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She looked at the table, hiding from his gaze. He was beginning to think he’d got it all wrong, when she raised her eyes to meet his and they were full of a yearning so pure that this time he really did lose his breath. It was as if he’d been punched right in the chest and he found that he was bracing himself in his seat just to stay upright.
‘Really?’
He could see it. The disbelief that he’d want to hear her play. And he wanted to curse her entire family for making this woman doubt such a simple thing.
‘More than anything else in the world.’
Lykos watched as Marit made her way to the piano. The musician seemed happy enough to let her play and, after a brief conversation between them, seemed eager to hear her too.
Lykos wasn’t blind to the way the young man’s gaze raked over her and he was forced to cage the proprietorial beast raging in his chest. But for a moment he saw Marit as the younger man did. Yes, there was a lightness to her, a youth, that was effervescent but not—as he had once told himself—naïve. There was also an experience that was beyond even his knowledge, the weight of inherent duty adding something to Marit that made him wonder how she’d kept that sense of fun and joy he’d witnessed in the park with the children and in the café in Milan; even in the boutique the shop assistant had seemed genuinely to turn towards her as if they were sunflowers and Marit was the sun.
She took a seat at the piano and swept a light touch across the keys with one hand and a smile curved her lips as if she were welcoming an old friend. Of the other few couples in the room, no one had seemed to notice, so lost were they in each other, making Lykos feel as if it were just the two of them. An intimacy strange for its publicness.
Suddenly he was hit by a wave of nervousness. Not because he thought she would be terrible, but he could see how important this was to her. He wanted it to go well because she needed it to go well. He clenched his jaw and swallowed. No matter what, he’d tell her that she was wonderful.
And then she started to play.
But what he hadn’t expected was for her to sing.
Marit’s fingers flew over the piano keys almost luxuriously, a series of notes that pulled at him and threw him into a song that filled him with a sense of old America and yearning. It was not what he’d expected and it made him stop and sit up.
Her voice was sultry and gentle as she sang about being at the end of one’s life, a woman with her mother’s name, building a world in his mind where people were trapped by life and helpless to fight against it. She sang of a desire like lightning that burned houses and he was enraptured.
And he felt it. The moment that everyone in the room stopped to listen. The sound of her voice and the piano raised the hairs on the back of his neck and poured longing, sadness, futility into his soul and his breath caught in his lungs.
She sang about the loss of youth, years passing and staying trapped and, even though she was conjuring images of rodeos and cowboys, he saw it—her future of missed opportunities and regret—and his heart turned for her, being stuck in a loveless marriage and wanting to be an angel that flew just as her voice spun into the room and beyond.
There were many times in his life that Lykos had felt trapped. He’d thrashed and raged against the cages of poverty and powerlessness. But what he saw in Marit was a woman who refused to let that trap be a cage, who instead welcomed it, embraced it, accepted it and allowed herself a freedom within it. How could he have ever thought her foolish or spoiled? How could he have ever dismissed her desire to become a musician as a petty whim when shewasa musician down to her soul?
She was coming to the end of the song and he didn’t want it to end. He could have listened to her for ever but, more than that, he knew if she stopped her song would come true. That this was her future. And he didn’t want that for her. He wanted to take her away from it, to stop it from happening.
And as she drew her hands from the piano and placed them in her lap she turned to him and he saw it, the truth she had known from the very beginning and that he was only now understanding.
I will always go back, no matter what.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HERHEARTWASthundering in her chest. She’d never done that, never sung or performed in front of people before, and the moment of silence after she finished had her trembling on a precipice until the sincere clapping of the few people in the room broke into the quiet and drenched her in a happiness she’d never experienced before.
This was what she’d wanted for the young performers in the orchestra she worked with. That cresting shining wave, washing away all the nerves and all the fears of making a mistake or getting something wrong and basking in the light of being able to truly express themselves freely. Lykos had given her that. Something she’d feared she might never have. She wanted to tell him how much that meant to her, she wanted to thank him for bringing her dream to life.
And when she looked to him amongst the smiling faces in the room she found him sitting there, unmoving. For a moment she feared she’d done something wrong. But then she felt the sheer force of his gaze, the explosion of something between them that blocked out everything else. Her pulse pounded harder than it had done in the hotel room when she’d placed her palms on his chest. Heat flashed over her skin, making her feel cold and shivery and hot all at the same time.
And in that moment she realised for the first time that she wasn’t alone in this feeling. That what she had seen was him fighting the same need, the same desire that swept over her like a tsunami. Its tide pulled at her feet as she made her way from the piano to their small table, threatening to push her this way and that. But it was his gaze that made her strong enough to make it, that filled her with a steely determination he must have seen in her eyes, because his gaze turned from speculative to assessing, even if he hid it behind the blink of an eye.
But it was too late. She had seen it. She had seen the extent of his need for her and she couldn’t ignore or deny it any more. Plates of artfully catered food were placed on the table and she didn’t break the connection of their gaze.
‘You should eat.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she declared. Not for food anyway. She didn’t have to say it. The slight flare of his nostrils, the renewed determination in his eyes, the flex of the muscle at his jaw. Before, she would have seen rejection, a dismissive warning, but now she knew what they were—the evidence of how much he was fighting his reaction to her. Now, they were a red flag, encouraging and taunting.
She’d meant what she’d said. She wouldalwaysreturn to Svardia to where she was needed, where she would finally prove herself. But she still had two days left and she couldn’t stand the idea of living the rest of her life without knowing what it was like to feel his skin against hers. To know what it was like to kiss this powerful Greek billionaire and have him break his own armour for them to be together just for one night.
‘I want to go home.’
‘To Svardia?’ he asked, purposely misunderstanding her meaning.
She narrowed her gaze at him and Lykos was instantly on guard. She shook her head very slowly, her gaze locked with his, and he felt hypnotised. Everything in him was fighting this. She was a princess. She was young. She did not know what she was doing, and certainly knew less of what she was asking for.
