With a start she remembered he was a prince. Royalty. Should she curtsey or something? He’d disappeared from the practice room before they could be formally introduced.
She cleared her throat and took a tiny step back. ‘My apologies, monsieur, but I don’t believe there is anything for us to discuss.’
‘I assure you there is. Get in the car. It is too cold to have this discussion out here.’
He spoke as only a man used to throwing his weight around could.
‘Is this about the solo? I did explain to your assistant earlier that I have a prior engagement for the gala weekend and won’t be able to attend. My apologies if the message never reached you.’
The assistant, a middle-aged man with an air of implacability about him, had been unable to hide his shock when she’d said she couldn’t do it. The orchestra directors had simply stared at her with pleading eyes.
‘The message did reach me—which is why I turned back from the airport and returned here, so I could discuss the matter with you directly.’
His displeasure was obvious, as if it were her fault his plans had been ruined.
‘You will need to cancel your engagement. I wish for you to play at my grandfather’s gala.’
‘I wish I could as well,’ she lied. A lifetime of dealing with forceful personalities had prepared her well for this moment. No personality came more forceful than her mother’s. ‘But, no. It is not something I can get out of.’
His brow furrowed in the manner of someone who had never had the word no uttered within his earshot. ‘You do realise who my grandfather is and what a huge opportunity this is for your career?’
‘Yes, he is the King of Agon—and I do understand what a great honour it is to be selected to play for him—’
‘And the majority of the world’s great statesmen who will be there—’
‘But there are many other violinists in this orchestra,’ she continued, speaking over him as if he had not just interrupted. ‘If you audition them, as you had planned, you will find most are far more talented than me.’
Of course she knew what a huge event the gala was going to be. Her fellow musicians had spoken about little else for weeks. Every orchestra in Europe had been alerted to the fact that Prince Talos Kalliakis was searching for a solo violinist. When it had been confirmed yesterday that he was coming to audition the violinists at the Orchestre National de Paris there had been an immediate mass exodus as every female musician in the orchestra had headed to Paris’s beauty parlours for highlights and waxing and all other manner of preening.
The three Princes of Agon were considered Europe’s most eligible bachelors. And the most handsome.
Amalie had known she wouldn’t audition, so hadn’t bothered to join the exodus.
If she’d known for a second that Talos had been listening at the door to her practice she would have hit as many bum notes as she could without sounding like a screeching cat.
There was no way—no way in the world—she could stand on the stage at the Jubilee Gala and play for the world. No way. She couldn’t. The mere thought of it was enough to bring her out in a cold sweat.
The chill of the wind was picking up. She scrunched her toes inside her cold boots, which were getting wetter by the second as the icy snow seeped through the tiny seams and spread to her socks. The back of Talos’s car looked very snug and warm. Not that she would find out for herself. The chill in his eyes perfectly matched the weather whipping around them.
‘Excuse me, monsieur, but I need to go home. We have a concert tonight and I have to be back here in a few hours. Good luck finding your soloist.’
The hardness of his features softened by the slightest of margins, but his eyes—she’d been right, they were brown: a light, almost transparent brown, with the blackest of rims—remained hard.
‘We will talk again on Monday, despinis. Until then I suggest you think hard about what you are giving up by refusing to take the solo.’
‘Monday is our day off. I will be in on Tuesday, if you wish to speak to me then, but there will be nothing for us to talk about.’
He inclined his head. ‘We shall see. Oh—and when we next meet you may address me by my formal title: Your Highness.’
This time her lips tugged into a smile—one she had no control over. ‘But, monsieur, this is France. A republic. Even when we had a royal family, male heirs to the throne were addressed by the title of “Monsieur”, so I am addressing you correctly. And I feel I should remind you of what happened to those who boasted of having royal blood—they had their heads chopped off.’
* * *
Amalie took her seat on the stage, in the second row from the back, nicely encased amongst the orchestra’s other second violins. Exactly where she liked to be. Hidden from the spotlight.
While she waited for Sebastien Cassel, their guest conductor, to make his indication for them to start she felt a prickling on her skin.
Casting her eyes out into the auditorium, she saw the projected ticket sales had been correct. She doubted they were even at half capacity.
How much longer could this go on?
Paris was a city of culture. It had accommodated and celebrated its orchestras for centuries. But the other orchestras weren’t housed in a flea pit like the Théâtre de la Musique; a glorified music hall. Once, it had been full of pomp and glory. Years of neglect and underinvestment had left it teetering perilously, almost into the red.
A large figure in the stalls to her right, in the most expensive seats in the house, made her blink and look twice. Even as she squinted to focus more clearly the thumping of her heart told her who the figure was and explained the prickling sensation on her skin.
Immediately her thoughts flickered to Prince Talos. There was something about that man and the danger he exuded that made her want to run faster than if a thousand spotlights had been aimed at her. His breathtaking physical power, that gorgeous face with the scar slashing through the eyebrow, the voice that had made her blood thicken into treacle...
Juliette, the violinist she sat next to, dug a sharp elbow into her side.
Sebastien was peering at them, his baton raised.
Amalie forced her eyes to the score before her and positioned herself, praying for her fingers to work.
Being at the back of the eighty-strong number of musicians usually made her feel invisible—just another head in the crowd, with the spotlight well and truly away from her. She couldn’t bear having the spotlight pointed at her, had actively avoided it since the age of twelve. More than that: she had cowered from it.
She couldn’t see him clearly—indeed, she didn’t even know for certain that it was him sitting in the stalls—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone in the audience had their eyes fixed firmly on her.
* * *
Talos watched the evening unfold. The orchestra was a professional unit and played with a panache even the most musically illiterate could appreciate.
But he wasn’t there to listen.
Once the concert had finished he had a meeting with the owner of this ramshackle building.
He’d originally planned to take his jet back to Agon and visit his grandfather, relieved that his two-month search for a violinist was over. Amalie Cartwright’s belligerence had put paid to that.
Looking at her now, the fingers of her left hand flying over the strings of her violin, he could not believe her rudeness. Her thin, pretty