Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,186

I had no desire to even try and stop it.

"I wrote this for you," I said, laying my hands back down on the piano.

"You wrote me a song?" she asked, biting her lip to try and hide a shy smile and the thought of this pleasing her so much loosened a knot in my chest.

"I don't sing, siren," I replied with a faint snort of amusement. "But I do play. So I wrote you a symphony - though I only have a piano to hand and am lacking the orchestra which would be necessary to bring it to life, so it's just this simple piece."

"Simple?" she teased like she knew it would be anything but and I allowed myself a smile.

"As simple as I am able," I conceded.

She shifted back to watch me from the top of the piano and I drank in the sight of her as my fingers moved into position over the keys. I exhaled slowly, finding peace in the music even before it had begun to pour from my soul then I began.

The song started slowly, the first notes piercing the silence of the room like raindrops falling in the night, striking without notice and falling unseen, yet leaving a mark all the same. As the lower notes came in to play, the music got darker like thunder rolling over a deep ocean while the rain continued to fall, so small in the face of all that water and yet changing it irrevocably with every drop that fell.

I lost myself in the music as the rain built into a storm in my mind, an unstoppable tempest that crashed and pounded against the ocean and the land, making itself known, bringing life and passion to a barren expanse of nothing and waking monsters from their slumber.

My hands moved faster and faster, never missing a single key because each and every one was important, necessary, the darkest, deepest notes just as crucial as the lightest, highest ones. And somehow it all just came together, the music fighting to be one just like the rain soaked into the ground and filled the ocean with stories of places it could never see for itself, but changed its outlook on everything.

The music became more complex, making my heart race and I fought to keep the pace just right as it reached the crescendo, an explosion of everything coming together, the battle for power forgotten and peace laying claim to the world as the storm blew itself out.

As I fell into the final notes, my heart ached with the sweetness of them, of how similar and yet how different they were to the notes that had started the piece. That was how I felt for her, like a man reborn, the same and yet altogether different at once. There was no more fighting for control, but a peace built of heat and flames that burned through everything and set it all alight.

As I played the final note, I sat back with an exhale and slowly lifted my gaze to meet hers.

Tatum's pink lips were parted as she stared at me, her chest rising and falling heavily as her pupils dilated and I swallowed thickly as I felt more than a little vulnerable before her. I'd just cut my heart from my chest and laid it bloody and beating at her altar. It was all I had to offer. Just a broken boy in the body of a man. I had so much baggage that sometimes the weight of it crippled me and I was never going to be easy to love. And yet that look in her eyes made me think she really did love me anyway. Despite it all. Never minding the fact that I wasn't deserving of any such thing from her. She was mine as much as I was hers.

The heat between us crackled and my limbs grew rigid as I looked at her up there on top of the piano, her long legs begging me to tear those stockings from them and bury myself between them. I held myself still through pure force of will as the idea of claiming her now overwhelmed me. I wanted her in the way a beast needed its mate. I wanted her clawing at my clothes, her nails biting into my flesh and her ass crashing down against the keys of that piano as I drove my cock inside her and made her scream my name.

And the look in her eyes said