Damn Gus von Rickenbach.
12
Twenty-three years earlier
Detroit, Michigan
THE DAY MIRIAM MET Gus, she was performing at a regional competition for high school students. He sailed into the room where everyone was waiting to perform, wearing a bright fuchsia shirt so neatly pressed, the creases could have sliced her open.
Miriam was too busy running through her music in her head to notice him making the circuit of the room, cracking jokes and introducing himself as if he were the host instead of a fellow competitor. She was the youngest of them all, and the only one without a string of awards to her name. It was all she could do to squash the devil in her head.
I am Mira Lewis, and I belong here. I am good enough!
“Hi,” said a voice, rich and warm like butter and cream and sugar fresh out of the oven.
She looked up and found herself face to face with the most gorgeous guy she’d ever seen: thick black hair, straight nose, and a smile that said no one else in the world mattered.
She blinked stupidly at him.
He stuck a hand out. “Gus von Rickenbach,” he said. “I’m from Chicago. More or less.”
Nobody that gorgeous had ever talked to her before. Or anybody that old, for that matter; at school, people looked right past her. Miriam’s brain went completely blank.
Gus von Rickenbach raised his eyebrows, giving her a teasing smile. “This is the part where you say, ‘Oh, hi, my name is …’”
The stage door opened, and the previous competitor, an Asian girl with an immaculate bun, tapped out in her high heels, wearing a bright smile.
“Mira Lewis.” The room monitor read from his list in a bored voice. “Mira Lewis.”
Miriam leaped up. “That’s me.” She hurried through the heavy soundproof door, through the wing, and onto the stage. But she’d lost her concentration; all she could see was Gus von Rickenbach’s handsome face and that smile—oh, that smile!
She had a memory lapse halfway through her first piece. It went downhill from there.
Miriam barely held herself together long enough to get off the stage. She couldn’t go back out into that room like this. Instead, she melted into the shadows of the wings, stifling her tears while the next competitor filed out onto the stage and settled on the piano bench.
When the music started, Miriam stopped crying. She’d never heard playing like that in real life. She looked up to see a neatly pressed fuchsia shirt and glossy black hair. She watched Gus’s entire performance through the gaps between the vertical wood panels, mesmerized by the beauty of the music; the beauty of his face, rapt with concentration; and the beauty of his body swaying as his hands flowed over the keys.
From that moment, Miriam Lewis was smitten.
She came in fourteenth that day. Out of fourteen. Gus, of course, won. Miriam went to congratulate him, but he barely looked at her as he shook her hand and went on whispering in the ear of the second-place finisher, a blonde bombshell who’d draped herself over him.
Miriam felt she’d been patted on the head by a rock star. It was exhilarating—and humiliating.
For the next several years, what kept Miriam’s butt glued to the piano bench—and her body moving on the job when every neuron screamed for rest—was the determination to be good enough to challenge him. But it made no difference. No matter how hard she fought—and she never, ever again had a memory flub—he was always better. His bio kept expanding. He took lessons from famous players. He won awards. He went to camps.
Miriam only knew she ought to be doing any of those things because he’d already beaten her to it.
It took her four years to beat Gus in a competition. By then they were both at the Curtis Institute—no small thing for a blue-collar girl whose parents not only had no money to send her to a high-level performing arts school but had no desire to do so.
By then, she finally understood why he acted like a Kennedy: he sort of was. Not literally, but he had that kind of history. Money, talent, charm. Oh, the charm. Even the teachers eyed him from behind as he walked down the hall.
And her classmates? They had no chance. The female student body fell like dominoes before him. Long, long rows of dominoes. Every six or seven weeks, he had a new girl. Tall, short, white, brown, black—he liked them all. Except, apparently, Miriam. He’d walk right past her on nights she worked as an usher at the downtown concert hall, and show her the same charming, remote smile he bestowed on her at school—the one that made her question whether he even knew her name.
Well, fine. Let him run through all those other girls. Miriam had no intention of being one of them. She intended to be the one who made him realize there was more to love than being fawned over by the masses. Like Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, when Gus noticed her, it was going to be because she was different. Worth committing to. When he noticed her, it would be as his equal.
Which meant she had to beat him.
And finally, in the spring of her first year at Curtis, she did.
That night in Boston, she wore a shimmery gown she’d found in a secondhand shop that was revealing, but not trashy. Gus played right before her, and as they traded spaces in the wings, he did a double take. She paused and gave him her Elizabeth Bennet smile—I am not like all those other shallow, simpering girls—and swayed out onto the stage, aware of his eyes on her body the entire way.
The bench still radiated the warmth of his body. She took the energy of that sensation and channeled it all into
