by Lucy Monroe
Cassandra didn’t so much as smile, though he received yet another perfunctory, “Thanks.”
“I am surprised you wear so many bright colors.”
He got her full attention with that comment. She glared at him. “Why?”
“I would think you wouldn’t want to draw attention to yourself.” “Debilitatingly shy” did not equal “vibrant dress style” in his mind, but then he was no psychologist.
“What, you think I should dress only in shades of gray and wear my hair in a bun, or something?”
“No.” But he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had, knowing what he knew about her hermitlike ways.
“I’m not fond of talking to strangers.”
That was one way of putting it. Agoraphobic was another, but he didn’t say a word.
“That doesn’t mean I want to dress like a piece of cheap office furniture,” she huffed and then grimaced. “It’s important to me not be a caricature. I don’t like to perform, but I can leave the house. I’m uncomfortable meeting strangers, but I don’t need to dress like a hermit with no fashion sense. My life has enough limitations, I take pleasure where I find it and I happen to like bright colors.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“I can’t imagine why you’d need to.”
Come to that, he couldn’t, either. She wasn’t one of his pillow-mates that he bought gifts for in lieu of giving anything of himself. Hell, who was he kidding? He planned to give more of himself to Cassandra today than he had to anyone in a long time. He intended to give her his time.
Still. “Now, you’re just being argumentative for the sake of it.”
“You think so?” she asked in a tone so subtly snarky he couldn’t help but be impressed.
And amused, though he was far too intelligent to let that show. He should be irritated. He’d cancelled all but his most pressing meetings and cleared his schedule in a way he hadn’t done in years. He would still work some, but he planned to entertain Cassandra. After all, it was his fault she was being evicted from her house for the day.
When he told her so, her frown grew slightly less dark, but it was still in the black range on the color spectrum. “I suppose you expect me to be grateful.”
“Is that likely to be on the menu anytime soon?”
“No.”
She was so refreshingly honest. Once she’d got past seeing him as a stranger, he didn’t intimidate her like he did almost everyone else. Again, he had an unexpected urge to smile, but he smothered it. “I’d settle for you being happy.”
“Why on earth do you care if I’m happy, or not?”
“I don’t know, but I do. Chalk it up to friendship.”
She sighed and looked more frustrated than annoyed. “The thing is, I have obligations, too, Neo. The music for my next album isn’t going to write itself. Only I can’t work on it while strangers are tearing apart my house.”
“So, we both take an unexpected break. What is one day?” He ignored the fact that him saying such a thing would be considered anathema by any and all who knew him.
She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it, looking at him contemplatively. “When was the last time you took a break?”
That was easy. “My first piano lesson.”
“Before that?” she asked with a degree of consideration that made him nervous. Though he didn’t know why.
“I don’t take breaks.”
Now she would use that truth as an excuse and say she didn’t need time off, either.
She surprised him by asking very seriously, “Ever?”
“Ever.”
“You do need a break.”
So Zephyr and Gregor insisted. “If the number of compositions you have created in the past years is any indication, so do you.”
That seemed to startle her. “Music is my life.”
“According to both my doctor and business partner, that attitude is not a healthy one.”
“I exercise.”
He remembered seeing her home gym when showing Cole Geary around her house. “So do I.”
“I eat right.”
“So do I.”
“Then why are they so concerned for you?”
Neo shrugged. “Got me, but if it’s bad for me to be so obsessed by Stamos and Nikos Enterprises, then it stands to reason your single-minded pursuit of music needs tempering.”
“I don’t want to spend the day being dissected by strangers.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Why?”
“They’ll be too busy watching me in wonder.”
She laughed at that as he’d meant her to do. “It makes me cranky to think of my house getting torn up.”
“It won’t be torn up. Cole gave me his word that you’ll barely be able to tell they were even here.”
“How is that possible? I saw the list. They can never get it all done in one day.”
“In fact, they can.”
“Money talks?”
“In even more languages than I do.”
A smile played at the edges of her lips. “I’m fluent in Mandarin, Italian and German.”
“You are accomplished.” He himself spoke Greek and English, of course, but Japanese and Spanish as well. “I understand the Italian and German, considering your passion for piano composition, but why Mandarin?”
“I like the way it’s written.”
“You are fluent in the Kanji?”
“Yes, though I’m still studying. I have a pen pal from the Hunan province and he tutors me. He’s a scholar and something of a recluse.”
“What do you write to him about?”
“Music, what else? He plays and composes on the guzheng. It’s kind of like a Chinese zither. Unlike the older and more traditional guqin, which only has seven strings and no bridges, it has sixteen to twenty-five strings with movable bridges. He can create complicated and very beautiful compositions on it.”
She was babbling. She was still nervous about leaving with him and letting the security company do their job. But she was going to do it. He was proud of her.
“How do you share your music?”
“We both have Web cams.” She laughed, but it didn’t sound like she found that funny. “It’s kind of pathetic, but I see more of him and my other online friends via the Internet than I do anyone else.”
It was unfortunate, not pathetic. One day, he would help her make that distinction. “Have you ever wanted to visit him in person?”
“Yes.”
“Naturally, you have not gone.”
“I would. Though not easily, I can travel anonymously, but I have no one to travel with.”
“So, it is not simply leaving your house that bothers you?”
She lifted her shoulders in a half shrug before turning back to her breakfast without answering.
He wasn’t done with the subject however. “You don’t like being recognized as Cassandra Baker, the renowned pianist and New Age composer.”
“Something like that.”
“But you wouldn’t answer your door to the locksmith.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“My father used to say I was debilitatingly shy.”
From her tone, Neo guessed the other man had considered that a liability, most likely to his brilliantly talented daughter’s career plans.
“Were you always shy?”
“My mother said I was an outgoing toddler. That’s how they learned I was a musical prodigy. I was always trying to entertain them and discovered the piano at the age of three. I played music I had heard from memory.”
“That’s amazing.”
“That’s what my teachers said.”
“They started you with a teacher at age three?” He could not help the appalled shock in his tone.
“Mom came down sick and I guess my parents saw the lessons as a way to divert my attention from her so I would not demand too much of her time.”
“That would imply you spent signi
ficant time each day playing piano.”
“I did.”
“How much time are we talking here?”
“I don’t remember exactly.” Though something in her expression belied that claim.
“Take a guess.”
“A couple of hours every morning and evening before bedtime.”
“Impossible.”
“Entirely possible. And that does not count the time I spent practicing on my own.”
“You must be mistaken.” Children often miscalculated the length of time spent doing something, or so he had heard.
“I used to think I might have been, too. However, I found the records of my lessons in a box of papers after my father’s death and there it was in black and white.”
“What?”
“Proof my parents did not want me around.”
“That is a harsh assessment.”
“How did you end up in an orphanage?” she asked challengingly.
“My parents both wanted something different from life than being a parent.”
“Harsh assessment, or reality?”
“Touché.”
“I have often wished I hadn’t found those records. I preferred the gentler fantasy that I mistook the number of hours I spent working on my music before I was old enough to go to school.” She bit her lip and looked away, old sadness sitting on her like a mantle. “Cleaning out the house of my parents’ personal possessions was supposed to be cathartic.”
“Who told you so?”
“My manager.”
“And was it?”
She laughed, another less than amused sound. “Define cathartic. It forced me to face my loss, to accept that they were gone and never coming back. Which was good, I suppose.” She met his gaze again, remembered pain stark in her amber eyes. “But it hurt. Horribly.”
“I am sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Enhancing your security will not make them any more gone,” he felt compelled to point out.
“I know.”
“But making the changes is bringing back those traumatic feelings, is it not?”
She nodded, but clearly forced herself to brighten. “You’re pretty perceptive for a business tycoon.”
“Figuring out what makes people tick is half the battle in business.”
“And I bet you are good at it.”
“Stellar.”
She laughed, this time sounding much happier. “Egotistical?”
He smiled in response. He liked making her laugh. “Honest in my self-assessment. Like right now, I know I’ll get damn short if I’m late for my teleconference.”
“Can you call in from your cell phone in the car?”
“Yes, but until I have my computer in front of me with the information I need, I won’t feel good about my input.”
“I bet you have most of it memorized.” But she got up from the table, gathering her dishes.
“I don’t like making mistakes.”
“I’d lay another bet that is an understatement.” She put the dishes in the sink. “Just to show I respect your schedule, I’ll leave these for later.”
He ignored the jibe. He respected her schedule, he just wanted to route it for the day. “I gave up betting when a careless wager led to me taking piano lessons.”
“Should I be offended?” she asked.
“No. I don’t regret being forced to accept my gift. It brought me a new friend.”
She shook her head, but her lips were curved in a small smile. “Some birthday pressie.”
“I think he did mean the lessons to be something special for my thirty-fifth.”
“He really thought you wanted piano lessons?”
“I wanted to learn to play when we were younger, but I hadn’t thought of that pipe dream in years.”
“Not such a pipe dream anymore.”
“No, but even more than that, I’m a huge fan of yours. Though I didn’t know it.”
“You didn’t know it? This I’ve got to hear, but not while it will make you late.”
An hour later, still reeling from the knowledge Neo was a closet fan and now considered her a friend, Cass listened to her latest self-recording on her MP3 player and took notes on what was lacking in the composition. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she told Neo she had work to do, too, but her implication she could only do it at home might have been stretching the reality of the situation.
She didn’t want to spend all day, every day, at her piano bench, so she had started working on self-recordings early on. She loved the flexibility her tiny MP3 player gave her. She could listen to it while exercising, cooking or practicing her Kanji writing. Or sitting at a table in an empty conference room in the Stamos & Nikos Enterprises building in downtown Seattle.
She’d bought her first one on the recommendation of another musician she knew online and had upgraded with each new technological advancement.
A tap on her shoulder alerted Cass to someone else’s presence.
She pulled one of the speaker buds from her ear and looked up. “Yes?”
“Mr. Stamos wanted me to make sure you have everything you need to make you comfortable.” Miss Parks, Neo’s personal assistant, lived up to her voice and attitude over the phone.
Blonde, in her forties, she wore her pale hair in a sleek chignon and dressed in a female power suit by Chanel, but it had to be from a previous year’s collection. Because this year the designer had gone whimsical, adding ruffles and lace that would look out of place on the businesswoman. Just as the polite query sounded out of character on her tongue.
Miss Parks clearly felt offering refreshments to her employer’s piano teacher was beneath her.
However the woman had absolutely nothing on Cass in the “annoyed nearly beyond endurance” stakes. While Cass sat in a strange conference room, in a huge office building filled with strangers, even more strangers were tearing her house apart.
She didn’t even attempt to hide her bad temper when she gave the blonde a curt, “Water would be nice.”
Never mind tea. That might soothe her and she didn’t feel like being soothed.
Without another word to the snarky PA, Cass put her speaker bud back in her ear and returned to work. A bottle of water and a glass with a slice of lemon showed up at her elbow a few minutes later.
Bad mood or not, Cass remembered her manners and looked up to give the deliverer a polite thank-you, only to clash eyes with a man every bit as overwhelming presence-wise as Neo.
Even if she hadn’t recognized him from publicity photos, she would have known he couldn’t be anyone but Neo’s business partner, Zephyr Nikos.
CHAPTER SIX
THE clearly charismatic Greek smiled. “No problem.”
She yanked her headphones out of her ears. “Um…”
“I’m glad to get the chance to meet you in person.” Zephyr’s smile would have been lethal if she hadn’t been inoculated that morning with a kiss from Neo Stamos. “Neo isn’t your only fan around here.”
She put her hand out. “Thank you for buying the piano lessons, Mr. Nikos, and I’m glad you enjoy my music.”
“Zephyr, please. And don’t thank me yet, you’ve only given Neo a few lessons.” He leaned against the dark solid wood conference table. “The jury’s still out on what kind of student he’ll make, but my gut tells me that if he sticks with it for the full year, you’ll earn every one of the hundred thousand dollars I donated to charity on his behalf.”
Cass let her lips tip in a wry half smile. “I’m sitting here working from my MP3 player instead of my piano because he’s got a team of construction workers and security personnel tearing apart my home. I’m under no illusions he’ll be an easy student to have.” Or friend for that matter.
“They’re replacing a few doors and windows, that is hardly tearing the place apart,” Neo said from behind Cass, his tone chiding.
She pushed her chair back and looked at him over her shoulder. “Are you done with your meeting?”
“I am.” He raised a single dark brow at Zephyr. “I thought you had a full schedule this morning, Zee.”
The other gorgeous Greek shrugged his broad shoulders. “I had a minute and I decided to meet the reclusive Cassandra Baker.”
“It’s hardly a public appearance,” Neo said, sounding borderline irritated. “She graciously agreed to spend the day with me while they do necessary security work on her home. She is not here for your entertainment.”
She hadn’t exactly been gracious, but she appreciated Neo’s minor prevarication on her behalf.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t have a baby grand moved into Conference Room B for an impromptu concert,” Zephyr mocked, clearly amused by Neo’s protective stance.
“If you had, I might have gotten more done,” Cassandra joked. “There are limits to what I can do working off my recordings.”
“You can afford to take some time off work,” Neo said with a perfectly straight face.
Zephyr laughed in clear amazement, his expression one of disbelief. “Coming from you, that’s standup comedian material.”
“I cancelled several events on my calendar today.”
“I know.” Zephyr gave Cass a strange look. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet this wonderfully talented lady. I knew she was a master pianist, I didn’t know she was a miracle worker.”
“More like a whiner,” Cass said self-deprecatingly. “Neo would never have gotten me out of my house and those workmen in if he hadn’t dragged me himself.”
She didn’t mention his form of persuasion had included a kiss that had about melted her brain.
“You are not a whiner.” Neo had come to stand by Zephyr and his expression was more than a little stern. “You have agoraphobic issues that have to be addressed with the seriousness and caution they deserve.”
“That sounds like something you’d read in a textbook on the subject,” she said. And then realization dawned. “You’ve researched my condition.”
“I had one of my top people do it for me.”
“Wow. You take being my student way more seriously than anyone else has in the past.”
Neo shrugged, but Zephyr appeared anything but nonchalant at the admission. He was once again staring at his business partner with blatant incredulity.
