My eyes traveled to one of the musicians who stood out from the others, not just because he was tall and lean with a dark shock of hair hanging over his forehead. He sat playing the French horn, a gleaming gorgeous pretzel of brass with a bell at one end.
The sound was a love language that spoke directly to my heart.
But an intricately curved, soulful symphony instrument at a country music jam session full of Tennessee local boys . . . WTF?
I didn’t have to be a country music aficionado to know that one of these things was not like the others.
Every other instrument came from the string family—banjo, guitar, fiddle. An older man with a gray beard stood behind Cletus playing the bass, plucking the strings, and nodding along with the music.
The faces in the room started looking more familiar. Maybe I’d known some of them once. Maybe I wasn’t such a stranger. Not that it mattered, since I had no plans of sticking around afterward to chat. I felt worn out from the funeral and the travel.
But . . . that horn . . . 
My eyes remained riveted to the instrument and the man playing it. I’d been to a couple of orchestra performances with a full brass section. Those were the types of places people normally found a French horn—with musicians wearing tuxedos and following a conductor.
This man and his instrument stuck out like a glossy gemstone in a sea of wicker and cardboard. And yet, oddly, it worked. He pursed his lips and blew out notes that had no business sounding so beautiful.
Nodding and stomping one foot, he picked up the rhythm of the other instruments and made his accompaniment sound like it belonged there.
He kept one hand in the bell-shaped end of the horn and used his other hand to draw out a melodic sound. From the first note, he had me willing to follow him down whatever path he took. For the first time since I’d arrived in town—hell, for the first time in months—I felt a glimmer of happiness. Double-chocolate cupcake happiness.
I wanted to hear more, and at the same time, I knew exactly what I would hear. Something in his beautiful aching call sounded familiar, as though I’d been hearing it my whole life.
But that was impossible.
I hadn’t been in town in years. Even if I’d heard this man play before, it had to have been so long ago that surely the sounds wouldn’t be familiar now.
The music called, and I answered by freeing myself of the funereal black jacket I wore over a white tank top and getting comfortable leaning against the wall. As a spectator, I had license to gaze at him for as long as I wanted.
My senses scrambled and competed for which one should win out—the sight of him, the sound of his music, or the touch I felt from him halfway across a crowded room.
Taking a couple steps closer, I cautiously took in the whole of the man playing the gleaming horn. He looked about my age, early thirties, and the strong cut of his jaw and short beard made things happen to my lady parts that hadn’t happened in a very long time.
He wore a dark brown corduroy sport coat over a fine-checked plaid flannel shirt and dark blue jeans. His eyes were a pale blue, like an illusion of shallow water that actually runs deep enough to be dangerous. Soulful. Like repositories of hurt or art or knowledge.
Almost as though he could feel the heat of my stare, his eyes fastened to mine and didn’t let go.
So I did the only logical thing a person could do when faced with a sexy, soulful stranger’s lingering gaze.
I ran from the room.