would also allow her a solo spotlight in the company.

At seventeen, this was unheard of in her business.

She needed to be ready.

Luca arched a brow. “Dad’s been calling for you for ten minutes, Roz. It’s time to go to the engagement party for Cece.”

Roz sighed, and glanced back at the piano. “But …”

“It’s still gonna be here.”

This was not a battle she was going to win. While she loved the Donati family, because they had basically been a second family for her growing up, she doubted that she would find something over there to take her mind off the fact she left her music unfinished.

Never leave a composition unfinished, Roz.