Wind River Wrangler
Page 24
The cabin had been a shell ready to be painted the last time Shiloh had seen it. Now, it was a home. It clearly reflected Roan’s quiet strength and masculinity. But it wasn’t a harsh male sort of design. Shiloh liked the warmth of the wood, the golden radiance of the sun sliding silently across the polished floor, creating reflective light everywhere. The brown of the leather sofa was actually toward the red end of the spectrum. The cedar coffee table in front of it looked hand hewn and designed. Shiloh would bet that Roan had designed it. The legs were curved and feminine-looking, with ball feet. As her gaze took in the tables at each end of the couch, she saw they were the same design. Almost as if Roan had introduced the curves to counter the angles elsewhere. A balance. She liked that, appreciating the beauty of the hand-carved cedar furniture.
There was a central light above the living room. So many people, she’d discovered, put antlers together with lights and used them as decorative Western features, but not here. Instead, as she turned and studied the huge central chandelier, her curiosity turned to wonder. Roan had used the same curving cedar design and they were like eight arms flowing sinuously from the center, outward. As she stepped closer, truly absorbing the sculpture, the art of it, her amazement grew.
Roan had twined two different types of wood around the main center post of the chandelier. One wood was reddish colored. The other, a deeper gold color, even more so than the cedar wood itself. They twined like vines, perhaps, four of them around each arm, to the end of it, so that there was a red and gold color on every other arm. And within the twined pieces of wood were highly faceted colored glass in blue, crystal clear, and green colors placed tastefully here and there. As the sunlight shot through the area, the crystals sparkled, creating a breathtaking collage of color.
At the end of each arm of the chandelier was a light hanging down from it. And surrounding the top of the light was a tentlike wooden roof with the twine of the colorful wood flowing around it.
She pressed her hands against her heart as she absorbed all that Roan had done to create this piece of incredible art that was fully functional. How long had it taken him to carve and make it? The details were so intricate and delicate. So feminine, as if honoring the beauty of women. Shiloh was sure he didn’t consciously realize that, but as she looked around, there was decided balance between the hard angles of the masculine and the curves of the feminine. Her mother had taught her to look at everything in those terms.
“You found my surprise for you.”
Whirling around, her eyes widening, Shiloh gasped. She saw Roan standing in the doorway, saddlebags draped loosely in one of his gloved hands. He was smiling, his eyes warm with what Shiloh recognized as love for her. And it really was. Her heart swelled.
“You scared me,” she whispered, her heart pounding beneath her hand.
“Sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you.” Roan gestured toward the chandelier. “You seemed caught up in it.” He walked in, taking off his gray Stetson and hanging it on a peg near the doorway.
“You’re early,” she murmured, going to the kitchen table where he set the saddlebags.
“No, I’m right on time,” he teased. “It’s noon. Were you off somewhere in your imagination? Did time fly by?”
She grinned and watched him pull his gloves off and stuff them in his back pocket. Those large hands, those long, callused fingers, had made her body sing like a harp last night. Already, her breasts were tightening and she could feel the nipples brushing against the silk camisole she wore beneath her blouse. “I guess it did,” she answered, and glanced down at her watch. Sure enough, it was noon. “It’s your fault, you know,” she said, coming over to Roan, sliding her arms around his shoulders, reaching up on tiptoe to kiss him. “Your cabin is like an art gallery of the finest kind,” she whispered against his smiling mouth. The predatory look in his gray eyes made her entire lower body clench with need. She felt his arms come around her, hauling her up against him.
Closing her eyes, Shiloh felt his mouth hungrily take hers. She wasn’t sure who was more starved for the other, languishing in the heat and strength of his mouth as he cherished her lips. He crushed her to him, allowing her to feel his erection. Suddenly, she was far more hungry for him than her growling stomach was for food. And as he eased his mouth from her, she felt like the most beloved woman in the world. She saw his love for her reflected in the stormy gray of his eyes. It was so tough not to say anything. Shiloh couldn’t. Not yet. There were so many unknowns between them with the stalker on the loose.
“I’ve missed you,” he growled.
“No more than I have,” she whispered, her voice breathy.
Roan reluctantly released her. “Come on. You must be hungry.” He pulled out the chair from the cedar dining room table.
Shiloh gave him a wicked look as she sat down. “I’m starving for you. Again.”
Roan gave her a heated glance and opened up the saddlebags, drawing out several containers and sandwiches. “Makes two of us, Darlin’. Open the containers? I’ll get us some silverware and some plates.”
She hadn’t even thought to open drawers in the kitchen and as Roan walked into it with that casual stride of his, Shiloh smiled. Pulling over the first container she said, “You’ve been awful busy. Last time I was here, this was a shell.”
“I’ve had two weekends to finish the drywalling and painting,” he said, bringing the silverware to the table. He set a bright red ceramic plate in front of her and himself. Sitting down at her elbow, he added, “And getting the furniture installed didn’t take hardly any time at all.”
“It’s beautiful, Roan,” she whispered, meeting and holding his gray gaze.
“Like it?” He opened another container and slid it between them.
“Like it?” Shiloh shook her head. “It’s gorgeous. Did you make the coffee and end tables?”
“Yes. I had them out in the garage. Didn’t you see them?”
Shaking her head, she whispered, “You’re a woodworker, too?”
“I like working with my hands.” And then he gave her a significant look.
Grinning, Shiloh said, “And I’m the lucky recipient of your hands, too.”
“You’re a beautiful carving, Shiloh. Someone I want to run my hands over, explore, and know.”
Her whole body went hot over his low, gruff words, her hands frozen midair with the container. The man could turn her on like a light switch. “With you, my body feels like that chandelier you made,” she said. “Molded, decorated—you made me feel so beautiful.” She saw Roan’s expression grow warm, a tenderness come to his eyes as he regarded her.
“That’s nice to know.” He opened the last plastic container. “You’re a work of art to me, Shiloh. You always will be.”
Every cell in her body quivered over his low timbre. Right now, she was starved but it sure as hell wasn’t for food. Shiloh felt like jumping him here and now, but the idea of a hard floor to make love on wasn’t exactly a turn-on for her. “Thank you. It’s lovely to be thought of as a work of art.” She spooned the potato salad, the three-bean salad onto her plate. Roan had brought thinly sliced beef sandwiches with horseradish mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato on them for their main course.
“Do you like the chandelier?”
“Oh, I love it! I was so taken with your kitchen that I didn’t notice it right away.”
“You like to cook. Why wouldn’t you go to the kitchen first?” he said, grinning.
Shiloh absorbed Roan into herself. He wore a blue-and-white plaid cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons. The collar area was open, a dark blue kerchief around his thick neck. The man definitely had some sense of art and color combinations. “Guilty,” she admitted. “That Wolf stove is to die for, Roan. And I loved the glass tile backsplash. You’ve been so thoughtful about the color scheme. It’s not too masculine and its counterpart is the feminine.”
Raising his brows, he smiled a little. “I hadn’t really thought about it in those exact terms.”
“Oh,” he drawled, “that’s a project that’s taken every stitch of my patience for nearly a year. I’d bring it out and work on it and the wood I’d wet to shape and curve it would snap and break. I can’t tell you how many times I had to start over.” And he shook his head, giving her a rueful grin.
“It’s breathtaking,” Shiloh said, so much passion behind her words. “And those faceted glass beads are the perfect addition to it. What made you put them on? What was your idea about it?”
Roan gazed up at the chandelier and then back at her. “I wanted the green to represent how lush this valley is with trees and grass.” He gestured upward toward it. “The blue is to represent the sky. The transparent crystals are the stars I see in the Wyoming night sky.”
She was mesmerized and deeply touched by his sensitivity, his ability to observe and then create such an incredible work of art. “Did you have a pattern? Or did you buy it?”
Shaking his head, he said, “There were many, many times when I wished I did, Shiloh. No, it was in my head. I made drawings on graph paper to figure out the dimensions, the length and width of each arm. Carving out the cedar template was easy compared to finding the right color of natural wood and then trying to get it to bend and curve.”
“And you said it took you a year to do this?” Talk about a labor of love, Shiloh thought.
“Actually,” Roan said, “when Maud gifted me with this five acres as part of my package as a wrangler working for the ranch, the design just popped into my head. After getting the cabin shell up, which took a year, beginning the second year, I started the design. I saw the chandelier as defining everything I wanted the cabin to represent.”
“Wow,” she murmured, awestruck, “you have such an amazing and artistic way of seeing the world.”
He grinned. “Not bad for a black ops guy like me. Right?”
She saw some color come to his cheeks, realizing he was blushing over her heartfelt compliment. “No . . . not bad at all. There must be some connection between your career as an operator and your skills in carving and building.”
“I don’t see any.”
She chuckled. “You wouldn’t. It’s my writer’s curiosity to understand the connections of how a person sees their reality. That’s how I create really great characters who have depth and breadth.” Tilting her head, she asked, “Is your mother an artist, I wonder?”
“She sure is,” Roan murmured, finishing off his lunch. He wiped his hands on a paper napkin and pushed the emptied plate aside. “But her art is in quilting. She likes crocheting and knitting, too.” He pointed toward the red afghan draped over the couch. “That’s her work. I don’t know if you went over to look at it, but it’s pretty intricately knitted. She’s great at detail work.”
“That makes me feel good that your mom is here with you in that way.”
Roan frowned. “Do you have things your mother gave you?”
“Yes,” Shiloh said quietly. “When my parents died, I was in the will and I got everything. My mother worked on several paintings at once. She loved landscapes. Maud has two of them in her house. If you feel like it, you might go over and take a look at them.”
“So you have some of her paintings?”
“I have four. And every one is priceless to me. She was working on a season theme before she was murdered by Leath. She’d gotten her art degree from the Sorbonne in Paris and she’d spent four years there. My mom loved nature. And she was always torn between the liveliness of the city and wanting to go live in the West. She made many trips out here. And she took a lot of photos. The season paintings were like a culmination of her trips to the West. I was only seven, but I remember walking into her art studio where she painted and feeling like I’d walked into a magical realm.”
Roan frowned. “How do you mean that?”
“Her paintings,” Shiloh said, finishing up her lunch. “These are big paintings, Roan. They are about four feet high and two feet wide. I remember when she was painting winter, that I came up and just felt like I’d walked into it, that I was a part of it.”
“Because she painted so realistically?” he asked.
Nodding, Shiloh smiled. “Yes. It WAS like a photo, but it wasn’t. But I felt it was so real, that it was like looking at it, it surrounded you and you were pulled into it.”
“I’m definitely going to have to pay Maud a visit and ask to see your mother’s artwork. It sounds incredible.”
“Like your chandelier. It touched me in the same way. I could feel how alive the wood was. The twining of the other wood felt like it was living and growing before my eyes. I thought the blue, green, and transparent crystals represented how it breathed.”
Roan smiled a little. “I like the way you view the world, Shiloh, seeing the beauty of it.”
“I try to do that in my writing, too. I want my characters to leap off the page and breathe for my readers. I want them so alive that my readers believe they truly are real.”
“Your mother had art with paints and you have art with words.” Roan stood, taking their plates and flatware to the kitchen sink.
Shiloh stood and put the lids on all the emptied containers. “I like to think I got the best from both my parents,” she murmured, her heart heavy because she missed them so much. Roan walked over to her. As she straightened, his arm went around her waist and drew her against him. The gesture meant so much to her, as if he felt her grief.
“Come on,” he urged, “there’s more for you to see. . . .”
As Roan guided her beneath his arm, he directed her to the wide, well-lit hall. He halted in front of one door halfway down on the left. “Go on in. Tell me what you think.”
She met his gray gaze, saw warmth and need in them for her. “Another surprise?” She saw his male mouth curve.
“Darlin’, didn’t I promise you surprises last night?”
Chuckling, Shiloh put her hand on the brass doorknob and twisted it. “Indeed you did and you’ve been a man of your word.” He released her and stepped aside as she pushed the door open.
Shiloh gasped as she stood in the entrance. She recognized the room because it was the master bedroom that Roan had shown her previously. Only, it wasn’t a hollow shell anymore. She wasn’t sure where to look first.
The drapes were pulled aside to reveal the huge window where light flooded the large bedroom. There was a mahogany sleigh bed against the far wall, covered with a colorful patchwork quilt. Shiloh automatically thought that Roan’s mother had made the quilt for this bed. There were mahogany bed stands carved exactly like the ones out in the living room on each side of the king-size bed. As if to counter the dark wood, near the door to her right was an antique blond oak dresser. And on the other side of the door, another one of the same design and size. There was a settee in one corner, covered with a gold-colored fabric similar to what she’d seen in the chandelier hanging in the living room. And nearby a stool with the same fabric color and a rocking chair. Shiloh could picture herself curling up on that feminine-looking settee and reading one of her books on her iPad.
She was thrilled to see that the drapes were exactly like the quilt bedspread. They were heavy and hung to the cedar floor. No one lived in Wyoming without seriously heavy drapes across windows during the winter. It absorbed the cold air at the window. She saw a straight-backed chair in another corner where a person could sit down and take off his boots for the day. Everything had been thought out, was practical and yet beautiful.
“This—” she gasped, “is so incredibly gorgeous, Roan!” Shiloh turned to him, seeing the pride in his eyes over the work he’d done to bring this room together.
“Like it?”
“Love it.” She shook her head. “Your poor mom must have gone to a LOT of work to not only create the bed
spread, but the drapes. It’s a stunning design idea.”
“My mom had a year to make them,” he reassured her. “And she wanted to do it. If I’d tried to refuse one of her quilts, she’d likely have killed me,” Roan chuckled.
Shiloh grinned. “Your mom sounds so wonderful.”
“Well,” Roan said lightly, placing his hand in the center of her back, guiding her toward the master bathroom, “maybe one of these days you’ll get to meet her.”
She didn’t have time to answer as Roan ushered her into the bathroom. She halted, feeling as if transported to another time and era. Roan had already laid down the ivory porcelain tile throughout it. The floor was heated so it would be warm in the winter. The huge area was decorated with a slipper tub with brass claw feet and Shiloh, who knew quite a bit about antiques, figured it was probably a bathtub from the late 1800s that Roan had somehow scored. There was a large oval quilt rug of the same patchwork colors as out in the bedroom. The windows were large, allowing southern light to flood the whole area. There were patchwork quilt drapes that did not go to the floor, tied back, to allow the light in.
“Ohhhh,” she whispered, moving into the tiled area, “a spa!”
“Thought that might appeal to you,” Roan said.
The spa was circular, the inside a pale blue and Roan had put dark blue tiles around the outside of it. There were three small steps up and into the lovely spa. Roan had tiled the outside of it with the same blue ceramic tile. To her right was the bathroom, the door open. It was large and roomy.