I glanced over at Mia, and her eyes were wide.
“I don’t think so,” she answered.
“Oh, come on! Why not?”
“I can’t sing,” she answered.
I laughed out loud. “Lie,” I blurted out.
Mia’s eyes heated in anger, and I felt a bit of triumph. Good, feel anger. I’d been living waist-deep in the shit for years.
“The girl I once knew would have gotten up there and sang her heart out at the first chance.”
“So, Mia…what do you like to do when you aren’t being all prim and proper and shit? I asked, fiddling with her hair.
We were sitting on the grass and sharing a crappy slice of pizza.
“Why do you keep calling me Mia? It’s not my name, and I don’t curse. It’s not polite,” she said, exasperated.
I knew she wasn’t really frustrated though. The curve of a smile on her face said otherwise.
I grinned, ignoring her comment about my language. I pulled a piece of pepperoni off my pizza and tossed it in my mouth. “Neither is Amelia. It’s too formal and uptight for a teenager. Mia is more your style. I like it.”
“Hmm…” was all she said.
A silence fell between us as she picked at her salad. I’d skipped the salad. She should have, too. Salad from the school cafeteria was scary.
“I sing.”
“What?” I said.
“You asked what I liked to do. I like to sing.”
The grown-up Mia gave me a hard stare, and then she slowly rose from her chair. Everyone at the table cheered and hollered at the accepted challenge. I just gulped in fear. I was a f**king fool. I didn’t want to hear her sing. It would end me.
Maybe she’d lost that talent. Maybe it’d gone away with age, and she now sucked at it. It could be true. I hadn’t heard her sing since she returned. She hadn’t let out a hum or an absentminded chorus, not one single note, as she’d cleaned the floors.
She walked over to the corner where the stage was set up. She huddled in close with the DJ, who was standing under a banner that proudly boasted he had every song ever known. She bent over the book of songs, and then she finally pointed and nodded, having made her decision. After the person in front of her finished singing Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You,” Mia quietly took the stage, and I stopped breathing.
The lights all pointed toward her, and a few males, who would be dead soon, hooted and howled as she wrapped her slender fingers around the microphone. She gave me a pointed look right before the music kicked in, and “The One That Got Away” by The Civil Wars filled the bar. She was seeking her revenge on that stage. I’d pushed her and forced her up there, and this song was her way of throwing it back in my face.
As soon as she sang the first note, the entire bar went quiet.
I heard Clare whisper, “Holy shit.”
Mia went into the first verse, her seductive voice owning every note like it was hers. This was not normal drunken karaoke singing where patrons cringed and wished the person up there would pass out. This was a performance, and everyone in the bar was mesmerized.
If anything, her talent for singing had only grown with age. Her voice was fuller, sexier, and she owned the stage as she took full possession of the song. Bewitched, the men were hanging on her every note. Every woman in the place wanted to be her as she took hold of the mic and sang the high notes effortlessly.
My eyes never left hers, and I was up and out of my seat before the last note roared from the speakers. Unfortunately, so were several other men. As soon as she stepped off the stage, a handful of suitors met her at the bar, all trying to get her attention with offers to buy her drinks.
She smiled and laughed and I felt my hands cramped from the hard fists they were making. I shoved them in my pockets and pushed through the crowd of adoring fans.
“Come on, let me buy you a drink, sweetheart?” a jackass in a suit said smoothly.
She blushed and opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, I grabbed her arm and pulled her from her spot at the bar.
“Garrett!” she yelped in surprise.
“Can I speak to you?”
“What? Um…sure,” she replied in guarded hesitation.
I wrapped my hand around her waist, trying hard not to think about how good that felt, as I pushed us through the heavy crowd. My possessiveness of her didn’t go unnoticed by many of the other men, and they quickly backed off.
Good.
I guided us toward the hallway which led to the kitchen and back door. It was fairly quiet.
“What the hell is this about?” she yelled.
Touching her had been a bad mistake. My hand was on fire, and I was about to lose any ounce of restraint I had left.
I shoved her against the wall, and she sucked in a breath.
“Do you enjoy driving me crazy?” I asked. My hands tightened around her waist as I pressed my body against hers.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
Her voice was husky, and it gave me memories of that same voice crying out my name while I came deep inside her.
“Don’t you? That little show up there wasn’t for me?”
“No.”
“No?”
My hands slid lower, and a slight moan escaped her lips as her eyes lost focus. My attention shifted, and I found myself transfixed on her mouth. She had the most perfect lips, soft and pouty and made for kissing. She saw me staring, and she stopped breathing in anticipation. I moved in to kiss her. I needed to remember what it felt like to live, to feel my heart beating in my chest.
And then, I remembered everything she had taken away from me.
She can’t mean this. She would never do this.
Those words haunted me. I pushed away with an angry growl as she sank against the wall.
“Go home, Mia,” I barked over my shoulder as I stalked away in anger.
Anger was my true love and my only soul mate.
Chapter Seven
~Mia~
After a fitful night of sleep, I awoke in a tangled mess of sheets to the sound of thunderous banging coming from my front door. I glanced at my clock with fuzzy eyes and saw that it was barely eight in the morning on Sunday.
Who the hell was bothering me this early? Sunday mornings were sacred and precious. I would sleep in, drink coffee, read for hours, and enjoy doing absolutely nothing.
Why was someone bombarding my solitude?
And why is that person knocking so damn loudly?
I threw on a sweatshirt, which was three sizes too large for me since it technically wasn’t mine, and I ran downstairs to see the person I would be yelling at. I pulled the door open and found a very angry Garrett on the other side.