“It just made me think how listening to Ray Charles made me want to play the piano.”

Rachel rested her chin on her folded hands and tried to ease the door open a little farther. “Do you play?”

“Not really. I used to think it would be pretty cool. Sometimes I’d hang around this music store and fiddle around until they kicked me out.” The twinge of embarrassment made him brush the rest aside. “I got over it.”

But once she had a purpose, Rachel wasn’t easily shaken. “I always wished I’d learned. Tash got my mother a piano a few months ago—when we found out she’d always wanted to play. All those years we were growing up, she never mentioned it. All those years…” Her words trailed off, and then she shook herself back to the matter at hand. “My sister married a musician. Spencer Kimball.”

“Kimball?” Nick’s eyes widened before he could prevent it. “The composer?”

“You know his work?”

“Yeah.” He struggled to keep it cool. A guy couldn’t admit he listened to longhair music—unless it was heavy metal. “Some.”

Delighted with his reaction, Rachel continued, just as casually. “At one of our visits down to see Tash and her family, we caught Mama at the piano. She got all flustered and kept saying how she was too old to learn, and how foolish it was. But then Spence sat down with her to show her a few chords, and you could see, you could just see, how much she wanted to learn. So on Mother’s Day, we worked out this big, elaborate plan to get her out of the house for a few hours. Anyway, when she came back, the piano was in the living room. She cried.” Rachel blinked the mist out of her own eyes and sighed. “She takes lessons twice a week now, and she’s practicing for her first recital.”

“That’s cool,” Nick murmured, obscurely touched.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.” She smiled at him. “I guess it proves it’s never too late to try.” When she offered a hand, she wanted him to take it as a gesture of friendship and support. “What do you say we walk off some of this pizza?”

“Yeah.” His fingers closed around hers, and Nicholas LeBeck was in heaven.

He was content to listen to her talk, to have her laugh shiver over him. Even the shadows of the girls who had weaved in and out of his life faded away. They were nothing compared to the woman who walked beside him, slim and soft and fragrant.

She listened when he talked. And she was interested in what he had to say. When she smiled up at him, those exotic eyes flashing with humor, his stomach tied itself into slippery knots.

He could have walked with her for hours.

“This is it.”