Falling for Mister Wrong (25 page)

But he just sprawled in his corner of the
couch, sipping cocoa, basking in the warmth of the fire, gazing up
at the mountain and occasionally sending her a glance filled with
warm affection… and something
much
hotter.

He sipped his cocoa, his gaze on her.
“So…what made you decide to stop performing?”

Caitlyn jolted, glad she wasn’t taking a sip
of her cocoa because she would have given herself third degree
burns on her esophagus. Alarm bells blared in her head, her sensual
panic instantly morphing into agitation of a different sort. Was
Will just like Daniel and her mother, only wanting her to be his
performing monkey?

Chapter
Twenty-Nine

“Why do you ask?” she asked warily, hiding
her face behind her mug.

Will shrugged. “You’re amazing. I was just
curious why you stopped.”

Caitlyn’s heart plummeted. He was just like
them—

“Did you hate it?”

Wait…
Daniel had never asked if she
hated it. He’d just assumed everything about her old life was
magical and she must be repressing her desire to return to it, with
him on her arm.

“Was it the attention and spectacle that got
to you?” Will asked. “Because, if so, going on the reality show was
a weird choice.”

He had a point… “No, it wasn’t that. Being a
famous Classical musician isn’t like being Angelina Jolie. I can
still go to the grocery store or the movies and no one knows who I
am. It’s only when I go places like Lincoln Center in New York that
people would ask me for my autograph—and that part was actually
kind of nice. They were music lovers and we could share that, you
know?”

“So it wasn’t the fame. The schedule?”

“I… it’s complicated.”

“Okay.” Just that. So simple.

He leaned back and sipped at his cocoa,
gazing out the window, but she knew he wasn’t ignoring her. He was
waiting, letting her decide if she wanted to tell him or change the
subject. She knew he would accept either choice without batting an
eye. Which, oddly, made her want to tell him more.

“I told you my childhood was… pretty
dysfunctional. My parents had a contentious relationship. Honestly,
I’m not sure why they ever got married. But the one thing they
could agree on was my music. My
gift
, they called it. And
so, when I was very small, I threw myself into it because I thought
it would make things better between them. When my career took off
as a child phenom, I became a sort of bargaining chip between them.
They started fighting again and my mom started cheating again—not
even bothering to be discreet anymore—and when they got divorced,
it was a good thing, I know that now, but at the time all I saw was
that my stupid career had torn us apart. I blamed my success for
everything that was going wrong and for a while I hated the piano
with a passion—but my parents insisted I keep performing. My career
was too important to throw away because I was going through a
phase
. So I performed—hating every second of it.”

She paused, regrouping, and found Will
watching her. Steady. Not judging. Just listening.

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen when they got divorced. I was
pretty miserable for a couple years—what girl going through puberty
doesn’t want to be on display every night, right? I played, but I
would dream about
accidentally
breaking a finger just so I
could stop.” She took moment to drink her cocoa, the chocolate
deliciously soothing. “I was in San Francisco one day when I was
fifteen, researching emancipation online so I could get away from
my parents and stop performing. I was so ready to be done. And that
night I had to play Rachmaninov. His Piano Concerto #3 in D Minor.
It starts out all sad and aching and builds to this agitation and
frenzy. Back and forth like that. Sad and wild. Then the finale
starts with this driving angry explosion. All fire and passion, but
it ends with the most gorgeous catharsis—almost triumphant—and as I
played it all of that just poured out of me. I’d never played like
that before. I was always technically brilliant—everyone said
so—and I had a gift for musicality, but this was a depth of emotion
in my music I’d never experienced before. I forgot about the
audience and completely surrendered myself to it. When it was over
the ovation went on for fifteen minutes. People were crying. I was
crying. Hell, I’m pretty sure the conductor broke down at one
point. It was an incredible experience. And I realized I’d been
blaming the piano for everything I was mad at my parents about. I
found my love of music again that night and it was my
salvation.”

She studied the chocolate bits sticking to
the inside of her mug. “I kept performing after I came of age. I
didn’t want to lose that bond with the music. I met Mimi and we
became friends, and when she married Ty and left the symphony to
move to Colorado and have kids, I realized I was envious. I wanted
that quiet life. I loved music, but I could take or leave
performing. My public life had such a complicated history and
sometimes I still felt like I was letting my mother control me when
I played venues she’d always wanted me to play. I kept performing
for another couple years—and there were nights when it was
magnificent, but also times when it felt like drudgery and I just
wanted to walk away. Then Mimi’s son was born and I came to visit
and we talked for hours about music and life and loneliness and
what I really wanted and I realized I didn’t have to be on stage to
still have the piano in my life. It took another ten months to
finish out my contracts and phase myself out of the life, but then
it was over and I moved here and now…”

“Now you just play for me.”

She toasted him with her empty mug. “An
audience of one.”

He caught the mug as she waved it, plucking
it out of her hand and setting it aside with his. He reached for
her, his long arms spanning the distance she’d put between them.
“Come here.”

“W-what?” And just like that, her nerves were
back, jangling even more frantically than before.

“I promised you a massage,” he said softly,
gesturing to her tense shoulders. “I’d hate for sore muscles to
ruin your first memory of skiing.”

“I… uh…”

His fingertips grazed her shoulder near her
neck, giving a gentle squeeze.

Caitlyn launched out of her seat like the
couch had a built-in eject button. “You like Chopin?”

She fled to the piano, feeling safe only when
her fingers touched the keys. She hadn’t panicked like this with
Daniel, but he hadn’t made her feel this wild syncopation in her
blood. It was too much.
Will
was too much.

He didn’t chase after her—thank God—simply
turning on the couch to watch her as she began to play Chopin’s
Prelude in B Minor. It was called the Heartbeat Prelude with its
steady pulse-like repetition, but her fingers rushed through the
notes too fast, making the heart race. He waited until the short
piece concluded before strolling to the piano. She plunged into
another Chopin, a nocturne this time, but she didn’t know it as
well and her fingers faltered on the notes. She broke off and
fumbled in the wooden chest beside the piano where she kept the
music. She almost tore the book when she found it, spreading it
open on the piano’s stand and reminding herself to breathe as Will
perched on the piano bench beside her.

“Caitlyn.”

She flubbed the intro again, unable to focus
on the notes on the page in front of her.

Will didn’t touch her, aside from his
shoulder brushing lightly against hers. “Caitlyn, I was just
flirting. We don’t have to do anything.”

She stared down at her hands, frozen on the
keys. “I don’t want you to stop,” she whispered, before forcing
herself to look up and meet his impossibly deep brown eyes. “I’m
just no good at this stuff.”

His lips quirked in that heartbreaker of a
smile. “I beg to differ.”

She bumped him with her shoulder. “You know
what I mean. I never know what to do with myself or if I’m doing
the right thing.”

“Do what feels right. It won’t be the wrong
thing.”

What felt right
. It felt right to be
with him. To have his warmth pressed along her side. She wanted his
hands on her again, but couldn’t imagine how to get from here to
there. She didn’t want to be the aggressor, but how to invite him
to touch… She’d only ever known how to seduce with the piano.

His favorite.

Caitlyn struck the opening chord of the
Pathetique. She was close enough to hear Will’s indrawn breath and
feel the slight shift in his body, angling toward her. He was
taller than her, even sitting, but she didn’t feel like she was in
his shadow, so much as protected by his heat. His warmth seemed to
wrap around her as the opening chords sang from the piano’s
strings.

She was breathless with anticipation, waiting
for the first touch, the hairs lifting on her arms as she played.
She’d never thought of the Pathetique as a particularly erotic
sonata, but she was suddenly aware of the sensualism that soaked
the opening minutes, building.

His hand whispered over the small of her
back, not quite touching, just shifting the soft fabric of her
shirt, and she held a fermata far longer than it warranted, the
moment suspended in that almost touch. Her breasts already felt
swollen inside her bra, the nipples furled into tight points.
Tension coiled in her stomach, heat gathering between her legs—and
he hadn’t even touched her yet.

Then, right as she began the first falling
run, his lips fell on the point where her neck met her shoulder and
Caitlyn’s head sagged back on a gasp. Thank God for muscle memory
or her hands would surely have faltered. She kept playing, her
focus splintered as the piece grew more rapid and intense, building
to its own climax and Will’s lips caressed their way up her
neck.

His heat pressed against one side of her
body, his arm curving around her, the lightest of touches gliding
up her other side, from her hip, along the indent of her waist,
teasing her ribs, flirting with the outer edge of her breast, then
back down before he got to where she
really
wanted his
hands, and then her fingers did fumble.

“That is very distracting,” she whispered,
barely recognizing the husky breathiness of her own voice.

He hummed against the skin of her neck and
she nearly came right then. “Do you want me to stop?”

Stop
? She wanted to compose a symphony
for him. “No.”

The word was barely audible, the unwritten
pauses in the music growing longer. She was never going to make it
to the second movement—which she had always thought was the most
romantic part of the Pathetique, but what did she know?

His mouth reached the underside of her jaw,
the curve of her ear. The soft tug of his lips on her lobe made her
miss a note. Then another as he made a little
mmm
sound, as
if he was enjoying this as much as she was.
Impossible
. It
was too good. He’d be a puddle on the floor if he felt even half of
the sensations shivering through her body.

His other hand came around, careful not to
get in the way of her arms as she played, and rested gently just
above her knee. Then he squeezed.

Just that. Just a little squeeze and
Caitlyn’s brain completely disconnected from her body. She turned
her face toward him, only an inch, but it was all the invitation he
needed. His lips were on hers, a low groan of need reaching her
ears—
his? hers?
—and her fingers forgot how to play. She
twisted toward him, one hand gripping his T-shirt at his collarbone
while the other wrapped around the wrist of the hand that was still
gently massaging her leg. His other arm curved all the way around
her back, gripping her side—she’d had no idea a man putting his
hand on the line of her waist could make her feel so
sexy
,
but then everything Will did was sexy.

His tongue teased her lower lip and then
slipped into her mouth and—oh Sweet Jesus,
this
was a kiss.
Every stroke, every taste drove her higher until she was dizzy with
the vertigo of it.

The hand on her leg roamed upward and why
wasn’t she wearing a skirt? Clearly she needed to be wearing a
skirt! He stopped at the top of her thigh, centimeters away from
where she wanted him most. They were both fully clothed, necking on
her piano bench, but she had never been so turned on in her entire
life. One touch would be all it would take to send her flying. One
little touch…

He stood abruptly, eyes wild, and shoved the
piano bench with her on it away from the piano with a grating
scrape across the floor, so fast Caitlyn was forced to grab for it
or go flying off. He grabbed both her knees, pushed them apart, and
knelt between them so her thighs were pressed against his ribcage,
his body between her and the keys. Drawing her down for another
kiss, his hands were deft on the buttons of her blouse.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

Her brain was jabbering, but she
didn’t
care
. Then her shirt was open and he was looking at her and
swearing worshipfully and he pulled down the cups of her bra
with his teeth
and
oh my God
, she was going to
die.

But what a way to go.

Chapter
Thirty

His mouth was—okay, suction?
Good
.
Teeth? Also, surprisingly,
good
. And that flicky tongue
thing?
Sweet Mozart’s Toes. Amazing
.

Her bra had somehow vanished, along with her
shirt, and now she felt the brush of fingers against her lower
stomach as he wrestled with the button on her jeans.

And what was she doing? Sitting there like a
bump on a log. Or a lump on a piano bench, gripping the edges for
dear life and forgetting that she had
hands
and she really
ought to use them.