Carnal Innocence

he’d stopped. Oh, she wished he’d stopped so she could have given that homicidal jackass a piece of her mind.
    She’d have felt better then, having vented her temper. She was getting damn good at venting since Dr. Palamo had told her that the ulcer and the headaches were a direct result of repressing her feelings. And of chronically overworking, of course.
    Well, she was doing something about both. Caroline unpried her sweaty hands from the wheel and wiped them against her slacks. She was taking a nice, long, peaceful sabbatical here in Nowhere, Mississippi. After a few months—if she didn’t die of this vicious heat—she’d be ready to prepare for her spring tour.
    As for repressing her feelings, she was done with that. Her final, ugly blowout with Luis had been so liberating, so gloriously uninhibited, she almost wished she could go back to Baltimore and do it again.
    Almost.
    The past—and Luis with his clever tongue, brilliant talent, and roving eye definitely belonged to the past— was safely behind her. The future, at least until she’d recovered her nerves and her health, wasn’t of much interest. For the first time in her life, Caroline Waverly,child prodigy, dedicated musician, and emotional sap, was going to live only for the sweet, sweet present.
    And here, at long last, she was going to make a home. Her way. No more backing away from problems. No more cowed agreeing to her mother’s demands and expectations. No more struggling to be the reflection of everyone else’s desires.
    She was moving in, taking hold. And by the end of the summer, she intended to know exactly who Caroline Waverly was.
    Feeling better, she replaced her hands on the wheel and eased the car down the lane. She had a vague recollection of skipping down it once, on some long-ago visit to her grandparents. It had been a short visit, of course—Caroline’s mother had done everything possible to cut off her own country roots. But Caroline remembered her grandfather, a big, red-faced man who’d taken her fishing one still morning. And her girlish reluctance to bait a hook until her grandfather had told her that old worm was just waiting to catch himself a big fat fish.
    Her trembling thrill when her line had jerked, and the sense of awe and accomplishment when they’d carried three husky catfish back home.
    Her grandmother, a wiry stick of a woman with steel-gray hair, had fried up the catch in a heavy black skillet. Though Caroline’s mother had refused to taste a bite, Caroline herself had eaten hungrily, a frail, tow-headed six-year-old with long, slender fingers and big green eyes.
    When the house came into view, she smiled. It hadn’t changed much. The paint was flaking off the shutters and the grass was ankle-high, but it was still a trim two-story house with a covered porch made for sitting and a stone chimney that leaned just slightly to the left.
    She felt her eyes sting and blinked at the tears. Foolish to feel sad. Her grandparents had lived long, contented lives. Foolish to feel guilty. When her grandfather died two years before, Caroline had been in Madrid, in the middle of a concert tour, and swamped by obligations.It simply hadn’t been possible to make the trip back for his funeral.
    And she’d tried, really tried, to tempt her grandmother to the city, where Caroline could have flown easily between tour dates for a visit.
    But Edith hadn’t budged; she’d laughed at the notion of leaving the house where she’d come as a new bride some seventy years before, the house where her children had been born and raised, the house where she’d lived her whole life.
    And when she died, Caroline had been in a Toronto hospital, recovering from exhaustion. She hadn’t known her grandmother was gone until a week after the funeral.
    So it was foolish to feel guilt.
    But as she sat in her car, with the air-conditioning blowing gently on her face, she was swamped with the emotion.
    “I’m sorry,” she said aloud to the ghosts. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. That I was never here.”
    On a sigh, she combed a hand through her sleek cap of honey-blond hair. It did no good to sit in the car and brood. She needed to take in her things, go through the house, settle herself. The place was hers now, and she meant to keep it.
    When she opened the car door, the heat stole the oxygen from her
lungs.
Gasping against its force, she lifted her violin case from the backseat. She was already wilting when she carried the