One Night at the Savoy: A 1920s Harlem Steamy BWWM Interracial Multicultural Standalone Historical Romance

One photograph. One hand on her back. Which one of them pays for it? Harlem, 1927 GENIE There's a white man on that bandstand who has never said my name out loud. Not once in three years. In June he started leaving a hole in the music. Eight bars, every Saturday, with the horns dropping out and a space in the middle of it the exact size of a woman. Nobody showed me. I heard it and I stepped into it. That man wrote me a love letter in front of eight hundred people and not one of them knew it but me. I have wanted him since a corridor in March and I have never once let it get above my neck. Then he came down off that stand, and we started meeting at four in the morning behind locked doors, and I found out what his hands are like. We were careful. I was born careful. Then somebody took a picture of us on a basement step at six in the morning, and you could see his hand on my back. >ERROL I have watched that woman work for three years and written down every note of it. She goes where the music is about to be. Nobody taught her that and nobody can. I put a hole in my own arrangement in June to find out whether I'd imagined her, and she walked into it on the first Saturday like I'd handed her a key. I've had her at four in the morning behind a bolted door with my mouth on her neck, saying her name over and over because that was the only room on earth I could say it in. I have never wanted anything the way I want her. I have never once been able to say so above a whisper. Now there's a contract on my desk worth more than everything I own, and not one line in it about her. I can lose the money. I can burn the whole thing down in front of everybody and walk out with my hands in my pockets, and I'll still be a bandleader who had some trouble up in Harlem. Nothing sticks to me. Everything I try to pay lands on her. And she won't tell me what she's decided. There's a man up from Chicago who sat through Friday and Saturday and never once watched the band, and she's been asking who holds the lease on a dark hall on 138th Street and won't say why. >He spent five months trying to buy her a place in a house that will never sell to her. She stopped asking for a corner. She wants the whole building. Harlem, 1927. The music is hot, the gin is illegal, and there's exactly one room in New York where the whole city dances together. It closes in twenty days. Forbidden interracial romance - 1920s Harlem - Jazz Age - Explicit - Strong Black heroine - Devoted, wrecked hero -