The Prince's Devious Proposal - Holly Rayner Page 0,55

and Sarah sat in the kitchen or under soft blankets on the plush couch with a bottle of wine or a couple of beers and discussed their lives. Much to Naomi’s relief, the topic of Petr didn’t come up again, and she got the feeling Sarah was letting her decide when and if she wanted to talk about him.

“You know,” Sarah said one night, after Naomi had been in New York for about a week, “we have one of your old guitars. You can take it if you want to.”

“You do?” Naomi asked. “Why do you have that?” Sarah had never played an instrument. She had been more interested in sports.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I guess it somehow got mixed in with some of my stuff, and when the movers were picking up my things from Mom’s house, they grabbed it too. I set it aside for you when I found it.”

“Where is it?” Naomi asked.

“It’s in the basement,” Sarah said. “We never took it out of the case. Ella wanted to a few times, but I told her she couldn’t.”

“Maybe she’d like to see it,” Naomi said.

“She definitely would,” Sarah said. “Don’t feel like you have to get it out for her or anything, though.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Naomi said. It would be nice to hold a guitar again. It had been a while.

The following day, she found the guitar and brought it up to the guest room where she was staying. Ella trailed after her.

“Are you taking that violin out?” she asked.

“Guitar,” Naomi corrected. “I thought we’d have a look at it. What do you think?”

Ella nodded solemnly. It was clear that her mother had driven home to her the fact that the guitar was something serious, not a toy.

Naomi laid the case on her bed, unclasped it, and pulled the instrument out. It wasn’t her favorite guitar, but it was a good one, one of the ones she’d taken on tour with her. She recognized the little chip in the neck from where the Desert Flowers’ drummer had stumbled into her on the bus one day and scraped his ring against it.

“Can I play it?” Ella asked.

“It might be too big for you to hold,” Naomi said. She sat down and pulled the guitar into her arms. “Why don’t you pluck this string?” she asked, pointing.

Ella did.

“Keep going,” Naomi said, tuning as Ella plucked. Soon, the string had been coaxed into a close approximation of the appropriate note. She would need to have this guitar restrung, she knew—these strings were just too old—but it would do for today.

She and Ella repeated the process on the rest of the strings, and then Naomi placed her fingers in position for a G chord. “Strum them all,” she told Ella.

Ella did. Her face broke into a delighted grin. “Play a song!” she said, jumping up and down.

Naomi found the chords for one of the cartoon theme songs they’d been singing each morning and picked her way through it. Ella quickly recognized the tune and began to sing along.

When the song was over, Naomi returned to the G chord and began to strum absently. This was how she had always begun her songwriting—by strumming a single chord over and over until she felt the inclination to move to another. Before long, a melody would emerge.

At least, that was how it had been at one time.

After the tour had ended, she had tried to write more songs, but she seemed to have lost the touch. Nothing had come to her. She had sat holding her guitar for hours, waiting for inspiration to strike, but it never had.

But now, as she played, the image of Petr’s face returned to her.

She shifted to a minor chord.

“That sounds sad,” Ella said.

Naomi nodded. “It does, doesn’t it?” She hummed along, moving through a series of chords, not yet certain of exactly what she was doing.

“What song is that?” Ella asked.

“I’m not sure,” Naomi admitted. “It’s a new song. I don’t know what it is yet.”

She played for hours, unable to put the guitar down.

By the time the family sat down to dinner, Naomi had most of the song completed. It was a sad, haunting melody, aching with loss and pain, but at its end it resolved in a major key. Was that a note of hope? She wasn’t sure, but she knew that it felt right to end the song that way.

“You’ve been working on something, haven’t you?” Sarah asked, passing the casserole Harry had