Up Close and Personal

by Maureen Child

  “Georgia told me where to find you.”

  “So much for sisterly loyalty,” she muttered with a quick glance at him. Oh, she wished she hadn’t looked at him. He was wearing dark jeans, a thick, forest-green Irish sweater and the wind was tangling his hair just as she wanted to.

  He smiled as if he knew what she was thinking. “I told her we had things to talk about.”

  “Do we?”

  She was nervous. She hated that she was nervous. Her hand was shaking, so she took a tighter grip on her paintbrush and willed herself to even out. To get steady. No way would she let Ronan know how he affected her.

  A few hardy surfers were out, looking for the perfect swell, but the sand was empty, and even the sidewalks were practically deserted. Not that many people interested in sitting out in a cold wind first thing in the morning. And a winter beach didn’t attract many takers. Not even in southern California.

  “You know we do,” he said quietly.

  “I know our conversations never go anywhere, and I’m too busy to run in circles today,” she told him.

  He moved away from the railing, walked around to stand behind her and look at the canvas that was nearly completed. She wasn’t comfortable having anyone looking over her shoulder as she painted. Ronan only upped the nerve factor.

  “I’ve no interest in circles, either,” he said, lowering his head until his whisper sounded against her ear.

  His breath on her skin was a sinful caress she sooo didn’t need.

  “Then go away.”

  “’Tis a public beach,” he reminded her in that same, low whisper before he stood up and moved around her chair to block her view of the ocean.

  “It is,” she agreed. “And a big one. Why are you in my corner?”

  “Because of you, Laura.”

  “So we’re going to do the circle dance today anyway, are we?” she asked, hearing the snap in her tone and wincing at the sound of it. Way to look unaffected, Laura.

  She wouldn’t look at him again. Wouldn’t meet his eyes. Because everything she was feeling would probably be written there for him to see. Ronan had always been too good at looking deeply. No doubt, exactly why he’d broken up with her in the first place.

  He had seen that she was putting too much of herself into a relationship destined to end.

  “Could you answer one thing for me?”

  She risked another glance at him and felt her heart take a hard jolt. “Depends.”

  “Could you tell me why you sell real estate when you can paint like that?”

  She stopped, lowered the brush she held in her right hand and took a long look at the nearly finished painting on her easel. It was good, she knew that. She had talent; every teacher she’d ever had had told her so. And she loved painting, though she didn’t have as much time for it as she’d like.

  “I like eating,” she quipped and swept her brush across the painted sea. “Making a living from art isn’t easy and real estate pays better. Well, usually.”

  “Seems a shame.”

  She didn’t want his sympathy. “We do what we have to do, right?”

  Seagulls wheeled and dipped in the sky, and the scent of coffee and sweet rolls drifted from a nearby diner. Laura took all of it in and none of it. Her eyes were focused on her painting, the rest of her was focused on Ronan. He slapped one hand against the metal railing, and she looked at him.

  “We do,” he said, “which is why I’m here.”

  “Ronan…”

  His gaze was fixed on her. “You missed me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Liar.”

  She frowned and lifted her gaze to his. Let him read what he would in her eyes, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting that he was right.

  “I thought of you,” he admitted and the Irish in his voice flavored every word. “Didn’t want to, but I did.”

  A warm ball of satisfaction settled in the pit of her stomach, then slowly dissolved. “Didn’t want to?”

  He shook his head. “No, not on this trip or before, on the six-week job with that—”

  “Singer?” she provided.

  He grimaced. “Supposedly.”

  Laura smiled in spite of the still echoing twinge of knowing he hadn’t wanted to think about her. “I actually saw you on TV one night. An entertainment show was covering her concert in Massachusetts and I caught a glimpse of you in the background.” She didn’t tell him that she’d heard nothing of the story because she had been too busy watching him. “You looked…uncomfortable.”

  “In pain is more like,” he admitted, slapping the railing again for emphasis. “Between the girl and her mother, it was a long job.”

  She was glad to hear it. He’d broken up with her, then disappeared for six weeks. Helped to know that he was as miserable as she had been—even if for different reasons.

  “Why did you go?” she asked. “Why take that job yourself?”

  “It’s what I do.”

  She shook her head and felt the wind slide through her hair, lifting it off her neck. “You told me yourself that you rarely take a guard job anymore. So why that one? To get away from me?”

  After a moment’s pause, he nodded. “I thought it best.”

  “To get over me.”

  “To let you get over me.”

  She laughed shortly. God, the man’s ego was amazing. “Well, how thoughtful.”

  “I wasn’t being thoughtful,” he argued, the brogue in his voice thickening with irritation. “It was…necessary.”

  “For you,” she said, picking up a new brush and dipping the edge of it into a splotch of white paint on her palette. When it was coated just thoroughly enough, she laid that white edge against the roiling swells on her painting. Instantly, the water looked more alive. More angry. Which, she supposed, was fair, since the artist herself was feeling pretty much the same.

  “I didn’t ask you to take care of me,” she said.

  “Perhaps not, but the request was there, toward the end of our time together, every time you looked at me, I saw it,” he countered. “Thoughts and plans for a future that wouldn’t be happening.”

  Maybe he had seen all of that in her eyes, Laura thought with a pang. But he’d sneaked up on her. She had thought what they shared was lust, pure and simple. A red-hot affair that would singe her socks off. She hadn’t meant to feel for him. To fall for him. In fact, she had been determined not to feel anything remotely like what she had once thought she had with Thomas.

  Back then, Laura had convinced herself she was in love because she had so badly wanted to be. She’d wanted a family. A home. Kids. Maybe she was an anachronism. A woman out of time. Most women were planning for big careers, chasing dreams and feeding their ambitions—and there was nothing wrong with that at all. But that just wasn’t her.

  Then, Georgia had been married, their parents off to Oregon, and Laura was alone. She had plenty of friends, but no…center. All she’d had was her condo and a job working for Manny Toledo—which was no woman’s dream.

  And then there was Thomas. Getting engaged had looked good on paper. But she’d been more in love with the idea of being in love than she had been with the oh-so-boring, predictable Thomas.

  When he had cheated on her, she hadn’t even really been mad. Or hurt. Or surprised. Which told her she had come close to making a huge mistake. Being lonely was one thing. Getting married for the wrong reasons was something else again.

  Then Georgia’s marriage ended, she moved in and suddenly, Laura wasn’t as lonely anymore. She had her sister, her home and eventually, their own real estate business. It had been enough.

  Until Ronan.

  “So you wanted to save me from myself, is that it?” she asked thoughtfully. “So selfless.”

  “I was trying to make it easier,” he countered. “On the both of us.”

  “Hmm. And how’s that working for you?”

  “Not bloody well at the moment,” he admitted, shoving one hand th
rough his windblown hair.

  “Good to know,” she muttered and dipped her brush into an open jar of turpentine. Then she used a rag to wipe it down before setting the brush aside for a more thorough cleaning when she got home.

  No point in staying here any longer. She was losing the early morning light and Ronan’s presence made it impossible to concentrate anyway. Methodically, she began putting away the tubes of oils, setting them in the mahogany box, each of them in their proper slots.

  “You were right about something,” he said after a long minute or two of silence.

  Well, that got her attention. She looked up at him. “Really? About what?”

  He frowned, shifted his gaze briefly to the crashing ocean behind him then turned his gaze back to her. “About Beast. I hadn’t really thought about what would happen when it was time for me to go home.”

  Laura just stared at him. “The day you came to claim him, you told me you’d always planned on taking him to Ireland.”

  “Aye, well,” he muttered as he scraped one hand across his face. “I may have exaggerated that point a bit.”

  Shaking her head, she twisted the lids onto her jars of turpentine and linseed oil, then slapped them both into the wooden case. “You lied.”

  “A bit,” he agreed, “though it’s no matter now anyway, because I will be taking him home.”

  He gave her a rueful smile that she should have found charming. Instead, she was simply annoyed.

  “But I do admit,” he continued, “that the thought hadn’t occurred to me before you dog-napped him.”

  “I didn’t—”

  He held up one hand. “The point is, I got him at the pound because I missed having a dog about. I—”

  “You were lonely?”

  He narrowed his gaze on her and his jaw muscle twitched as if he were grinding his teeth. “I’m never lonely. ’Tis only that a house is an empty thing without a dog in it.”

  Ronan Connolly, billionaire bad-ass, would never admit to being lonely. But Laura could hear the real answer in his words. And it wasn’t hard to understand. Thousands of miles away from his home, rattling around alone in that massive house on the cliffs of Laguna. No wonder he’d wanted a dog for the company.

  “There I agree with you.” She sighed and laid a piece of plastic wrap across the top of her palette, protecting the wet paint from smearing. Then she laid it carefully atop the paints stored inside the box, closed the lid and turned the lock.

  “You’ll still not give him back?”

  “No.” It was more now than protecting Beast from being ignored. Or about teaching Ronan that he couldn’t walk away from a commitment. She loved Beast and as Ronan had just said himself, a house without a dog in it is an empty thing.

  “Aye well, then I suppose we’re not finished, you and I.”

  She stood up, folded her stool and leaned it against the trunk of a nearby tree. Taking her canvas down and setting it aside, she then collapsed the three-legged easel and laid it beside everything else. She didn’t look up at Ronan until she was finished. When she did, she said, “No. I suppose not.”

  “You know what you’re doing to me, don’t you?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’m not trying to do anything, Ronan.”

  “And that’s just the frosting on the cake, isn’t it? You don’t even know it, and yet you still scramble my thoughts until I find myself here—” He took a breath. “As you said, talking in circles.”

  She hated that he could twist her insides into knots. Hated knowing that he didn’t want to be anywhere near her—he was just too stubborn to leave before he had his answers.

  And she was no better. She’d held off telling him. Giving him what he wanted from her because she hadn’t been willing to see him walk away for good. But staring up into his eyes now, Laura knew that nothing would ever be as it was, so what the hell was she hanging on to? Ragged dreams? Tattered fantasies?

  They were gone.

  So for her sake, it was time to end this.

  “You don’t want to be here, so don’t be.”

  He reached out for her, grabbed her shoulders and brought her to him. She felt the strength in his hands, read the determination in his eyes.

  “Tell me,” he insisted, drawing her even tighter to him. “Tell me what’s driving you. What’s kept that glint of banked fire in your eyes whenever you look at me. There’s more going on here than just my dog—”

  “This isn’t about Beast,” she said, temper flashing inside her like a struck match, billowing up in heat and flame. Laura pulled free of Ronan’s grasp and staggered back a step or two.

  “Then what, woman?”

  She grabbed up her things, then spun around to face him. “You want to know what’s eating at me, Ronan? Well, here it is. While you were off playing babysitter to that teenager, I was here at home, losing our baby.”

  He looked as if he’d been struck by lightning. His jaw dropped, his eyes went wide, then narrowed a heartbeat later. “You lost—”

  “Now you know everything,” she told him, lifting her chin and meeting those haunting eyes of his for what she knew would be the last time. “So goodbye, Ronan. Have a nice life.”

  She left him there, standing at the edge of the sea, and when she walked away, she didn’t look back.

  * * *

  He followed her.

  What else could he do?

  Thoughts crashed through his mind with the wild ferocity of waves thundering against rocks. Blindly, he headed for his car and pulled into the street just moments behind Laura’s Volkswagen. His hands fisted on the steering wheel, he was half surprised the damned thing didn’t snap in his grip.

  A child?

  She’d lost their child and hadn’t bothered to tell him?

  What was he supposed to feel now? Relief? Grief? He didn’t know. In a blur, his conversation with Sam came rushing home to him and Ronan saw it all so differently now. In a blink all had changed. He might have been a father. He could have been in Sam’s shoes, waiting for the birth of a child. Shaken to the bone, he couldn’t even separate the colliding emotions inside him. All he was sure of was the fury.

  “Be damned if she’ll simply lay something like that out, then leave me without so much as an explanation.” He navigated Pacific Coast Highway, steering around the early morning traffic while his heart and guts twisted inside him until he could hardly draw a breath.

  “A child, she says, then tells me it’s gone?”

  He made the turns as she did, keeping to the speed limit, watching carefully that he kept the anger inside him on a tight, short leash.

  On her street, sunlight dappled through the trees planted on either side of the road. It was a pretty picture that he took absolutely no notice of. As she turned into the drive beside her house, he pulled his car up front and jumped out almost before the roar of the engine had died away. He came around the end of the car and stalked toward her, where she stood watching him as if he were a ghost.

  Ronan laughed shortly. “That you can be surprised to see I followed you here amazes me. Did you really think it was ended? Because you said it was so?”

  “You wanted your answer, you got it,” she shot back, and reached into the car for her purse. When she went to get her painting supplies from the trunk though, Ronan stopped her with one hand on her arm. “Leave them till later.”

  He felt her tense in his grip, as if she’d fight him on this, then he felt resignation sweep that tension away. She turned her face up to his and through the anger in her eyes, he read a depth to her sadness he was stunned as hell to admit he hadn’t noticed before. Had it been there since he got back? Had she been grieving the loss of his child without so much as mentioning it to him?

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?” he muttered, still lost in the gleam of sorrow shining back at him.

  “When, Ronan? You were gone,” she reminded him. “You made it clear you were done with me.”

  “If I’d known…�
�� He let that sentence dangle for he wasn’t sure even now what he might have done. How he might have reacted. Though he had damn well deserved the chance to make his own bloody decisions about how he felt.

  “If you’d known,” she said, “you would have thought I was trying to trap you into staying with me.”

  Maybe, he decided. Maybe he would have. And maybe not. “We’ll not know for sure now, though, will we?”

  “I know,” she insisted and the grief in her eyes burned away in the flash of temper.

  Was she right? He didn’t want to think so, but a glimmer of something resembling shame rippled through him and he had to admit at least to the possibility. He hadn’t planned on having a family. Ever. His own childhood had been enough of a roadmap to show him that emotional entanglements led to misery. Raised like that, Ronan was convinced he wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to raise a child as it should be raised.

  How could he show love to a child when he’d never seen it for himself?

  And how could he grieve for a child he hadn’t known existed until moments ago?

  “Come on,” he said, pulling her after him toward the house. “I’ll not have this conversation out in the open.”

  She pushed her car door closed and hurried her steps to keep up with his much longer stride. “I don’t want to do this now.”

  “That’s a shame then, for sure.” He drew her to a stop on the porch and held out one hand. “The key, Laura.”

  He could see the urge to argue in her eyes, but she only muttered something under her breath and handed over the keys she still held in her hand.

  He had the door opened, her inside and the door slammed shut again in under a minute. Only then did he release the grip he had on her arm. He released her instantly, relieved to see he hadn’t marked her fair skin, but damned if he had calmed down any. Standing feet braced widely apart, he barred the door with a stance that silently told her there would be no escape.

  “Fine,” she told him flatly. “We’ll talk. Then you’ll go.”

  Ronan sneered at her. She was already tossing him out and he’d only just gotten in. “When I decide to go, I’ll let you know.”