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  Or maybe I want one night of truth.

  “What was the real reason?”

  “That I loved you as soon as I heard you play. That I saw the way your father left you to fend for yourself, well before he died. That I wanted to hide you away from the world that would hurt you and scare you and use you, and I was just selfish enough to actually do it.”

  Her eyes widen. “You never said you loved me before.”

  “Love isn’t something I ever wanted, Samantha. Especially parental love. That was the worst kind of all. It was dangerous. Cruel. I never wanted to do that to you.”

  It’s more than I meant to give away, revealing what I think about parental love, how horrible it can be. She doesn’t miss the implication. Her brown eyes widen. “What did your parents do to you?”

  Once a principal had called my father. This is incredible news, the woman had said. Your son is extremely gifted. I spent three days and three nights in the well because of those test scores. I learned to get the answer wrong enough times not to attract attention, after that.

  I never really believed the devil lived inside me. If I believed in the devil, then I had to believe in God, and he had abandoned me too long ago for me to speak his name—even to myself. It wasn’t the devil, precisely. It was me. Simply me. As I’d traced my fingers along the moss-damp bottom of the well, I knew that I deserved to be down here. That every glimpse of sunlight was a gift I didn’t deserve.

  That every sweet thing I’d ever have would have to be stolen.

  “And then when that love started to change into something else, when it was spiked with desire, I didn’t know how to handle that. It was better and so much worse at the same time.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of it.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Maybe it’s time that I gave you the sex talk,” she says, her tone impish. “So that way you’ll know what you’re doing. Repeat after me: condoms are mandatory.”

  A bark of laughter escapes me. “I never stood a chance against you, did I?”

  Her humor fades. “You’ve done a pretty good job resisting this.”

  Part of me still wants to deny it. Stubborn to a fault, that’s me. But I can’t pretend not to want her anymore. Lust thrums through my body in visible shudders. Being this close to her, touching her, but not having her—it’s enough to rip me to shreds. “I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

  “How much longer?” she whispers.

  My internal clock is accurate down to the second. “A minute.”

  “What would you do to me? If I were over eighteen?”

  Heat races through my veins. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, but I would do it again. And again. And again until you moaned into my mouth. And then I’d move lower, down your body. To your shoulders and your stomach. Your breasts. It’s all I can think about.”

  Her chest rises and falls with rapid breaths. “Keep going.”

  How did I ever think I was the one with control in this relationship? Because I made rules and she followed them, but that was always her choice. I only ever had as much control as she gave me. And I’m helpless in the face of her desire. “I want to kiss you between your legs, to taste you, to drink you in and make you push your hips against my face. And all the while you’ll play the violin, so perfect, so perfect, because you don’t know how to make a mistake, not even if you tried.”

  Her eyes are wide and dark and luminous. “Liam.”

  “But then I would find your clit. It would already be hard and throbbing. Slick. I’d flick it with my tongue, again and again, ruthless, not caring that you’d beg me to go slower or softer. Your hands would falter, and there would be a terrible sound from the violin, because you would come hard enough to forget.”

  “How much longer?” she says on a tortured breath.

  At some point my words stopped being hypothetical. They became a promise, and every muscle in me strains for completion. My whole body aches to hear the beautiful sounds as she rises and the terrible screech as she comes for me.

  “Almost doesn’t count,” I mutter, grim and aching.

  “Now.”

  I shake my head, my eyes not leaving hers. She’s heavy-lidded, her lips gently parted. “Ten,” I tell her. “Nine. Eight.”

  She moves her violin back into place, her arms up as the bow goes into position. How many times have I seen her like this? And yet she’s completely different. It can’t be the seconds ticking away. Nothing as external as time. Something’s changed inside her.

  “Seven. Six. Five.”

  The first note enters the air around us, and I feel it deep inside my body. In my muscle and bone. In my cock, which pushes against the rough denim of my jeans.

  There is more than welcome in her eyes. There’s challenge.

  SAMANTHA

  I don’t expect him to actually touch me. “Four,” he says, and I begin the opening rise of Beethoven’s “5 Secrets.” They’re moving and sweet, with a touch of melancholy.

  His eyes flicker with a deep shame. He doesn’t want to want me, which is what makes it so sad. The music is how I speak to him. It’s how he speaks back to me, his head bowed before me. Does it really matter so much whether I’m seventeen or eighteen? Does it really matter that a piece of paper makes him my guardian? He does not have a monopoly on being protective. It’s not only him who decides what happens here.

  I want to guard him from the onyx shadows in his green eyes.

  “Three,” he murmurs, and I expect him to walk away.

  The bow moves almost on its own, my limbs forming around the instrument the way it wants. It’s a sensual experience, playing the violin. I didn’t realize how much until now.

  He touches my lips with his thumb, the movement bold. His hand trails lower, over the shape of my breasts and the concave of my stomach.

  “Two,” he says, pushing my legs. The backs of his knuckles brush the insides of my thighs, and everything in me tightens. Muscle memory is a powerful thing, and I manage to keep playing without missing a single note. Two fingers slip beneath the slit of the dress. Those green eyes widen, and I know he’s shocked that I’m not wearing anything underneath.

  My regular panties left an obvious line in the thin fabric of the dress. I’ll need something else to wear underneath—a thong. Though at the moment having nothing feels more right than anything I could buy at a store.

  “One,” he says, his voice almost sympathetic. Rough finger pads open my most private place, searching and inexorable. I’ve never felt so exposed, even with nothing bared to his sight.

  The hard part isn’t playing the notes. It’s keeping the tempo the same. My hands want to speed up, my body moving toward an uncertain peak. He finds a well of moisture and draws it up, his forefinger circling my clit. My breath shudders out of me.

  “Keep playing,” he murmurs, his thumb moving to my clit, his fingers searching below.

  My eyes fall shut, but my hands know what to do even without watching. The bow meets the strings in perfect accord, the tempo rising only slightly. “Don’t stop,” I say on a moan.

  A humorless huff of laughter. “I couldn’t.”

  His hands move with startling knowledge of my body, as if he’s been practicing for ten thousand hours, as if I’m his instrument to play. Pleasure swirls inside me, soft at first, and then louder, unmistakable. Orgasm wrenches my body with sudden violence.

  A loud screech rents the air as my bow rubs discordant against the strings.

  In the aftermath of my climax, Liam gently strokes the inside of my thigh. My body twitches and sighs, struggling for equilibrium. I open my eyes to find him watching me.

  “You stopped playing,” he says, his tone grave, a hint of erotic playfulness lurking deep in those moss-green eyes. “We’ll have to start over again. And again. Until you get it right.”

  “Oh no,” I protest weakly, not sure my body can take another ounce of pleasure.

  “Oh yes,” he says, a note of mock regre
t in his voice. “Practice makes perfect.”

  My limbs feel like they’re made of jelly as I play the opening rise of Beethoven’s “5 Secrets” again. Liam’s fingers work with devastating accuracy to bring me to the peak. I tighten my hold on the neck of the violin, determined to finish this time, to play the song to completion.

  Then he spreads my legs wider and presses his mouth to my core, and I’m lost.

  LIAM

  I rest my forehead against the inside of her thigh, breathing roughly, struggling to control the lust raging in my veins. My lips feel swollen from kissing her. The scent of her arousal engraves my memory for safekeeping. There will be no time when I don’t think of this night, when it doesn’t make me hard. When I don’t wish I could do it again.

  Samantha makes little whimpers, as if it’s too much, as if she’s oversensitive even though I’m not touching her anymore. There’s no way she can know how the sounds incense me, how I want to make her come again just to prove that she can take more. I’ll show her, I’ll make her. Some shred of reason holds me back. Perhaps the certainty that I would not be able to keep from fucking her if I heard her come again, if I felt her liquid on my lips, her secret muscles clenching my tongue as if they could draw it inside her body.

  “God,” she says, sounding shattered. Sounding broken.

  I did that to her.

  The irony rises over me, a shadow with weight, a goddamn cross to bear. God, she says again, but it doesn’t have anything to do with a divine being. It’s the other guy. The one who’s always been inside me. By touching Samantha, I finally proved my father right. The devil lives inside me. Doesn’t he? And the worst part, the truly unforgivable part, is that I would do it again. Now that I know Samantha’s intimate flavor I can’t imagine not knowing. It seems like not breathing. Not living. And I’d gave up any miniscule chance at redemption to have it.

  “Go to bed,” I say, hoarse from the restraint it takes to not bear her down on the floor and invade her body like an animal, in full view of her violin and my office. These symbols of my guardianship and her childhood made witness. “It’s late.”

  I move to stand up, but her hand touches my cock. It just reaches out and lands on my cock, only denim and cotton separating her flesh from mine. A wave of desire overtakes me, and the only thing I can do is freeze.

  “Let me,” she says, still breathless, almost begging. “Let me touch you.”

  “No.” The word comes out like a slap, and she flinches.

  “I want to please you.”

  There is no hell that would be deep enough, hot enough, painful enough for me. “I took advantage of you. And now you want to please me?”

  Anger shoulders aside the lust in her eyes. “You took advantage of me? No, Liam. I made this decision.”

  “Really? You put on that dress because you wanted to make me insane with desire? You wore no panties so I wouldn’t rip them to shreds? You spread your legs because you knew I would eat you like a madman?” She looks so beautiful as she comes. Her hoarse cries are sweeter music than anything her violin could produce. She’s everything good and pure and right in this world, and all I can think about is defiling her again.

  Her cheeks turn pink. “I didn’t plan this, but I chose it all the same. I could have said no.”

  “It wouldn’t have stopped me.”

  “Liar,” she says, softly, almost sadly. “You didn’t take advantage of me, and you couldn’t hurt me if you tried. Not like this. You hurt me in other ways. By telling me that you don’t want a relationship after the tour. That you don’t love me. I love you, you know that? I do, but you don’t care. You’re too busy fighting with your demons.”

  “I’m not fighting demons, sweetheart. I am one.”

  Her eyes are wide and luminous. “You really believe that, don’t you?” she says, her voice wondering. “Why do you believe that?”

  With a growl I push away from her, pacing across the parquet floor, damning the iron-hard erection in my jeans. “If you knew the number of people I killed you wouldn’t ask that.”

  “Almost everyone on your payroll is ex-military,” she says in an outrageously reasonable tone. “Do you think they’re bad people?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what makes you different?”

  I can’t possibly explain all the deep-rooted ways. When you grow up with abusive parents you either hate the world or you find a way to rationalize their behavior. You think, maybe they’re right. Maybe they see something in me that’s fundamentally flawed. Maybe I should drink dirty well water to survive, only to throw it back up, and then stew in it for the next twenty-four hours before my father sends the rope down. Samantha knows something about shitty parents, but she doesn’t know my secrets—and God willing she never will.

  That’s how I leave her, collapsed on her practice chair, boneless with satiated desire, hurt a clear bell in her eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The most expensive violin ever sold cost $16 million.

  SAMANTHA

  When I wake up in the morning, I’m back in my bed, Liam nowhere to be seen. I don’t feel one year older or one day older. I’m a million years older, not because of the clock ticking away—but because of what happened with Liam last night. I examine myself in the mirror—the same brown eyes and brown hair. The same slight build that by some quirk of nature gave me the ability to play the violin with a speed and grace that astonished kings. Well, so much for being a child prodigy. It’s my eighteenth birthday.

  I’m not a child any longer.

  Liam North doesn’t have custody of me anymore.

  The knowledge should give me a sense of independence, of grief. Of power and loss in equal measure. For surely I’ve lost as much as I’ve gained as the calendar flicked past yesterday. I don’t feel any of those things, only a curious hollowness. Maybe I’m in a kind of emotional shock, my body resorting to numbness in order to avoid the pain.

  There is only one thing that could possibly cut through the gauzy material that separates me from reality right now. The same thing that has always helped me hurt and heal, the lodestone of all my emotion. And that’s music. After a quick shower I make my way downstairs.

  Standing in the doorway, I know immediately that something is different.

  That something is wrong.

  The violin I’ve used for the past five years is a lovely Nicolo Amati, its bearing proud, its sound clear. There are multiple cracks that have been professionally repaired. It is on the whole weatherworn and discolored, the pedigree exceeding its appearance.

  Even in its shabby state it’s worth several hundred thousand dollars at auction—and of course, like most other things in my possession, it does not actually belong to me. It’s owned by Liam North, purchased by him, his name on the insurance papers. It sleeps in a thoroughly modern suspension case made of carbon fiber. There could be a nuclear disaster, and the violin would remain inside the rectangular case, fully protected and encased in microfiber.

  Gone.

  The carbon fiber case, the Nicolo Amati violin. All of it, gone.

  There is my chair with faded fabric and gleaming wood, the one I usually use to practice. My stand. The sheets of music that I’m practicing for the tour.

  “A birthday gift,” comes a low voice from behind me. Liam moves so stealthy that I didn’t hear him. “We still have the Amati, if you want to keep it.”

  I take a step closer, examining the case, which is clearly an antique in its own right, with its smooth satinwood surface and brass closures. Even a few feet away I can feel the presence of the violin inside, as if its heartbeat thrums through the case.

  He said I could keep the Amati, but it isn’t really mine.

  “I—don’t understand.” Violins like this aren’t gifts. They are sold at auction, usually to museums and societies. Occasionally to eccentric billionaires with more money than musical skill.

  “I had a hell of a time tracking down the owner after the
last auction. He preferred to remain anonymous, but I promised him—well, more money than he can spend in his lifetime. And a private demonstration at its debut in Tanglewood by the famous violin prodigy Samantha Brooks.”

  A brass lock plate is engraved with the following words: Lady Tennant/40 Grosvenor Square W.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper.

  “We can get a new case,” he says, sounding gruff and strangely uncertain. “One with your name on it. This is the one it came with.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I say, half laughing, half crying.

  There are only five hundred Stradivarius violins left in the world. Even so there are too many for me to know the provenance of every single one, but I know this one. Lady Tennant got its name because it was purchased by Sir Charles Tennant as a gift for his wife.

  My hands are shaking as I reach for the clasps and open the case. I barely feel worthy to touch this violin—and I can’t even imagine owning it, even though that’s apparently what’s just happened. I grasp the violin gently by its neck, lifting it from the case, and all my tremors evaporate. It’s like the part in Harry Potter where the wand chooses the wizard. In this case it’s the violin choosing me.

  I’m tempted to run my fingertips over the strings and the neck, to learn its terrain by touch. But a violin’s imperative is to play, and so I lift the bow and touch it to the strings. The sound soars through the air, the clearest note I’ve ever heard.

  An opening scale and it sounds as momentous and poignant as any classical piece. It feels like I’m playing violin for the first time, hearing notes in an entirely new way.

  I look back at Liam. He’s always appreciated my playing. I suppose he would have gone mad by now if he didn’t, having my music room connected to his office. Even he looks awed by the sound.

  “How did you know?” I murmur, reluctant to set down the violin for even one moment.

  “You like it?” His voice is roughened with something, maybe emotion. Are the strings of a Stradivarius so compelling that they’ll move a man of strength and stoicism to this?