His eyes flare with desire and I shake off the feeling that he deflected my question on purpose as he pulls me into a passionate kiss that has my stomach filling with butterflies.
“I could kiss you forever,” he whispers against my lips, tracing my cheek with the back of his hand. “But then you’d miss what I brought you here to see.”
He sits back, spreading his arm around me over the back of the seat cushion. He delicately circles my bare shoulder with gentle, skilled fingers.
“Watch. And listen.”
I look over the water at a floating platform we’ve drifted closer to. A lone piano is set up on it.
A man dressed all in black wearing a balaclava sits at it.
“That’s not…?”
Sullivan smiles at me as my throat goes dry. He pulls me into his side and kisses my temple.
“It is,” he whispers.
The first notes ofNuvole Biancheby Einaudi ring out over the water like a haunted introduction.
My stomach drops as the crowd lining the harbor comes into focus. Hundreds of cell phone lights illuminate the gathering like fireflies as they film him.
The Masked Maestro.
Here in the flesh. Playing as well as he always has. Exactly how he’s always sounded when I’ve raced to one of his concerts to lose myself inside his music.
Sullivan strokes my skin, but I no longer feel it. I’m numb.
“I thought it was you,” I say, my voice a strained whisper.
“I told you it wasn’t,” Sullivan says calmly, like the realization isn’t crushing something inside me.
“I heard him play a song that wasn’t like the others. It was…”
I grow tenser in his hold. I sound ridiculous. A woman with stupid dreams about feeling a man’s soul through his music. Feeling his passion. His pain.
Feelinghim.
“It was what?” Sullivan asks, relaxing into the seat, enjoying the music.
“It doesn’t matter,” I breathe, forcing down the illogical swell of disappointment in my gut.
I thought it was him.
I wanted it to be him.
I swore it was him because the way I feel around him has become so intense so…
I love him.
But as stupid as I know it is, a tiny part of me fell in love that day at Grand Central Station.
And the rest of me fell for Sullivan.
I wanted it to be him.
Forty-eight hours of replaying our date in my head and I’ve finally come to terms with it.
I spent so many months wondering who The Masked Maestro could be. It was part of the magic, that element of mystery. But now I know for certain that it isn’t Sullivan, I no longer care who The Masked Maestro really is.
