Lani shook her head, chuckling. “You’re incorrigible, Kirov.”
“Nix, I am determined,luxiva,” he returned quickly.
“You really won’t tell me about the instruments?” she asked, her eyes dancing with amusement.
“Nix,you will see for yourself.”
Lani asked, surprising him, “What doesluxivamean?”
Kirov swallowed but he saw no reason to hold the truth from her. He’d already told her what happened between them, about his Instinct awakening, whether she wanted to believe it or not.
“It means ‘fated one.’”
Lani said softly, “I figured it was something like that.”
“Does this mean you have accepted it?” he asked, reaching over to touch a stray lock of her beautiful red hair, feeling how soft it was between his roughened fingers.
She bit her lip and replied, “I don’t know.”
It was progress, he supposed. Before, she’d denied it completely.
Silence dropped between them again.
In a low voice, Kirov said, “Is that why you move your fingers over surfaces? You are playing your instrument in your mind,tev?”
“Yes,” she murmured softly, looking over at him with a soft, almost sad smile that tugged at his chest. “I stopped playing piano for a couple years, once I moved away from home, from my parents. I thought not playing might make me happier because for so long I had attributed playing it with unhappiness.”
Kirov’s brow furrowed and he watched his female’s profile when she turned to look over the meadow.
“Not playing the piano was like…losing an arm. Or like losing a sense, like my hearing or my sight,” Lani said softly. “Maybe not as dramatic as that, but I felt it all the same. But I was rebellious and stubborn. Istillam,” she amended when he leveled her a look and her lips quirked in a sheepish smile.
“But you began playing again,” he said, wanting to ask her so many questions, not fully understanding some of the meanings, some of the societal concepts behind her words.
“Yes,” she said. “One day, I was walking passed a music shop with my friend, Nadine. I walked passed it almost every day, but that day, Nadine suddenly stopped me and asked me to play a song for her. Nadine was my best friend and she begged me to and I couldn’t say no, even though I felt sick in my stomach to touch a piano again. Sick, but wanting to at the same time,needingto.”
Kirov listened silently, listened to Lani’s words flow from her, like she was confessing something. She spoke in a way that made Kirov think she was lost in the memory, until she was somewhere else entirely and not sitting right next to him, with her small feet drawing invisible patterns in the stream.
“I went in the shop with her. It was completely empty and I saw a small, cheap keyboard piano in the back. I sat down, put my fingers on the keys,” she whispered. Then she blinked and looked over at him, her eyes slightly wet with moisture, the sight making him restless because he knew that humans leaked from their eyes when they were sad. “And I played for two hours straight that day. My fingers remembered everything, how could they not? Music poured out from me because it had been locked away for so long. And Nadine sat there and let me play on that cheap keyboard. Even the shop owner let me stay, said I could come play whenever I wanted. And I did. I went back the next day, and the next, and the next, until I finally just bought a piano for myself. Since then, I played every day…until the abduction, that is.”
Kirov heard the longing in her voice, felt it reach into him until he could feel it with her.
“I was good, you know,” she said quietly, looking over at him.
“Tev, female?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I was classically trained. Some called me a prodigy. I was playing in grand concert halls for hundreds of people by the time I was thirteen. I had a future and then I threw it all away.”
“You said it made you unhappy,” he murmured, trying to understand. He was trying to figure his female out, but Kirov knew it might never be possible and that both frustrated and delighted him.
“No, not playing the piano. It was everything else surrounding it. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
“Tell me,” he murmured.
She smiled and looked up at him underneath her eyelashes. “Maybe another time. You’re not the only one allowed secrets.”
Maddening female, he thought, awed.
“That is fair,” he rasped. When he saw her suddenly shiver, little bumps spreading over her arms, he dragged her to him, her feet lifting from the water momentarily until she was settled between his splayed thighs. He positioned her so that her back was to his front, her lush backside settled against his hard cock.
