Page 2 of Royally Wed
This was his chance to prove himself, to set things right. Everyone in New York wanted to know the story behind his hasty midseason departure from the Philharmonic’ssolo series and the other canceled concerts. Rumors of some kind of mental breakdown were swirling. There’d even been anarticle in the Arts section of theNew York Times. Asher hadn’t accepted the invitation to play at the royal wedding in order to prove his worth to the music world, though.
He needed to prove it tohimself.
But he could barely pick up his bow he was so tired, and nothing soundedright. Even Finzi’s Romance for String Orchestra, Opus 11, the one piece on the program he’d played countless times, rang with sadness. Every note seemed to drip with heartbreak.
Somewhere in the periphery, he thought he heard something. It almost sounded like a woman weeping.
He was losing it.
He needed to stop. Sleep would fix things. He’d play better after some rest. The opus would soundjoyful again. Ithadto—he was playing for a wedding, not a funeral.
Asher slid his bow over the cello’s strings with excruciating slowness, drawing out the final note as long as possible. It echoed off the marble figures that made up his audience, filling the empty church with sound long after he set down his bow. The space around him was so beautiful it hurt.
Asher closed his eyes. His earsrang, and beneath the fading strains of his music, he still heard it—the soft sorrow of feminine tears.
He hadn’t been imagining things, after all. The weeping was real.
His chest grew tight. Should he say something? He should, shouldn’t he? But when was the last time he’d had any kind of real conversation with anyone?
He felt like an intruder suddenly—in this place, in thiscountry. In thislife.
Whoever she was, she sounded broken. What kind of monster would he be if he ignored that kind of heartbreak?
Asher cleared his throat and rested his palms on the shoulders of his cello, aware now more than ever of how the instrument’s parts were named after the curves of a woman’s body.
The neck. The back. The waist.
“Do you need help?” he asked, his voice full of promises he didn’tknow if he could keep. He couldn’t even see her. How could he possibly help?
The silence that followed stretched on so long he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Perhaps he was alone, after all.
He really needed to get some damned sleep.
“You play beautifully,” she said.
He could hear the tears in her words, but her accent was lovely. Pure, like English cream.
Asher released a breathhe hadn’t realized he’d been holding. For an insane moment, he’d allowed himself to believe the woman had been Serena, that something had happened between her and Jeremy.
They were all here in London, after all. The three of them, just like the good old days.
Oh joy.
“Thank you.” Asher squinted into the semidarkness, but still couldn’t see anyone. The only discernible movement came from theflickering candlelight dancing on the arched stone walls.
“Don’t stop. Not yet,” she said. Asher’s gaze darted to the left, where a sculpture of Shakespeare loomed over a small bench carved into the marble wall. Starlight poured through the stained-glass windows overhead, washing her profile in watercolor hues of blue. “Play something else. Just one more song. Please?”
“All right,” Asher heardhimself say.
What was he doing? And what in God’s name was he supposed to play for her?
He picked up his bow with his right hand and wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the cello’s neck.
He closed his eyes and played the first thing that came to him—Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Asher had always considered it the most devastating piece of music he’d ever heard, and undeniably the mostbeautiful. The first time he ever played it in concert, he’d wept.
The piece was ten minutes long. For the first minute or two, Asher had trouble focusing. He thought more about the mysterious woman than the music. Who was she? And what tragedy had brought her here at such a late hour?
But soon, he began to lose himself in the haunting melody. He stopped holding back, gave up on trying to keepthe despair of the music at bay and leaned into it. He dove right in, and once he did, he realized he’d been wrong to resist it. There was a certain kind of purity to heartbreak. To loneliness.
