“I did. Well, in a way I did. The song you gave me, I sent it off to the Magee in New York City. He called me today, just this morning, and said how he wants to buy it. And that he wants to see your other work.” She spun in a circle, too excited to see how cool his eyes were as they watched her. “I didn’t think I’d get through the day without telling you.”

“What right did you have to do that?”

Still beaming, she sipped champagne. “To do what?”

“To send my music off that way, to take it on yourself to show a stranger what was mine?”

“Shawn.” She put a hand on his arm to give him a little shake. “He’s buying it.”

“I gave it to you because you asked me—because I thought you wanted it for yourself, and that you valued it for that. Is this what you planned all along, to send it off somewhere, have another put a price on it?”

Something was wrong, badly and dangerously wrong. The only way she knew how to deal with it was temper. “What if it was? It got results, didn’t it? What good is it to make songs without doing something with them? Now you can.”

He met heat with ice. “And it’s for you to decide, is it, what I can and should do, and how and when I should do it?”

“You weren’t doing anything about it.”

“How do you know what I’m doing or not, planning on doing or not?”

“Haven’t I heard you say a thousand times you weren’t ready to show it for sale?”

The minute the words were out of her mouth, she recognized her mistake. Even as she searched for a way around it, he was plowing on. “That’s right, you have. But that didn’t suit you, didn’t sit well with the way you want things done. What good is it, you’re thinking, if you can’t make a living from it. If you don’t have coin to show for it at end of day.”

“It’s not the coin—”

“My music is the most personal thing in my life,” he interrupted. “Whether I ever make a pound from it doesn’t change what it is to me. You don’t understand that, Brenna, or respect that. Or me.”

“That’s not true.” She was beginning to feel something other than anger. It was a clawing in the gut, in the throat, that had nothing to do with temper. “I only wanted you to have something out of it.”

“I had something out of it.”

She’d never seen anger so cold, so controlled. There was no mistaking it in that rigid face, those hard eyes. It made her feel like a bug not worthy of being squashed. “For Christ’s sake, Shawn, you should be dancing instead of hammering at me. The man wants to buy your song. He thinks it should be recorded.”

“What he thinks matters more than what I do?”