“No, I want you to entertain me.” Her completely innocent comment had Kellen imagining not-so-innocent ways of entertaining her.

What the hell? He hadn’t reacted this way to a pretty girl since his lust-fueled teenage years. Was this what it felt like to be Owen? No wonder he was always begging to try out Tony’s newest sex club. This perpetual state of arousal was downright distracting.

“Um.” What had they been talking about? His band. Right. “We’ve been together as a unit for about seven years now.”

“What do you call yourselves?”

“Sole Regret.”

Her eyes lit up, and a broad smile spread across her face. “That sounds familiar,” she said. “Maybe I do remember the announcement of your nomination at the Grammy’s.”

“Was it accompanied by a really long air-horn blast?”

She laughed. “That was you?”

Kellen shook his head. “Owen. He isn’t into proper etiquette at award shows. He also yelled, ‘You suck!’ during the winner’s acceptance speech.”

Dawn laughed. “I remember that. Didn’t they ask him to leave?”

“We all had to leave. Owen’s a bit loud and outspoken when he’s been drinking, and we’d started celebrating our sure-win the night before.”

“Oh,” she said, her lips in a beguiling pout. “He must have been terribly disappointed.”

She sliced a piece of bread from a loaf, soaked it in the egg mixture, and then carefully laid it in the sizzling butter.

“You wouldn’t know what that was like,” Kellen said.

She glanced up. “Why do you think that?

“Well, because you won your Grammy.”

“But I didn’t win the World International or the Peabody Mason Piano Competitions, did I?”

“Never heard of either of those.”

“I also didn’t win—”

“Dawn, you have a fucking Grammy. I’ve heard of that one. Celebrate your victories.”

She gaped at him, her spatula gripped tightly in one fist. For a second, he thought she was going to smack him with it.

“I don’t like to lose,” she said.

Fire sparked in her voice, in her face. The rapid rise of her passion caused certain body parts in the room to rise. Again.

“Name one person who likes to lose,” he said.

She sucked in a little gasp and blinked at him. He suspected that no one dared to call her out on anything, which inspired the urge to find all her buttons and push them repeatedly, see just how brightly her fire could burn.

“But I really don’t like to lose. It’s almost pathological.”

He appraised her closely for a moment, looking beyond the sexual creature that had his full attention to the tense, slightly uptight, a-bit-too-proper woman he’d overlooked until now, what with the hormones swirling through his body. She seemed to cling to control a bit too tightly. He’d love to bind her and see how she responded to giving up complete control. To him.

“There’s only one way to ensure you never lose,” he said.

She flipped over a perfectly browned piece of French toast with her spatula. “What’s that?”

“Don’t compete.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen. I have a competitive streak a mile wide. I have to know if…”

She met his eyes, and the fire in them surged. Would rendering her defenseless with ropes cause that fire to burn brighter, dampen it, or extinguish it completely? He predicted she’d ignite under his meticulous attention as he included her body in one of his creations—where bondage became art. And he doubted she’d be the only one to ignite if he played with that particular fire. He took a deep breath. He needed to find focus, which was entirely impossible with her looking all defiant and tense. He wanted to draw both the defiance and the tension from her body and teach her how to relax.

“You have to know if you’re the best,” he completed her sentence.

She used her spatula to eject a perfect piece of French toast from the skillet onto a plate and then added a raw slice to the pan. It sizzled and hissed. Kellen inhaled the scent of vanilla and warmed bread. His mouth watered.

“I don’t need to be the best at everything,” she said, her attention on her task. “Just at what I’m most passionate about.”

“Would that be composing or playing piano?”

“Both,” she said.

“And does it make you happy to pursue perfection?”

Her gaze darted upward to find his.

He hid a grin. Another of her buttons found and pressed.

“That’s a very personal question,” she said, her voice a bit louder than necessary. “And how did we end up talking about me? I asked you about your band.”

“We’re talking about you because you’re more interesting than I am,” he said.

“I guarantee that I’m not.”

“We’ll see.” He chuckled. “I started playing guitar when my grandfather caught me fooling around with the vintage Les Paul that he’d won in a bet. I snapped one of the strings and thought he was going to skin me alive, but instead he punished me by forcing me to take lessons from a friend of his who played in a local band. I was thirteen. That’s the same year I met Sole Regret’s bassist, Owen. He wasn’t into music much. He liked to follow me to my lessons and watch, but he didn’t want to learn to play himself. Not until a couple years later when the girls started hanging around me because I was cool. So Owen learned to play in an attempt to attract girls. He’s very shallow that way.” Kellen winked at her.

“So you didn’t learn to play in order to attract girls?”

“Music is my escape,” he said. “I quickly became addicted to producing sound. It’s like a drug I can’t get enough of.”

He met her eyes and they gazed at each other. “I feel the same way about the piano,” she said. “I just would have called it a compulsion instead of an addiction.”

Sara had never understood this part of him. She’d thought of music as something that took him away from her. She seemed to think she was competing against music for his affection, not that it helped make him the man she loved. It was nice to meet a woman who understood how vital music could be to a person.

Dawn flipped a second piece of French toast onto a plate before adding a third to the pan. While it cooked, she set a tub of butter, a bottle of maple syrup, and his plate before him. He inhaled deeply.

“This smells heavenly.”

“My grandmother’s recipe.”

Kellen’s first bite had his eyes rolling into the back of his head in delight. “This is amazing. What’s the secret?”

“Vanilla,” she said. “And day-old, fresh-baked bread.”

“Lucky I happened along the day after your trip to the bakery.”

Her cheeks went pink, and she paid extra close attention to the toast sizzling in the pan.

Had he discovered another button? He wasn’t sure where to push. “Is there a bakery nearby?”

She shook her head. “I baked it,” she said. “Baking is a huge stress reliever for me.”

“Lucky me,” he said. “What are you stressed out about?”

She hesitated for a long moment and then let out a sigh. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m supposed to turn in a completed composition tomorrow,” she said. “I was commissioned for a piece to be used as the main theme in some feel-good summer blockbuster. I’ve been working on it for months and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it right.”

“Maybe that’s your problem,” he said, trying to remember his manners and not talk with his mouth full, but the French toast was so delicious that he couldn’t stop shoveling it in.

“My problem?”

Oh, another button? Poke. Poke. Poke.

“One of many, I’m sure,” he said.

She leveled him with a heated glare, and he warmed from the inside out. He hadn’t even realized he’d been cold.

“Maybe you’re just trying too hard,” he said. “Sometimes the best inspiration hits when you aren’t paying attention. Let your subconscious write the music. It’s purer that way.”

“And what would you know about writing music?” she said, flipping her piece of French toast to an empty plate. She turned off the burner and reached for the tub of butter. He couldn’t resist moving it out of her reach.