After Midnight

by Grimm, Sarah

  “Yes, she is.”

  “I mean as a pianist. I’ve heard her. Maybe not as smooth as before the accident, but still…incredible.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  His stomach tightened. “She’s wasting her talent running that bar.”

  “There are people all over the world, more talented than you and me, who go through life without ever realizing their potential,” Dominic pointed out. “It happens every day.”

  Frowning, Noah rubbed a hand across his jaw. “I know that. I do, but I’m not…”

  “You’re not what, Noah? You’re not in love with them?”

  He let out a slow breath and shook his head.

  “You didn’t plan on that, did you? You saw something you wanted—Isabeau—you went after her. You thought you would swoop in, save her from herself, and walk away unaffected.”

  “I can’t,” he admitted softly. Dominic was right. He loved Isabeau. “I can’t walk away.”

  “She may never play again,” Dominic had to point out.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Of course you do, you wrote a song for her.”

  He didn’t care. She was the only woman he wanted to be with. She made him laugh. Hell, she made him cry.

  “Let me ask you something,” Dominic said, his eyes grim. “Have you considered the risks of this plan of yours? What if it backfires?”

  “Backfires, how?”

  “You push her into this, you force her to play when she doesn’t want to, isn’t ready to…it doesn’t matter that your heart is in the right place, she may not thank you. In fact, she could wind up hating you.” Dom settled a hand on his shoulder. “Trust me, Noah, that’s a place you don’t want to be.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Clint’s voice trailed off the moment Thomas pushed through the doors and slid onto the stool at Noah’s right. By the way the bartender straightened away from the bar, he felt the same thing from Thomas as Noah. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  No one had seen or heard from Isabeau all day. Not since yesterday, actually, when she walked out of the studio and broke into a run. Thinking about it sent nausea lurching into Noah’s stomach. Dom had been right; he hadn’t wanted to know what the thought of playing again did to her.

  Now he not only had the grave misfortune of knowing, but being unable to shake the image loose. Every time he closed his eyes he saw her, pale and shaken. She’d stood in the control room, refusing to look at him, at any one of them, as she listened to the song. At the song’s completion, she turned to Pete and informed him that they didn’t need her. What they needed was to record the song with a few strings backing them. Once the suggestion was made, he had to admit that she was right. But as Pete was quick to point out, they only had a few days left in which to finish the demo.

  At Pete’s comment, she’d finally looked at him. The pain in her eyes cut him to the bone.

  For the rest of the day, he held on to the hope that she would come to his hotel room as planned. She didn’t. He didn’t begin to worry until on his way to the studio this morning, he’d swung by the bar and found it locked up tight. The way it remained until Clint’s arrival late in the afternoon. When all his calls to her went unanswered, his worry increased.

  Isabeau was angry with him, Noah understood that, but the longer she went without contact with anyone, even Clint, the more afraid for her he became. And so he’d staked out her place, hanging out with Clint long after closing time. Which was why he was still here as Thomas came through the door, pain and anxiety evident in the lines on his face.

  Desperate fear seized Noah’s heart, easing only slightly at the creak of the floorboards as someone moved in the apartment above them.

  Before the thought to go check on her was even complete, Thomas settled his hand on Noah’s forearm, effectively keeping him in his seat. “Scotch please, Clint, three fingers. Then leave the bottle and make yourself scarce.”

  Clint’s mouth settled into unhappy lines but he did as Thomas ordered; placing the Scotch atop the bar before slipping out the door.

  Noah waited, muscles tight, body prepared for a blow. He felt it in the air, in the very essence of the room. Thomas was here to offer the missing piece in the puzzle that was Isabeau. Or, at the very least, some insight into where that piece lay hidden.

  He could only hope he was prepared to hear it. “Is she okay?”

  Thomas released Noah’s arm, lifted the glass to his lips and sipped. “If you mean is she hurt, then the answer’s no. But she’s hurting.”

  Hurting because of him, and what he’d asked her to do. “Has she been with you all day today?”

  “Only since early evening.”

  That left nearly twenty-four hours unaccounted for. Where the hell had she been?

  Thomas kept his gaze focused on a point in the distance while his fingers turned the glass clockwise. “Have you heard Izzy play?”

  “Once,” Noah admitted, “but only briefly.”

  “I haven’t heard her play in thirteen years. For all I knew, she couldn’t. Not after the accident.”

  The emotion in Thomas’s voice had acid swirling in Noah’s stomach.

  “I always hoped…she seemed to be able to use her hand normally, but the dexterity? I didn’t know if it was there. All I knew was she never touched the piano again, not after her mother died. Even so, I’ve kept hers tuned for all these years, with the hope that one day…”

  Letting his words trail off, Thomas drained the glass, refilled it and offered the bottle to Noah.

  Noah shook his head. “No, I don’t drink hard liquor anymore.”

  “It’s not something I often do myself.”

  That bit of information only increased the amount of acid churning in Noah’s gut. He shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden stool.

  “She used to play all the time, day and night. Some days, I thought it would never end. Then she would go on tour with Nicole, and I’d miss it.” The glass continued to turn as his gaze focused on something only Thomas could see.

  “I was finishing up with a customer. It was about five…that’s when it began. The opening bars were strong, unmistakable. From her last tour, her final performance. I heard her practice for that tour enough times, I’d know her music anywhere,” Thomas admitted, then lifted the glass to his lips and drained it a second time. “One song bled into another with little or no pause. She played the entire set—the whole show—played for over an hour while I sat in that tattoo parlor and cried like a child.”

  Propping his elbow atop the bar, Thomas pressed his fingers against his closed lids. Noah didn’t move. He didn’t turn to witness the emotion of the man at his side or reach for his own glass, even though his mouth was suddenly dry. He sat there and absorbed.

  “Then the final note rang out and there was silence—a few minutes of total silence before the most pain-filled sound I’ve ever heard. That instrument did not like what she was doing to it. I crept up the back stairs to witness her pound on that piano. With her fists, her arms, while a godawful sound broke from her throat.”

  When his hands began to tremble, Noah fisted them against his thighs.

  “I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t let up. I can’t believe she didn’t break something—not the piano as much as herself. When she finally stopped, she drew her knees up to her chest, curled her arms over her head and cried. She curled into the smallest ball possible, like she was trying to disappear. That’s when I knew.” Thomas shook so hard, the scotch splashed onto the bar as he attempted to refill his glass. “I suspected. All these years, I suspected. Now I know.”

  “I’ll go—”

  Again, Thomas stopped him with a hand on his arm. “There’s something you need to know.”

  “It can wait.” What he’d already heard had been difficult enough to sit through, Noah didn’t think he could handle much more. He wanted to go to Isa, hold her and believe he had the power to ease her suffering. He didn’t want to know that wh
at she was suffering was more than he could fix.

  Thomas began talking again without pause. “The day they took her from me…that was a pain like no other. Nicole, she was my heart, but Izzy, ten years she called me daddy. Ten years I called her daughter. Then because I didn’t have a piece of paper to tell me I was allowed to love her like I did, I was labeled a—”

  Thomas took a deep breath and didn’t say aloud what he’d been labeled. “They took her away from me and gave her to him.”

  “The devil incarnate,” Noah supplied, the knot in his stomach twisting painfully.

  Slowly, very slowly, Thomas turned in Noah’s direction. “She said that? Izzy called him that?”

  Noah closed his eyes. “Yes.”

  “What else? Has she ever told you anything else about him?”

  She hadn’t meant to reveal even that much to him. And when she had, he’d been too afraid to ask what she meant. “She doesn’t talk about him. She’ll only talk about you, her true father.”

  “Some father I turned out to be. I failed her, Noah. When she needed me most, I failed her. John Whitehorse was a miserable excuse for a human being. He filled her head with lies, stripped her of her self-confidence. She ran from him more than once. The last time, she was fourteen. She came to me all coltish looking—long limbs and eyes bigger than her face. One look at her and any fool could see that when those gangly teen years were past her, she was going to be beautiful. That’s not what he told her.”

  Thomas’ knuckles whitened as his grip tightened around the glass. “She spent three days with me that last time. I could tell there was more going on in that house than she would say, more than just the emotional cruelty. I didn’t know what to do. I had no power to help her. In the eyes of the law, I was the criminal.”

  “Because she kept running back to you.”

  “Yes. A young girl and a grown man. The law saw only one reason she kept coming to me. ”

  He didn’t need to explain. Noah knew what the authorities thought of Thomas’s relationship with Isabeau.

  “She was starting to open up to me, beginning to tell me what life with him was like when Whitehorse arrived with the men in blue. He gave me three days with her, knowing how much more it would hurt having had the time. He was right, of course. The pain in her eyes as they snapped the cuffs on me—it was like the courthouse all over again. Only this time, Izzy didn’t cry.”

  Thomas lifted his glass, spoke before draining it. “I knew then that I wouldn’t see her again. And I didn’t. Not until Whitehorse died.”

  “She was protecting you.”

  “I should have been protecting her, damn it!”

  His hands had been tied. Literally.

  Thomas released a ragged sigh. “I should have fought them, begged them to listen, to see what I could see. But the minute he walked through the door, she closed up. That was the most painful thing of all. She didn’t argue, she didn’t say anything. She gathered her things and left.”

  She’d definitely been protecting him. Noah knew enough about her personality, as well as her love for Thomas, to say with certainty that young Isabeau realized by running to Thomas, she was hurting him. And because she didn’t wish to hurt him, she stopped running.

  He turned his gaze to the ceiling. The silence of the apartment above them made him uneasy. There was no sound of music coming through the floor, no echo of her feet as she walked around. He could only hope she was still up there, that she hadn’t disappeared once again. He needed to see her, hold her. As much for his own peace of mind as hers.

  “Izzy was seventeen when Whitehorse managed to send himself to an early grave. I hadn’t seen her in three years when one day the door to my shop opened and there she stood, suitcase clutched in her hand. I cried then, too. Then I reached for her…”

  “She shifted away from you, didn’t she?”

  “She was right there, then she wasn’t. It broke my heart. She stood there, with this blank expression on her face. Disconnected. Then she went up the stairs to her old room and unpacked.”

  Taking a deep breath, Noah gathered his courage. “What had he done to her?”

  “That son of a bitch took a beautiful, confident, outgoing, and loving child who gave affection freely and often, and turned her into a skittish woman. With walls and barriers she allows no one past. Not even me.”

  “Do you think he abused her?”

  “I know he did,” Thomas hissed through his teeth.

  Acid climbed up the back of Noah’s throat. He closed his eyes, gathered his courage. “Sexually?”

  Thomas’ gaze locked with his. He made no reply. He didn’t have to.

  Noah’s denial was total, instinctual. No way. Not his Isabeau. It couldn’t be true, he wouldn’t accept that.

  “Jesus Christ.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. Thinking about Isa suffering something like that tore at his insides, froze the blood in his veins.

  “She’ll talk to you,” Thomas said softly.

  Noah slipped from his stool, tipped his head to the ceiling and struggled to breathe. “I’m not so sure.”

  His body trembled, his heart split apart as he pictured the little girl from the courthouse photo—so tiny, so terrified. So lost. She was no match for a grown man. No child was.

  He had to force back the nausea that surged up the back of his throat.

  “You’re the catalyst, Noah, you started this. It was only once you came into her life that she began breaking out of whatever hold Whitehorse still held on her. You got past her aversion to touch. I believe somehow you drove her to that piano today.”

  “Thomas—”

  “Ask her about those years, Noah. She needs to let go of them, share them with someone. There’s too much pain for one person to handle alone.”

  ****

  Isabeau sat on the floor of her living area, frantically transferring the music from her head to the composition paper before her. The lights were dimmed, the stereo silent. Although she was chilled, she didn’t stop, even for the few minutes it would take to retrieve her robe from the end of the bed or a blanket from the back of the couch. She couldn’t stop, not until she got it all out, until the music was silenced. It haunted her, the melody that played over and over through her mind. Unnerved her in a way no melody had done before.

  Dominic was right, this was the song to secure them a contract with the record company. It was also the song that insured Noah would leave her.

  The song was spectacular—different to everything else out there in both lyric and composition. Not that the concept expressed was anything new, for love was timeless. But the depth of emotion behind the words, the way the music seemed to amplify that emotion, these were what drew the listener in. What made them experience the song instead of just hear it.

  Closing her eyes, she couldn’t help but wish that she had never heard it. It had played through her mind endlessly since she stood in the studio, slowly dying inside. Somehow she’d managed to make it out of there without anyone seeing the pain. The heart-wrenching agony of discovering that while the song may have been written for her, it most definitely had not been written about her.

  Noah’s ballad.

  Black Phoenix’s future hit.

  The story of a man and the feelings invoked in him by a woman he loved unconditionally.

  As tears threatened, she closed her eyes. She was tired, so tired—physically drained, emotionally exhausted. She didn’t want to feel right now, she wanted to be numb. But she hadn’t been numb since Noah strolled into her life, bringing with him the relentless, unavoidable waterfall of music, constantly flowing through her head.

  The music that was suddenly louder than normal.

  Her head came up. She blinked to bring her eyes back into focus, absently wondering if she’d remembered to turn the lock on the door leading down to the bar. Aside from the fact that she didn’t want to see anyone right now, she didn’t worry about the identity of the person who turned the knob on her door in
an attempt to get it. She didn’t have to. The only person to ever make the music in her head louder was Noah.

  He’d called her a few times today. More than a few. Enough times that she’d turned off the ringer on her mobile phone. She didn’t want to talk to him. The truth was she couldn’t. Not now. Not yet.

  A quick glance to where the phone rested on the table near her elbow told her that he hadn’t called again since the last time. Why would he, she wondered, when it was obvious he’d been staked out in her bar. It didn’t matter that it was long past closing time, Clint wouldn’t kick him out. Not when he would have been as worried about her failure to open today as anyone.

  “Isabeau?”

  Noah’s voice drifted through the door to wash over her.

  “Isabeau, open the door, I need to talk to you.”

  She glanced in the direction of the door, the pain in her chest so intense she was amazed that she could breathe at all. She had nothing to say to him, nothing left to offer. She’d given him everything she had and it wasn’t enough.

  “Please, Isa,” he continued, his voice lowered with intimacy and touched by emotion. “I need to know you’re all right.”

  Pulling her legs up to her chest, she wrapped her arms around them and rested her cheek atop her knees. Her lungs were burning, her body shaking uncontrollably. She wasn’t all right. At the moment, she wondered if she would ever be all right again.

  Noah fell silent, but she knew he remained outside the door. The knob turned again, remained locked and he sighed. Immediately the image of him pushing his hand through his hair the way he did when things weren’t going his way sprang to mind.

  The pain in her chest intensified.

  “I’m sorry, Isabeau. I’m so damn sorry.”

  So was she.

  Noah didn’t speak again. A few minutes later, he left and she went back to work. She didn’t answer the phone when he called an hour later, even though she was still awake and composing. She didn’t answer it the next morning either. Only once did she pay the telephone at her elbow more than a passing glance, and it was when she called Pete and told him to expect her at noon.