An Act of Persuasion(60)

“Father.”

Father? He took her hand and watched her dip into a small curtsy.

“Did you just curtsy?”

Marie shuffled over to them quickly. “Sophie often has to greet dignitaries and sometimes foreign heads of state when she’s traveling. A curtsy is always appropriate.”

Except he wasn’t a dignitary or a head of state. He was her father and she’d shaken his hand as though he were a stranger.

Then again, he was a stranger. But he was here to change that.

“Marie, I brought you some flowers.”

“They are lovely. I’ll put them in water while you two chat.”

Left in the center of the room, Mark didn’t have a clue what to say. There she stood, perfectly still and elegant, while inside he was shaking like a leaf. Wasn’t she supposed to be the teenager, and he was supposed to be the grown-up?

The grown-up thing to do, he supposed, was make the first attempt.

“I’m sorry about your mom. I tried to be there for the funeral but...” He didn’t think she would understand about cargo planes being routed to the Philippines. “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

She blinked then, but said nothing. Looking around the room his gaze landed on the large black grand piano. It made sense that it was the focus of the room. He wondered how many times her family had gathered here to listen to her perform.

He latched on to it. “I was hoping I could hear you play something.”

“I’ve prepared a piece for you this evening.”

She looked like a girl, he thought. The green dress she wore was formal satin with a large bow belted in the back. He thought it looked like something a doll might wear. Not a teenage girl. And she sure as hell didn’t sound like a girl—teenage or otherwise. She sounded like a middle-aged adult.

He certainly wasn’t going to mention either, though. She’d obviously taken care to dress appropriately and prepare a piece of music to play for him. And she hadn’t run screaming from the room as soon as he walked in. That had to be a good sign.

“So what’s the situation with school? Are you thinking high school next year? You would be, what...a sophomore?”

“Given my travel schedule it’s easier for me to be tutored at home and on the road.”

“Sure. But don’t you want to go to high school at some point. For the experience?”

Now she looked at him as if he were dull-witted. And pitted against her formidable IQ, he might very well be. “I believe the experiences I have performing with some of the best musicians in the world while traversing the globe far outweighs any I might have at a pep rally. Did you think I might want to be a...cheerleader?”

Uh-oh, deep waters, sinking fast.

“Of course not. Not that there is anything wrong with cheerleaders. Your mother was a cheerleader, after all.”

“Sophie, darling, why don’t you play,” Marie suggested as she and Dom reentered the room. “It will be a wonderful way to start the evening.”

Mark could have hugged Marie—who was not a huggable woman—for intervening. He felt like a man sliding down a steep slope with nothing to hold on to. He could see the abyss in front of him, but he couldn’t stop.

Dom and Marie moved to two high-back chairs that he was sure were their assigned seats for every performance. That left the elegantly patterned love seat facing the piano to him. He sat and watched as Sophie situated herself on the bench as if she’d practiced just that—sitting on the bench—more than a thousand times.

She went through a few warm-up runs then stilled her fingers and her hands until the anticipation was almost too much for him to bear.

Then she began and it was like heaven cracked open the gates and beauty spilled forward in a slow, steady stream. He knew the piece—one by Beethoven. The sad one. But he’d never heard it played like this. Never so chillingly poignant, so achingly beautiful. He wanted to weep for no other reason than it was that good.

This was his daughter. This creature who could make this incredible sound with her fingers on a large piece of what he’d more or less considered noisy furniture. This was art and she was a master artist.

It was a moment after she finished before he even realized she had stopped. So enraptured he’d been by the story she had spun with the music and the sadness it left in his heart.

“Sophie that was...that was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.”

She looked at him then. “That was for my mother.”