A sob tried to escape. She squeezed her lips tight to keep it inside. If she started crying now, she might never stop.
A boom of thunder vibrated the piano bench, followed by a bang against her balcony doors. She spun around and gasped.
A man, silhouetted in a flash of lightning, stood on the balcony of her twenty-second-floor apartment. Tall. Lean. Arms pressed to the glass.
She raced for the door and fought with the latch. When it finally gave, she was hit with a blast of rainwater and the smell of ozone.
“What are you doing?” Terror made her push past him to the balcony rail. She looked down, expecting to see—a ladder? Ladders didn’t extend this high, and a fifteen-foot gap stretched between her balcony and her closest neighbor’s. The street lay far below. How had he—？
She looked up into the rain. The elderly, white-haired woman she’d once seen in the elevator leaned out the window directly above, oblivious to the rain, gaily waving. Thad pulled Olivia inside and shut the sliding door.
Everything went quiet.
They stared at each other. His wet, dark hair lay perfectly against his head. Rainwater dripped from the tip of his nose, and his shirt stuck to his chest. Her terror at the risk he’d taken—what could have happened to him—blocked out everything else. “You didn’t!” The words were hoarse. “You didn’t jump down here from my upstairs neighbor’s window.”
“She’s a nice lady. I met her in the lobby.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck as he swallowed. “She’s eighty-four, a widow. She invited me up.”
He was here, in her apartment. She couldn’t take it in. “She let you jump out her window? You could have killed yourself.”
“She gave me the cord from her bedroom drapes.” He sounded both nervous and apologetic. “I rappelled part of the way.”
“An eighty-four-year-old woman let a man she didn’t know into her apartment and helped him rappel out her bedroom window? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I might have told her it was your birthday surprise,” he said. “And in her defense, she thought I was her dead brother.”
“Dear God.” She suddenly noticed the trickle of red running down his arm. “Your arm is bleeding!”
“It’s only a scratch.”
She dug her fingers into her eye sockets. “You didn’t have to do this. You’re free of me. No more text messages or phone calls or showing up at your parents’ house. No more setting deadlines and then breaking them. I’m sorry! I don’t know what I was thinking.” She couldn’t stop herself. “Well, I do know what I was thinking. I thought if I could finally talk to you, maybe we’d have this big reconciliation. You’d realize you were in love with me after all, the same way I’m in love with you. We’d fall into each other’s arms, and everything would work out, and the curtain would come down on happily-ever-after.” She wrung her hands. “But that’s not reality. You’re a more casual person than I am. My life is too big and too complicated for a man like you to put up with. That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me, but instead of listening, I harassed you. And now, I’m going to apologize for the last time, swallow my humiliation, promise never to bother you again, and let you out.”
He looked so sorry for her. She couldn’t take his pity. She blinked hard and headed for the door. “I understand. Really, I do. You care about me, but you don’t love me, and you especially don’t love my drama and my career. Just the idea of you being seen as Mr. Olivia Shore would be a humiliation for both of us.”
“So that’s it?” he said from behind her. “You’re bailing?”
She reached for the doorknob. She wouldn’t cry. Would. Not. Cry. “What else am I supposed to do?” she whispered. “Keep torturing both of us?”
His hand settled over hers on the knob. “Amneris fought for what she wanted.”
“And ended up killing him!”
“That’s opera for you.” His face was soft, inquisitive, achingly tender. “The night I pulled you out of the river—the night I thought you’d drowned. It was the worst moment of my life. It took you almost drowning for me to realize how important you are to me. How much more important you are than winning a ball game or being a starter. How much I love you.”
“You love me?” Her own words sounded as if they were coming from the far reaches of the orchestra hall.
“How could I not love you?” He searched her face as if he couldn’t get enough of it. “You’re everything. Smart and beautiful and funny and gifted. Sexy. God, are you sexy. When I couldn’t find you in the water, I wanted to die myself.” She’d worked so hard not to cry, and now he was the one with tears in his eyes. “I love you, Liv. I love you in more ways than I can count.”
She’d always known he had a sensitive heart, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. She lifted her hand and gently brushed her thumb along his cheekbone, catching a tear, not saying anything, listening.
He searched her face, taking in every detail. “I need to know I’ll always come first. And you need to know I’d never make you choose between me and your career.”
Anyone else might have been confused by this statement, but she understood, and it made her dizzy with love.
He took her hand and gently kissed the pulse point on the inside of her wrist. “No more deadlines, Liv, okay?”
“No more deadlines,” she whispered. “Ever.”
They kissed. A kiss she would remember forever. Deep and sweet and yearning. Everything a woman could want. The kind of kiss dreams were built on, that lives were built on. A kiss that was a forever pledge.
The sweetness of that kiss changed its timbre, becoming hot and fierce. They dragged each other into the bedroom, pulling at their clothes, at the bedcovers, desperate to seal the words they’d spoken with their bodies.
They came together ferociously—two athletes, champions in their own worlds, their bodies moving together, soaring together, hitting that perfect crescendo, that perfect rush. The perfect joining of body and soul.
*
Later, sated in each other’s arms, he brushed his lips across her hair. “We have a busy couple of years ahead of us.”
She ran her fingers across the delicious cording of his abdomen. “Yes, we do.”
“You’ve already signed contracts for the next two years, and I have two more years left on my own contract.” He stroked the curve of her hip. “I know what I’m going to do after that. I never thought I’d say this, but I can’t wait. Still, nothing is for sure. These next couple of years are going to be important ones for us. They’ll be our training camp.”
It was a perfect analogy. “The time when we work out the logistics. Find out how to make our lives fit together,” she said.
“We’ll make mistakes.” He took her hand and kissed her earlobe. “It’ll be trial and error.”
“It’ll be a mess.” She gave him a watery smile, not caring if he saw her tears, because they were happy ones. “We’ll need lots of open communication.”