Riley’s face came close to the screen. “Magical? Did you seriously just use the term magical?”
“Um—”
“You…Owen Shaughnessy…don’t believe in things like that. You’ve never looked at anything that way. You’re a man of science. Of practicality. Even with the most whimsical of things you tend to look at them in a logical and pragmatic way. And you’re sitting here telling me Brooke’s work is magical?”
Owen hung his head. “I know. This is a terrible idea, right? I shouldn’t even be considering it.”
“Hold on.” This came from Savannah, who was pushing her husband aside so she could be seen on the screen. “Owen? Look at me.”
Her tone was sweet but firm, and knowing she was a little fragile at the moment, Owen did as she asked without arguing.
“Do not listen to your brother.” She playfully slapped Riley on the back of the head. “If you think her work is magical, then I think that’s great! And if you had that strong of a reaction to it, then she is truly talented. Don’t feel bad about how you feel!”
“I… I wasn’t. I know Riley was teasing. And he’s right. I never look at anything that way, but when Brooke walked into the room in her flowy skirt and bracelets, she reminded me of…” He stopped and shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Oh no,” Riley said. “You can’t get out of it that easy. Finish the sentence.”
“Riley,” Savannah sighed, bumping her husband’s shoulder. “Leave him alone.”
“Hell no. Do you know this has never happened?” He looked at his wife with a big grin still in place. “Owen never gets like this over a girl. Never.”
“Well…” Owen stammered.
Riley sighed and gave another exaggerated eye roll. “Okay, he was mildly intrigued by you when he first met you, and he was the one to convince me to stop being such an ass around you, but still. This is different.” He turned back to the screen and leaned in close again. “Out with it. What did she remind you of?”
“A fairy. A gypsy. A nymph,” he said, his face flaming. “It… I… I never—”
“Okay, okay,” Riley said, sitting back and looking satisfied. “We get it. You’re totally crushing on her right now. Which makes this whole situation perfect.”
“Oh, this I must hear,” Savannah said, grinning.
“Hear me out—again. If you let Brooke help you on this project and you find you’re comfortable around her, then it’s a game changer.”
Owen wasn’t following.
“If you can sit and comfortably talk with a beautiful woman—have conversations with her that aren’t just you spouting encyclopedia passages—then it’s going to completely change your world, bro.”
“I think you’re oversimplifying this.”
Riley shook his head. “Nuh-uh. No way. Trust me on this. Girls make you nervous in general. Pretty girls make you more than a little uncomfortable. Beautiful women practically render you catatonic. Now according to your theory, you can get over it when you’re related to them—like all of your sisters-in-law—but not any other way. Maybe by spending time with Brooke, you’ll relax a little and see she’s just like everyone else.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Owen, you just met her, and from what you described, it lasted all of fifteen minutes. Don’t write her off just yet.”
“I’m not writing her off,” Owen said defensively and then huffed with agitation. Why did he have to keep explaining himself over and over and over? “I like Brooke. A lot. And spending time with her? Um…it’s not going to do anything but make me even more attracted to her!”
Once again Savannah slapped Riley on the back of the head. “Stop giving your brother bad advice.” She shook her head and looked into the camera. “Owen, the decision has to be yours, and you need to be comfortable. While Riley might be on to something, the fact remains you have an important event you’re prepping for, and you have to decide if you need the distraction.”
“Distraction?” he questioned.
“Brooke.”
“Ah.”
“Personally, I don’t think you’re so bad with the opposite sex,” she said with a wink.
“Hey!” Riley cried with just a bit of outrage. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, “the first time Owen and I met, he did just fine putting me in my place. He was uncomfortable, but I think it had more to do with what was going on between you and me. So I say he doesn’t need to do some sort of crazy social experiment with Brooke. If he wants her with him on this project, it should be because she’ll be an asset to him—professionally. Not personally.”
Riley shook his head and scooted his wife out of the camera frame. “Now who’s offering bad advice?” he teased before looking back at Owen. “If you ask me, I think she sounds perfect all the way around.”
“But…what if she…you know…doesn’t like me?”
A look of understanding crossed Riley’s face. “It’s a chance we all have to take at one time or another, Owen. No one likes it, and—let’s be honest—rejection sucks. But…not everyone gets rejected. And for all you know, she might be crushing on you a little bit too.”
Somehow Owen greatly doubted that, but rather than argue about the subject, he decided to let it go.
“So, Savannah…talk to me about baby names.”
* * *
“I don’t think he’s going to call.”
“He never said he would.”
Brooke sat and watched as her uncle contemplated his next chess move. They were out in his yard—a small piece of land with a tiny garden and an all-season game table where he loved to play chess. It wasn’t a particular favorite of hers, but he enjoyed it, so she indulged him. Chess had been her brother’s game. He and Howard would play for hours. Even now she could still picture the two of them sitting out here playing.
“But…how am I supposed to know if he’s going to hire me?”
Sighing, Howard reached across the table and patted his niece’s hand. “Patience. Owen Shaughnessy doesn’t make decisions lightly. Or quickly. We’ve planted the seed, and now…we wait.”
Her eyes went a little wide, and she shivered in the cool afternoon breeze. There was an outdoor heater beside them, but for the life of her, she wished they could just go inside. “For how long?”
Howard shrugged. “As long as he needs.”
This was not the news she had been hoping for. Brooke felt as if she was on the cusp of doing something great, and the thought of having to sit around and wait until she knew if she was finally going to get to paint in the desert—safely and with her family’s blessing—was making her crazy.
“Can’t you…you know…call him? Prompt him? Make sure he’s even considering it? Because if he’s not, then I’d like to start looking at other options.”
“Brooke, sometimes you need to be a little less impulsive. Waiting another day or two isn’t a big deal.” He looked at her, saw her shiver again. “You want a heavier sweater?”
Ignoring his question, she went back to the topic they were already on. “But it’s already been a week, and you just said it could take a while,” she reminded.
“No, what I said is Owen doesn’t make decisions quickly.”
“Same difference.”
“Hardly.”
Now it was her turn to sigh. “Okay. Fine. What do you suggest I do? Do I go to see him tomorrow? Maybe just pop in and remind him of our conversation?”
Howard thoughtfully considered her for a moment and then started to smile. “Actually, I think that is a marvelous idea.”
Relief washed over her. “You do? Seriously? Because I was thinking of bringing him my résumé and telling him about all of the work I did on committees back in college and how that experience would come in handy for this trip. And—”
Howard stood, shook his head, and reached down to move his bishop. “That won’t do. What you need is to stop in and say hello. No pressure. No sales pitch. Maybe sit in on the entire lecture this time.”
She blushed at the reminder of her showing up late. “What good will that do?”
“Like I said, Owen doesn’t make decisions lightly. And he certainly doesn’t do well under pressure, so if you go in there at full throttle trying to convince him to hire you, you’ll more than likely scare him off. Trust me on this one. I’ve known him for a very long time.”
Brooke watched as her uncle turned to walk into the house. “What if he doesn’t want me?” she blurted out and then realized how that sounded. “I mean…what if he doesn’t want to hire me?” She hated the desperation in her voice.
Her uncle smiled at her—a smile that was part sympathy, part pleasure. “It’s good to see you believe this isn’t going to be handed to you.”
Sometimes she hated when his comments came out sounding like Yoda’s. “What does that even mean?”
“It means there was a time when you thought the world owed you everything—that you didn’t have to earn it or work for it. Sort of like a game of chess. It makes you think. It’s not just about skipping around the board, you have to put a lot of effort into every move. Your brother used to love it.”
She sighed wearily. “And this has to do with Dr. Shaughnessy…how?”
“Go see him tomorrow. For the entire class. Take notes. Learn a little about what he’s doing.”
“But…”
But Howard had already gone inside.
Sighing, Brooke sat and rested her face in her hands. Patience wasn’t her thing. She was more of a get-it-done kind of girl, and that meant always being on the move and in action, not waiting around for the phone to ring. True, it had only been a week, but she had thought she and Howard had presented a great opportunity to Owen Shaughnessy.
Owen.
Or was she supposed to refer to him as Dr. Shaughnessy? Professor Shaughnessy?
Her immediate impulse was to call him Owen—it was more personal, and she had a feeling he would probably prefer that to the stuffy title. How she knew, Brooke wasn’t sure, but she just…did.
Weird.
Deep down, Brooke felt confident she could be an asset to…Owen. She smiled. They would be assets to one another—she would help him feel more at ease with his students on this trip, and she would get to paint in the one place she was dying to with everyone’s blessings.
Why was it so important to get her family’s permission to take this trip? Well, she owed them. Her parents had become more and more protective of her over the past several years—and with good reason—and the last thing she wanted to do was cause them any more undue stress. So if that meant not going to the desert without a strong support system around her, then she’d wait.
Sometimes it was hard to do what was right. The old her—the girl who used to be selfish and frivolous and uncaring of other people’s feelings—wanted to come out and stomp her foot and demand to be heard. And sometimes it was hard to push that girl aside and remember who she was now—who she needed to be and why. Not that she didn’t like the woman she had grown into. She did. On every level Brooke knew she was proud of who she was now.
She just hated remembering the person she had been.
That was one of the reasons this position with Owen Shaughnessy was so damn important. She’d get to paint and…she’d get to help him. Swallowing the painful lump of emotion that instantly clogged her throat, Brook went to the kitchen to put her coffee cup in the sink, then wandered back to the guest room her uncle had transformed into a temporary studio for her.
Blank canvases lined the walls, and there were several easels collapsed in the corner and one set up on a tarp in the middle of the room. She’d been here for almost three weeks and hadn’t picked up a paintbrush yet.
That was about to change.
With a long stretch to help herself relax, Brooke started making her way around the room to set up. Within minutes she had her hair pulled back and her favorite smock on to protect her clothes. Her paints were organized on her palette, and Taylor Swift’s 1989 was playing on her iPod.
Stepping up to the canvas, Brooke dipped her brush into the blue paint and was about to touch it to the canvas when she stopped. As she’d been setting up, in her mind, she knew she was going to paint the desert—the way she’d seen it in pictures—but with her own twist on it. But now that the brush was in her hand and the canvas was in front of her, her subject changed. Turning, she put the palette down, rinsed her brush, and wiped her hands on her smock as her heart began to pound.
It had been so long since she’d painted anything other than the skies and landscapes that she was almost afraid to get started—afraid that once the first stroke of paint was on the canvas, she’d realize she’d made a mistake. But rather than letting that twinge of fear stop her, Brooke took a deep breath and picked the brush back up again.
She took in her palette with the primary colors—yellow, blue, red—and began to mix them together. With a hint of white she continued to blend until she refined the colors to her liking. When she glanced up at her canvas, it wasn’t blank. There, before her eyes, she could see what she was going to paint, what she was going to create, and it made her smile.
Her hand began to move—color began to cover the surface, and her subject began to take form. In the background, Taylor Swift sang of wildest dreams, while in front of her, Brooke’s was taking shape.
It was amazing—how fluid it all felt. How confident her strokes were. Her shoulder began to cramp, but she refused to stop—couldn’t even if she had wanted to. So she worked through the discomfort—refusing to call it pain. Every so often, she would step back and critique what she’d done, but immediately she’d return to the canvas with more color.
Every time Brooke picked up her brush in the past, she had been inspired. She loved what she did and received great pleasure from the art she was able to create. But this? This wasn’t simply inspiration that had her painting like a woman possessed.
This was art on an emotional level she didn’t know existed.
This was coming from a place within that had yet to be defined.
And as silence filled the room after Taylor’s last breath, Brooke stepped back and stared in wonder at the painting before her.
And looked into the eyes of Owen Shaughnessy.
* * *
The next day, Brooke made her way to the lecture hall and checked her watch to ensure she was early. It wasn’t enough to be on time, she had to get to the room, get inside, and find a seat so she could observe Owen in a way she hadn’t on her previous visit.
Of course, he was there already—standing at the front of the room behind the podium and reading his notes. At least, she guessed that was what he was doing. There were several students already seated, and as Brooke made her way up the aisle to a higher seat, she stopped and turned to look at him.
And found him looking right back at her.
Heat flooded her cheeks, and she was thankful to be standing so far away. Smiling, she gave a small wave and then turned to find a seat—which wasn’t what she wanted to do at all. Nope. Her first instinct was to turn, walk back down the steps, go over, and say hello to him.
If you go in there at full throttle trying to convince him to hire you, you’ll more than likely scare him off. Trust me on this one. I’ve known him for a very long time.
Her uncle’s words came back to her, and Brooke knew she was doing the right thing. No matter how wrong it felt. She finally chose a seat right on the center aisle so she could see Owen clearly and pulled out her notebook. Looking around she noticed how all of the other students in the room had laptops or tablets, but—call her crazy—she still liked the feel of putting pen to paper. And besides, it wasn’t as if
she were taking the class. The only notes would have to do with topics that might come up on the Nevada trip.
Meteor showers, right?
All of a sudden, she couldn’t remember what—specifically—was the purpose of the trip other than going to watch the meteor shower. Damn it! Maybe she should have brought her laptop with her! Ugh.
At the front of the hall, Owen cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, and Brooke instantly sat up straighter.
“Good afternoon,” he said, his voice loud but not overly confident. “Today we’re going to continue on our topic with the discussion of dust tails and dust trails. As you should know, there are two types of comet tails: dust and gas ion.” He looked up to make sure no one had any questions so far, and then he returned to the notes in front of him.
“A dust tail contains small, solid particles that are approximately the same size as those found in cigarette smoke. This tail forms because sunlight pushes on these small particles, gently shoving them away from the comet’s nucleus. Because the pressure from sunlight is relatively weak, the dust particles end up forming a diffuse, curved tail.”
Behind Owen, a screen diagrammed everything he was saying, and Brooke found herself fascinated. While she knew he was still speaking, she studied the picture and wondered how she could replicate it with acrylics. When he started speaking again, she forced herself to stop looking at the screen and focus on him.
“Gas ion tails form when ultraviolet sunlight rips one or more electrons from gas atoms in the coma, making them into ions in a process called…” He looked up to see if anyone could fill in the blanks.
“Ionization?” someone called out.
“Exactly,” Owen replied with a small smile. And Brooke felt a fluttering in her belly.
She was in serious trouble here.
Stuff like this didn’t happen to her. She didn’t get crushes—certainly not at her age—and she was beginning to feel utterly ridiculous at her schoolgirl reaction to Owen Shaughnessy. Brooke was comfortable with the amount of men she’d dated in her twenty-eight years of life, and even though most of them were shallow jocks who were full of flash, she’d never reacted to any of them the way she was right now to this shy and quiet astrophysicist.
One More Kiss Page 33
