Girl on a Diamond Pedestal (9 page)

How could he say that? As if she let men touch her like that all the time? Though, he might think she did.

Well, so what if she did? She knew
he
was an epic playboy, and if she wanted to get off with men on piano benches every other night of the week that was her business. Not her mother’s and not Ethan’s. Hers.

She whipped around and was not that surprised to find Ethan only a couple of paces behind her. “You know what, Ethan? It’s none of your business what I do in my spare time. Beyond this little charade of ours, my life is none of your business. I could have had sex with a hundred guys, and guess what? Not your job to judge. I’m the one who has to live my life. The one who has to live with me. So … there.”

She turned again and walked away, her heart pounding hard in her head, her entire body shaking. It was true, and she hadn’t even realized it until she’d said it.

She
had to live her life. No one else. Why had she always taken the path other people put her on? Why was she still doing her drills for hours every day?

It was
her life
. No matter how much her mother had wanted to treat it as her own, no matter how much her instructor had fed his ego on her success. They had had no right.

She was angry now. Not just about her situation, but for herself. For everything she’d accepted, her whole life, because she’d believed that her only option was to do as she was told.

Ethan’s firm grasp on her arm stopped her in her tracks. He didn’t seem at all concerned by the people walking by, craning their necks to see if there was going to be a huge fight between them.

“You’re right, Noelle, it’s not my job to judge you. And I don’t. My comment was out of line.” His dark eyes blazed with an intensity that stood in direct opposition to his apologetic words.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I … you apologized,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think anyone has ever apologized to me.”

“I’m a confident guy, Noelle, and that means my ego can take it when I have to admit I’m wrong. That
was
wrong. It isn’t my business how many men you’ve slept with, or intend to sleep with. It was my sexual frustration talking there. A bit of jealousy, which, I’ll be honest, is unfamiliar to me.”

“The … jealousy or the sexual frustration?”

“Both.”

“Oh.” She looked around at the people, moving around them now as though they didn’t exist, no more interesting than the pylons that divided the boardwalk from the sand.

“You sound shocked.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever aroused either emotion in a man before. So, yes, I am a bit shocked. Maybe as shocked as you are.”

“Not possible. I’m sure you make men feel like this all the time.”

He looked at her, his dark eyes intense, his jaw shifting as he tightened it, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“I … I doubt it.”

He stepped closer, the hand on her arm gliding up to her shoulder, around to the back of her neck, his thumb moving over her skin, fingers sifting through her hair.

“I don’t. Not for a moment. You really are beautiful.”

“Ethan, I thought we decided that … it’s a bad idea.” She
hated that. Why was it a bad idea? Ethan felt good. And warm, so warm. Everything had been frozen over for so long, dead and dry. Ethan was like the sun.

She wanted to bathe in his warmth, in the promise of new things that seemed to come every time he touched her.

But it was a bad idea. They’d decided that. She’d agreed.

She moved closer to him, her heart pounding. His hand was still on her neck, massaging her, spreading heat and fire through her.

She didn’t want to move away. Didn’t want to break her connection with him. It was her life. And she had to live it.

She wanted a little bit of Ethan in it. For as long as she could have it. Because he made her angry and happy and he turned her on. He made her
feel
, when for so long she’d simply been existing. He made her aware of things—needs, desires she’d never been mindful of before.

It was like finding a new dimension to life. And that was more than just the beach and sand and ice cream. It was deeper, it made everything seem as if it had broader scope, more depth.

She didn’t want to run from that. She wanted to dive into it head-first.

She stood up on her toes and leaned in, brushing his mouth with hers, her entire body trembling as she increased the pressure of the kiss, as the shock of his flesh on hers fired through her, charging her like a bolt of electricity.

It didn’t satisfy her. Not even close. She felt like he was water and she had been lost in the desert. She felt insatiable. She touched her tongue to the seam of his lips, explored the shape of his mouth, tasted his skin.

They hadn’t kissed enough last night. He’d done the
touching, he’d done the pleasuring. But she wanted more than that. She wanted it all.

A short groan vibrated in his chest, and he locked his arm around her waist, pulling her to him, holding her against his hard, well-muscled body. She arched into him, could feel the heavy weight of his erection against her stomach.

And that was when she realized they were standing on the boardwalk, in broad daylight.

She pulled away from him, blinking hard. Pushing shaking fingers through her hair, she looked around, trying to see if they’d caught everyone’s attention. No, there were one or two people in line for ice cream who hadn’t noticed them. Great.

“I … for someone who was trained not to draw the wrong kind of attention, I seem to be doing a pretty bad job at … not drawing the wrong kind of attention.”

“You kissed me,” he said.

“Not … not
your
attention. People are staring,” she hissed, lowering her face and walking back toward the hotel.

“Isn’t that the idea? We are supposed to be an engaged couple.”

“That wasn’t the idea … just now. For me I mean.”

“I see, then what was it?”

She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “If you were a gentleman, you wouldn’t ask.”

“I didn’t say I was a gentleman.”

“No. I guess you didn’t.”

“You’re right.” He sighed. “This is a bad idea.”

A bolt of panic hit her in the chest. “Not the whole deal, just the kissing, right? Because I need this, Ethan. I need my house. I can’t lose it.”

He frowned and reached his hand out, brushing his
thumb over her cheek. “Your cheeks are pink. You need sunblock.”

“Please tell me you don’t mean the whole deal,” she repeated.

“I think it’s all a bad idea, Noelle. But I’m not backing out of it. We have a deal, and we’ll stick to that. But it’s a business deal, don’t forget that.”

“I … I won’t.” Of course, if she really felt like it was a business deal her heart probably wouldn’t be beating so erratically, and her lips wouldn’t still be stinging from the kiss. “We should probably go.”

They were still standing in the middle of the crowded boardwalk, but even with so many people everywhere, she felt as if they were the only two people on the planet. At least, the only two who mattered. She wasn’t sure what that meant, or why he could make her so mad, and then make her want him, then make her nearly melt inside with the things that he said, all in the space of a few moments.

“Yeah, I’ve got some work to do this evening,” Ethan replied.

“Oh. Good.” That meant they wouldn’t have time to spend together and maybe she could figure out what was happening inside her. Newfound feelings, along with life-changing revelations, needed to be examined after all. “I mean … I’ll have a chance to play around with that song I started working on last night.”

A spark crackled between them. The shared memory of what had interrupted her songwriting. His lips on her throat, his hands on her breasts …

“You should wear this.” He reached into the pocket of his shorts, took out a small velvet box and handed it to her without opening it. She curled her fingers around it, holding it firmly closed like there was a great hairy spider inside, instead of what she knew was a giant heirloom engagement
ring. Actually, at that moment, the ring seemed scarier than a spider.

“You going to open it?”

“Later,” she said. Not now. Not on the boardwalk with people all around. Not while she felt scrubbed raw from everything that had happened over the past week.

He nodded once. “We’ll fly back to the States tomorrow. Things will settle down. Get back to normal.”

She nodded in agreement and tightened her hold on the box. She didn’t ask him what he meant by normal, because she was starting to wonder whether she’d ever experienced normal. This wasn’t normal. Kissing a man in public, then screaming at him, then having him give her a ring. Marrying him for a house. No, this wasn’t normal.

And what she felt for Ethan had even less to do with normal than their marriage farce did.

She’d been expecting that performing, playing for crowds again, being famous and staying in posh hotels would make her feel like herself again. Now she wondered if that had ever been the case. She was starting to wonder if she’d ever figure out what it was she wanted.

She looked at Ethan’s strong profile and tried to ignore the tightening in her stomach. All right, so there was one thing she wanted. But it was the one desire she should probably ignore.

Ethan had been wrong about New York bringing normality back. Waking up in the soft, luxurious bed was still too good to be
her
normal. Having Ethan to talk to every day, even if it was about mundane things, was better than normal too.

It was like having a companion, if not almost a friend. Someone to share things with. The details of her day. Three days a week she went to work with him and shadowed his
assistant, learning different, somewhat menial office tasks. But she made a mean pot of coffee now and her typing was getting a lot faster than it had been that first day.

And yesterday, Ethan hadn’t come by the suite to pick her up in his car, so she’d simply called his assistant and asked her to come and share a cab. It felt … good. As if she was building a life. A
real
life—
her
life—not just the broken remains of a life that had never been hers in the first place.

Ethan was due to arrive, and she was pacing, trying to shake off her nervous energy, fairly certain it was futile. Even after a month with him, even though it had been three weeks since he’d kissed her, she just couldn’t relax around him.

She crossed the room to the piano and slid her fingers across the length of the keyboard. Excitement fired through her veins, her stomach tightened in that way that it did when Ethan touched her. Desire. A thrill. She’d been working on the song that had grabbed hold of her in Brisbane, but it hadn’t progressed easily. It was still harder to write music now than it had been.

She sat down on the bench and put her hands into position, flexing her fingers for a moment before pushing down on middle C. She added E and G and let the chord fill the empty room, let it fill her.

Then she followed the feeling. She saw Ethan, remembered how he had stood behind her that night back in Australia. How he’d touched her. She hadn’t let herself think of it, if at all possible, since their return to New York. But she opened her mind up to it now.

It was easy to put the feeling into her music, effortless. This wasn’t like the songs she’d written a year or more ago. Those songs had been born out of technical ability,
mostly because she’d had to tame her creativity to make her teacher happy with the structure of a piece.

But this one held her. Her as she was, not beaten into submission, into a shape and form that her teacher deemed salable. Here and now, she was pouring out her feelings, dissonant and minor, filling the room. Uncertain but powerful, deep and all-consuming.

It didn’t empty her of the emotion, but made it stronger, growing inside of her, flowing from her fingertips.

She didn’t know how long she played, how many times she went through the piece so she could cement it in her mind. When she stopped she sat frozen, before letting it all overtake her.

She felt one tear slip down her cheek, then another. She put her hand over her mouth to cut off the sharp sound that was trying to escape. And then she stopped. She let it all happen, because she’d never done that before. She’d been trying to hold on. To her past, to a life she wasn’t certain she would have chosen for herself, but one that she’d been comfortable with.

And she’d never let herself truly grieve the loss of it. She’d never moved on. She’d cut off everything inside of her instead, and she’d lost her music. Not the crowded auditoriums and the CDs, but the music that had always lived in her, coloring the way she saw and heard the world.

It had been quiet in her when before it had always been filled with a rich, layered sound. Music.

She was finding it again. But different. On her terms.

“Are you all right?”

She turned around on the bench and wiped her cheeks, trying to hide the evidence of her crying jag. “I’m great.”

“You don’t look great.” Ethan, who did look great in his custom-made suit, stepped further into the room.

“Gee thanks, Ethan.”

“Why were you crying?”

“I have a song,” she said. And it sounded lame. It made sense in her head, but she imagined that Ethan probably wouldn’t get it.

“Did you finish the one you started back in Australia?” he asked, his voice rough. That pesky, shared memory again. She knew he was thinking exactly what she was thinking.

“Kind of. It was sort of a take-off from that. But it was … different too. I think I might really have something though. It’s been such a long time since … I’ve been able to do drills, songs I knew, but there was nothing new and … that made me feel like part of me had been cut off. Music has always been in me. That’s how it all started. I was composing music from such an early age and … my mother saw potential that needed to be capitalized on.”

“So it was lessons for you then?”

“With the very best instructor. Neil was—is—a genius. He was my support system until … until my mom ran off with all the money and it was clear I couldn’t … pay him anymore.”