Rock Wedding(58)

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 experienced, the soaring highs making her feel as if she were flying while the somber notes brought tears to her eyes. She was on her feet with the rest of the audience come the end of the concert, clapping enthusiastically and calling for an encore.

They got one.

“That was so wonderful,” she whispered in the aftermath.

Abe, his hand firmly clamped around hers as they stood to exit the concert hall, passed her his program to hold. “Not their best performance, but damn good.”

“Not their best?” Sarah’s mouth fell open. “How much better can they get?”

“You’ll have to keep being my plus one if you want to find out.” He maneuvered them through the crowd milling around in the large atrium outside the performance chamber.

Sarah didn’t consciously realize he was still holding her hand until they were in the elevator to the parking garage, and then she didn’t want him to let go. Just like she hadn’t been able to stop herself from saying yes when he asked her out. Fear licked over her heart, quelling the breathless joy she’d found in the music.

Abe had hurt her so much.

“You want to stop for a snack?” Abe asked after they were in the SUV.

And the words just spilled out. “Let’s go to bed.” It was only chemistry, nothing more. She’d surrender to it, let it burn out. And see what was left.





CHAPTER 22



ABE WAS FUCKING GLAD HE HADN’T started driving, or he’d have plowed into something right then. “Sarah.”

“You heard what I said.” Tone firm, she stared straight through the windshield, but her breathing gave her away, shallow and a little too fast.