I had never been one for small talk and the condescension of a typical occupational question did nothing to turn me over to that particular type of conversation. I assumed she didn’t really want to know anything about what I did. Asking me about such things was simply easy and made things less awkward for her about me being here in her home.
I figured I’d save her from that.
I’d brought my toolbox into the kitchen and after I put the clean coffee pot back underneath the maker, I retrieved it.
“Not much schooling,” I told her, humoring her as I stood to my feet with the toolbox. “And I’m going to go ahead and get started.”
My job actually didn’t take any schooling at all, something I picked up in a pinch. It was the closest thing I could do for money to what I used to do in my more than nine-to-five. Truth be told I could work up to eighty-hour weeks in my old life.
I now gratefully knew it’d been a half life.
Alicia’s foot touched the floor in my thoughts. She’d had one on the legs of the chair next to hers. Closing her robe though the garment fully covered her, she stood.
“All right. Well, don’t worry about anything. If you need supplies just let me know. I’ll give you whatever you need and as far as payment that’s fine too—”
“No payment required,” I said, dark eyebrows jumping in my direction with the words. “It’s my pleasure. Jo was a friend.”
The fact I’d severely minimized the role the elderly woman had in my life and the life of my kid quite frankly turned my stomach a little. A friend didn’t just sit back and allow you to come into their lives day after day and be at peace with all you could give them—which wasn’t much. I couldn’t give Josephine much, but that didn’t matter. She never asked, not once about why my daughter was so withdrawn and why I never talked about the road that brought us to this small town in Kansas. She just let me come in, day after day and help her with small tasks she couldn’t do herself, the woman playing the piano in her living room while I did.
She sat and played for my mute daughter.
She played without question or reprieve, Laura’s eyes opened while she watched her play on the piano bench beside her. It brought my daughter peace, which was why Jo played. She’d play for hours.
A friend wouldn’t do that. A friend would try but they’d always wonder. They’d always question. The fact of the matter was Josephine Bradley wasn’t just a friend.
She was the epitome of family.
Moving my jaw, I nodded at Alicia before leaving the kitchen. She could keep her money, buy herself a purse or something.
My work took me outside for the better half of the morning, not surprising considering all the work that needed to be done out there. In reality, the entire property needed an overhaul, siding falling off and the roof of the house basically shot. Alicia had a few months at best with that. Whoever the realtors brought in to care for the general landscaping of the house should be fired. They mowed enough to create a partially symmetrical square around the house and didn’t even touch the current state of the trees or overgrown shrubs. It looked like no one had been out here in months.
Standing with my back to the house, I gazed out into the horizon. Josephine’s property line stretched far. I knew because she took Laura and me to walk out there many times.
A smile tugging at my lips, I recalled it had actually been my daughter to take Jo and me out, leading the charge with her run of the temperate land. There was actually a lake out there, an abyss beyond the canopied woods.
I saw my daughter come to life out there, smiling as she actually used to… play.
The pressure behind my eyes I squeezed away, pushing those visions that weren’t my current reality from view. I never once heard my daughter’s voice during those times, but that had been okay. She’d been getting there however slow.
I’d never been affected much by death before Laura came into my life. I lost both my parents at a young age and after their tragic car accident, I motivated myself. I’d be successful, take care of myself, and I had done just that. Then came Laura, her appearance not changing my life like it should have. I had been selfish when I found out I had a kid. Despite the knowledge, I still took care of number one. It wasn’t until I truly feared for her well-being that this fact changed, however late. I changed and because I had, I’d been utterly gutted by Josephine’s death. The difference between Laura and me was my status as an adult changed the ways in which I could mourn. I couldn’t mourn with Laura around for fear it might break her more than she already was.
I checked on her several times that morning, several unnecessary times but several nonetheless. She was still asleep, fine…
I drove a nail into Jo’s shed, securing the wall that no longer hung. If I had it my way, the means, people would be out here getting this whole place turned right side up.
I guess that was the perfectionist in me.
Driving one more nail for good measure, I stood back, the dark hair on my forearm catching sweat when I used it to wipe my brow. Taking a rag out of my back pocket, I used that instead, catching a vision when I returned the rag to my back pocket. Brown eyes widened in my direction, and slowly, Alicia lifted a hand from the kitchen window. She no longer had her coffee in hand, but she was still half dressed from what I could see, the summer breeze blowing about pink material against the swell of her full hips. She had her other hand on the half-open window and I assumed she’d just opened it.
Her fingers moving, she waved at me, her smile stiff before opening the window the rest of the way and escaping my gaze.
Bending back down, I ran my hand down the siding I just secured, the wall of stable wood running smooth under my palm. I knew this, construction and architecture. I knew the science behind it and what a man or woman’s hands needed to do to create art.
I moved away from the structure, not everything that had come into my life I understood so simply. I got this, though. I understood this.
I stared at the house, the breeze pulling sheer white curtains in and out of the window. Smells of femininity, faint and soft like roses in the wind lingered in the air around me and I found my time outside may have been too long.
Must be my mind playing tricks on me.
The temperature rose high even with the early hour already. I was in for a sweltering heat if I didn’t wrap up what I was trying to do soon. I’d stay all day normally.
I looked at the window again, my eyes flashing at a sudden sound. Closing my eyes, my chest felt on the brink of caving and I grabbed onto the shed I’d just finished working on. I needed to hold on for stability.
The heat really was being an angry bitch today. It had to be because no way was I hearing what I thought I heard, the sounds of a piano…
Josephine?
Gripping my head, I was soon squatting, trying to wake myself up or something. She couldn’t be playing, Josephine.
She couldn’t be still alive.
But I felt… her, the essence of her while the notes played in the air. She lingered in the wind as notes soft and incredibly dulcet sounded into the morning. The elderly woman could play like an angel to their harp, easy and natural.
And beautiful.
I hadn’t known so much beauty until she came into our life. I had been surrounded by anger and greed much of my adult life, most of which stemmed from myself. I had no reason to be angry. I had everything back then.
I pressed my hands on the shed, the notes still playing from the house, and suddenly, I found myself lost, the sounds of the piano inside moving through me. So deep, I held my heart. I could feel them there, alive within me.
Something told me I should go find out what all this was about, who was playing the piano inside and why, but I couldn’t make my boots move. I just stayed there, listening and pretending my reality was that of only weeks ago when Josephine had been alive and my life was finally, finally starting to right.
The sudden notes ripped themselves out of me with the abrupt
way in which they stopped. They ended too soon and I faced the direction in which I’d heard them, that kitchen window with the white, breezing curtains. I stepped in that direction.
I ran at the sound of a scream.
Chapter Six
Alicia
There was a little girl under my aunt’s sofa…
And I think I scared her more than she scared me.
I screamed in the end because I could only determine I’d been shocked. I heard something coming up behind me while I’d been playing my aunt’s vintage piano and that terrified me. I had never been much of a jumpy woman, on my toes constantly in the often male-dominated environment I worked in. Because I worked with men, strong and powerful leaders in both business and law, I had acquired somewhat of an iron stomach. I didn’t do flustered. But this girl, well, she unsettled me.
Especially, with what she’d done after the scream.
I barely caught a glance of deep-colored hair with tones reminiscent of a foul’s shiny coat before she’d fled, scurried really. With quick feet, she’d dropped to the floor and pushed herself underneath my aunt’s couch. She had been so quick I might have missed her had my senses not been so vigilant. I’d heard someone behind me, felt the ray of an intense gaze on my back.
I guess I had been correct.
She had been staring at me at least for a little while. I knew by how deep she’d gotten into the room. I heard her literally right behind me. Maybe only three feet away.
I had never seen anything like it, the way she’d reacted to me and her behavior. Yes, I had screamed, but the highest capability of that reaction to a stranger was a jump at best. This little girl hadn’t jumped. She’d cowered, shrinking to the floor before tucking herself away under the sofa. One might have seen that reaction from an animal, a terrified being in attempts to flee a predator.
Not another human being such as myself.
My fingers to my robe, I wrapped the material tight around myself, my body at odds with standing versus trying to say something to her. Finding an option in the middle, I bent at the knees. My intention had been to speak to her, do something in this situation.
But I paused right away by what I saw.
A tiny human lay formed up in a tight ball, her arms and legs secured as well as they could be in her tight position beneath the couch. She faced away, her shoulders and back donned in a red-and-white-striped t-shirt, which currently all shook like a leaf. Her knees also knocked against each other in the same way while covered in a set of blue jean coveralls. I knew because the material crisscrossed at her back, a real, live kid under there.
Pushing my hand into my hair, I fell back a little, the reality in front of me I literally couldn’t believe.
I went back for another look at what’d happened, what was happening as plain as the oak floor underneath my feet. There was a little girl under my aunt’s couch.
And she truly was terrified.
I swallowed, not knowing what to do. Should I call the authorities? I didn’t know the answer. She could be a runaway or something and found her way into a house that was usually vacant.
I looked again, her body still racked with tremors. Reaching, I figured I should do something. I couldn’t leave her there.
She looked so scared.
My hand got within inches of shiny locks of a deep brown before the resonating sound of thick boots filled the room. Steps followed in from behind me and I turned to find Gray in my aunt’s hallway, the door open and the sheer size of him nearly filling the archway leading into the living room.
“Alicia?” he questioned, eyes wild, everything wild. His dark hair and brow shined with perspiration, his white t-shirt dirtied and sticking damp to the outlines of his defined chest.
He crossed the room over to me in two strides.
“You all right?” he stumbled, his words stumbling. His hair cut the air when he shook his head. “What…? You screamed, right?”
I had screamed. I had been scared.
But not nearly as much as her.
In all my own flustering by what happened I couldn’t voice any of that though. I could only point down to… her.
He followed my hand with his gaze, confusion and all-out wonder on his face.
“I didn’t know she was there,” I started, mouth opening and closing. “She was just there and—”
“What are you talking about?”
I pointed with vigor to the floor. “The girl. I don’t know who she is. She scared me and I screamed.”
I didn’t think anything of what I said made any sense. My words were jumbled up, my body wracked and thrown, but somehow through my rambles something got through to him.
And whatever did put nothing but pure terror on his face.
His features visibly transformed from worry about me to dread about something else and whatever that was had him on the floor in not a breath, not even a whisper of it he’d been so quick.
A soft and raspy, “Laura?” hummed from the depths below me, within him, and I stepped back, my hands to my mouth. Gray had himself close to the floor on his side with his scruffy cheek pressed to the dark wooden slats on the floor.
He spoke to someone, tones of cool and soft vibrato in his normally gruff and sometimes terse voice. There had always been somewhat of an edge to his voice when we exchanged words. I figured that was just how he communicated.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My steps continued to the outskirts of the living room, then later the hall. He spoke as if he definitely knew her and the feeling in there, the love in his words…
He talked her down. There was lots of “stay with me” and also “just look right at me.”
My hands warmed my lips, my breaths on my palm. Like so many things today, I didn’t know what to make of this. That girl was scared and there was no way she’d come out willingly.
A tan and muscular hand lined with dark hair across the knuckles disappeared underneath the couch and when it came out, it wasn’t alone.
Tiny fingers with little nails on top of them wrapped around a hand that could literally devour it whole, Gray’s hand so vast. Hell, his hand could do that to mine and I was a grown woman, but his hold was so gentle with hers. He tugged slightly and soon the small hand turned into an arm, a shoulder covered in red and white t-shirt stripes.
And then a face, a baby doll face. Round cheeks and big, dark eyes I’d only seen on the likes of puppies. Her skin dark, so much darker than Gray’s, the girl looked to be of an ethnic origin, possibly Hispanic.
She pressed her forehead to the other side of Gray’s neck, which I couldn’t see. He let her stay there, using both her limbs to wrap around his neck. He picked her up in the next moment, using only his legs to get himself off the floor before pushing his hands under her tiny legs and holding her. I think his next move would have been the door, his long strides taking him right out of the living room and quickly into the hallway.
Gray turned just before he would have, his hand on this little girl’s head. He wouldn’t let her see me, her head cradled as if to protect her. She wouldn’t even know I was standing not three feet away from her if she wanted to. He made sure of that.
The largeness of his chest rose and fell.
“My daughter,” he said, something I suspected had I not known by the care he displayed on that hardwood floor.
His lips moved. “You told me she could rest in your spare bedroom.”
Spare bedroom… my aunt’s spare room and the one I’d been sleeping in? She’d been in there? I hadn’t recalled giving such permission.
But then again, I’d had so much wine yesterday.
The sudden feeling of that wracked my brain, no more adrenaline or coffee to see me through. The liquor’s after affects ran rampant within me, my way of not dealing with my emotions when it came to everything that went down last night on the phone with Bastian.
I pushed my hands into my hair. I probably hadn’t heard Gray. He no doubt had asked, but
I wouldn’t have heard anything this morning. Especially considering how early he came over today.
The man in front of me breathed deep.
“She must have just heard your playing,” he started, his voice cracking a little. He pressed a hand to her back. “Your aunt… She used to play. She—”
A shake of his messy hair must have shaken him out of the rest of what he’d been about to say.
Standing back, he held the girl closer than he had just a moment before, backing toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said, large boots retreating. One hand reached for the door. “I’m just so sorry, Alicia.”
He turned and I managed to get one look at that little face, her eyes on me and absolutely haunting in their beauty. She was like a tiny angel, a lost child in Neverland, but that’s all I got before Gray cut us off with the close of the door.
He left me wondering, long after he departed, what he was actually sorry for.
Chapter Seven
Alicia
“Alicia… did you hear me? Us, my dear?”
The words parted my view of passersby, the people on the street walking their dogs and sipping coffee in a natural bliss. I’d been watching their goings-on for a while, lost by the many words exchanged in this downtown office.
As well as so many other things.
I was still in a state of confusion and overall wonder by what happened at my aunt’s home the other day, by what happened with Gray’s child and her unsettling reaction to me. I carried the heavy weight of that before I set heels into the office of my aunt’s estate planner today.
And then the estate planner dropped the bomb on me.
“She owns all this?” I questioned, coming back to him. The map had been placed in front of me, wide and seemingly went on forever on the conference room table. The dimensions of the modest-sized home sat on the outskirts of a property line.
But that had only been its start.
His Sweetest Song Page 5
