by Lilia Moon
Rafe laughs, which is a sound I’ve come to treasure. “Callum likes opera. He might already know her.”
I eye the new man in town, earnestly hoping my day isn’t about to get any stranger. “Beatrice Monk?”
His eyes register surprise—and pleasure. “I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard her sing. It was in Amsterdam and she was magnificent. She dared the whole audience to listen and let themselves be changed by her voice.”
That’s a compliment Bee would cherish. “You should meet her. She’d be thrilled.”
“That would make two of us.” Callum’s eyes don’t leave mine. “But it’s you I’d like to take to lunch.”
I can’t. I know it, but for the first time in a very long time, I can feel myself chafing against my self-imposed rules. Lunch with a sexy man isn’t normally a problem, but this time I’m quite certain it would open a door that needs to stay closed. Callum is too much of what I might want in a man, if I hadn’t sworn off of them. “I have work to do. Commissions that need to be done and mailed by Valentine’s Day.”
His head cants again. A man who truly listens. “Then perhaps we can pick up some food and you would permit me to watch you work.” His smile is gentle this time, the dimples barely there. “I didn’t manage to see much of what you brought into the gallery.”
I laugh, some at him and mostly at me. “You want me to invite you to see my etchings?”
His eyes twinkle. “Do you do those too?”
Damn him for being funny and adaptable and self-deprecating.
And damn me for wanting to feed him.
Chapter Four
Callum
She’s captivating, and I’m a little disgruntled that Matteo and Rafe didn’t invite me here to meet her. It would certainly have been worth the trek.
I watch as Daley makes her way back to the car from the third cottage we’ve stopped at. Each time she emerges with a container or two and tucks them safely into the console between us. This time she grins as she climbs back in. “We’re totally set. Liane had dal and sag paneer.”
Liane is the one who has claimed Matteo. My brain, long used to sorting new people and places, takes notes. “When I asked you out to lunch, I somehow never imagined we were going to raid your neighbors’ kitchens.”
She looks over at me, eyes sparkling. “It’s dangerous to have preconceived notions.”
Especially when someone is clearly very fond of disrupting them. “Where I grew up, there were generally trades involved. Not necessarily food, but I often delivered eggs to the nice lady down the road who made me new wool mittens each winter.”
She glances at me as she backs out of Liane’s driveway, eyebrows raised. “That sounds like farm country, but you don’t look like a farmer.”
I so easily could have been. “I’ve been many things. Tour guide. Electrician. Food-stand operator. Architect.”
She blinks. “That’s an interesting list. Which one of those connected you to Matteo and Rafe?”
It pleases me that she allows for the possibility it could be any of them. “They work to change corporations. Sometimes it helps to adjust the physical environment as well. That’s where I sometimes get involved.”
She grins. “That doesn’t narrow it down much. You re-architect the spaces, you rewire them, or you set up really good food?”
She listens. I would have found her beautiful even if she didn’t, because some people are just meant to be bright orbs in the universe and it’s a privilege to spend a time in their gravity well, but she’s more than one who glistens. She gives. Takes. Lets herself be present, even when a goodly part of who she is didn’t want me in her car. “I mostly assist with redesigns that create safer, more open spaces, but adding good food is never remiss.”
She pats the food containers between us. “Exactly.”
She drives us down a stretch of road that’s nicely curvy and makes my hands itch for the wheel. They also itch to touch her, but I’m treading carefully there. She didn’t seem at all perturbed that I’m a Dom. The discomfort started earlier than that. So for now, I’ll keep my hands to myself and learn in other ways. “Were you born an artist, or did you become one?”
She makes a soft sound that could mean anything. “Interesting question.”
One I think she might answer, so I let my eyes meander over the trees we’re passing to give her some time to percolate. The evergreens of this land are fascinating to me. Tough sentinels of winter, and a closed-in kind of forest that makes the sudden views that appear so much sweeter. It would be hard to ramble through the hills here, though, which is a shame. Hills in winter rain are one of my favorite pleasures.
“I think I was born an artist, but eventually tucked it away along with other childish things. So when I took it out again, I became an artist, too.”
Interesting answer. “Tell me about the taking out.”
She frowns. “Liane’s right. You Doms are pushy creatures.”
The best of us push in the right places, but it’s not my kink she’s curious about. “I was born with the need to push boundaries. Being a Dom is just one way to do that as a grown-up.” I put my hand over hers on the gearshift, just for a moment. This is a woman who very much wants to drive herself. “When did you pick up your pencils again?”
She huffs out a breath. “Thirteen years ago. I dabbled before that. Told myself it was a hobby.”
“Sometimes there’s nothing quite so painful as putting a passion in a box that’s too small.”
She glances over at me. “I dabbled, but mostly my art supplies stayed hidden under the bed. Then my husband voted for a newer-model wife, and a few months into the fallout, I picked up a cheap box of charcoals on a whim. I went back two days later for the good kind I should have bought in the first place.”
“Tools matter.” I murmur the words, quiet backdrop to her story, so that she knows I’m listening.
“They do.” She pats the food beside her. “A year or so later I made my way here. I was on a long road trip, looking for a place where tools and people and connections and dreams matter. I rented a small cabin for a week and never quite managed to leave.”
She slows on the road, turning into a driveway with towering trees up both sides. I can see a house through their trunks, but only dimly. She parks the car in a pullout and looks over at me. “I usually walk in. I like to believe I live in a pristine forest clearing.”
I’m a man who appreciates aesthetics, and one who’s happy to stroll through a winter forest for any reason. I collect up some of the containers of food and open the car door. The rain is only mists now, with hints of fog.
She circles the car and waits for me to follow her, a lead dog not at all sure she wants to be hitched to this particular sled.
Which isn’t something I can ignore, even for lunch. “Daley.”
She turns to face me, caution in her eyes.
“This doesn’t have to happen. This is your space, and there’s an intimacy to inviting me in your door. We can go find a pretty spot to park and have a picnic in the car if you’d rather, or have a nice lunch at the cafe we drove past and you can keep these for your dinner.”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “This would be so much easier if you were a jerk.”
I’ve been called that and more, but it’s not a place where I try to live. “In the world I share with Matteo and Rafe, we believe deeply in the idea of enthusiastic consent. Consent with strain, with resistance, with doubt, isn’t really consent at all.”
She takes in a deep breath and sighs it back out. “This isn’t any of those. It’s consent with discomfort. One thing I learned thirteen years ago was that I had shrunk myself down to fit into a comfortable box, and one of the promises I made myself was that I would never do that again. Sometimes it means breathing into the uncomfortable for a while. That’s all this is. Me squirming over something I’d really like to do.”
I look at this woman, standing with the towering trees at her back, and th
e fascination in me transmutes to something deeper. I step forward and take her elbow, nodding at the house nestled in the trees. “Come, then. Show me the box you’ve built to fit you.”
Chapter Five
Daley
I have no idea how he knows I built this house. Or had it built, anyhow. “I worked with an architect to get exactly what I wanted. Everyone told me it was foolish to spend so much money on a small house hardly anyone else would ever want, but it suits me down to the ground.”
I keep my eyes on the view I know as well as the back of my hand, quite literally. I love this walk. Coming home, in every way that matters. “It’s entirely solar powered, but I’m tapped into municipal water. Unlimited hot showers are a very important part of what keeps me human.”
His head tips up, tracing the steep rooflines of the house that capture the sun, tracking down to the crazy stilts that perch my house on the edge of a precipice. “You built an eagle’s nest, tucked away in the high branches.”
It pleases me that he gets it. So many people told me to move the house back a hundred feet to flat ground. The ones who didn’t quickly became my closest friends. “There’s a risk it will slide down the hill one day, but we did our best to attach it to rocks that will at least slide very slowly.”
He smiles at me. “Your architect must have loved you. Bold clients are the very best kind.”
“She did. When she didn’t want to kill me.” I look over at the man in the slightly damp suit with food containers tucked under his arm and intrigue in his eyes. My consent isn’t getting a lot more comfortable, but I brought him here. My need to be seen, slowly pummeling my need to be comfortable into unconsciousness.
I stop at my bright-red door.
He breathes in sharply and reaches out to touch the trim. It’s carved, my somewhat amateur attempt to capture the movement of water on some hunks of wood. His fingers are tracing it like it’s beautiful, and I know that’s a big part of why I’m letting him in my door. Sexy men are a dime a dozen, and I don’t need one. People who can see my artist’s soul and appreciate it are something else entirely. This one just happens to come in a sexy-man package. It would be a loss to push him away, so I’m not going to do that. I’m going to let him see. And I’m going to remember that there are good reasons for my rules.
I push open the door to my nest in the trees and back up a step to let him enter first. His hand comes to rest on my back, but his eyes are locked on the emerging view through my front door. He brings me in with him, which is a tight fit. He pauses on the landing, looking around at my sanctuary. It’s messy, which I never apologize for, because if that’s the first thing someone sees, they aren’t my people.
He breathes out softly. “Such light.” His eyes rove a little more. “You’ve set it up for your day to travel with the light.”
I have. Breakfast starts in the dining nook to our left, and watching the sunset from my corner eyrie finishes out my evenings. Art happens in my self-contained bubble of a studio at most of the times in between.
He cants his head curiously, looking at my bubble.
I smile. “Charcoal dust is like a weed. If you don’t contain it, it spreads everywhere. That’s set up with fancy filters and fans that mostly keep the debris of my art in there.” Without having to leave my nest. Just one of the things my poor architect is likely in therapy for.
“It’s magnificent.” Callum lets go of me, walking down the steps that take him to the first of many levels in the non-studio part of my house. It’s an accessibility nightmare, and also dangerous to architects who are gawking and not paying much attention to where their feet land.
I scoop up the containers he set on the plant stand that serves as my side table. I’m starving, and food will fill that need more safely than watching a stranger truly appreciate the eight hundred square feet where I live. I head to the kitchen. “Give yourself a tour if you like.” It won’t take long. He can see everything from where he stands but the bathroom and the loft where I sleep. “I’ll get some food on plates. Is there anything you don’t eat?”
“Brussels sprouts. Food that’s still wriggling. Anything that resembles an insect.”
I laugh, because he’s speaking like a man who tried all of those before he set his limits. “Come back when Brussels sprouts are in season. Liane roasts them with bacon. They’re out-of-this-world good.”
He chuckles, and I realize he’s gone back to the entryway, shedding his suit jacket and footwear. “Brussels sprouts are a hard limit.”
He rolls up his shirtsleeves and heads toward the glass wall that divides off my studio. Which I’m fine with, until I remember there are naked photos of an actually identifiable person pinned all over an easel he can easily see. I scamper to get between him and invasion of privacy. “Hang on a second. Let me cover up the easel on the left before you take a good look.”
He stops instantly.
I appreciate that, but I still dash into the studio, grab a throw from a chair arm, and toss it over the many versions of Lori. When I pop back out, he’s leaned against the glass, his back to my studio, waiting easily. I exhale. He’s an odd combination of wobbly and steadying, and I haven’t quite found my rhythm. “Sorry. I do charcoal portraits. Clients send me photos, and most of them are nudes. I generally don’t leave them lying out, but I thought I was just taking a short break to deliver cardstock and pick up some soup.”
He comes to me, his hand settling on my lower back again. “I’ve deep respect for privacy, Daley. Whatever the reason. I’d like to hear more about your work, but I also have deep respect for hungry bellies. Shall we chat while we eat?”
I’m not normally quite this terrible a hostess. I head back to the kitchen. “I’ll get us those plates. You’re free to look at anything else you like. The view out the windows isn’t bad either.”
“It isn’t, at all.” His words trail off at the end. I turn back to see what’s distracted him. He’s moving toward a vertical display of small drawings on one of the pillars that keeps my house from crashing down around my ears.
I want to toss a throw over those too, but I won’t.
They’re nudes too—but these ones are of me.
Chapter Six
Callum
I’m a man who recognizes the shape of a woman, even when he’s only guessing at what lies beneath her clothing. But more, I recognize a soul, and these small, delightful drawings of movement and life are surely self-portraits.
Minimalist ones. Bare suggestions of human form in some of them, an ode to feminine curves in others. In one, she’s curled up as tightly as a seed in spring and fairly bursting with the uncomfortable energy of it. In another, her arms stretch for the sky as her feet show just how little need they have to be attached to the earth. In a particularly lovely one at eye level, she’s quite still, a thinker on a rock as the mosses grow up around her.
I turn to the woman standing quietly at my shoulder. I see pride. And nerves. I imagine that telling her what I see in her small and lovely sketches might feed the nerves in ways that wouldn’t offer due respect to this invitation inside her home, so I back away and offer her my arm. “What smells so very good?”
She leads me over to a small, high table with tall chairs that let us look out the windows like birds on our perches. “Soup. Butternut squash, I think, but knowing Liane, there’s a few other tidbits in there too. Ham sandwiches made with fresh bread, and that’s the full extent of my cooking skills. The sandwich making, not the bread. India has taught every five year old in Crawford Bay to make a decent loaf, but I’ve been deemed hopeless.”
She seems not at all chagrined by that. “What do you teach the five year olds?”
She shoots me a surprised look as she stirs her soup. “What makes you think I teach them anything?”
I don’t know if it will help or hinder this intriguing dance for her to discover that I notice things. “The art in Matteo’s office. There were drawings. Bold ones, done by a child’s hand.”
I hold out my mug, watching her hands steady as she pours.
“The drawings in Matteo’s office are done by two different children. Lee, who is my grandson, and Mari, who would be an artistic genius if she weren’t far more interested in her skateboard.”
My turn to be surprised. “There are facilities for that here?”
She grins. “She says if bikes can go off road, there’s no reason skateboards can’t. She added knobby tires to hers and lets very little get in her way.”
The list of people here I’d like to meet is growing noticeably. “I spent some time in India, and the kids there would make functional race cars from metal coat hangers and the like. They ran them over all kinds of terrain. I learned a lot about resilience watching those cars.”
She shakes her head like I amuse her, much as she would prefer otherwise. “Have you traveled a lot?”
I nod. I don’t always get intensely personal over soup and sandwiches, but this feels like a time and a place where I want to. You can take a boy away from Ireland, but you can’t remove his fondness for wistful memories. “I did. My wife, Ellie, was a linguist. She spent the summers when she wasn’t teaching traveling and documenting old languages, and, fortunately for me, she liked having me along on her journeys. I’ve kept up the travel since she died. She made me into a wanderer.”
Her hand moves forward and then back, a woman who wants to comfort and isn’t quite sure what I would find comforting. “That sounds wonderful, except for the part where you lost her.”
