Encore

A hundred and one years ago, the greatest soprano in the river cities sang the last aria of her life on the stage of the Larkspur Opera House, walked into the wings to wait for her bow, and never came back out.Gideon Ashby doesn't believe in ghosts. Thirty-eight, broad-shouldered and built like the beams he hauls, with warm brown skin, close-cropped black hair and a trimmed black beard, he has spent twenty years building stages in four cities and has never met anything stranger than a drunk tenor. The Guild has hired him to bring the Larkspur back from thirty years of rot before it reopens at Winterfair, and he works alone, at night, stripped to the waist under the gilded balconies.But his tools keep moving. Cold drafts brush his bare back in a room with the stove going. And somewhere up in the dark, a woman's voice hums the same few notes, over and over, every single night.Then he lights the old footlights for the first time in thirty years, and at the stroke of midnight she steps out of the glow.Isolde Varenne is not mist and moonlight. She is pale porcelain skin and dark red lips, glossy black curls pinned high, an ivory satin gown laced tight over the most spectacular curves he has ever seen, and a voice that can stop a man's heart. She has been watching him for six weeks. She knows exactly how he looks at the washbasin. And she is tired of waiting in the wings.She is solid only while the footlights burn. She has one night, a full house of empty seats, and a hundred years of hunger she has never once been allowed to satisfy.All she asks is that he make it a performance worth remembering.