Liron's Melody Read Free

wouldn’t have a hard time with it. But
then again, he was a guy, so who knew? Knowing him, he’d think she’d fallen
madly in love with his primal, alpha behavior. In other words, the fact that
he’d acted like a complete caveman.
    She rolled her eyes and stood, heading down the hall. She
pulled her clothing off and threw it haphazardly around her bedroom, grabbed
her pajamas, and made her way into the bathroom. After she had drawn a steaming
hot bath, she stepped into the tub and lay back in it with a sigh of bliss.
    As the hot water relaxed her tired, tense muscles, she let
her mind replay the day, specifically her outing with Rob. Sometimes she
wondered why she continued to indulge him. He irritated her seventy-five
percent of the time. Try as she might, she couldn’t see herself falling for
him. He was cocky and flip, and self-centered.
    In the back of her mind, she knew the real reason she kept
him around. It wasn’t because she was interested in him. It was because he was
a distraction. It kept her from thinking about anything in her life that
reminded her of the past. Rob was about as far from what her life had been as
she could get.
    Before her parents’ accident, the three of them had lived and
breathed music. It had been the three of them for Melody’s entire life. While
she’d had friends and had never been a loner by any means, she had always
preferred the company of her mother and father above everyone else. They all
understood one another. They all spoke the same language, music. There was
nothing now that they were gone. There had been nothing for the last year. No
music. No joy. No nothing. So she filled her days up with mundane things that
didn’t matter, distractions, just to get by.
    She had a job, a pitiful one, working as a sales clerk in a
women’s clothing store. She hated it with a passion. It wasn’t her, but that
was why she had taken it. It had nothing to do with music, nothing to do with
the life that had been shattered.
    But as she thought about it, she realized she wasn’t really
accomplishing anything by avoiding all that had once reminded her of what she’d
loved. Like Rob had pointed out, she still had pictures everywhere of her
parents and the orchestra they had all been a part of. And she couldn’t escape
the fact that the love of music still lived within her. It wasn’t going to
disappear just because she turned her head the other way and pretended she
didn’t see it.
    She’d done everything in her power to alter her life to not
revolve around music and the memories that would cause her pain, but it had
only ended up causing her pain anyway. And it made her sick to her stomach to
think that, by turning her back on what had made her life with her parents
special, she had, inadvertently, turned her back on them.
    Self loathing washed over Melody in waves while Nikki’s words
from earlier repeated in her mind. She had been right about one thing. Her
parents wouldn’t have liked her current course of action. It would have
saddened them to see Melody give up everything she had loved, everything she
had worked for, just because she was hurting, just because she was afraid.
    She heaved a sigh as she got out of the tub, pulled the plug,
and dried off. She slipped into a light pink tank top and gray pajama bottoms
and headed into the kitchen. She put on the teakettle, thinking a cup of tea
sounded relaxing, and relaxation was the driving force of the evening,
considering how rigorous the day had been.
    As she wandered back into the living room, her gaze fell upon
the score of music she’d set on her piano. She stared at it for a second,
chewed on her bottom lip in contemplation, and then went over to give it a
closer look. She picked it up and flipped through it gently, careful not to
damage the well-worn pages. Glancing over the notes, she tried to imagine what
it would sound like, but came up short. Nothing her mind could conjure would
come anywhere near what it would actually