Rock Wedding (Rock Kiss #4) - Nalini Singh Page 0,62
earned them.” Glossy Sarah wasn’t a mask she put on; it was simply the look that helped her navigate certain situations in this life she’d clawed out for herself.
Could she have done it without Abe’s money?
No.
Sarah had never lied to herself about that. The divorce settlement had been relatively conservative because of the short length of their marriage—and Abe’s own Rottweiler of a lawyer—but it had been more than enough to give her what she needed to set up a new life.
Abe had also given her something even more dear to her: his name.
It had infuriated Jeremy that she hadn’t reverted to her maiden name of Smith, but that name held only horrors for Sarah, far worse than the most painful memories from her marriage. She hadn’t even cared when, right after the divorce, certain snarky columnists had called her a “first wife” who wanted to cling to the fame of her ex-husband.
Sarah paid her good fortune forward every single month, writing out checks to charities that supported and tried to offer help to teens on the streets. She’d been one of those lost children not that long ago, knew that sometimes a teenager had a home so unsafe the street was the better option.
Flames. Fear. Grief.
Those were her last memories of her childhood home.
“That’s in the past,” she whispered aloud. “No one will ever link Sarah Bellamy with the unwanted girl born in a one-bedroom shack in Miami, or with the teenager who became the star witness in a murder trial.” She was gone forever, that fifteen-year-old girl with her skinny face and bruised arms and legs, her hair cut tight to her skull.
The people who’d known her then would never recognize her in Sarah.
And this strong, successful woman she’d become, she had a date to attend the symphony.
“I’VE NEVER BEEN TO THE SYMPHONY BEFORE,” she confessed to Abe after they took their seats.
“Yeah?” A pleased smile as they waited for everyone to finish filing in. “It’s fucking amazing.”
Sarah bit back a smile as the blue-haired matron in front of them turned to give Abe an admonishing look. “Really, young man. Language.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Abe said with a rueful smile. “Got a little too excited.”
As Sarah had mentally predicted, the matron melted. Smiling her forgiveness, she returned her attention to her partner, an elderly man in a dapper brown suit and spotted bowtie.
“Charmer,” she whispered under her breath to Abe.
“Nana Bellamy would call it good solid manners.”
Cheeks creasing at his choirboy response, she said, “Do you ever think about giving up the band to join an orchestra?” He was a gifted classical pianist who’d been offered placements at prestigious music academies right out of high school.
“Nah.” Abe played with the program for today’s concert. “I love listening to it, but this isn’t the kind of music I want to make—and those people would never be my family.”
Not like Fox, Noah, and David.
Sarah glanced away, reacting as she’d always done to mentions of the band, her jealousy a bitter creature inside her. She turned back the instant she realized what she was doing.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, not after the way the band members, as well as Kit, Thea, and Molly, had closed ranks around her after the nightmare with Jeremy. Not after Molly had invited Sarah into her home and her wedding. Not after all three women had extended the hand of true friendship.
Abe was right—his bandmates had never been the problem.
“Noah and Kit,” she said under the cover of rustling and mumbled conversation as people settled down. “I always knew they had chemistry, but I could’ve never predicted their relationship.” It was obvious the couple was madly in love, however. Any idiot could see they were a unit, two halves of a whole.
Stretching out his arm behind her seat, Abe leaned down to speak against her ear. “Kit’s good for Noah, really good. And he’s nuts for her.”
Sarah was having trouble thinking with Abe so close, his warmth enticing and his mouth almost touching her skin. “At Zenith, they did that thing with the eyes,” she finally managed to say.
Abe’s fingers brushed her shoulder. “What thing?”
Butterflies in her stomach, her skin hot, the bad, bad trouble becoming ever more dangerous. “You know, when couples don’t speak but they’re communicating with their eyes.”
“Huh.”
The lights dimmed on Abe’s bemused response, the haunting song of a single violin filling the void until that void was music and there was no more darkness.
The concert was unlike anything Sarah had ever before