Page 99 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Annabelle’s hand on his chest, in the dark. He let himself remember the weight of it…the warmth. Her voice saying:You’re here. I’m here.
He held it.
She had not moved her hand. She had stayed, which was the thing that undid him, not the words—she had stayed with her hand on his chest in the dark and felt his heartbeat and counted his breathing and not made anything of it at all, as though staying were the simplest thing in the world.
He breathed out and took another step. The floor was cold through his boots, and before he knew it, he was in the middle of the room. He breathed in again.
Then, he reached the piano. He was standing two feet from it, with unsteady hands, and the image was working at the edge of his vision—the dark line along the keys, the shape against the pedal board—but he managed to keep breathing as he gripped the edge of the linen and pulled.
It came off in a long sweep, dust rising, and the keys appeared, ivory and ebony, old now, the ivory gone slightly yellow at the edges. The fallboard was closed, but… it was still the same piano.
The image came then.
It did not come slowly or by degrees. It came all at once, the way it always came: his father’s hands, and the blood, dark in the cracks between the keys, and the sound of it still in the air of the room though there was no sound. The shape of her against the pedal board. The quality of his father’s breathing—ragged and very slow.
Dominic gripped the edge of the cabinet with both hands.
The room had gone wrong at the edges. His breathing was too fast and too shallow, and he could hear it from the outside of himself, could hear how it had gone wrong. His legs were not going to hold this steady. The light in the room was too much and too little at the same time, and the piano was in front of him, and the image was all around it, and his throat had closed down to nearly nothing.
Breathe.
He closed his eyes.
Her voice in the dark, steady and unhurried: You’re here. I’m here. Breathe. Her thumb moving across the back of his hand in slow passes, not calling attention to itself, simply there. Theway she had counted his breathing without counting out loud—he had known she was doing it, had known she was matching her own breathing to his, had felt the evidence of it in the rise and fall of her chest against his arm.
She had not made it a performance. She had simply done it, and he had followed without meaning to, the way a body follows a rhythm it recognizes.
He breathed in. Held it, and then. Out.
The floor was still cold through his boots. The cabinet was cold under his palms. The room was where it had always been—the windows at the far end, the walls on either side. His heartbeat was still too fast, but it was in his chest, where it belonged.
In again. Hold. Out.
He breathed until his legs held properly. He breathed until the edges of the room came back. He breathed until the image had not gone—it would not go; it had lived in him for twenty-three years, and it was not going anywhere now—but it had moved back to where he could see it without it being the only thing he could see.
He opened his eyes and fixed them on the keys before sitting down on the bench.
He had not sat here since the night before she died. He had been nine years old, and she had arranged his hands over hers andsaid: Listen for the middle note—do you hear it? He had been trying to hear it when she sent him to bed. He had gone up the stairs and lingered at the top, wanting to hear more of her playing through the floor.
He raised the fallboard. The keys were ivory and ebony, old and slightly yellowed. They were clean. He looked at them for a time, the fallboard up, the room quiet around him.
He set his hands on the keys; the cold of them going through his fingers at once. He did not press anything yet, taking it as slowly as he could, sitting there with his hands on the cool ivory and looking at the garden wall through the window, at the grey London sky above it.
Then he pressed a single note.
Middle C.
It rang out into the room and died slowly, the way old instruments do, the resonance going and then gone. The room did not close around it.
He played three more notes—a chord low in the bass, the opening his mother used for a piece she had played often. He had not known, until this moment, that he still carried it: the shape of it in the muscles of his hand, waiting there since he was nine years old.
They rang out and went quiet.
And instead of his father’s hands, he saw hers. Her long fingers…the way she sat at the bench—always straight, which she had explained to him was mechanics rather than manners: you breathe better upright, the air goes all the way down. The way she tilted her head when a piece went right, listening for something just past the room.
He remembered Annabelle’s hands on the keys at the Fairmont soiree. The way the room had gone quiet around her without her seeming to notice it, and the music had moved through everyone standing in it, and he had stood at the back and not been able to look away.
He remembered James’s face when the new piano arrived. Both hands pressed flat to the cabinet, stock-still, his eyes wide and full of what he was holding—the way he looked when a thing mattered, and he needed it to stay exactly as it was.
