by Janzen, Tara
He did not count himself as an affair. He wasn’t giving up that easily or walking away with that little. He’d found something special in her. She had her feet on the ground, her life in order, and yet she retained a special innocence that was incredibly appealing. That first time he’d kissed her, he’d felt a pull on his soul, a need to touch her and share the magic surrounding her.
Danny had seen it. He’d capitalized his fame on the shimmering aura of Lila Singer. Jack wanted to capitalize on it, too, in the most personal ways imaginable. He wanted her inspiration for his own. He wanted to love and protect her and give her his heart in return.
He took a deep breath and looked out his windshield at the softly lit house. All he had to do was convince her to give him a chance. What the hell, he thought. At this point he’d settle for half a chance.
* * *
The ringing of the doorbell startled Lila into jumping off the barstool by the breakfast counter. The chair fell over and she scrambled for a minute to set it aright. She hadn’t expected him to use the front door. She wondered what it meant.
Probably nothing, she admonished herself. He was just being polite.
She smoothed her culottes and straightened the placket on her blouse. He was just being polite, she repeated silently. Or was he being formal? And how did she fit formality into an evening with the man she’d spent a morning making love with just before she’d ran off?
Life had been so simple before Christmas Eve. Why had she gone and made it all messy and complicated and full of possibilities and promise?
She stopped in front of a gilt-framed rococo mirror in the hall and ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing the curls into place. Large eyes stared back at her.
“Why couldn’t you stay out of trouble for one more day?” she whispered to her image. “Was that too much to ask?”
Yes, her heart answered, and it might have told her more, but the doorbell rang again.
After a calming breath, she took the necessary four steps to the door and opened it.
He looked great, better than great. He looked like everything she’d ever dreamed of in a man, and a lover, and a mate. She was hopeless.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” he echoed with the slightest smile curving his mouth.
It took her a moment to absorb the smile and the warmth of his gaze, but as soon as she did, she remembered to invite him inside.
“Come in . . . please.” she said, making a welcoming gesture and moving out of the way.
As he stepped by her, she did a completely unpremeditated and purely subjective appraisal of him, her gaze skimming him from top to bottom. Dove-gray jeans encased his long legs, ending at cream-colored cowboy boots tipped in dark brown that had seen their share of wear. The jeans were worn, too, giving them a soft sheen, and she fleetingly thought about brushing her fingers across them.
She quickly clutched her hands together and waited while he shrugged out of his leather jacket. The action revealed a black chamois shirt and brought to mind a similar movement he’d made on Sunday when he’d bared his chest.
When, she wondered in silent irritation, had she slipped into such a sophomoric, one-track frame of mind? There had never been another time in her life when so many of her thoughts had revolved around sex and the male body. She certainly hadn’t had such thoughts about Robert, which might explain why the one time she had gone to bed with him she’d cried through most of it and enjoyed none of it.
“Something smells great,” he said, laying his jacket across a chair arm.
“Oh, yes, well, I whipped up a little dinner.” She stuck a smile on her face to cover her lie. She hadn’t whipped anything up. What she’d done was re-whip what her mother had served her the previous night. She didn’t know if she was trying to impress him, save him the cost of another night out, or ensure a modicum of privacy for their talk. Whatever their talk turned out to be about, she was sure they’d need at least a modicum of privacy, maybe more.
“If I’d known,” he said, “I would have brought some wine.”
“I have wine,” she assured him. In truth, she was already on her second glass. It was supposed to calm her nerves, but it hadn’t.
The awkwardness of the moment increased exponentially for every tenth of a second she spent looking up at him, until it reached the unbearable point.
“Well, yes,” she managed to choke out, her gaze dropping to her eye level and his chest. “Why don’t we go ahead and eat.”
That wasn’t right, she thought. She knew that wasn’t right. People were supposed to chat before dinner, not drop their coats and chow down.
Things had definitely gotten worse. If he’d never kissed her, she might have maintained her control. But he’d kissed her right off the bat, less than half an hour after a very polite business introduction, and things had been going downhill ever since. Leaping into bed with him had only quadrupled the speed of her slide into chaos.
He followed her into the dining room, while she tried to fit in some cocktail conversation.
“How long have you been doing sculpture?” A great question, she praised herself, but she should have asked it days before. At the time they’d both had something else on their minds, though.
“I had an art teacher in high school,” he said. “He also doubled as the remedial reading teacher. We spent a lot of time together, mostly in a standoff, or with him sending me to study hall or giving me detentions, until I finally broke him. Do you need some help?” he asked.
“Please,” she replied, leading the way into the kitchen. “Broke him?”
“One day he just got fed up. He snapped, threw a book at me, bounced it off my head. Sure got my attention.”
She gave him a concerned look as she handed him a pair of potholders. “Did he lose his job ?”
“Nobody ever knew.”
“You didn’t report him?” She opened the oven—and pointed to the two casserole dishes. “They both need to be set on the table.”
“Nah. I was a cocky little jerk. He should have kicked my butt a lot sooner. His name was Art. Get it?”
“Art the art teacher?”
“We called him Art-Art”
She lifted the salad bowl out of the refrigerator, shaking her head. “You must have been a terror, a teacher’s nightmare.”
He shrugged. “There wasn’t a lot in school to hold my interest, not until Art taught me how to weld coat hangers together.”
“You two became friends?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Let’s say we decided not to waste each other’s time in the reading lab. When it was just the two of us, we hid out in the shop.”
As he carried the second casserole dish into the dining room, Lila took the bread out of the oven and arranged it in a linen-lined basket.
“This stuff really does smell great,” he said, lifting the lid off one of the hot dishes. “And it looks great. I love spaghetti. What’s this other one called?”
Lila hesitated for a moment in the kitchen, her hand resting on the bread basket. She didn’t make the stuff, or call it by name. She just heated it up. “Uh . . . it’s an old family recipe, made with eggplant.”
“Looks great,” he repeated.
She let out a sigh of relief. He didn’t want details.
“Maybe you could give me the recipe.”
He wanted details, probably more than she had. Her total set of instructions consisted of “one half hour at three fifty.”
“Sure,” she said, grabbing the bread basket and walking into the dining room, determined to change the subject before they got to the point where she was sneaking off to her bedroom to call her mother.
“So,” she began after they were seated. “You started out welding coat hangers. When did you graduate to half a ton of steel?”
Eleven
“. . . And after I’d welded up all the rusty junk lying around my dad’s farm, I started looking for something new and shiny, like steel.” He glanced up from his plate,
grinning. “Over the last couple of years the pieces have gotten bigger and bigger, a lot bigger than I ever thought they’d get. I finally had to build the garage.”
“Have you ever shown your work?” Lila asked, leaning forward with her hand cupped in her chin. She’d become so fascinated by his story, she’d forgotten to be nervous.
“A couple of people here and there have seen a few of my sculptures,” he said, shrugging nonchalantly. “It’s not something I do for other people.”
“And it’s not a hobby,” she added, remembering his reply to her question on the subject a couple of weeks earlier.
“No.” He grinned again, pouring himself more wine. “It’s not a hobby.”
“Still, I bet you could sell some of the pieces, especially your bronze work.”
“My bronze work?” He quirked an eyebrow.
“Sure,” she said, getting excited. “Even people without an eye for art, real art, like your phoenix in the garage, go for bronze castings.” Danny had never considered a photograph complete until someone paid him. It was a measure of success, he’d said. Not necessarily the most important one, but a vital one.
“Bronze castings,” Jack murmured, pouring the last of the wine into his glass and setting the bottle aside. Suddenly he laughed. “You mean the mermaid?”
No, she hadn’t meant the mermaid. She wouldn’t have deliberately mentioned that particular piece. She had assumed he must have more bronzes of different subjects. “Well, yes . . . or something else like it.”
He shook his head, still laughing. “Oh, there’s nothing else quite like the mermaid.”
She silently agreed as she drank the rest of her wine. Few women were built like his ex-wife. It bothered the hell out of her, even though she knew comparisons were ridiculous, unnecessary, unhealthy, and oh so human.
“Even if I did bronzes,” he continued, “I doubt if I could come up with something quite as . . .” He paused, searching for a word. “Quite as blatant as a half-naked woman decked out as a mermaid. From the day it arrived, I always felt it lacked a certain subtlety of style, a certain refinement of spirit. But you’re right. The stuff sells like hot-cakes. I’ve heard the artist does quite well for himself in California.”
“California?”
“Yeah, his name is Rico. It took me a long time to figure out why he sent it to me. Christina and I had been divorced for over a year when it came, so it was a little late to make me jealous. But then, it was always a little late to make me jealous where Christina was concerned.”
“Oh?” Lila said, dying of curiosity, but not wanting it to show. It struck her that in all their time together, the heart-to-heart confessions had always come from her. She knew virtually nothing about the ups and downs of his emotional life.
Their eyes met across the table and the two candles she’d lit for no special reason, certainly not to create a romantic atmosphere. He held her gaze for a long, quiet moment.
“I guess this is part of what we need to talk about,” he said softly.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“It must have been pretty awful for you to find her in the house Sunday afternoon.”
She nodded again and wondered if maybe it wasn’t absolutely necessary for them to talk about this after all.
“I mean,” he went on, “there were still four cookies left, and you left all of them for me without a word.” He grinned a little grin, deepening the crease in one cheek. “I figured something pretty terrible must have scared you off.”
She lowered her gaze to her plate.
“Christina’s timing has always been bad,” he continued. “She started sleeping with old Rico weeks before she remembered to tell me she wanted a divorce.”
Lila’s head snapped up. Jack wasn’t smiling anymore.
“It happens.” He shrugged and took another swallow of wine. After setting the glass back down, he twirled it between his fingers. “The trick is making sure it doesn’t happen to you.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Don’t be,” he replied evenly, glancing up at her. “I’m not.”
“But you must have loved her.”
“I wanted her. There’s a difference.”
The words were spoken slowly, but they made her heart race with something akin to panic. She knew there was a difference, and she was afraid that wanting had more to do with what was between them than loving, more afraid than she’d realized until he’d said the words aloud.
She rose abruptly. “I’ll get dessert. We’re having a cake, chocolate. Cheesecake actually. A chocolate cheesecake.”
In the kitchen, she set her plate in the sink and grasped the edge of the counter with both hands. Her chin lowered to her chest, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Jack had followed her, and he now stood in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room, studying her bowed head and the dark curls falling around her neck and shoulders. She was very still, with her knee bent and the toe of one boot resting behind the heel of the other. But the tension emanating from her slender form was undeniable. He felt it across the width of the kitchen.
“If you’d give me some guidelines,” he said, “maybe I could stop saying the wrong thing.” He spoke lightly, but he was damn serious. She was like water running through his hands, an ethereal mist he couldn’t catch in his fingers. Every time he thought he had her, she slipped away. Her husband probably hadn’t had to do anything special to her to make his photograph. She was the queen of the woodland fairies—a dream impossible to hold on to.
“It’s not you,” she said, lifting her head and pretending to be doing something in the sink. She didn’t fool Jack.
“If it’s Christina, or the mermaid, they’re both gone. That’s why she came back, to get the mermaid. Apparently, she’s running a little low on cash, and Rico had told her he’d sent a copy of the sculpture to me in a fit of remorse. Sort of a let-bygones-be-bygones gesture after she left him. She figured I didn’t really want it, and she was right.”
“Must have left a big empty spot in your bathroom,” she said.
“Actually, it kind of helped the place. I gave her the copper seaweed too.” At her lack of response, he continued talking, pausing occasionally in case she had something to add to the conversation. “One of these days, I’ll get around to chipping out all those seashells . . . should have done it a long time ago. Christina and I never did have the same taste in interior—”
“It’s not Christina or the mermaid,” she interrupted, turning to face him. “It’s you and me together.”
He mulled her statement over for a couple of seconds, then said, “I like you and me together.”
“So do I,” she admitted. “Maybe too much.”
He was starting to get confused again, and he didn’t know if he should keep that news flash to himself or tell her. He chose a roundabout route. “How about Sunday? Did you like us too much on Sunday?”
Predictably, the color rose in her cheeks, and she nodded. “Far too much.”
“Good,” he said quickly. At least he hadn’t been wrong about that. He began to feel better—until she spoke.
“We’ve been far too physically attracted to each other from the beginning.”
“I like physical attraction,” he countered, feeling himself losing ground. He hastily tried to shore up his case. “I like it a lot, especially with you. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember ever liking physical attraction as much as I liked it on Sunday.”
“Me either.” she confessed.
He took a step forward, but her next words stopped him.
“And I think it’s a very shaky basis for a relationship.”
“Well,” he improvised slowly, taking another step, “so do I, but I think . . . I know we have more in common than physical attraction.”
“Not much,” she said, her voice taking on a resigned tone as she dug into her skirt pocket. “I made a list, and it’s darned short.”
“A l
ist?”
She sorted through the scraps of paper in her pocket and shot him a quick glance. “Sex and chocolate.”
Sounded good to him.
“And art,” she added. “Or, rather, you have an interest in art, and I seem to have a subconscious interest in artists, since I was obviously attracted to you before I knew you were a metal sculptor.”
He didn’t know what to say. Unfortunately, she did.
“It’s not enough, Jack.”
Why not? he wanted to know, but he phrased his question differently. “How many things in common would be enough?”
“Enough for what?”
She was getting quick, he thought, momentarily caught off guard. He wanted enough things to get her back in bed, that was for sure. But he also wanted enough things to get himself an open invitation to dinner, and breakfast, and lunch. He was tired of eating alone, and if tonight was any indication, she could cook circles around him.
He wanted enough things so that his heart didn’t go into cardiac arrest every time he got close to her, for fear she’d skip out on him. He wanted enough things to make her happy, to light her face with a sweet glow of contentment . . . forever.
“Enough for marriage,” he said, not surprising himself, but shocking the daylights out of her.
“Marriage?” she gasped, one hand landing on her chest.
“Yes. Despite one not-so-good try at it, I still like marriage. I believe in it, and I think you do too. Please add that to your list.”
Lila stared at him in amazement. With three short words he’d catapulted their relationship into the stratosphere. The man didn’t know when to quit. First, he’d kissed her when he had no business doing any such thing. Then he’d slipped inside her life until they’d actually had a dinner date. Worse yet, he’d made himself utterly irresistible. She’d practically chased him into bed. Now he was talking about the ultimate commitment, the lifetime, through sickness and health, till-death-do-us-part type of relationship that she’d thrived on with Danny.
It still shocked her.
“I . . .” she began, but got no further. She tried again. “I . . .”
“How many things would that take, Lila?” he asked, moving one step closer, then another. “How many?”
