The First Kiss

by Grace Burrowes

  His hands settled low on Vera’s hips, steadying her as he came at the kiss from a different direction. James was tempting her, teasing her into parting her own lips even as he moved closer, pressing her back against the outside wall of the garage.

  In the space of a heartbeat, Vera’s pleasure was replaced by panic.

  Her hands, fisted on his jacket lapels one moment, shoved him away from her the next. Tried to shove him—he barely moved, though he lifted his head.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” She scooted away from him along the wall, scuttling like a rat in a searchlight.

  “Vera?”

  “I didn’t invite you over here so you could…could do that.”

  He took a few steps back, his expression puzzled. “Why did you invite me over here?”

  “Because the lock was scratched to smithereens and the sheriff won’t be out here until Wednesday and you’re the only neighbor I know and because…I don’t know!”

  “Sweetie, calm down.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Vera, please calm down. I did not kiss you to upset you, and I’m sorry if I have.”

  “So am I.” She crossed her arms and glowered across the wintry landscape to the bare trees edging the woods. They’d been pretty when she’d moved in, leafy guardians of her privacy. They looked sinister now. “Why did you kiss me?”

  Why had she kissed him back?

  James rubbed a hand across his nape. “To comfort you, to distract you, to give you something to think about besides the way your door has been vandalized. Because I wanted to.”

  Heaven help her, she’d wanted to too. “James, I like you—I like you a lot. Any woman would—but I’m not good at this. Whenever I think I’m putting my marriage behind me, I turn up all ridiculous, flustered, and confused again.”

  Good Lord, what if Twyla had come upon them kissing?

  “A little affection between grown-ups isn’t ridiculous, Vera.”

  That was a little affection to James Knightley? “If I can’t manage a little affection without losing my cool,” Vera retorted, “then I’m ridiculous. I’m sorry. I don’t want to feel ridiculous, and—we’re done kissing.”

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to tell him they were done being neighbors.

  “I do believe you’re the first woman in the history of women to put me on the receiving end of an it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech.” The smile James offered her was slight, dear, and even a little hurt.

  Vera tucked her hands in her pockets rather than brush her fingers over that smile. Ridiculous was an understatement.

  “I have to be very careful, James. I cannot trust my judgment where men are concerned, and there’s Twyla to consider. I’m sorry.”

  Far more than she could admit where he was concerned, she was sorry.

  He shifted so he stood beside her, both of their backs to the garage’s outside wall. “You liked your first husband OK, and you can’t berate yourself forever for choosing Donal. You said you were grieving, and Donal was someone you trusted.”

  She’d said that? Vera couldn’t even recall thinking it, but James’s version of events sounded plausible. It sounded true, in fact, and made her want to get away from James so she could think clearly about what he’d said.

  Also so she could cry.

  “The issue here is not Donal, it’s me. I’m apparently still in no condition to be kissing you.” Which was not James’s fault, or his responsibility to ascertain.

  Even B-flat minor wasn’t sad enough for how Vera felt to be running James off again.

  “You’re a grown woman, Vera, and you’re entitled to decide with whom you do and do not socialize. Don’t apologize for speaking your mind.”

  Why couldn’t he act even a teeny bit like a jerk and why, on this cold, stupid day, did the garage wall hold a hint of warmth?

  “James, I am sorry. I never used to be like this. I was steady and confident. You deserve nothing but the best, and I won’t bother you again.”

  A woman who wanted to kiss a guy good-bye after yelling at him for kissing her in the first place probably didn’t qualify as sane, much less steady or confident.

  “Yes, you will bother me, Vera Waltham. You might not call me again, but you surely to goodness will bother me.”

  B-flat minor minor minor.

  Vera expected James would walk off, just disappear back through the woods, because his vehicle was nowhere in sight, but he paused long enough to gently squeeze her shoulder, and abruptly, Vera could no longer contain the urge to cry.

  She dashed back through the damaged door rather than watch him leave her property.

  Chapter 7

  The sorry scene with James marked a turning point for Vera. She was frustrated with Donal and his silly games, but more to the point, she was frustrated with herself. The next time a sweet, sexy, lovely guy kissed her, no matter how rattled she got, she would not send him packing over a bout of nerves.

  She’d blown it with James Knightley, but she could learn from her mistakes.

  In that spirit, when Tuesday morning came, Vera was tooling east to Baltimore on Interstate 70, the fields and farms of central Maryland rolling past in their drab winter plumage.

  Will she ask me to play? Ask being a euphemism, of course. Vera had never suffered the sharp edge of Olga’s tongue, but she’d seen her mentor put many a musician in his or her place with a look, a word, an excruciating silence.

  A lesson with Olga Strausser was not for the faint of heart.

  Serious students only.

  And yet, the old woman vibrated with joy, courage, and vitality Vera craved like sunshine. The joy was there when Olga hugged her hello.

  “My Vera, my lovely Vera. How glad I am that you do not live in California, or Texas with all those cowboys. Come, we will have chocolate and sweets, and you will tell me of my little Twyla.”

  For a small woman, Olga had a fierce embrace.

  “Twyla’s hardly little anymore,” Vera said, draping her coat over a chair. “This weekend she went off into the woods by herself and was lost until a neighbor found her.”

  Given that opening, the interrogation commenced immediately. Gently, relentlessly, Olga prodded and questioned, and Vera spilled the story.

  Leaving out an awkward epilogue involving yet another first—and last—kiss with James Knightly.

  “An adventure, then,” Olga said, “but safely concluded like all good adventures. Now to our sweets.”

  James’s kiss had been sweet.

  They had chocolate, because Olga eschewed tea and coffee—and because Vera deserved to be haunted by a sweet, final kiss.

  “You are done with the divorce from that Scot?” Olga asked.

  How had she known to ask? “I am, mostly. The restraining order expires in a few weeks, and I expect Donal will pressure me to honor the few dates I haven’t canceled yet.”

  “You are stubborn, so you think, no, not for him shall I play.”

  “I am stubborn.” Vera set her empty cup down, though she’d barely tasted her chocolate. James’s kiss had tasted better. “I’m also enjoying the time off, Olga. I love raising my daughter, like having a real home, not simply a retreat between tours, and relish having students I can watch progress.”

  “These are important things to a woman,” Olga said, pushing the tray of buttery madeleines closer to Vera’s elbow. “You need to eat, Vera. Music takes energy.”

  Life took energy, but to Olga, music and life were of the same magic.

  “Olga, did you ever want to quit all together? Just let it all go, the performing, the practicing, the touring, the teaching?”

  “Oh, yes,” Olga said, taking a slow sip of her chocolate.

  The older woman was still beautiful. Not because she had lovely features, though good bones s
erved her well, but because she still embraced life with verve and humor. She enjoyed her chocolate; she ogled cowboys; she flirted with her doorman; she played the hell out of anything she set her hands to, be it music or cards or life.

  But was Olga ever lonely? “You wanted to quit?” Vera asked instead.

  “I did quit, three times. The last time I retired I was eighty-eight. What did I know? You think you shall die tomorrow, and then it’s six years later, and here you are still rattling around in your much vaunted retirement. This is a great joke on God’s part, but the humor is subtle.”

  “I’m not eighty-eight.”

  While Vera studied a cookie, she knew Olga was studying her.

  To admit the possibility of not being a musician, not being a pianist, much less a concert soloist, was a relief. Music was a lovely place to hide, an enchanted forest, but that forest had an admission price that was never paid in full and came with a full complement of trolls and warlocks.

  “You think next time, maybe a neighbor will not find our Twyla?”

  Vera had thought it, dreamed it, had probably played it a few times in B-flat minor too.

  “Donal took something out of me,” Vera said, putting the cookie back on the tray. “Something precious. I trusted him, I’d known him forever, I even found things to like about him, and he betrayed me.”

  Olga swatted Vera’s knee. “Play for me.”

  Ah, the keyboard, the ultimate dissection table. But with Olga, there was no refusing, none at all. One could bargain, though.

  “What would you like to hear?” Vera asked, rising and opening the cover of the vintage Bösendorfer that Olga had once toured with. “Some technique to warm up?”

  “Nothing too technical today. Maybe a little late Brahms, some dear old Chopin.”

  Blessed St. Cecilia. Those two. The musician who thought to approach either composer without technique well in hand was doomed.

  So, a test, and not simply of technique.

  Vera chose Brahms’s Opus 116, a suite of short works that was by turns tender, lyrical, and full of good old Teutonic bombast, leavened with the occasional contrapuntal passage just for fun. She’d liked these pieces since she’d met them as an adolescent. Liked them for their expressiveness and their challenge.

  Olga listened to three pieces in succession, eyes closed, humming softly as Rudolph Serkin had done even in concert. When Vera had played the final cadence, she closed the keyboard cover and remained on the piano bench, hands in her lap as she’d been taught.

  Judgment would come; no need to hurry it.

  After a dramatically long silence, Olga opened her eyes. “We are so serious. Come sit with me.”

  She patted the place beside her, and Vera obeyed, feeling more satisfaction than she ought. For the first time in three years, she’d played for Olga and played well. James would have been proud of her.

  “Vera, my dear, do you think Johann Sebastian wanted to bury eight of his twenty children?” Johann Sebastian Bach, to differentiate him in Olga’s parlance from the dabbling pack of offspring by the same last name.

  “Eight?”

  “His first wife, too, of course. Do you think Frédéric Chopin wanted to spend ten years rotting to death of consumption as he both composed and toured? Did Beethoven wake up one day and think what great fun it would be to lose his hearing? Did Brahms set out as a young fellow to go his whole life without the comfort of a wife to love him? And what of Mozart? A childhood spent being paraded around Europe like his papa’s trained monkey followed by poverty and heartache. And yet we have such music from him!”

  Vera’s Old Testament was shaky, but her music history was fairly solid.

  “They were great men, and great musicians,” Vera said. “They triumphed over hardship.”

  “They were merely human.” Olga smacked Vera’s knee again, harder this time. “They chose music, or it chose them, and they learned to be happy with their fates.”

  Vera was not happy. That’s the real reason she’d panicked at James’s kiss. She knew herself well enough to say that much with conviction, but the rest of the problem was harder to articulate.

  “This isn’t like when I’ve blown a performance, Olga. This is my life that’s in shambles.”

  “What shambles? You buried a husband, and a car accident was a hard way to lose him, but you were ready to be out from under his wing, just as you were ready to throw over that Scot whom you married in a momentary lapse of judgment. I have had two such lapses, but twice I also chose more wisely. But you, now you are free, and all you can do is doubt yourself. Humility is a virtue, but this fear, Vera… Is this what you want your daughter to know? That life can toss you off your piano bench like a bucking horse?”

  A direct, telling hit. Vera sat back and let her gaze roam over the great black grand piano across the room. How many people had it taken to move that one instrument here to Olga’s living room?

  “I want Twyla to be safe. I want to be safe.”

  “So you married Alexander, and he sheltered you and protected you and exploited you. The Scot exploited you more—though give the devil his due, he also worked hard to build your career. You might have allowed his exploitation endlessly, had he known how to care for you. Better that he didn’t.”

  Caring had never been part of the bargain with Donal, but neither had abuse. “I might still be performing if Donal had been less of a tyrant.”

  “So you’d perform, but would you be happy?”

  Vera thought about it for three seconds. “I’d be miserable.”

  “All right, then you stopped performing, but are you happy now?”

  No, and Vera didn’t need even three seconds to reach that conclusion. “I am content.”

  “Content is for men who are one hundred and three with bad knees,” Olga spat. “Listen to me. You are trying to refresh your playing and your confidence by hiding in the technique. It’s a good strategy. More of us should resort to it more often, though you will only partially succeed.”

  Partial success was better than no success at all. “I’m playing better. I am more confident with the notes than I ever knew I could be.”

  “The notes, bah!” Olga waved a hand that was still as strong and graceful as a young man’s. “When good musicians are young, they have the passion of the music. They play and play until they are drunk and reeling with it, with their talent, with their ambition. This is good. To learn the repertoire and perform it well takes stamina.

  “But then life sweeps you along, and you have a choice, Vera. You can try to sustain your career on a passion for the music alone, or you can allow yourself a passion for life. I say this because of who you are. Another must content himself with only correct notes, but you are capable of more.”

  Olga sat back, offering an endearingly self-deprecating smile. “I have become a preacher in my dotage. I do not recommend this retirement business. One soon bores not only oneself, but one’s guests. Will you play at my benefit next year?”

  The smile had been a decoy, and Vera was unprepared for the salvo that followed. Olga’s yearly benefit raised money for all manner of deserving charities. She recruited shamelessly from all musical walks, and performing for her was an honor.

  “I am old enough that I recall how it was years ago,” Olga said, studying her hands. “Nobody took a baby’s continued life for granted. Children died with alarming frequency where I grew up, and their first few birthdays and name days were celebrated with a certain caution. It’s the same now, at the end of life.”

  Vera helped herself to two more buttery, sweet madeleines. “Stop it, Olga. The death and dying speech will not get me to play.”

  “Then play for your daughter,” Olga said, dropping the lugubrious air as easily as she’d put it on. “Twyla takes a walk in the woods, and instead of being proud of her adventurous spirit, you fret yourself in
to a dark, dank little corner. I blame this on the Scot. Though you divorced him, he still controls you. Snap your fingers at him, Vera, and make him disappear from your life.”

  Olga gave a loud, crisp snap of her fingers right in Vera’s face.

  “I’m trying, Olga. He’s not disappearing as obediently as he should.” If anything, Donal’s presence loomed larger as the restraining order expiration date approached.

  Another part of the reason Vera had blundered so badly with James.

  “Then keep trying. Be more stubborn than Donal is, and take some of these cookies. They grow stale if I’m left to eat them all. I wish Sting had come to one of my benefits. Such an attractive man, and that voice…”

  If he had come, he might have found himself sharing the stage with some country music great, or the up-and-coming world music act to catch Olga’s ear most recently. The benefit would be a no-pressure venue to perform in, where Vera could play anything she chose and be guaranteed a positive reception. Olga had never extended this invitation to her before.

  And Vera hadn’t accepted.

  You’re snakebit… Snakebit was the name for when the enchanted forest turned dark and scary, and Vera no longer viewed getting home in one piece as a merry adventure.

  * * *

  As the week wore on, James tried to focus on his work, but all the ladies whose numbers he’d tossed out were abruptly determined to look him up.

  He let them, every single one of them, ring through to voice mail, and he did not return the calls. This behavior was quintessential Clueless Guy, and only a year earlier, it would have been unthinkable for James.

  Now he could not rise to the challenge.

  He did, however, exchange texts with his prospective piano teacher. She would come to his house—though he still hadn’t even a name to go with his mental image of her: sensible shoes; hair in an iron-gray bun that no grown man had ever seen down, even before she’d gone gray; no figure to speak of, and a metronome where her heart should be. She would be a relief as females went, and her name would be Irmantrude—Fraulein Piano Teacher, to him. James wouldn’t have to charm her.