Midnight Shadows by Lisa Marie Rice Page B

because her throat stopped up. Her voice had remained unchanged after the surgery. She could still sing, and did, often.
    Playing her harp…not so much. Her fingering was clumsy, nothing flowed as it used to. It had been years since she’d had to actually concentrate on individual notes on the harp. To her, the music that floated from Dagda, her insanely expensive Irish harp, had been one long seamless sound, not many plucks of the strings. A seamless beautiful sound that came from her fingertips but partook of something else, something very special.
    That something special was gone. She was now a competent player, but the magic had fled from her. She never let on the depth of her grief, but Douglas understood. He understood everything.
    “I can’t bear the thought of playing badly,” she confessed. To her knowledge Yannis had no musical talent at all, but somehow he understood her. In his way he’d been as gifted a performer as she, except his exceptional talent had been infiltrating nasty places and whacking bad guys. His playing days were definitely over.
    With her, the jury was still out.
    Yannis was sitting in Male Mode, knees apart, big hands dangling from his knees, contemplating the expensive tufa tiling. He exhaled and lifted his head and she saw grief briefly cross his face, then it closed up again. “I understand completely. And I can’t tell how well you’re playing because my tin ears have two left feet. It sounded great to me. But Cousin Gavras, who knows what he’s talking about and plays a mean kithara, says you have an extraordinary sense for the instrument. I’m quoting him.” He shrugged. “What the hell would I know? I’m just a Navy diver with a bum leg. Most of my countrymen’s instruments sound like a cat yowling to me.”
    Allegra laughed and at his pleased grin she realized that’s what he wanted. To make her laugh.
    How kind of him, she thought. Then another shadow filled her vision and this time it wasn’t an artifact, this time it was real.
    Douglas! Coming around the corner, scowling, a day early.
    Allegra’s heart gave a huge thump. There were no thoughts in her head at all, simply an upwelling of immense joy at seeing him again. She leapt up and ran toward him and encountered something else very real. A small planter she didn’t see because she couldn’t see anything but Douglas.
    She tripped, and everything happened in slow motion. The unmistakable feeling of losing control of her body. Her feet slipping out from under her, falling at an angle where she would slam her head against the travertine edges of the pool then fall in, in slow motion, but unstoppable.
    Someone screamed.
    Allegra was in slow motion but Douglas was in fast forward. For such a huge man he could move like lightning. There was a blur and then she was caught in his arms, heart pounding, mind still dealing with the consequences of the fall, though there hadn’t been one. Douglas had caught her.
    His heart was pounding too.
    Allegra let out a huge breath against his chest and tightened her arms around him. “Quite an entrance, Senior Chief,” she said breathlessly. “Are you sure you aren’t in show business?”
    She pulled back to look at him, but he wasn’t smiling. He was pale under his tan, harsh brackets around his mouth.
    “Shit,” he breathed. He looked her up and down. Not the look of a lover, but the look of a teammate checking for wounds. “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine.” Allegra ducked her head. Once again she’d been clumsy. She used to be so graceful before the operation, before the blindness. She could remember her body working in harmony with itself and the outside world. Now it felt as if her body was composed of Frankensteinian chunks of flesh badly stitched together. The clumsiness was a small price to pay for the recovery of sight, but still. “I’m so sorry, Douglas.”

Chapter Two
    Kowalski waited for a second for his heart to stop thundering before answering his