When Lainey looked back to the screen, she looked at the sheet music for a long time, hearing the notes in her head as though she was reading words from a book.
“Can I hear more music?” she asked.
“Tev,” he said immediately, swiping over the Com. “Of course.”
And he played the songs for her, going through the Golden Record.
There were chants, there were songs with bagpipes and windpipes and drums, there was opera by Mozart, the Queen of the Night aria. Kirov’s favorite—thus far—was by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, a wonderful jazz piece that made her close her eyes andfeel.
Who knew aliens loved jazz?
But then she heard it.
Bach.
The Well-Tempered Clavier. Book Two. Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1.
Pure piano, the beautiful sounds drifting over her ears like a caress.
Tears sprung in her eyes, her hands shaking with the notes, as Kirov watched her reaction.
Lainey listened to it in its entirety, with bated breath, hardly daring to move. And when it was over, she asked to listen to it again. And again.
“This,” she finally whispered to Kirov, pointing to the Com. “This is my piano.”
Kirov inclined his head.
“What…” Lainey trailed off, her head still muddled from the music, but feeling determined, wanting to create that music again. “What do we do now?”
Kirov guided her to the table and pulled out a tablet for her, not unlike the one he’d given to Crystal.
“I need a design for your instrument.”
“I’m terrible at drawing,” she warned.
“Try,” he urged. “It does not need to be perfect. I will need the approximate size as well.”
That would be easy, considering she knew a piano like the back of her hand. Lainey quickly drew a rough sketch of a standard 88-key grand piano and a sketch of a keyboard, up close. She’d once played on a piano with 97 keys—with 9 extra bass notes—but thought better of including those.
When Kirov looked over her designs, he asked, “How do you produce sound?”
A loaded question. Lainey took in a deep breath and said, “Well, to put it as simply as possible, when you press a key,” she tapped Middle C on her keyboard design, “a hammer strikes a string inside and produces a specific note. But on Earth, there are keyboards where the sound is programmed in and reproduced without strings.”
Kirov nodded, cocking his head at the design. He was getting a look in his eye, a look she was slowly beginning to recognize. His intense look when she knew his beautiful mind was working like crazy.
“We will begin with this keyboard,tev?” he finally said. “You can isolate specific notes from the music you heard and I can program them. Any notes you still need, we can synthesize if you can identify the correct pitch.”
Lainey’s lips parted, her belly warming unexpectedly with arousal. Kirov’s brows ticked up when he scented her and a growl rose from his throat.
“Baby,” she breathed, reaching up to lock her hands around the back of his neck. “Itreallyturns me on when you talk about pitch and piano notes like that.”
Kirov chortled and rasped, “Noted, female.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
For the next five days and nights, they worked together whenever they could in Kirov’s labs. Of course, her male had other duties to attend, but he still made their project a priority, something she couldn’t tell him just how much she appreciated.
And life was good. She would wake next to Kirov in the mornings, feel his heat and scent wrapped around her in their furs. On the rare occasion she woke before him, she would kiss him awake and then they would spend a leisurely and pleasurable morning in bed. Once they got up, Kirov would work on the kitchen extension he’d already started adding. Sometimes Luxirian males would show up with materials or help her male with installation and while it would still be another week until it was finished, Lainey could already see that it would be beautiful, the kitchen of her dreams.
