Page 52 of Not Another Love Song

Silence. He looked up at her for the first time, eyes shadowed and hair limp with the rain. She heard a few titters behind her. Diane was probably huffing.

It wasn’t her place to admonish another orchestra member. It was Nathan’s. But he refused to discipline him. She glared at Xander as Nathan instructed them to turn back to the top, hiding a smile. Xander stared back at her, eyes dark and drilling into her as she lifted her violin.

“You’re getting a reputation,” a deep, familiar voice said.

Gwen’s fingers shook at the voice behind her, ripping at the honey packet she was working open to squeeze into her tea at the snack table.

“Oh, good,” she quipped. “That makes two of us.” She kept her gaze on the cup in front of her, working quickly despite the sticky honey on her fingers.

“Oh, yeah? What’s my reputation?”

She pressed her lips together. “Hostile. Arrogant. And late.”

“You care deeply about timeliness.”

He said it like a fact, not a question, but still she needed to respond. “If someone says they’ll be somewhere, they should be there. It’s not fair to make people wait.”

She paused in the middle of reaching for a napkin to wipe her sticky fingers when he stepped closer to her. She felt his chest just inches from her arm, and she struggled to keep her eyes down.

“I can be on time when it’s important to me. Let me prove it to you. Meet me for—”

“So, the Manhattan Pops isn’t important to you?” she snapped, looking up at him and noticing his warm gaze and parted lips in the middle of a sentence. In the middle of an offer. She had a sudden thought that Alex Fitzgerald would never be caught dead late to a rehearsal. “Saturday Night Live isn’t important to you?”

He swallowed. “No. I had something far more important going on that day, if you remember.”

She blamed the heat. Blamed the stupid fucking look in his eye and the warmth spreading in her chest, blooming deep in her stomach.

And definitely blamed that dream when she chose to suck the honey off her fingers, deeply aware of his gaze on her lips. When she pulled her second finger into her mouth, eyes on him, he drew in a slow breath and leaned a hand on the table.

She returned to her chair. And ignored his eyes and the way he kept missing entrances.

He was never late again. Instead, he was consistently five minutes early.

She could feel his gaze during pieces, during breaks, while Nathan was talking, while they packed up. She started going to the bathroom on breaks to just have ten minutes to herself without him in her line of sight.

The week of the September concert, he was waiting for her outside the rehearsal building, more than twenty minutes early. She saw him when she turned the corner and had to walk toward him. It felt a bit like heading to the gallows holding an iced latte and a violin.

“Yes?” she said, when she was close.

He stared at her, like he’d lost his train of thought, and she watched him lick his lips. “Can I see you? After rehearsal? Any day. Or morning.” A hand shoved through his hair. “See, I can be on time.” He sent her a shaky smile, quickly pressing his lips together.

She blinked away the image of his smile. “Why?”

“I have some new music. I want to hear you play it.”

Something tugged in her chest. Something worth more to her than the way his eyes dropped to her mouth whenever she entered the room.

Clearing her throat, she said, “More untitled sheet music for you to ‘teach’ me?” She lifted a brow and moved around him to pull open the door.

“It doesn’t have to be anything other than the music,” he said, following her inside.

“I’m sure there are tons of other ‘anything but ordinary’ musicians you can work with, Xander,” she said flatly. She marched in, grateful no one was in the lobby. “I need to concentrate on the concert. I won’t have time—”

“On Saturday night, then, after the concert.”

Just the idea of meeting him at night, after a cocktail party, had her spinning. “I’ll be…with friends, and—”

“Are you seeing someone?” His eyes dragged over her face. “I never…I didn’t ask before.”

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