Page 100 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Dominic played the chord again.
He held it until it faded. And he sat for a time with his hands in his lap, just letting the sound echo inside his mind. Then he stood, walked to the door, and walked through it.
But he did not close it behind him. In fact, the key was still in the lock. He left it there too, and walked back down the corridor, and did not look back at the open door.
He did not need to.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The walk back from the park had taken longer than expected. James had found a snail on the south path and determined that it required full scientific inquiry—he had read something about locomotion that he wanted to test against direct observation, and he tested it thoroughly, and Annabelle had stood in the thin afternoon light and given him the time.
He was still talking about it on the way back through the gate. He had moved from locomotion to the comparative weight of shells, and then to a question about whether snails dreamed, which he had raised not as whimsy but as a genuine inquiry deserving a serious answer. She had given him one. She was listening to herself do it from a slight remove—the voice that moved through the day undisturbed, while the part of her that did not perform ordinary things stayed where it had been all morning, behind her sternum.
They came in through the front hall. James was two steps ahead, still mid-theory, and she was working out the afternoon—his reading hour, her correspondence, the long evening she had learned to fill rather than feel—when James stopped.
She nearly stepped into him.
He had gone wooden in the doorway, and so she followed the direction of his head.
The new music room door was open. The sound coming from it was slow and uncertain—a single note, a pause, another note, the halting shape of a melody worked out one key at a time by someone reading it off the space between presses.
James turned to look at her, but she had nothing for him. She simply looked back, just as perplexed. He turned and walked toward the door, and she followed behind him to find…
Dominic was sitting at the piano.
His back was straight, and his hands were in his lap, and the fallboard was raised, and he had been, from the evidence, pressing keys individually in the manner of someone mapping terrain. He looked up when James came into the doorway.
He saw Annabelle behind him.
He stayed on the bench. He did not arrange his expression into anything, which meant she got the unmanaged version: the careful stillness he used when he was uncertain, which she had learned to read as its own kind of speech.
James stood in the doorway. “You are playing the piano,” he said, confusion in his tone.
“I-I am…attempting it,” Dominic said, his tone gruff.
James looked at the keys, then at Dominic, then at the keys again, making the inventory.
“Would…Would you like to play with me?” Dominic asked.
It came out plainly. He had stripped the question of the hedging that most adults attached to invitations directed at children—it arrived as a direct question, which James received in the way he received all direct questions: as something to be answered.
He stared at Dominic for three full seconds. Then he crossed the room and climbed onto the bench.
He set his hands over the keys with the authority of someone who had been here many times and knew where everything was. His posture at the piano was already better than Dominic’s.
Annabelle stayed in the doorway.
Dominic placed his right hand on the keys and picked out a simple figure—four notes in a low pattern, the shape of a melody James would know. It took her a moment. Then she had it: a nursery song, the kind that moves from hand to hand until no one can say who originated it. James’s face changed when thefirst phrase came through. He found his place at the treble end and joined in.
They played together, and then Dominic pressed the wrong note. A half-step off, the wrong tone arriving in the room in a way that admitted no ambiguity.
“No.” James leaned across at once and pointed at a key two positions over. “That one. Not that one.”
Dominic looked at where he was pointing. He looked at the key he had pressed.
He let out a sound—small and brief, almost nothing, quickly gone. Annabelle heard it as what it was: a real laugh, surprised out of him, not deliberate.
“You’re a strict teacher,” Dominic said.
