“Brew Magic on Friday?” Sarah suggested. “After work?” She loved her girl chats with Emily, but she had a feeling this week she might be squirming. Emily could be as bad as Elsie when she wanted information.
“I’ll be there. I want to hear the whole story,” Emily warned her with a wink before she left the room to attend to her duties as director of the youth center.
“There’s no story to tell,” Sarah whispered softly to herself. It had all been a terrible mistake, an incident that should never have happened. She felt guilty, knowing she should have sent Dante home the moment he’d arrived, but she didn’t. It wasn’t just the lobster rolls or his attempt to say he was sorry. It was the man himself. Something about Dante Sinclair fascinated her, and she wanted to unravel him piece by piece to figure out exactly how his mind worked. Maybe it would give her some clue as to why she was so unnaturally drawn to him.
Needing a distraction, Sarah started to play. She didn’t need to see sheet music. She could play almost anything by heart, having played most classical piano pieces hundreds of times.
She started with Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor. It was one of her favorite classical pieces, the composer leaving so much of the arrangement open to the interpretation of the player. Losing herself in the melodic bass lines, she allowed herself to express her passion in the music, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she poured every emotion she’d been feeling throughout the week into her playing. This was her emotional outlet, the one activity where she felt safe letting go of intellect and reasoning to just . . . feel. Every emotion was woven into the music: sorrow, joy, confusion, disappointment, guilt, and pain. Finally finishing the piece to a round of applause from her small audience, Sarah started right in on another, Franz Liszt’s “La Campanella.” It was a livelier composition, and one that had never failed to make her heart a little lighter after performing it. She finished with gusto, panting as she struck the last chord. Standing to thank her elderly audience, she startled as she saw Dante and Jared Sinclair sitting in the crowd.
The two Sinclair brothers were hard to miss. They were the youngest listeners, their darker hair standing out among a sea of mostly silver-haired ladies. Her gaze locked with Dante’s, his expression fierce and his eyes so hungry that he looked like a predator that had finally found some desirable prey. Dante’s stare was so intense that Sarah couldn’t pull her gaze away. She wasn’t even entirely certain how long she stayed like that, frozen, her eyes captured by his, before the others in the room started making musical requests. Finally, Sarah jerked away from the fixed stare and nodded hesitantly when someone asked her to play a particular tune. She sat back down again and played for the next fifteen minutes, waiting for the next request before she started to play again, keeping her focus on the gleaming wood in front of her.
I can feel his eyes on me and the tension between us from here.
Sarah’s hands were shaking when the last song was finally complete and the bingo crowd started filing out of the room, all of them smiling and telling her how beautifully she played before they left.
“You’re incredible. I’ve never heard Rachmaninoff interpreted quite that way. It was very beautiful and incredibly eloquent,” Jared Sinclair commented as he approached her. “That was the most pleasurable half hour I’ve spent anywhere in a long time.”
Sarah smiled at him despite the fact that he’d spilled her secret. His tone was genuine and the praise obviously sincere. There was nothing more satisfying than knowing she’d made someone’s day a little brighter with music. “Thanks. You like classical?”
“I do,” Jared admitted. “I’ve heard some of the best pianists in the world, but your playing is outstanding. I’m surprised you never pursued a musical career.”
Sarah stood and carefully pushed the bench in closer to the piano. “I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much if it became an actual job.” She couldn’t imagine playing for a living, having her music become a duty that she had to do on a schedule. It wouldn’t be the same.
“Thank you for sharing your talent,” Jared replied, his tone genuine as he grinned at her before walking slowly out of the room.
“You’re welcome,” she called after him as she stepped down from the elevated platform where the piano was situated, grabbing her purse from the floor as she went.
Her head swung to the right as she noticed that the room wasn’t entirely empty. Dante Sinclair hadn’t moved from his chair, and his expression was still as focused as it had been earlier.
“I need to lock the room up,” Sarah told him as calmly as possible, her heart beginning to race as he stood.
“We need to talk,” Dante told her in a graveled, demanding voice.
He sounded like a man who wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
CHAPTER 6
Mine!
Dante’s entire body was wired up and tense, his instincts pounding at him to take Sarah away somewhere and satiate her until she couldn’t think straight anymore. She was dressed in a pair of blue-and-yellow-striped shorts and a short-sleeved matching blue shirt. The shorts were long, almost to her knees, and weren’t meant to be provocative, but on her, they were sexy as hell. Even the innocent, shiny pink polish on her toenails that peeked out from a pair of casual sandals made his dick hard.
He hadn’t just listened to her play the piano; he had felt her. Underneath her logical, analytical exterior was a woman of fire and passion. Yeah. He’d already known that, but he hadn’t realized just how raw those emotions really were. He’d watched her face the entire time he’d been listening to her pour her heart into her music, and it had leveled him, leaving him completely destroyed. He could feel her need just like it was his own, and the sensations hadn’t stopped when the music had ceased. Dante could still feel that sense of longing, and he knew that he was exuding it just as much as Sarah was. Tension flowed in the space between them like an electric current, and his cock was so hard that he was barely able to suppress the need to touch her, to somehow claim her. Even watching her smile at Jared had nearly killed him. He didn’t want another man near her, especially when she was vulnerable. Was it just him who could see that she wore every emotion close to the surface when she was playing?