RUSH (City Lights, #3)(102)

And then he turned and walked, alone, up the aisle and out of the hall.

“Noah!” I cried. “Noah!” But the applause was only just now starting to die down. I had my hands full. I put the roses on the floor and handed my Cuypers to a shocked Isaak.

“Come here, come here, come here,” I said, waving frantically at the usher in a distinctly inelegant show of arm flapping. The usher helped me down from the stage and I gathered my dress up and tore through the hall, past the applauding crowd.

I reached the near-empty lobby and swept my gaze all around. “Noah!” No sign.

I raced outside, to a dark and chilly night. The fortress on the hill loomed above the city. I scanned the streets in both directions, searching the faces of the pedestrians strolling under the lamps. “Noah!”

“Charlotte.”

I spun around. He was leaning against the wall, a small, tremulous smile on his lips.

“I’m going to fly at you,” I warned him.

“God, yes,” he said, and I did.





Chapter Thirty-Eight


Charlotte

I held him, kissed him, afraid if I stopped touching him, he’d vanish in a puff of smoke. He kissed me back, hard, holding me harder, pressing me to him. His hands roamed my back as he kissed my lips, my cheeks, my eyes with desperate intensity before finding my mouth again. I tasted my salt tears, or maybe they were his, and then we couldn’t kiss anymore, but held on to each other as the crowd letting out of the concert hall parted around us.

I wanted to demand answers, but I was overcome by the sheer reality of his presence. I clung to him, inhaled him, listened to his heart thundering in my ear. My body missed him as much as I did, and even though it felt a little salacious, I took him to the nearest hotel where the front desk clerk raised a brow at our luggage-less check-in.

We didn’t make it to the bed. We didn’t even come close. I’d hardly had the door closed when Noah had me up against a wall in the small room. He pushed the velvet of my dress around my hips and took me right there, hard and fast and deliciously rough.

As the first shuddering throes of ecstasy began to fade, Noah eased me down, his every touch turning gentle as if to atone for the desperate intensity of that first time. But the need between us hadn’t been satiated. We indulged in long, languid kisses, soft touches, the slow shedding of his clothes and mine. He laid me down on the bed, and I took him inside me again, reveling in the feel of him. I clutched him tightly, with my arms and legs, with my mouth and the soft heat of my body, unwilling to let him go ever again.

After, I held him until he worried he was going to crush me, and then we lay on the pillows, face to face, entwined, me running my fingers through the silken hair at the back of his head. I felt the ridged scars there but what were they but testaments to what he’d survived? I loved touching them for that reason alone.

He ran his hands along my shoulders and arms, my cheeks and lips, my neck and breasts, looking at me by touch.

“How are you here?” I asked finally. “Have you been in Salzburg long? Have you been in Europe long?”

“Since July.”

My head shot up. “July? That was nearly a month and a half ago! What have you been doing?”

“Listening to you, Charlotte.”

“But I don’t understand. You’ve been in Europe for six weeks and you haven’t tried to find me until tonight?” My joy at seeing him was morphing to confusion. “All this time I’ve been missing you and you’ve been here the whole time.”

His arms around me tightened. “I couldn’t tell you, though God knows I wanted to. Hearing you play—even when you were one violin out of a dozen, I swear I could still hear you. It was the best torture.”

“I don’t understand. You followed the tour?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, baby. I told you that I needed to make myself worthy of you. I needed to be self sufficient, and learn how to live blind. So that’s what I set out to do.”

“How?”

He settled himself against the pillows. “Lucien arranged my flights and set me up with hotels in every city but that was the extent of his help. I took off and did the rest, making my way from city to city, by bus or train, then finding my way to the hotel, then from the hotel to whichever venue you were performing in.”

I searched his face. He sounded different. Peaceful, in some intangible way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for you, in foreign cities? With language barriers and different customs and…”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder than PT. But I did it, and I never missed a single performance of yours. Not one.”

My jaw worked soundlessly until one question of hundreds fell out. “We’ve sometimes stayed at a city for days at a time. What did you do then?”

“I wrote.”

“You wrote?”

“I’m writing a book. With that software you told Lucien about. I don’t know that it’s any good, but I feel good about it. Like it may be the thing that I’m supposed to do now.”

I turned on the pillow to look up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what to feel, Noah. Happy? I am happy, so happy to see you I feel like I’m glowing. But you were so close. All this time, you were right there in front of me, in the audience, and I never knew it. Is that fair? That you knew where I was and what I was doing and I didn’t?”