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I didn’t want to be a professional pianist. Never had, never will. There was a special magic in loving something without capitalizing on it, and I was comforted by the idea that there was at least one thing in my life I could turn to with no expectations, pressures, or guilt.
“What about you?” I lightened my tone. “Do you have any siblings?”
I knew little about Kai despite his family’s notoriety. For people who’d built their fortune on dissecting the lives of others, they were notoriously private themselves.
“I have a younger sister, Abigail. She lives in London.”
“Right.” An image of a female version of Kai—cool, elegant, and decked out head to toe in tasteful designer clothing—flashed through my mind. “Let me guess. You both also took piano lessons growing up, along with violin, French, tennis, and Mandarin.”
Kai’s lips curved. “Are we that predictable?”
“Most rich people are.” I shrugged. “No offense.”
“None taken,” he said wryly. “There’s nothing more flattering than being called predictable.”
He shifted in his seat, and our knees brushed. Lightly, so lightly it barely counted as a touch, but every cell in my body tensed like I’d been electrocuted.
Kai stilled. He didn’t move his knee, and I didn’t breathe, and we were tossed back to the beginning of the night, when the latch of his arms around my waist conjured all sorts of inappropriate thoughts and fantasies.
Tangling tongues. Sweat-slicked skin. Dark groans and breathy pleas.
The point of contact between us burned, taking our easy banter and condensing it into something heavier. More dangerous.
A blanket of static settled over my skin. I was suddenly, intensely aware of how we would look to anyone walking in. Two people crowded on the same bench, so close our breaths merged into one. A deceptively intimate portrait of rules broken and propriety discarded.
That was how it felt. In reality, we weren’t doing anything wrong, but I was more exposed in that moment than if I were standing naked in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
Kai’s eyes darkened at the edges. Neither of us had moved, but I had the uncanny sense we were barreling down an invisible track headed off a cliff.
Get it together, Isa. You’re conversing in a piano room, for God’s sake, not bungee jumping off the Macau Tower.
I dragged my attention back to the conversation at hand. “So I was right about all the lessons. Predictable.” The words came out more breathless than I’d intended, but I masked it with a bright smile. “Unless you also have some exciting hobby I don’t know about. Do you tame wild horses in your free time? BASE jump off the top of that tower in Dubai? Host orgies in your private library?”
Embers smoldered, then cooled.
“I’m afraid not.” Kai’s voice could’ve melted butter. “I don’t like sharing.”
The ground shifted, throwing me off-balance. I was scrambling for a response, any response, when a loud laugh sliced through the room like a guillotine.
The electric link sizzled into oblivion. Our heads swiveled toward the door, and I instinctively jerked my leg away from his.
Luckily, whoever was in the hall didn’t enter the room. The murmur of voices eventually faded, leaving silence in their wake.
But the spell had shattered, and there was no gluing the pieces back together. Not tonight.
“I have to go.” I stood so abruptly my knee banged against the underside of the piano. I ignored the pain ricocheting up and down my leg and summoned a flippant smile. “As entertaining as this has been, I have to, um, feed my snake.”
Ball pythons only needed to be fed every week or two, and I’d already fed Monty yesterday, but Kai didn’t need to know that.
He didn’t show a visible reaction to my words. He just inclined his head and replied with a simple, “Good night.”
I waited until I was out of the room and down the hall before I allowed myself to relax. What the hell was I thinking? My night had been a spectacular series of bad decisions. First, going to the piano room instead of heading home to work on my manuscript (in my defense, I usually wrote better after a piano session), then staying and semi-flirting with Kai.
My run-in with him must’ve knocked my good sense loose.
I made it halfway down the stairs when I ran into Parker, the bar manager.
“Isabella.” Surprise lit her eyes. With her lean frame and platinum pixie cut, she bore a striking resemblance to the model Agyness Deyn. “I didn’t expect to still see you here.”
