Rock Wedding (Rock Kiss #4) - Nalini Singh Page 0,46
the front. She hadn’t paid much attention to it earlier, more focused on Abe’s strong black scrawl on the other side.
It was a drawing of a fairground.
Sarah’s breath stuck in her chest for a long second. She’d asked Abe to go to a fair once. It had been toward the end of their marriage, when her husband was home so rarely it had felt as if he was actively avoiding her. That night, he’d turned her down to party with the guys instead. She’d gone to the fair alone, had ended up sitting in her car watching other couples walk by arm in arm, laughing and excited to be together
Had he remembered? Or was this just chance, the note card grabbed at random off a stand at the counter when he went to pay?
More importantly, what did she do about it?
Her hand went to her phone, but she hesitated, the memories of her awful loneliness while she’d been with Abe holding her in place. Curling her fingers into her palm, she picked up the television remote instead.
She had to keep her distance if she was to have any chance of protecting her battered heart. Because this Abe? The one who sent her flowers and books and who dropped by to make sure she was all right? He was more dangerous than the man who’d broken her to pieces.
ABE ATE, TALKED, MANAGED TO SOUND NORMAL enough that neither Molly nor Fox saw anything amiss, but all the while he was waiting for his phone to buzz. Even after he returned home around ten that night, following a jam session that had ended up turning into an impromptu dinner at Noah and Kit’s, he was poised to grab the phone.
An hour passed, two.
Sometime after midnight, he finally accepted that Sarah wasn’t going to call him.
His jaw clenched as he sat on the edge of the bed, his muscles rigid and his emotions black and twisted. Before, he’d have gone for the drugs, tried to drown it all out. If he didn’t feel, he couldn’t hurt. Today he went to the baby grand piano that sat beside the glass doors that led out onto the patio. He stared at it, his soul aching.
Before Noah had shared “Sparrow” with them, he hadn’t played it for years, not since the last day his baby sister spent in his home. She’d been healthy then, had come to stay with him while his parents went on a little vacation; he and Tessie had decided on their own vacation and gone to Disneyland three times in a week.
The rest of the time, they’d made music together, Tessie as drawn to song as Abe. After they buried her, his tiny sister who had never had a chance, he hadn’t been able to bear the memories that came flooding back when his fingers touched the keys: of Tessie dancing while he played, saying, “More! More!” when he dared stop.
But those memories weren’t the only ones that haunted him now when he looked at the piano.
The anguish on Sarah’s face, his wife’s footsteps as she ran from him.
Spinning away from the baby grand, he went to the other piano in the room, placed all the way on the other side. And he played. What came out wasn’t hard and raw but soft, melancholy. A nocturne.
The one Sarah had been playing that night.
The birds outside were chirping in the predawn light and his hands ached by the time he stopped. And still there was no message on his phone.
He went to bed at last, only to be awakened four hours later by the buzzer that announced a visitor at the gate. Groaning, he put a pillow over his head and tried to ignore it. That was when his phone began ringing.
“What?” he growled into it without looking at the screen to see who it was.
“Abe?”
The husky feminine voice chased all sleep from his mind. “Sarah?” He sat up. “Is everything all right?”
“I’m here,” Sarah responded instead of answering him. “Can I come in?”
Had Abe been on drugs, he’d have been sure he was hallucinating. As it was, he wondered if he was dreaming. “Yeah, sure. Give me a second.” Getting out of bed wearing what he usually wore to sleep—nothing—he didn’t even try to find the gate remote. He just made his way to the control panel and let her in.
He was still standing there butt naked when Sarah’s car pulled up. “Shit.”
Running to the nearest bathroom, he splashed water on his