by Nora Roberts
He brushed her words aside. “Whatever you meant, the fact remains that I want to paint you. I work at my own pace, so you’ll have to be patient. I’m not good at compromise, but owing to your condition I’m willing to make some concessions and stop when you’re tired or uncomfortable.”
It was tempting, very tempting. She tried to forget that she’d traded on her looks before and concentrate on what the extra money would mean to the baby. “I’d like to agree, but the fact is, your work is well-known. If the portrait was shown, they’d recognize me.”
“True enough, but that doesn’t mean I’d be obliged to tell anyone where we’d met or when. You have my word that no one will ever trace you through me.”
She was silent for a moment, warring with herself. “Would you come here?”
Hesitating only a moment, he tossed his cigarette into the fire. He rose, walked over, then crouched in front of her chair. She, too, had learned how to read a face. “Your word?”
“Yes.”
Some risks were worth taking. She held both hands out to his, putting her trust into them.
With the continuing fall of snow, it was a day without a sunrise, a sunset, a twilight. The day stayed dim from morning on, and then night closed in without fanfare. And the snow stopped.
Laura might not have noticed if she hadn’t been standing by the window. The flakes didn’t appear to have tapered off, but to have stopped as if someone had thrown a switch. There was a vague sense of disappointment, the same she remembered feeling as a young girl when a storm had ended. On impulse, she bundled herself in her boots and coat and stepped out onto the porch.
Though Gabe had shoveled it off twice during the day, the snow came almost to her knees. Her boots sank in and disappeared. She had the sensation of being swallowed up by a soft, benign cloud. She wrapped her arms around her chest and breathed in the thin, cold air.
There were no stars. There was no moon. The porch light tossed its glow only a few feet. All she could see was white. All she could hear was silence. To some the high blanket of snow might have been a prison, something to chafe against. To Laura it was a fortress.
She’d decided to trust someone other than herself again. Standing there, soaking up the pure dark, the pure quiet, she knew that the decision had been the right one.
He wasn’t a gentle man, or even a contented man, but he was a kind one, and, she was certain, a man of his word. If they were using each other, her for sanctuary, him for art, it was a fair exchange. She needed to rest. God knew she needed whatever time she could steal to rest and recover.
She hadn’t told him how tired she was, how much effort it took for her just to keep on her feet for most of the day. Physically the pregnancy had been an easy one. She was strong, she was healthy. Otherwise she would have crumpled long before this. But the last few months had drained every ounce of her emotional and mental reserves. The cabin, the mountains, the man, were going to give her time to build those reserves back up again.
She was going to need them.
He didn’t understand what the Eagletons could do, what they could accomplish with their money and their power. She’d already seen what they were capable of. Hadn’t they paid and maneuvered to have their son’s mistakes glossed over? Hadn’t they managed, with a few phone calls and a few favors called in, to have his death, and the death of the woman with him, turned from the grisly waste it had been into a tragic accident?
There had never been any mention in the press about alcohol and adultery. As far as the public was concerned, Anthony Eagleton, heir to the Eagleton fortune, had died as a result of a slippery road and faulty steering, and not his criminally careless drunk driving. The woman who had died with him had been turned from his mistress into his secretary.
The divorce proceedings that Laura had started had been erased, shredded, negated. No shadow of scandal would fall over the memory of Anthony Eagleton or over the family name. She’d been pressured into playing the shocked and grieving widow.
She had been shocked. She had grieved. Not for what had been lost—not on a lonely stretch of road outside of Boston—but for what had been lost so soon after her wedding night.
There was no use looking back, Laura reminded herself. Now, especially now, she had to look forward. Whatever had happened between her and Tony, they had created a life. And that life was hers to protect and to cherish.
With the spring snow glistening and untouched as far as she could see, she could believe that everything would work out for the best.
“What are you thinking?”
Startled, she turned toward Gabe with a little laugh. “I didn’t hear you.”
“You weren’t listening.” He pulled the door closed behind him. “It’s cold out here.”
“It feels wonderful. How much is there, do you think?”
“Three and a half, maybe four feet.”
“I’ve never seen so much snow before. I can’t imagine it ever melting and letting the grass grow.”
His hands were bare. He tucked them in the pockets of his jacket. “I came here in November and there was already snow. I’ve never seen it any other way.”
She tried to imagine that, living in a place where the snow never melted. No, she thought, she would need the spring, the buds, the green, the promise. “How long will you stay?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
She turned to smile at him, though she felt a touch of envy at his being so unfettered. “All those paintings. You’ll need to have a show.”
“Sooner or later.” He moved his shoulders, suddenly restless. San Francisco, his family, his memories, seemed very far away. “No hurry.”
“Art needs to be seen and appreciated,” she murmured, thinking out loud. “It shouldn’t be hidden up here.”
“And people should?”
“Do you mean me, or is that what you’re doing, too? Hiding?”
“I’m working,” he said evenly.
“A man like you could work anywhere, I think. You’d just elbow people aside and go to it.”
He had to grin. “Maybe, but now and again I like to have some space. Once you make a name, people tend to look over your shoulder.”
“Well, I, for one, am glad you came here, for whatever reason.” She brushed the hair away from her face. “I should go back in, but I don’t want to.” She was smiling as she leaned back against the post.
His eyes narrowed. When he cupped her face in his hands, his fingers were cold and firm. “There’s something about your eyes,” he murmured, turning her face fully into the light. “They say everything a man wants a woman to say, and a great deal he doesn’t. You have old eyes, Laura. Old, sad eyes.”
She said nothing, not because her mind was empty, but because it was suddenly filled with so many things, so many thoughts, so many wishes. She hadn’t thought she could feel anything like this again, and certainly not this longing for a man. Her skin warmed with it, even though his touch was cool, almost disinterested.
The sexual tug surprised her, even embarrassed her a little. But it was the emotional pull, the slow, hard drag of it, that kept her silent.
“I wonder what you’ve seen in your life.”
As if of their own volition, his fingers stroked her cheek. They were long, slender, artistic, but hard and strong. Even so, he might merely have been familiarizing himself with the shape of her face, with the texture of her skin. An artist with his subject.
The longing leaped inside her, the foolish, impossible longing to be loved, held, desired, not for her face, not for the image a man could see, but for the woman inside.
“I’m getting tired,” she said, managing to keep her voice steady. “I think I’ll go to bed now.”
He didn’t move out of her way immediately. And his hand lingered. He couldn’t have said what kept him there, staring at her, searching the eyes he found so fascinating. Then he stepped back quickly and shoved the door open for her.
“Good night, G
abe.”
“Good night.”
He stayed out in the cold, wondering what was wrong with him. For a moment, damn it, for a great deal longer than a moment, he’d found himself wanting her. Filled with self-disgust, he pulled out a cigarette. A man had to be sinking low to think about making love to a woman who was more than seven months along with another man’s child.
But it was a long time before he could convince himself he’d imagined it.
Chapter Three
He wondered what she was thinking. She looked so serene, so quietly content. The pale pink sweater she wore fell into a soft cowl at her throat. Her hair shimmered to her shoulders. Again she wore no jewelry, nothing to draw attention away from her, nothing to draw attention to her.
Gabe rarely used models in his work, because even if they managed to hold the pose for as long as he demanded they began to look bored and restless. Laura, on the other hand, looked as though she could sit endlessly with that same soft smile on her face.
That was part of what he wanted to capture in the portrait. That inner patience, that … well, he supposed he could call it a gracious acceptance of time—what had come before, and what was up ahead. He’d never had much patience, not with people, not with his work, not with himself. It was a trait he could admire in her without having the urge to develop it himself.
Yet there was something more, something beyond the utterly feminine beauty and the Madonna-like calm. From time to time he saw a fierceness in her, a warriorlike determination. He could see that she was a woman who would do whatever was necessary to protect what was hers. Judging from her story, all that was hers was the child she carried.
She had more to tell, he mused as he ran the pencil over the pad. The bits and pieces she’d offered had only been given to keep him from asking more. He hadn’t asked for more. It wasn’t his usual style, once he’d decided an explanation was called for, to accept a partial one. He couldn’t quite make himself push for the whole when even the portion she’d given him had plainly cost her so much.
There was still time. The radio continued to squawk about the roads that were closed and the snow that was yet to come. The Rockies could be treacherous in the spring. Gabe estimated it would be two weeks, perhaps three, before a trip could be managed with real safety.
It was odd, but he would have thought the enforced company would annoy him. Instead, he found himself pleased to have had his self-imposed solitude broken. It had been a long time since he’d done a portrait. Maybe too long. But he hadn’t been able to face flesh and blood, not since Michael.
In the cabin, cut off from memories and reminders, he’d begun the healing process. In San Francisco he hadn’t been able to pick up a brush. Grief had done more than make him weak. For a time it had made him … blank.
But here, secluded, solitary, he’d painted landscapes, still lifes, half-remembered dreams and seascapes from old sketches. It had been enough. Not until Laura had he felt the need to paint the human face again.
Once he’d believed in destiny, in a pattern of life that was meant to be even before birth. Michael’s death had changed that. From that point, Gabe had had to blame something, someone. It had been easiest, and most painful, to blame himself. Now, sketching Laura, thinking over the odd set of circumstances that had brought her into his life, he began to wonder again.
And what, he asked himself yet again, was she thinking?
“Are you tired?”
“No.” She answered, but she didn’t move. He’d stationed a chair by the window, angling it so that she was facing him but still able to look out. The light fell over her, bringing no shadows. “I like to look at the snow. There are tracks in it now, and I wonder what animals might have passed by without us seeing. And I can see the mountains. They look so old and angry. Back east they’re more tame, more good-natured.”
He absently murmured his agreement as he studied his sketch. It was good, but it wasn’t right, and he wanted to begin working on canvas soon. He set the pad aside and frowned at her. She stared back, patient and—if he wasn’t reading her incorrectly—amused. “Do you have anything else to wear? Something off-the-shoulder, maybe?”
The amusement was even more evident now. “Sorry, my wardrobe’s a bit limited at the moment.”
He rose and began to pace, to the fire, to the window, back to the table. When he strode over to take her face in his hand and turn it this way and that, she sat obligingly. After three days of posing, she was used to it. She might have been an arrangement of flowers, Laura thought, or a bowl of fruit. It was as if that one moment of awareness on the snow-covered porch had never happened. She’d already convinced herself that she’d imagined that look in his eyes—and, more, her response to it.
He was the artist. She was the clay. And she’d been there before.
“You have a completely feminine face,” he began, talking more to himself than to her. “Alluring and yet composed, and soft, even with the angular shape and those cheekbones. It’s not threatening, and yet, it’s utterly distracting. This—” his thumb brushed casually over her full lower lip “—says sex, even while your eyes promise love and devotion. And the fact that you’re ripe—”
“Ripe?” She laughed, and the hands that had clenched in her lap relaxed again.
“Isn’t that what pregnancy is? It only adds to the fascination. There’s a promise and a fulfillment and—despite education and progress—a compelling mystery to a woman with child. Like an angel.”
“How?”
As he spoke, he began to fuss with her hair, drawing it back, piling it up, letting it fall again. “We see angels as ethereal creatures, mystic, above human desires and flaws, but the fact is, they were human once.”
His words appealed to her, made her smile. “Do you believe in angels?”
His hand was still in her hair, but he’d forgotten, totally forgotten, the practical reason for it. “Life wouldn’t be worth much if you didn’t.” She had the hair of an angel, shimmery-blond, cloud-soft. Feeling suddenly awkward, he drew his hand away and tucked it in the pocket of his baggy corduroys.
“Would you like to take a break?” she asked him. Her hands were balled in her lap again.
“Yeah. Rest for an hour. I need to think this through.” He stepped back automatically when she rose. When he wasn’t working, he took great care not to come into physical contact with her. It was disturbing how much he wanted to touch her. “Put your feet up.” When she lifted a brow at that, he shifted uncomfortably. “It recommended it in that book you leave lying around. I figured it wouldn’t hurt for me to glance through it, under the circumstances.”
“You’re very kind.”
“Self-preservation.” Things happened to him when she smiled like that. Things he recognized but didn’t want to acknowledge. “The more I make sure you take care of yourself, the less chance there is of you going into labor before the roads are clear.”
“I’ve got more than a month,” she reminded him. “But I appreciate you worrying about me—about us.”
“Put your feet up,” he repeated. “I’ll get you some milk.”
“But I—”
“You’ve only had one glass today.” With an impatient gesture, he motioned her to the sofa before he walked into the kitchen.
With a little sigh of relief, Laura settled back against the cushions. Putting her feet up wasn’t as easy as it once had been, but she managed to prop them on the edge of the coffee table. The heat from the fire radiated toward her, making her wish she could curl up in front of it. If she did, she thought wryly, it would take a crane to haul her back up again.
He was being so kind, Laura thought as she turned her head toward the sound of Gabe rummaging in the kitchen. He didn’t like her to remind him of it, but he was. No one had ever treated her quite like this—as an equal, yet as someone to be protected. As a friend, she thought, without tallying a list of obligations, a list of debts that had to be paid. Whether he listed them or not, someday, when she
was able, she’d find a way to pay him back. Someday.
She could see the future if she closed her eyes and thought calm thoughts. She’d have a little apartment somewhere in the city. Any city. There would be a room for the baby, something in sunny yellows and glossy whites, with fairy-tale prints on the walls. She’d have a rocking chair she could sit in with the baby during the long, quiet nights, when the rest of the world was asleep.
And she wouldn’t be alone anymore.
Opening her eyes, she saw Gabe standing over her. She wanted, badly, to reach up, to take his hands and draw in some of the strength and confidence she felt radiating from him. She wanted, more, for him to run his thumb along her lip again, slowly, gently, as though she were a woman, rather than a thing to be painted.
Instead, she reached up to take the glass of milk he held. “After the baby’s born and I finish nursing, I’m never going to drink a drop of milk again.”
“This is the last of the fresh,” he told her. “Tomorrow you go on powdered and canned.”
“Oh, joy.” Grimacing, she downed half the contents of the glass. “I pretend it’s coffee, you know. Strong, black coffee.” She sipped again. “Or, if I’m feeling reckless, champagne. French, in fluted crystal.”
