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  Copyright © 2013 Shunta Montgomery

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  Publisher’s Note:

  Love in Music is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, event or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Capri Montgomery Books

  www.caprimontgomerybooks.com

  Cover by: Sweet Temptation Designs

  www.sweettemptationdesigns.com

  Special Thanks

  Thank you, Barb, for catching the mistakes I missed. Your assist with editing has been wonderful.

  Thanks to all of my readers for showing your support for my work by buying and reading my books.

  Books by Capri Montgomery

  Write Me A Murder: Sing Me to My Grave

  Shadow Ridge

  Shadow Hills Returns: Revenge Justified

  Shadow Hills Returns: Breaking Point

  Shadow Hills Returns: Obsession’s Curse

  Forged in Fire

  The Funeral Planner

  Hiking for Danger

  Shadow Hills Returns: Family Ties

  Shadow Hills Returns: The Cost of Love

  The Sixth Sentinel

  On the Line

  Inferno

  When the Heart Breaks

  Killing Hannah

  On Thin Ice

  Warriors of Persia

  Sworn to Secrecy

  Explosive: Deadly Connections

  Betrayal of the Dove

  Vendetta

  Shadow Hills: M is for Murder

  Seducing the Bodyguard

  Shadow Hills: No Valentine

  Shadow Hills: Fallen Hero

  Fahrenheit

  Secrets and Lies

  Saints and Sinners

  The McGregor Affair

  The Geneva Project

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  Dangerous Obsessions

  Watch Over Me

  And Many Others…

  Chapter One

  That night felt like something out of a horror movie. One of those movies where everything seems all right until that moment happens, the one where things can either start a future, or end one. It was dark that night. The rain was falling in sheets that could blind the most skillful driver, but it was okay because I was safe inside where it was warm, where life felt to be moving forward and upward at the same time. And then that moment came—the one that changes everything forever; the moment that ends the fairytale and brings with it hell. My life changed that night in a way I never expected it would.

  If somebody had told me two years ago that Arashi Sakamoto and I would have reached this day in our lives I would have never believed it. When I first met him, it wasn’t as if we couldn’t stand each other, it was just that I was friends with his twenty-eight year old sister, Hina. I was thirty-one at the time and Arashi was thirty-nine. He wasn’t exactly looking my way and I wasn’t looking his.

  True to his name sake, Arashi was very much like a storm when it came to women’s hearts. From what Hina had told me he was quite the catch, but nobody could keep him once they caught him. He seemed to go through women like a box of tissue—in my mind that’s the vision I had of him. Maybe he wasn’t exactly a male slut, but he wasn’t a stranger to using women. I saw it as using them with the way Hina described his conquests to me. He never kept any of the women very long. “He was not always this way,” she had said, but obviously deciding she had said too much about her dark eyed long haired brother she stopped talking about his personal life and put the focus back on our conversation pre-Arashi.

  I figured it didn’t matter what Arashi did, or who he did for that matter, because we weren’t a couple and we weren’t heading toward a relationship so why should it matter to me. Why should I care who he dated, why he dated them, or why he left them? I knew how to mind my own business. And for a while that made sense. It made sense to ignore the obvious and live with the perception I had formed of him. He was a man loyal to his family, but not a man who would think twice about breaking a woman’s heart. I knew all this and we hadn’t even conversed with each other. A few words here or there was not a conversation, especially when those words consisted of hello and goodbye. Yeah, Arashi wasn’t a threat to my heart, because he wasn’t anywhere near it, just as I wasn’t anywhere near his bed worthy exotic woman radar.

  Despite the distance between Arashi and me, his mother, Natsumi, on the first day that I met her had been sure to let me know I wasn’t good enough for her son. She didn’t mince words either. She spit them out like daggers as if each word could pierce my armor of skin, draw blood and send me into oblivion—away from her son. He deserved somebody who shared his passion—and his financial status I would assume.

  I had been over to their family estate visiting Hina and her parents, Akio and Natsumi, had just gotten into town. They mostly lived in San Diego while Arashi and Hina lived in San Francisco. They had numerous houses, but the San Francisco and San Diego estates were the largest. Apparently Hina’s parents had given the San Francisco estate to her and Arashi. It was theirs. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew nobody obtained marble floors and that much land with that big of a house unless they had money. I just wasn’t interested in Arashi on that level. I guess he was a nice guy. We just never talked enough for me to even get to know him. I had based my opinion of him on what Hina had told me, mixed with our abrupt interactions with each other and his relationship history.

  Hina and I hit it off from the first massage. She has her own spa. I guess you could say in a way it was fate. I couldn’t afford that spa. I dropped my business card in a plastic canister at a restaurant I had gone to for a smoothie and I won a day at the spa—her spa. She mostly did the business side of things, but that day she walked into the room where I was to be massaged, given a facial and pampered into perfection, and we just clicked.

  I found out later that she saw me when I came in and told the lady who was supposed to be my masseuse to take a break because she was taking over. She’s really good with her hands by the way. I’m not sure why she decided to work on me. Maybe it was because I was there for free and she wanted me to like the place enough to come back and pay for it. Or maybe she had seen my business card and wanted to talk to me about what I did.

  Anyway, we became friends and I helped her design her Web site and some graphics for her marketing cards and fliers. That’s what I do—I, Topaz Kissinger, happen to be one of the best designers in San Francisco. San Francisco just doesn’t know that yet.

  My first day meeting the parents had Natsumi looking me in the eyes, her dark globes of judgment had assessed me and found me unworthy of her son. I’m not some gold digging whore. And quite frankly her son wasn’t my type. I loved his creative side for sure. I love music. He composes and mixes music. His love for music is about where our similarities started and ended.

  “You will not worm your way into my son’s life using my daughter to do it,”
she had said. I was shocked. I really hadn’t expected my first meeting of Hina’s parents to be hostile. Hina had quickly become my best friend. I didn’t know too many people here on a friendly basis. I moved from small town Kalamazoo to New York when I was sixteen. I went to school there, but I have never made friends easily because I’m a total chicken when it comes to talking to people I don’t know. Moving to San Francisco didn’t change that fact at all. I can do it for business, but trying to fit in and make friends has never been my strong suit. I have always been on the outside looking in and I guess I just got used to that—comfort zones and all.

  “Hina and I are friends and I have no interest in your son. I understand you’re a mother and mothers protect their children. My mother is the same way so trust me when I say I understand your words. But believe me, I am not the threat you perceive me to be. I’m saving myself for my husband so please don’t think I’m looking to be another notch in your son’s bedpost so that I can get knocked up and ruin both of our lives.” Was that too harsh, too candid, too honest? I don’t know, but she took a step back out of my face and nodded. Natsumi wasn’t tall, maybe five four at most. Her husband, Akio was the exception. He was tall, maybe just under six feet and I guess that’s where Arashi got his height from because he stood about five ten, maybe five eleven.

  Natsumi was a beautiful woman. Her hair was still raven and silky. Her skin was still devoid of excessive wrinkles and I marveled at that because she wasn’t still super young. She was sixty-three, but she was aging very well. Akio still looked good too. At sixty-seven he was starting to gray in his sideburns and he did have some lines gracing his eyes, but nothing so dramatic that it would tell of his age. They were both lucky. In this state looking old seemed to be a curse.

  Hina wasn’t happy with her mother’s attack and I could tell from her defense of me. I left that day a little angry, a lot hurt, and extremely confused. I mean Arashi always stayed back in his music room creating music, mixing music, recording somebody playing cello—somebody Japanese and thin and beautiful from what I could see of her when she came into the kitchen with Arashi.

  I’m not an ugly duckling or anything. But put me next to perfection and I look rather Plain Jane. I’m short—who knew. Both of my parents are short. My mother, who filed for separation from my father and my father escalated that to divorce, is only five four. My father is maybe five five at best. So My five feet one inch height is rather short indeed. Everybody thought I would be the tallest in the family because this is about the height I was when I was nine years old. But my period came and the growing stopped. I read somewhere that’s how it works. Sucks, doesn’t it? But you know I like being short. I only had one boyfriend who was shorter than me.

  Anyway, Arashi did his thing and Hina and I kept to ourselves up in the front of the estate. We were either enjoying the day together or I was discussing new designs with her. I was not the threat her mother thought I was. Besides, I was kind of starting something up with the guy I thought would be the love of my life.

  Technically when I first met Jace Peters I couldn’t really stand the man. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him per se, it was that he was rather obnoxious. I was working on a project for his company and we had to work together. He kept hinting at asking me out and I kept avoiding the conversation. I just wanted to get the joint project done, collect the rest of my money and get out of there. But the longer we worked together, the more I liked him. He made me laugh. He was also extremely smart. We started dating and we did that until the night of my birthday. He asked me to marry him that night. Yes, I was engaged for all of sixty seconds. You see, over his lobster and my chicken dinner he decided to tell me he loved me, would marry me, but that his one condition would be I go have liposuction. I was too fat for him; that’s what he told me while he pushed a card over to me with an appointment for me to go see a cosmetic surgeon written on it. Yeah, he thought of everything. Well, he’s a smart guy so I guess why wouldn’t he think of everything; right?

  Ironically, Jace is one hundred eighty-six pounds heavier than I am, and trust me when I say that’s not muscle weight. He’s two hundred eighty-two pounds, and he called me too fat for him.

  To say I fell apart that night would be an understatement. I remember it like it happened yesterday because it was my birthday, because I thought I was in love enough to say yes to his proposal, and because he left me sitting there with an unpaid check while he took the tickets to the concert he had promised to take me to. I was going to buy those tickets myself. It was the absolute last performance ever of the show and I wanted to go, but Jace said he wanted to do my birthday up right—yeah, up right had really gone to crap real quickly.

  By this point I had known Hina and her family for nearly a year. Her parents were back in San Diego, which was good because whenever they were in San Francisco and Hina invited me over for something I could feel her mother giving me the evil eye. Well, it felt like the evil eye anyway. She was attempting to be moderately pleasant toward me just so long as I didn’t look at her son, or even look like I was going to look at him. To say the tension was still there would be accurate, but I think that she realized I was happy with my boyfriend so she backed off a smidge.

  It was dark, the wind was howling and the rain was beating against the glass windows so hard I thought it might pick up enough force to break the windows and send glass shattering everywhere. The thunder and lightning didn’t help much either. Even with the torrential downpour Jace left me there. He got in his car and left me there with no way home.

  I called for Hina, but apparently she was able to get an earlier flight out to Japan so instead of leaving at noon the next day she had already boarded the plane and left. I got Arashi when I called. He could tell from my voice that something was wrong. Gee, I wonder what gave it away, the shake in my voice or the audible tears that I hadn’t let my eyes shed yet.

  He came for me. He picked me up, and there is where I started crying like a friggn’ baby. I was crying so hard that he pulled over in the parking lot of the market, unsnapped my seatbelt and pulled me into his arms. There I was, straddled his lap. Now in a dress that’s A-line it wasn’t too tight for me to spread my legs and sit there with his arms wrapped around me. I clung to him tightly while tears leaked out of my eyes and onto the warm skin of his neck.

  “It’s okay,” he said as he rubbed his hand up and down my back. There was comfort in his words and in his touch, but all I could feel was pain. I felt so much pain that it just hurt to breathe.

  “Oh God,” I sobbed trying to catch my breath, trying make the pain stop stabbing me in my heart. I couldn’t. All I could do was cry. All he could do was hold me, stroke his hand up and down my back, and say in that soft, deep melodious voice of his that everything would be okay. He didn’t know everything that had happened. I hadn’t told him. But I knew he was a smart man so he probably had an idea. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that I was dressed for an evening out, coming out of an upscale eating establishment—coming out alone. Yes, he had to know Jace and I weren’t together anymore.

  “It will be okay,” he said calmly and smoothly as if he knew the future for me when at that moment all I could feel was my pain. At that moment I couldn’t see a future beyond my present. I loved Jace, and he hurt me more than anything.

  Sitting at that table and listening to Jace’s words sent my emotions spiraling and I had to fight to contain them. “You’re an elephant,” he had said. I took great offense to that. I’m not gray nor am I wrinkly. Well, okay, I have my mother’s side of the family hands and they are a little wrinkly. And I do have a few strands of silver in my hair. So I guess I am gray and wrinkly, but I don’t have big ears and I’m not an elephant.

  “You’re too fat for me,” he had said. “But I made you an appointment with a doctor. I’m going to charge it. You can have the rest of the fat sucked out of your body.”

  The smart half of me saved crying until I was outside the restaurant. I told him n
o. I told him I was the same weight I was when he met me, when he worked so hard to get me. I was the same ninety-six pounds as I was before so why was that suddenly too fat for him? Why?

  I gave him his ring back and he got up and walked away. The waiter had perfect timing though. As everybody at the surrounding tables just stared at me, drinking it in as if it were a movie for them to gawk at, the waiter was handing me the dinner bill. One hundred fifty-four dollars and thirty-eight cents. Yeah, all I had was the chicken while Jace picked the most expensive meal and here I was paying for it by using the money I had in the bank to upgrade my software for the design business. On top of that I had no way home.

  I have to say that Arashi surprised me. We had never uttered more than a few words in passing to each other, hello, goodbye and “she’s out back,” is about all he had ever said to me. My words were always hello, goodbye and thanks, before I darted off down the hall toward the back patio exit so I could go see Hina. That night, with him holding me while I cried, with him assuring me I would be okay, things just changed between us. I didn’t notice they were changing but they were—they had.