Music lit up the soul.
It certainly lit up Rosalynn’s.
“Roz!”
Ivory keys of the piano felt the best under her fingertips when Rosalynn Puzza could shut out the rest the world, and focus on only the music she was making. Currently halfway through a ballad of her own creation for an upcoming audition, she had no intention on paying any attention to the voice calling her name from down the hall of her parents’ home.
Didn’t they know what she was doing?
“Roz, could you step away from the piano for a bit?” her father, Zeke, shouted. “We have to go!”
To nothing important.
Nothing that would make music.
Nothing like this.
Maybe that wasn’t entirely true. The dinner party for her father’s best friend’s daughter and her fiancé was important to Zeke, and her mother, Katya. Roz remembered her father’s best friend always being around from the time she was a baby. Or, as far back as her memories could go, anyway.
But that was the thing about Roz when she sat down at a piano and got to work. The rest of the world faded away, and nothing else mattered. She put her fingers against ivory, and became an extension of something beautiful.
Someone had put her in front of a piano when she was a toddler. She vividly remembered that moment standing on the bench in a poofy Sunday dress with matching yellow shoes that she’d loved because they looked like her ma’s heels. The hands on her waist had kept her steady as she leaned over the keys, and smacked tiny palms into the ivory.
It made the best noise. There was something about the way the ivory felt under her hands, and the sounds the piano made when she kept hitting those keys that had clicked in her brain. It took very little time for her to realize if she did it a certain way, those noises became something else entirely.
No one had been able to keep her away from the piano since then. Oh, she got better, of course. She learned to make music instead of simply noise.
They called her a prodigy because she could hear notes, and mimic them perfectly by ear alone. They called her a genius with the piano because she could compose music in her mind, and translate it to the keys without having ever written it down. They said she was going to do amazing things because it was her destiny.
Roz just liked the music.
“Hey, can’t you hear them calling for you?”
A hand landed on her wrist, and the second someone touched her while she was playing the piano, Roz’s concentration was broken. She lost that focus because someone had to come into her space. Oh, sure, the ballad still played on in her mind even after the piano had stopped echoing her racing thoughts … but still.
Glancing up with a scowl, Roz found her brother, Luca, standing next to the bench. He grinned in that way of his. A way that made her want to punch him right in the throat because it said he knew exactly what he had done.
It wouldn’t be the first time she hit him. At only a year older than her seventeen, Luca was the typical big brother that liked to both overprotect, and annoy the fuck out of her. He took great pleasure in doing those things. She suspected it was because he was bored, needed to get laid, liked bothering her, or a mixture of all three things.
“What the hell?” Roz asked. “I was almost finished!”
She was running out of time to finish this original piece before her audition in Australia. She’d been enrolled in a private academy for the musically gifted from the age of eleven, but now she had a chance to be a part of an orchestra in Australia that would also allow her a solo spotlight in the company.
At seventeen, this was unheard of in her business.
She needed to be ready.
Luca arched a brow. “Dad’s been calling for you for ten minutes, Roz. It’s time to go to the engagement party for Cece.”
Roz sighed, and glanced back at the piano. “But …”
“It’s still gonna be here.”
This was not a battle she was going to win. While she loved the Donati family, because they had basically been a second family for her growing up, she doubted that she would find something over there to take her mind off the fact she left her music unfinished.
Never leave a composition unfinished, Roz.
Her mentor had repeated those exact words to her so many times that it was impossible to ignore. It didn’t matter. Her brother wasn’t leaving.
“Fine,” Roz grumbled, standing from the bench. “I’m coming.”
“Good.” Luca clapped his hands once, and followed behind her. “Naz is home this time, too. First time you’ll be seeing him in a while, right?”
Nazio “Naz” Donati.
Her father’s godson.
Resident genius—literally.
Her brother’s best friend.
Two years older than her.
The guy she had a crush on from the time she was five.
There were a lot of reasons Roz could list why she didn’t care if Naz was home around the same time she was for the first time in years. Most importantly because he’d never seemed interested in being friends with her when he was closer to her brother.
But … who knew?
“Yeah, maybe I’ll say hi,” Roz said.
Luca grinned as he slipped past her in the hallway. “You should.”
*
The Nazio Donati that Roz remembered from the last time she’d actually had a conversation with him was a surly teenage boy who was more interested in fixing the laptop he’d broken in pieces on the kitchen table than explaining to her where she could find his mother. Roz remembered that moment in her life vividly.
She’d been fourteen.
He was sixteen.
Naz had no idea, and she’d been too embarrassed to explain, but she was looking for his mother that day because hers was not home. Katya had gone on a weekend trip to Vegas with a friend, and her father had been in the city for work. Likely for Naz’s father.
Point was … there was no woman nearby for Roz to have help her when she suddenly realized her first ever period had started. Of course, she’d been wearing a light-colored summer dress that ended up entirely fucking ruined.
She did change before making the trip through the trails that separated her parents’ home from the Donati property, thankfully.
Eventually, Naz had listened long enough to her quiet, embarrassed voice whispering from the doorway that she was using to hide herself to say where his mother was. Catherine—as wonderful as she was—helped Roz, got her set up until her mom got home the next day, and it was like nothing had even happened.
Naz probably never knew the truth. He likely didn’t even remember that passing day in his life. She couldn’t forget it, though.
However, that brusque, distracted teenage boy with his black-rimmed glasses he wore as he tinkered with the broken electronic was not the same man standing across the room with an open beer in his hands.
Oh, sure, they looked the same … that was, if the teenager had gained about sixty pounds of muscle, grew his hair a bit longer, hadn’t shaved his face in a week, and could smile in a way that had Roz’s stomach doing fucking flip-flops.
The house was full of people, which made it a hell of a lot easier for Roz to blend into the crowd. So was the way of mafia families. They were big, and whenever something important happened—like this engagement party—everybody had to show up just because.
Roz was using that to her advantage. She wasn’t really a shy girl, but one look at Nazio from across the room as he greeted her brother, and she suddenly didn’t know how to speak.
He was just a guy.
She’d dated guys.
Something in her mind said, not a guy like that.
A cute girl passed Nazio by and stared all the while. He didn’t seem to notice her at all. He was too busy talking to Luca, and Roz was kind of mesmerized.
Like a dumb girl.
So what if his eyes were as dark as night. And who cared if his jaw looked like it had been chiseled from stone? Did it matter that he looked like he could probably bench press two-hundred pounds easily?
Apparently, her body cared.
It was strange—Roz had been so focused on being a world class pianist for the better part of her teenage years that things like boys and dating had been pushed to the side. Sure, she’d gone out occasionally with a guy, but that was it. It rarely went beyond one date, and she’d never found a guy who made her want to simply stare at him because of the way he looked while he fucking talked.
And to her brother, no less.
Luca told her to say hi.
Ha.
Roz wasn’t quite sure she was up to that right now. If she opened her mouth and something stupid came out, she would die.
“There you are, Roz.”
At the sound of Catherine—Naz’s mom—Donati’s voice, Roz spun around in her shoes. She didn’t want someone to catch her staring. That would be embarrassing.
“How’s it feel to be back in New York again?” Catherine asked, giving her a quick hug. “You know your mom and dad are so proud of you, right? They tell us everything.”
Roz smiled. “I bet. And it’s good to be back.”
“I hear you have something huge coming up. An audition, right?”
She shrugged. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Not what I heard,” Catherine said slyly.
“Okay, so it’s kind of a big deal.”
Catherine winked. “You’re going to be amazing, Roz.”
“Thanks.”
The woman gave her another brilliant smile, and then someone behind Roz caught her attention. “Oh, there’s Miggy. By the way, your father was looking for Luca. Could you let him know for me?”
Roz glanced in the direction she had last seen her brother with Naz. “Yeah, he’s right over—”
Not there now.
“I’ll find him,” Roz said.
Catherine nodded. “Oh, and by the way …”
Roz glanced back at the woman. “Yeah?”
“You know, Nazio responds better when you speak to him, Roz … and not just stare at him. Conversation is what makes that young man’s mind go. And once you make his mind start to go, the rest of him quickly follows. I blame it on the genius thing. His mind is the gateway to everything.”
She blinked.
Apparently, her staring had not gone unnoticed.
Catherine grinned slyly. “Good luck. Have fun.”
Well, then …
