Read Love in Music for Free Online Page B

and pulled her into my arms. She didn’t fight me.
     
    “I do understand, Topaz. I understand because I’ve been there before.”
     
    “Yeah right. You’re the one to walk away, Arashi. You’re the one who walks away with his head still on straight.”
     
    “It wasn’t always that way. I’ve had my heart broken before too, Topaz. I’ve had it broken and hardened and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you. Let it go. Let him go.” I held her tighter, my heart was beating fast, pounding hard in my chest with anger, pain—pain for her and anger at the man who caused her to hurt like this.
     
    She tightened her arms around me and held me tight. I held her back, trying to calm my rage because she needed to stop crying over the fool, but she couldn’t seem to do that. I figured I was just going to have to keep her busy enough to be able to work through it instead of cry over it. I was afraid to let her go home. Maybe I didn’t think she would harm herself, but with the emotions rolling off her I wasn’t sure.
     
    “Come on; we’ll go back to your place and work. We both need to eat and last I checked your refrigerator had eggplant while mine doesn’t.”
     
    She chuckled on a sniffle. “Yeah, I was going to make dinner for Jace.”
     
    I growled low and her voice stopped abruptly. “But you know we’ll just eat it. It’s my eggplant and we’ll eat it if we want to.”
     
    I laughed hard. “Kind of like it’s your party huh?”
     
    “Yeah…I’ll cook for you.”
     
    “No. I’ll cook for you. I have something I want to wow you with.”
     
    “Ooh, wow me. Okay. But what am I supposed to do while you cook?”
     
    “Keep me company in the kitchen, discuss some design ideas, anything and everything.” I winked at her and she finally gave me a real smile. Yeah, this was going to take some work, but I was up for the challenge.
     
    When we reached her place, Topaz said she was going to take a shower. I could see she was still near tears and I figured she wanted to go cry in the shower so I couldn’t see her and chastise her again over shedding more tears over that idiot. I didn’t have the strength at that moment to fight her on it so I nodded and set about my task in the kitchen.
     
    I was deep in thought until I heard her belting out a tune from the shower. She had the voice of an angel. Hina had never told me the woman could sing. I confronted her about it when she got out the shower and came back into the kitchen dressed in white lounging pants and a soft pink top.
     
    “No,” she had laughed and dismissed my words.
     
    “You sing,” I reiterated.
     
    “No. I just…no.”
     
    I shook my head. “You’ve been holding out on me, woman. You have a beautiful voice.” I was starting to think I should ask her to do vocals for some of my music, but then I wasn’t going to cut anymore of my own music for myself. I was going to focus on the artist I would be working with producing and recording. They would have the choice to write their own, use some of my musical pieces or hire somebody to write for them, but my instrumental work wasn’t going into a CD of my own. Then again, with a voice like Topaz had we could make something great together. I kicked the idea around in my head and then kicked it out just the same. I wasn’t looking to take on a new project and Topaz wasn’t in the music industry. She was a graphic designer and artist. She needed to stay focused on that. Besides, the music industry could rip somebody as innocent as her apart and not even care about it. No, I wouldn’t have that for her.
     
    I wondered why I cared so much. I wondered why I was taking it upon myself to try to help her and then I decided it was because we had shared the pain of betrayal.
     
    “So where’s your head on the design?” I needed to stop thinking about personal business and focus on work.
     
    “Oh I have so many ideas,” she said very animated in her response. “Oh, I