This was different though. The familiar spike of adrenaline was infused with a warm, honeyed sensation that pooled in her stomach and made her body ache in places she’d never given a thought to.
She clenched her teeth and took a breath. Focus.
She walked from the lift to a reception area and gave her name to the man sitting behind the desk. While he searched for it in the computer, she picked one of her favorite pieces—not one of her own, but one of Mozart’s—and began to run through the notes.
Pictured her fingers flying over the keys. Effortlessly, joyfully.
It was something she always did before a performance, to remind her of how prepared she was. That she was ready. That she wouldn’t make a mistake.
“Just through that door there, Ms. Birch,” the receptionist said, smiling brightly.
“Thank you,” she replied, keeping her mind on the music as she walked to the door.
She tried to slow her breathing, keeping it in rhythm with the legato portion of the piece. Slow and steady. Don’t rush. Don’t falter. Smooth.
She opened the door and the notes fluttered from her head like startled birds. She wasn’t prepared for whatever this meeting was, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
Because Ethan was more frightening than a theater filled with three thousand people. He was sitting behind a broad, neat desk, his large hands folded in front of him, his expression even harder than it had been yesterday at her house.
“Good morning,” he said, unfolding his hands and putting them behind his head, the action so casual it was maddening. That he wasn’t tense at all when she felt like a slight breeze could shatter her was beyond unfair.
“Morning,” she said, refusing to lie and call it good. “I’m here for our mysterious meeting.”
“Have a seat,” he offered, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk.
“No.” She wasn’t going to put herself in that position. Him behind his big desk, her sitting there on the opposite side like a child about to be scolded.
Being meek and subservient didn’t work. It didn’t keep people with you. It only made you easier to deal with. And this past year she’d come to see that she’d been being thoroughly dealt with all of her life. That was one good result of having a bomb detonated in the middle of her existence. She wasn’t going to play the pawn anymore.
A harsh lesson learned the hard way. But she had learned it. In some ways, without her gilded cage, she was stronger now than she’d ever been. Even if it didn’t always feel like it.
A half smile curved his lips. She didn’t like that. Because it wasn’t an amused smile, it was something else. Something sort of dark beneath the surface of the expression. “No?”
“I’d prefer to stand,” she said stiffly.
He inclined his head. “If you like.”
He stood then, and she felt dwarfed. He was a foot taller than she was, and broad. More than that, he just seemed to fill the room with his presence. The something else that gave people whiplash as they passed him in the street, trying to get a look at him. Mad sex appeal or something. She stretched her neck and straightened her shoulders. It didn’t help.
“I would say that this was business,” he said. “That it’s not personal. But that would be a lie.”
She swallowed hard. “Would it?”
“Yes. I don’t need the money your home would bring in as a boutique hotel. I don’t need the money that would come in from buying the family business, Grey’s. But I don’t want him to have it. And that’s where you come in.”
“Me?”
“It was a nice accident, seeing that your home was about to be foreclosed on. I thought I might be able to help you out. For a fee.”
“A fee?”
“There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or, in your case, a free manor house situated a reasonable commuter distance from the city.”
“You must realize that I don’t have anything to give you,” she said, her heart sinking into her stomach at the same moment that the back of her neck started to prickle. He must know she didn’t have money. Which meant he must want something else. And that couldn’t be anything good.
“You’ve never heard my name?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Should I have heard it?”
“I know yours. And not just because you’re famous. Or, more accurately, I know your mother’s name.”
“How?”
“Do you know the name Damien Grey?”
“I …” She almost said no. But it was a name she knew, not the last name, but the first. A very familiar name. “Yes. Well, Damien, but … it could be a different Damien.”
“I’m betting not. Damien Grey is my father, and for several years, he was your mother’s lover.”
As revelations went, it shouldn’t have been shocking. It wasn’t as though she’d believed her mother had been out having tea parties while Noelle spent nights alone in grand hotel suites before performances, but her mind had never gone there.
She did remember her mother talking about Damien, though. Meeting him. Staying with him. She’d been eight, maybe, when that had started and she simply hadn’t put the relationship in the right context.
“I always thought he was in the music industry,” she said, realizing how stupid that sounded. She shook her head. “But what does this have to do with me? Or is it all part of drawing out the torture that has been the past year of my life? I’m not quite dead yet, want to land the fatal blow?”
“I have a proposition for you.”
She gave him a pointed glare and drew on every shred of strength she’d been building in herself for the past year. “If this has anything to do with filling the position in your life that my mother filled in your father’s, you can take your proposition and shove it up your—”
“I’d like you to be my wife.”
She took a step back and sucked in air, choking on it, coughing and coughing while trying to catch her breath.
“Are you all right?” Ethan took a step toward her and she held up her hand, gesturing for him to stop. A gesture he ignored.
He put his hand on her back, his touch warm and … comforting, in some strange way. A connection. She hadn’t had a connection with anyone in so long. She wondered if she ever truly had.
She cleared her throat and breathed deeply. “I’m fine now.” She stepped away from him.
“Do you need something?”
She’d have to make a list.
Yesterday’s craving came back to her in full force. “A latte?”
He nodded and walked back to his desk, pressing the intercom button on his phone. “Christophe, I need a latte.” He looked back at Noelle. “How do you like it?”
“Vanilla. With whipped cream.”
He repeated the instructions to Christophe then cut off the connection.
“It will be here soon,” he said.
She wanted to cry, and it was the stupidest thing. Yet she couldn’t stop the ache of emotion that tightened her throat. No, it wasn’t emotion, she told herself. It was her recent choking experience. That was all. “Thank