Musician's Monsoon Read Online Free Page A

best,” he stated.
    She blinked in bewilderment, looked up at him, and felt the color leave her face when she realized she’d spoken her thoughts aloud.
    “And you’re not plain,” he continued. “Not in the least. If you were plain, I never would have noticed you. You stood out in the crowd, Sophie. Your face made me falter in my playing. Your lovely face. A plain person wouldn’t cause that reaction.”
    Her mouth and throat went dry, thus preventing her from speaking. So, instead, she just stared at him like a moron. She counted her heartbeats as they thundered in her chest. One…two…three…four….
    Four beats and her senses returned. She shook her head and backed away from him. “Dude,” she stated, sounding entirely too much like one of her high school students. “What the heck is this?” She looked around the still-deserted parking lot and wondered what kind of alternate universe she had fallen into.
    She pulled her fingers out of his grasp and slashed the air with her hands. The delightful electrical current that had been passing between them dissipated as she moved away. “This is insane.” She fixed him with a critical eye and put one hand on her hip while she brandished the antenna ball with the other. “Reality check,” she said. “This kind of stuff never happens to people like me. What are you up to?” He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off by taking a daring step up to him and stabbing the now frazzled-looking antenna ball at him. “You said you wanted to explain all that mumbo jumbo about hearing music when you looked at me. So get to it, because I swear, if you’re just trying to put a notch on your belt for laughs, or someone made a bet with you or something like that, so help me, I will put out your other eye.”
    He held his hands up and retreated slightly. “Whoa, calm down!” he exclaimed. “No one bet me anything!”
    “Then what are you telling me all this junk for?” She shook the ball at him again. “I’m a nobody, a forgettable face in the crowd. You say hot blondes are average at best? What, are you on crack? Do you honestly expect me to believe that you actually feel that way, or do you think I’m a gullible idiot? Well, let me tell you something, mister. I’ve been around long enough to know that men like you, who do what you do, do not try to pick up girls like me without some kind of motive. So what’s yours?” She flung the ball down again. It bounced once on the asphalt and rolled away in dejection. As if to punctuate her sentence, thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. Sophie put her hands on her hips and stared up at him in a blatant challenge.
    Zane seemed completely at a loss, and he took a breath to say something, but whatever it was disappeared while a look of surprised awe passed over his face. His eyes widened, and he gasped softly before his attention snapped to her. He reached down to snatch her wrist. “Come with me,” he stated.
    Sophie’s eyes bulged when he turned and started to haul her after him across the parking lot. Suddenly, every bad horror movie she had ever seen flashed through her mind, and she screamed. “What? Where?”
    “My hotel,” he threw over his shoulder. “I hear all sorts of notes. I need to get them down!”
    “Your hotel ?” she gasped. “No way! Abduction!” She dug in her heels, trying to pull out of his grasp, her mind turning wildly with terrible scenarios. She couldn’t help it. Before she’d taught high school, she’d taught elementary, where she had been inundated with what to do if one was being kidnapped. “Stranger danger!” she shouted. “Let me go!” She tried to remember self-defense, but everything in her mind was muddled and confused. Some of the anger she’d felt toward the antenna ball resurfaced at the fact that he was blatantly ignoring her demands. “I said, let go !”She used the side of her hand to karate chop him on the neck like she’d seen