Page 15 of A Balm of Healing
Until now.
But Emeric didn’t want her, as evidenced by his non-reaction to her kiss.
He broke her out of her somber thoughts by reaching across the table and grabbing her empty dishes, balancing them on his lap with his own. “Do you play any instruments, Gwen?” he asked before wheeling himself toward the kitchen.
Hesitantly, she followed.
“Unfortunately, no. You mentioned you carve instruments. Do you play?”
Curiosity probed at her when he nodded and began rinsing the dishes beneath the water pump in the sink. “Almost every Forest Fae where I’m from plays some sort of instrument. I enjoyed playing the lute. I haven’t strummed a chord in…a very long time.”
The sudden slump in his shoulders spoke of his broken soul. True, Emeric was different from the man she had first met weeks ago. But he wasn’t yet whole.
She clasped her brooch, her heart beating wildly as she asked with uncertainty in her tone, “Will you play for me?”
Emeric’s entire body stiffened, and the sight of his unwillingness raked another cut across her heart. After today’s earlier blunder, she never should have asked such a thing. Because she didn’t like the feeling of putting herself on a layer of thin ice, only for it to break beneath her feet and dunk her in cold, miserable water.
“I have no idea if I can still play,” he said instead of giving her a hasty rejection. “All of my belongings were burned in the fire meant to kill me.” He paused and frowned. “My new carving is just that. A carving.”
She ran a hand down her arm and cupped her elbow in her hand. “I understand if you don’t want to show me.”
He blinked at her as if slowly escaping the nightmares in his mind. “I do want to show you.” As he wheeled himself back toward his room, she followed. “This is almost the only thing I’ve accomplished since leaving Attleglade. It takes a while to carve larger instruments.”
Although she wanted to follow him inside his room, the incident earlier gave her pause. Instead, she found a place to sit on the sofa, waiting as drawers opened and closed in the other room, followed by a silent curse when his wheelchair must have bumped into furniture.
She held back a giggle.
Finally, he emerged with an instrument case and opened it to reveal a beautiful lute carved out of bone. Reverently, she reached out and ran her fingers across the eleven loose strings along the neck of the instrument, only for a chorus of off-tune notes to reverberate within the body.
He grimaced. “What a dreadful sound.”
As if unable to help himself, he picked up the lute and tightened the strings one at a time, plucking each of them until a smooth, melodic note escaped. And then he strummed his hand down the length of the strings.
Gweneth’s lips parted at the beautiful, soulful sound, a piece of her shocked Emeric could create such a heavenly chord within the matter of minutes.
“Play me something,” she breathed.
He bit his lip, fingers hovering over the strings. But then his lips twitched as he met her eye. “You correctly guessed the surprise I hid in my hand earlier, and I promised you anything you wanted. Is this your wish? For me to play for you?”
The mortified heat burned her ears all over again as she recalled the incident with perfect clarity. She dipped her head and adjusted her spectacles to give something to occupy her hands with. Somehow, she managed to lift her head to look him in the eye. “Yes. But I wish for you to play only if you would like to.”
“I do,” he murmured. “Though, I’m not sure if I can remember how to do this.”
He rested the body of the instrument beneath his arm while his fingers curled under the neck. He held on tenderly as if it were a child rather than a lute. “I don’t know the words to this song in your language, only in my native tongue.”
Her eyebrows rose with the realization that each word he spoke was tinged with the faintest accent. Until now, she hadn’t realized he didn’t usually speak in the Sun Fae tongue. But his nearly flawless execution told her he used to.
The man took a deep breath before he strummed his fingers across the lute, creating another melodic sound that cushioned her entire soul in a cocoon of warmth. He smiled, his previous anxiety visibly melting from his expression and leaving behind unadulterated joy.
As if his fingers remembered the movements, they plucked the strings one at a time. Slowly at first, and they moved quicker until each note blended into a beautiful melody.
And then he began to sing.
Gweneth swallowed the emotion that immediately slammed into her as his deep, alluring voice escaped his mouth like a rumble of a storm rolling through the sky. She didn’t recognize the words he sang, so she listened to the melody and the rhythm. It captivated her with every rise and fall of his voice, with every expert strum of the lute.
Her attention moved from the lute to his face. A river of emotion moved across his expression, from joy to heartache to relief. And when he glanced up to meet her eye, her heart tumbled inside her chest at the sweetness in his silver eyes, at the adorable curve of his mouth as he sang, at the way he looked at her as if no one else existed.
Finally, his song finished with one final note reverberating through the room. It pulled on her soul like nothing ever had. She didn’t want it to end. Rather, she wanted him to play for her all night until she fell asleep with sweet rapture in her soul.
