The Girl is Not For Christmas - Emma V Leech Page 0,62

so foolish. Yet she kept on, kept hoping for better, striving for better, and not for herself but for those children whom she loved like her own, and whom she deserved more than their blessed mother did.

Something like rage swelled in his chest and he tamped it down. Not his fight. Even if it were, there was nothing he could do, nothing he could offer.

He sat down at the piano and smoothed his fingers over the keys, feeling a little of the tension in his shoulders ease as he did so. To his relief, and somewhat to his surprise, the piano was well tuned and cared for, and he ran through a few well-loved pieces before settling on something more personal and closer to his heart. Foolish of him, but he was a fool. He’d always been a fool, a dreamer, an idealist, until his father had finally taught him the lesson King had resisted learning, once and for all. Either he was the man the marquess wished him to be, or he was nothing. Anything King tried for that was his own, his father destroyed. Yet, he couldn’t destroy this. He could take back the piano, which had been a gift to him as a very young man, but not the music he’d written himself. That was his own, except it didn’t feel like it was his any longer. When he’d written it, he’d been foolish enough to hope, to hold on to a wistful longing, to believe there might be something more in his future, something rare and bright and hard to find, but he’d had that glimmer in the darkness. He’d clung to the fragile hope that he might find it for as long as he could. It had been lost to him too long ago now, drowned it in brandy as he let himself sink into the darker side of life, and yet here it was again, mocking him now, taunting him. Not that it mattered. He might as well never have seen it, seen her, for all the good it would do him.

He lost himself in the music, closing his eyes and letting it sweep him up and carry him away. When he played nothing could reach him, nothing could touch him. Prinny himself could have come and sat down beside him, and he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. Yet he knew when she opened the door, though she didn’t make a sound. He knew it was her, though the door was at his back. He felt her presence like the sun warming his face on a frosty day, like the room had lit up with the glow of her. Oh, for pity’s sake, how nauseating. He was turning into a bloody maudlin poet. Someone shoot him, for the love of God, and put him out of his misery.

“I’ve never heard anything so beautiful,” she said, standing at his shoulder.

“You don’t get out much,” he replied dryly.

She gave an impatient tut but ignored the comment. “Who is it by? I don’t recognise it at all.”

King shrugged. “Don’t remember.”

Livvy moved around the piano and sat down on the stool beside him, forcing him to shove up a bit to give her room. He huffed but did not stop playing, did not look at her, could not look at her. She sat close, too close, the warmth of her body like sitting too near to open flame. A flush of heat and want burned up the back of his neck and he tried to concentrate on the music. He could feel her looking at him, as if she had peered inside his brain and seen the tangled mess churning inside his head.

“You wrote it.”

He said nothing, and she gave a triumphant laugh.

“I knew it. You have hidden depths, don’t you, King? There you are, drinking and carousing and making all the world believe you the epitome of depravity, when all along…”

He halted abruptly and reached for her. His hands sank into the warm silk of her hair and he kissed her, hard and desperate and out of control. She made a little squeak of surprise and then, like always, she softened in his arms, utterly pliant, perfectly biddable, wrapping her arms about his neck and pressing closer. The fierce, prickly Miss Penrose was entirely his the moment he touched her and, oh God, didn’t that knowledge make him wild? Was it just him? Would she be this way for any man who touched her? No. No, she