An Affair by the Sea: Siren’s Retreat #2 by Erica Ridley

Author:Erica Ridley [Ridley, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 11

It wasn’t until Allegra’s cousins had gone from the room that doubts began to assail her. She was an almost-thirty-year-old rag doll amidst a menagerie of fashionable young ladies. Did he see her as an object of pity?

Or the opposite: was the dwindling window of opportunity to claim her dowry the reason for his attentions?

Before she could decide which would be worse, footsteps sounded outside the open door. Her cousins had returned. She leapt to her feet and made a futile attempt to smooth the new wrinkles from her mismatched violet gown.

When John strode through the door, heat filled his stormy gray eyes upon sight of her. As though when he looked at her, he did not see an aging spinster in dowdy attire, but rather a dashing piratess fully capable of doing some plundering of her own—and him, the willing captive, eager to remand himself to her sensual custody.

He took her hand in his and brought it to his warm lips for a kiss, without ever dropping his gaze from hers. “Was the piano to your liking?”

“The what? Oh, the piano. Yes. Everything is very much…to my liking.”

He still hadn’t released her hand. Not that she wanted him to. Allegra wondered if the fifteen minutes that remained was enough time to progress from chaste-hand-kiss to bent-backwards-in-his-passionate-embrace.

“The music was lovely,” he said softly.

“You could hear it from the tea room?”

“Just barely. It was as though bits of your essence floated through the walls and into my body. My heart beat in time with your music, and my chest swelled with a slice of your joy.”

“I… That’s… the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.” Allegra’s stomach fluttered at the idea that she was not simply pouring her emotions into her music, but also injecting a tiny part of her directly into his soul.

“Play him something else,” Portia blurted out in excitement. “Play the game!”

John’s brows rose. “The game?”

Allegra slipped her hand from his with reluctance and reseated herself on the bench before the pianoforte. “Press any two keys and tell me a mood. I’ll start there.”

He looked at the piano doubtfully. “Any two keys?”

“Or more. It’s up to you.”

He hunched behind her, one strong arm reaching around from either side of her, as though preparing to envelop her in a warm hug. Instead, his fingers pressed two discordant keys. His lemon-scented breath tickled a tendril of hair by her cheek as he murmured, “Pining.”

“What did he say?” Portia called out. “We couldn’t hear it.”

“You’ll hear it when she plays it,” Dorcas admonished her sister.

John stepped aside, and Allegra let her fingers fly.

Pining. She was rapidly learning a thing or two about that emotion. The keys he’d chosen were perfect to set off a round of stumbling and bumbling and wanting and needing and backing away only to charge forward again with hope and joy and, no, more waiting, more infernal waiting, and wanting, and watching, and praying. Pining.

The last note hung in the music room as though suspended from a taut wire before fading back into the shadows.

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