He tried to get his wildly spinning mind under control enough to send the music dancing through her as he had done before. It was difficult to concentrate when everything in him was wrapped up in her, but he managed to regain some semblance of balance and sent some notes drifting and cavorting through her, just enough to make her tremble.
It worked. She groaned softly and bit down on his bottom lip. He gave a quiet chuckle, delighting in the effect his talent had on her. She made him feel so sexy, so wanted, so alive.
Her fingers found their way beneath his shirt and trailed up his sides, leaving lines of scorching fire in their wake. She drew her nails lightly back down and he shivered.
“Liron.” His name left her lips in the sultriest breath of sound. “Do you really think I could be your mate?”
“There is no one in this world or any other better suited to me than you,” he murmured while moving his lips to her neck again.
“I want to stay here,” she whispered.
“I want that as well.”
“I want to always stay here. I want to be yours.” He slowly drew his fingers up her bare arm in a music-infused caress. She shuddered and her hands came up to grip his shoulders. She pushed him back gently, enough for her to stand up straight, and broke just enough of the spell to be taken seriously. “I mean it. I want to be yours.”
He nodded, frowning in slight confusion. “I’ve never denied you, Melody. As long as you want to stay here, you are welcome to.”
Something in her gaze softened, and she reached up to touch his face. “Liron, I’m not saying, ‘I want to be yours until I get bored.’ I’m not going to do what Elizabeth did.”
He flinched at the mere mention of her name and looked down. The thought of Melody abandoning him was a hundred times worse than when his former wife had walked out on him. In such a short amount of time, she had wrapped herself around him that much.
She sighed and continued to touch his face, his chest, his shoulders. Anywhere her hands fell, she soothed and caressed. He closed his eyes, holding those precious touches close to his heart. “I don’t know how much you know about the human world, but where I come from, many people spend their lives feeling like they don’t really belong anywhere. Like they are alone, an oddity. The only time I ever felt like I truly belonged was when I was surrounded by music. When I went to Juilliard, when I would play in the orchestra, when I would compose. Being lost within the notes and the sweeping sound felt like home to me. And I shared it with my parents, so I never felt lost or alone.
“When they died, it was like I could never get back to that place again. It felt hollow and cold when I tried. Liron, it wasn’t until I found you and came here that I felt that again. That safety and sense of belonging. It no longer exists in my world. It exists with you. Maybe by human standards, it doesn’t make sense, but I don’t even care. I’ve fallen in love with you, and I’m starting to realize that maybe I just think more like a muse.”
Liron’s heart tripped over itself at her words. Could she really love him? Because of his disastrous marriage, he had begun to think he was incapable of being loved. Could someone as wonderful, as inspiring and lovely as Melody, really want him? The realization that she wanted to give him everything he had longed for and been denied was overwhelming.
He sighed and leaned in to rest his forehead against hers. “It’s the strangest thing,” he murmured. “I was paired with Elizabeth as my perfect muse mate. We were supposed to inspire one another and, in turn, inspire humans. She was unhappy with her life, her world, her arrangement with me. She wanted riches and grandeur and a short life full of material things and fame. Then, a human woman walks into my world, full of passion and beauty, with a connection to me that is so strong, I hear compositions when she enters the room. Elizabeth abandoned me because she thought like a human, and wanted a human life. At random, I was given a human who thinks like a muse. And not just any muse. The perfect one for me.”
She snuggled closer to him. “Maybe I was misplaced for awhile. Now, I finally found home again.”
His breath caught in his throat and emotion overwhelmed him like a tidal wave. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. She felt perfect against him, and his heart was so full. “Stay with me,” he whispered, burying his hands in her golden hair. “Stay with me always. Be mine. My mate, my inspiration, my song.”
She pulled back to look up at him and grinned. “Liron Tabor, I thought you’d never get around to actually asking me. I refused to be the one to propose to you.”
He laughed and claimed her lips with his again.
“So, when do we get to do it?” she asked.
He pulled back and frowned in bewilderment. “Pardon?”
She grasped his hands in hers. “Let’s do it now!”
His lust-induced brain was having difficulty latching onto what she was actually talking about. “Do…what exactly?”
She frowned. “Well, you said all we had to do was find two witnesses and claim each other or something, right?”
Muse marriage…that’s what she was referring to. Right. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. “Yes.”
“Well, let’s go!”
“Now?” She may have thought like a muse, but her time frame still existed on human. “Melody, it’s the middle of the night. You haven’t slept in almost an entire day and you had a very emotional evening. Do you really think it’s best to—?”
“No, you haven’t slept. I slept for a couple hours when I went back home. But that’s because my entire day took up like two hours or whatever in your world. And what are you trying to tell me? That you don’t want to do it?”
At the sly way her eyebrow raised, he was beginning to wonder if she was intentionally making his thoughts go south. His body raged like an inferno, and he briefly considered if any of this was a good idea. She could very well kill him by the end of all of this. His blood could reach a degree that was impossible for his body to sustain and he could spontaneously combust. Or, given the fact that he’d been celibate for a really long time by both human and muse standards, he could have a heart attack right there, if he even remembered how to make love to a woman at all. It wasn’t like Elizabeth had given him much practice.
“Liron?” She shook his hand and frowned at him, concern that he might actually be changing his mind flashing over her lovely features.
His heart melted and all doubts vanished from his mind as love for her chased them all away. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, then pulled back and grinned. “All right, let’s go.”
Chapter Fourteen
The woman who came to the door of the house that Liron and Melody invaded looked like she had literally just crawled out of bed. Her brown hair was sticking up in about five different directions, and she was rubbing groggily at her puffy eyes.
“Hi!” Melody greeted. Behind the woman, a man came trudging up, his red stocking cap making him look very gnomelike. “Oh, good! There are two of you!” She squeezed Liron’s hand and suppressed a giggle. His rich, quiet chuckle inflamed her, and the joy she felt surge to life within her heart was overpowering.
She turned to face him and shook his hand. “Go on,” she urged.
He raised an eyebrow. “Me first?”
“Well, sure. I don’t know what I’m doing!”
He grinned and reached out to tuck back an errant strand of her hair. “Melody…uh….” He frowned in question.*
“Hoffman,” she supplied.
“Melody Hoffman, I claim you as my mate, my inspiration and chosen one.” The warmth in his gaze was almost tangible.
His words seemed to flow through her and take root in her heart, and she closed her eyes, letting out a shaky breath. If she didn’t know any better, she would have sworn that they actually filled a place within her that had been waiting for them, for him, forever. None of it made any sense.
None of it had to.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. She lost herself within t
he bottomless depth of his gaze, and while none of this was how she had ever envisioned herself getting married, nothing had ever felt more natural and right to her. “Liron Tabor,” she murmured. “I claim you as my mate…my inspiration and my chosen one.” The joy on his face was like the sunrise to her. She stared at him for a long moment, feeling such peace, such contented wonder, when she looked into his eyes.
The man cleared his throat suddenly. “Are you two finished? Because, with all due respect, we’d like to go back to sleep now.”
Melody and Liron turned to face the groggy couple. She glanced back up at Liron. “Are we finished?” It was all so simple. Could things in life really be that simple? You feel creative? Then create something. You love someone? Just tell them and you’re legally married. You’re emotional? It’s perfectly acceptable. The philosophy was so hard for her to wrap her mind around, but her heart embraced it as the most natural thing in the universe.
Liron nodded that they were indeed finished, and he took her hand to lead her away from the small, thatched hut they had run to closest to Liron’s home. The couple shut the door and Melody turned, followed Liron down the sandy path to the cliffs for several paces, then stopped in bewilderment. She felt like her brain was having a difficult time catching up with reality.
“Oh my gosh,” she murmured. “I’m your wife.”
He turned to face her, alarm clouding his beautiful face. “Do you regret your decision?”
She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, it’s just….” She shook her head again as it seemed to be the only action capable of expressing how rattled her mind felt. She looked up at him and smiled. “People don’t do things like that in my world. Ever. I mean, not unless they’re drunk and in Vegas.” He arched an eyebrow in mild confusion. She giggled and took his hand, twining their fingers as she continued to stroll down to the shore.
“Humans have a constant battle between mind and heart,” she explained. “We are taught that what we feel is treacherous. It can get us into trouble if we follow our emotions without thinking them through. And, for the most part, that’s true in my world. Blindly following your emotions can get you into a wealth of trouble where I come from. The human world is full of lies and deceit and people taking advantage of others.”
“We have that here, as well, Melody,” he interrupted. “Caution is a necessary part of life in any dimension, but muses are creative beings. And in order to create, we must embrace our emotions. Emotion is vital to creation.”
She smiled at the simple explanation. Maybe that was why his world appealed to her so much. “With humans, it’s much more complicated,” she continued. They reached the shore and she bent down to remove her shoes so she could walk in the sand. “For example, tonight, or maybe it was three days ago by now.” She shook her head. “Who knows? Time is all messed up for me right now.” He laughed softly and his fingers tightened over hers. “Anyway, when I was at that symphony, the piece I heard upset me. I had an emotional meltdown. Here, you held me, you listened to me, you let me cry and let my emotions run their course.”
“Well, of course. What else would I do?”
She smiled wryly. “Look at me like you feared for my sanity because it’s not ‘healthy’ to be having such an emotional reaction a year after my parents passed away.”
He blinked in obvious bewilderment and frowned. “That’s ridiculous. That kind of loss is not something you can eradicate from your being. And grief is something personal. There is no formula for it.”
They stopped close by where they had shared their passionate moment before, and Melody sighed as she turned to look at the sea. The water was inky in the darkness and the air was moist and electric. Off in the distance, lightning lit up the sky and made the waves angry and turbulent. A storm was rolling in, but was still far enough away to be of no imminent danger. “I know that, but humans are taught that, if you haven’t moved on, you don’t know how. Life doesn’t stop, so you’re not supposed to stop either. Keep busy and you won’t hurt. Bury it until it’s so far down you forget about it…until you’re fifty and it all comes back to kick your butt and you have a nervous breakdown.” She rolled her eyes. “Our society is stupid, the philosophies we live by. Emotions are sometimes seen as the enemy, and if you are an emotional creature, and you don’t want everyone telling you that you need therapy, you had better learn to hide everything you’re feeling behind a great big, giant, fake smile.”
He snorted his displeasure. “I will never ask you to hide what you feel from me.”
She turned to face him and smiled. “I know that. I know I don’t need to worry about that here. That’s why, even though my human mind, which has been conditioned for twenty-seven years to never trust my emotions, was screaming at me back there that I was doing the most impulsive, stupid thing I could have ever imagined, my heart knew it was right.” She stepped closer to him and ran her palms up his chest in the way he liked. “My heart has always known you were right. Ever since I played your music.”
His arms encompassed her and his lips met hers in a tender, yet needy kiss that turned her whole body to mush. The wind picked up, tossing her hair and tugging at her dress, causing her to mold herself more intimately to Liron. Something shifted between them, morphing with the realization that they belonged to one another now. No barriers, no limits, no rules. She was his, and he was hers. And she couldn’t help but feel as if she had been waiting her whole life for this very moment. This very scene. It was better than any written song, any composition, for this was the song created by the rhythm of their hearts beating in tandem. It was theirs, their song together. He had been the missing piece of her concerto all along.
Pulling away with a soft breath, Liron looked down into her eyes and she saw the same longing in his gaze that she herself felt. Without any words, he took her hand and led her down the shore to where the craggy cliffs had created a bridge of sorts. There was a large hole eaten away out of the rock, open on both ends, but creating a shelter from any kind of inhospitable weather.
He turned to face her, and searched her eyes once again. Her breath caught at the smoldering desire she saw burning within his blue gaze, and her heart melted at the silent question that she could still read within it. She let out a soft sigh and reached up to push his hair back from his face and trail her fingers down the line of his jaw.
The tender gesture caused him to shiver and he squeezed his eyes shut, bringing his forehead to rest against hers. “Melody,” he whispered, his voice holding an ache to it.
“Shhh,” she breathed, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m yours now. Always. I promise.” She lifted her lips to his to seal her vow, meaning it within the very depths of her soul. She didn’t care that her human mind said it was ludicrous and hasty. Her heart knew it had finally found home.
He took her face in both of his hands as he kissed her, parting her lips to deepen it. She rose on her toes to press herself fully against his strong frame. Lovely, wonderful notes invaded her mind, and she felt their vibrations in every cell of her body.
He slipped his arm around her waist and, with infinite gentleness, lowered her to the soft sand below. He kissed and nibbled at her lips in an unhurried fashion that belied the hunger she felt within him just below the surface. She reached up to tangle her fingers in his hair and banished any lingering doubt from her mind. Whenever she was with Liron, everything else fell away.
“You are such a gift,” he whispered as he kissed his way down her throat and across her collarbone. “I don’t know what I did to end up with such a perfect present.”
She smiled. “You wrote a music score that spoke to my heart,” she murmured. Her fingers absently trailed over the buttons of his shirt and began to undo them.
He sat back and hastily removed the garment, throwing it off to the side and smiling softly down at her. “That score was my heart.”
She sat up and ran her hands up his chest, delighting in how much more sinful the
simple touch was when her fingers were gliding over his bare skin. He was all lithe muscle, lean and elegant.
He shivered. “I don’t know what it is about when you do that. It makes all my thoughts scatter.”
She grinned and pressed soft kisses here and there, without an agenda, just wanting to feel and taste his skin. She slid her hands around to his back and twined her arms around him, resting her cheek on his chest. She closed her eyes and sighed in contentment. “Your heart is a symphony, Liron.”
His arms tightened around her for a moment before he took her face in his hands and tilted her lips up to meet his. He claimed them in a fierce, impassioned kiss, his tongue marauding her mouth in a primal, wild dance that made her heartbeat trip over itself in its attempt to accelerate so quickly.
He guided her back down onto the sand and she tangled her fingers in his hair as he explored her mouth. After a few moments, he pulled away just enough to cause her to protest. He smiled down at her and caressed her cheek before lowering his lips so that they hovered just above hers. She could feel his breath, and with every warm exhale that touched her lips, the softest, faintest sounds of whispering music filtered through her. She closed her eyes and fidgeted, trying to seal the kiss he was teasing her with. She wanted to feel the velvet softness of his lips, wanted to satiate her hunger for him, as well as for the music she couldn’t quite hear completely.
His low chuckle caused a louder burst of notes in her mind, and they traveled through her like electricity, lighting her ablaze for the rest of the song and the rest of its creator.
Instead of kissing her lips as she had anticipated, Liron turned his attention to her collarbone. He pressed a gentle kiss there, and she sucked her breath in as another measure of music cavorted through her body, heart, and mind.
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