Loving the Storm

by Linda Seed

  He hadn’t been with a woman since his breakup with Megan, and that was a long damned time ago. He wondered if Aria Howard might be amenable to a little no-strings fun.

  Working in the barn later that afternoon—the barn they actually used, not the one with the spork thing in it—he kept thinking about her, about her body, and the eyes, and the hair, and that mouth. And the way she’d tightened her hold on his hand.

  He wasn’t one to use women just for sex. But would it hurt to ask her what she thought of the idea?

  He hoped the rain would end soon, so the barn roof could dry and he’d have an excuse to go back over there and see her again.

  Liam just hoped he wouldn’t fall off the damned roof. It was hard to impress a woman when you were screaming like a girl. At least, he assumed it would be.

  It was dark by the time Aria got back to the Delaney guest cottage. She flipped on the lights in the sitting room, the kitchen, and the bedroom until the entire little house was aglow. Then she lit the gas fire in the fireplace, less because she was cold than because she needed more light, more life, inside the house.

  After about ten days at the ranch, she was feeling the solitude and the loneliness of being out here in the middle of nowhere by herself.

  Yes, the cottage was on the property of a large ranch where a lot of people lived and worked. But the guest cottage itself was away from all of that, off a little dirt road near a creek, far enough from the busy bustle of the ranch that Aria could imagine there was no one left in the world but her.

  She’d stayed away from the house all afternoon for that reason. She’d thought the isolation would be peaceful, and it was—to a point. But she wouldn’t have minded a little company, a little noise.

  And the thought of company made her think of Liam Delaney.

  She went to the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine from the fridge. She poured herself a glass and took it back to the sofa in front of the fireplace.

  Would it be so bad to spend a little time with Liam? He was interested—she got that from the way he’d looked at her. If he was in a period of emotional turmoil, then it might not be a good idea, because she wasn’t thinking long-term; she was thinking about one night during which she wouldn’t have to feel the loneliness and isolation that were so much a part of her life.

  Was Liam really as fragile as Gen had made him out to be? Really as vulnerable? He didn’t seem that way to her, but she had nothing to go on but a first impression.

  Lacking any other form of companionship, Aria turned on the TV, then turned up the volume. She didn’t particularly want to watch anything, but at least the chatter of the television was better than nothing.

  By morning, the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through the clouds just above the horizon. Aria got up early and made coffee in the cottage’s tiny kitchen. She drank it at the kitchen table, then showered and put on warm clothes for a walk at Fiscalini Ranch, a nature preserve with acres of trails and rugged land atop bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

  This early on a Tuesday morning in November, there were a few people out on the trails, but not many. She passed an elderly man walking a cocker spaniel on a leash, and a couple of joggers, but she mostly had the place to herself. She could imagine that in the middle of summer, the preserve was probably thick with tourists. But right now, it was mostly her, the crash of the waves, and the barking of the sea lions lounging on the rocks below the bluffs.

  Out here in the beauty of the morning, feeling her muscles grow pleasantly warm with exertion, it was hard to remember that she’d been unhappy the night before.

  It was mostly the nights that got to her.

  She thought too much at night, and it was hard to turn those thoughts off.

  But in the mornings, she had her work to look forward to, and the beauty of the landscape here, and that was enough.

  Almost.

  As she walked, with the crunch of the dirt path beneath her shoes, she reminded herself of everything she had.

  She had good health, a rising art career, the opportunity Gen Porter had given her with this residency. She had the art itself, which was immensely satisfying when it was going well. And that was a lot. It didn’t pay to think about all of the things she didn’t have, like a family. Like the kind of happy childhood memories the Delaneys probably had.

  Like a relationship with a man who loved her.

  The childhood and the family were things she could do nothing about—they were what they were, and she was still here, still alive, still breathing.

  And the relationship?

  Aria had never had anyone in her life who hadn’t eventually left. And she’d survived anyway—she’d gotten through hell and back out the other side.

  Her own strength, her own will, her own self were the only things she’d ever been able to count on, and she wasn’t naïve enough to think that was going to change.

  But the idea of a fling with Liam? Well, that was undeniably appealing.

  That train of thought made her think about the fact that the rain had passed and the sun was coming out. Sun that would dry the barn roof, allowing Liam to come back and work on the skylight.

  If Liam wanted to spend some time with her—time that would chase all thoughts of loneliness out of her head, if only for a little while—then who was to say that was wrong?

  Warm and loose from her walk, she hiked back to her car, drove up Highway 1 to the ranch, and got settled in with her piece in the barn, with its leaky skylight.

  With a day of work and a possible visit from an attractive man in front of her, it seemed like she really did have all she needed.

  Chapter Four

  Liam was looking forward to going to the barn to inspect the skylight—and to seeing the woman who was out there building things out of sporks. But for some reason he didn’t fully understand, he didn’t want everyone to know he was looking forward to it.

  So he found it happily convenient when Ryan started nagging him about it at the breakfast table that morning.

  It was just before sunrise, with Sandra slapping platters of eggs and bacon and toast onto the big kitchen table, when Ryan started in about it.

  “Gen wants to know if you’re going to go out and look at that skylight,” Ryan said as he started to dig into his oatmeal—his usual vegetarian alternative to the eggs and the bacon.

  “Well, why doesn’t Gen ask me about it, then?” Liam responded.

  “Mainly because she doesn’t get out of bed for another hour, like normal people,” Ryan said. “She wanted me to ask you, so I’m asking.”

  Liam’s usual mode was to be crusty about such things, and if he changed that now, people were likely to think there was something wrong with him. So instead of just saying yes, he was going to check the skylight, and in fact he didn’t mind at all, he gave Ryan a ration of shit about it.

  “I don’t know why the hell that skylight is a priority when we’ve got a ranch to run,” Liam grumbled. “It’s not even raining anymore.”

  “Which is why today’s a good day to look at it,” Ryan pointed out. “But if you don’t want to do it, I can go out there and—”

  “I’ll do it,” Liam grumbled.

  “Look, I don’t mind,” Ryan said. “It’s my wife’s deal, I guess I ought to be the one who—”

  “I said I’ll do it,” Liam snapped at him.

  “Well, whoever’s going to do it is going to need some damned breakfast. So you two ought to shut your pie holes about it and eat,” Sandra put in as she sat down at the table with her own plate of eggs.

  “How are they supposed to shut their pie holes and eat at the same time?” Orin asked, suppressing a grin. “They’ve gotta open their pie holes if they’re—”

  “That’s enough out of you,” Sandra said.

  Liam left the breakfast table that morning satisfied with how it had all turned out.

  He showed up at the old barn later that morning with a ladder and a toolbox, knocking on the open door a
nd peering into the cool depths inside.

  “Anybody home?” he said. But he didn’t say it right away. Because she was in there, all right, bending over the spork thing with her ass turned toward the door. The ass in question was covered by a tight-fitting pair of jeans, and it was almost unbearably round and luscious. There was no harm in enjoying the view for a minute before announcing himself.

  When he did finally make his presence known, she straightened and turned. “Oh!” She had a bottle of glue in one hand and a used, crumpled drinking straw in the other, and her face turned just a little bit pink in a way that he found cute as hell.

  “I thought I’d take a look at that skylight.” He lifted the ladder and the toolbox a little to demonstrate his intentions.

  “Great.” She smiled, and he felt the smile in places on his body that were especially dear to a man’s heart. She must have been at work for a while, because the knees of her jeans were dusty from the floor, she had spots of glue on her shirt, and her hair, which was up in some kind of bun, was starting to come loose a little at the edges.

  “How’s the … ” He motioned vaguely at the pieces of trash sculpture on the floor.

  “The yurt,” she supplied.

  “Yeah, the yurt. How’s it coming?”

  “It’s coming.” She pointed to the two-by-four-shaped structures on the floor. “When these pieces are done, I’m going to interlock them to make the basic frame.”

  He nodded as though this all seemed completely sensible. “Then what?”

  “Then, I’ve got to cover it all up with a kind of skin. Most people use canvas, but I’m going to weave together some plastic grocery bags.”

  “Huh.” He rubbed at his chin. “I guess there are a lot of those around.”

  “You have no idea. Globally, five trillion plastic grocery bags are produced every year. And they’ve got to go somewhere. Some people recycle them, and that’s better than nothing, but most of them end up in landfills, where they don’t even start to degrade for seven hundred years. Do you have any idea how many of them end up in the ocean? They—”

  “You don’t have to lecture me about the environment,” he said, interrupting her.

  “I wasn’t trying—”

  “You were. But that’s okay. It’s worth lecturing people about. I’m just saying, you’re preaching to the choir.” He’d already set his ladder and his toolbox down on the dirt floor of the barn, and now he was standing with his hands in his jeans pockets, just taking her in.

  “Sorry. I get worked up.”

  “I can see that.” He couldn’t help grinning at her a little; she was just so fired up and full of energy, and so pretty out here with the sun from the skylight shining on her hair.

  “You think it’s dumb,” she said, her head tilted slightly, peering at him. She wasn’t being defensive; she was just stating an observation of fact.

  “What? Worrying about plastic bags? I told you …”

  “No, the yurt.”

  She had him there. No sense trying to deny it. “Well … sort of. I just kind of don’t see the point.”

  “You don’t see the point of art?”

  He shrugged. “Paintings, stuff like that … sure. But this? I don’t know what this is. I guess I just don’t get it.”

  Admitting that he didn’t get it might set him back in any effort to get her out of those tight jeans, but he didn’t see the point in lying, or in pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to get it.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She considered him. “Because if I do it right, you will.”

  Aria wasn’t offended that Liam didn’t get the point of her yurt. In fact, it would have been less fun if he had. When someone immediately identified with her artistic vision, that was fine. But it wasn’t nearly as thrilling as starting with a doubter—or even a mocker—and converting him.

  There were people who couldn’t be converted. Some people simply didn’t have the depth or the vision to appreciate anything that didn’t present obvious beauty or utility. But she was willing to bet that Liam wasn’t one of those people.

  He had a certain arrogant tough-guy exterior that said he wasn’t the kind who could see the potential in her work. But the exterior was wrong. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she knew.

  She had a knack for spotting such things, and she was rarely mistaken.

  Liam wandered to her worktable, where she had an array of broken glass—pieces in green and blue, brown and red—laid out in a big circle.

  “What’s this for?” he asked.

  “The skylight.”

  He peered up skeptically at the roof and at the leaky skylight he’d come to fix.

  “Not that one,” she told him. “It’s for the yurt.”

  “The yurt’s going to have a skylight?”

  “It is.” She came over to the worktable, flipped through some pages in her sketchbook, and showed him a sketch of a circular structure with a mosaic pattern of broken glass pieces in various colors. “See? I’m going to set up an overhead light just above it, so the colors will reflect inside the yurt.”

  For the first time since she’d shown him the project, he looked interested. “Huh. That could work.”

  “The skylight in the barn was what inspired me. For that part of it, anyway.” She turned to him and looked up into his clear blue eyes. “Inspiration can come from anything. Or from anyone.”

  For a moment, he didn’t move or speak, and the connection between them almost drew the air out of her lungs. Then he blinked once, stepped back, and headed toward his tools.

  “I guess I’d better get up there, then.” He didn’t look at her, just picked up his ladder and his toolbox and headed toward the door. “Seeing as how the damned skylight is so inspiring and all.”

  Liam set up his ladder and began climbing toward the roof. He’d wanted to flirt with Aria—she’d seemed open to it—but instead, he’d hauled ass out of there. Because risking life and limb on a damned ladder was preferable to putting himself out there with a woman, apparently.

  Was he that pathetic after what had happened with Megan? He hadn’t thought so, but now he was beginning to wonder.

  As he climbed the ladder, he reminded himself that he needed to focus. Going up onto a twenty-foot-high roof was dicey under the best of circumstances. It was dicier when one of your legs didn’t work one hundred percent right. Add the memory of Aria’s ass to the equation, and he was likely to find himself lying flat on his back on the ground with a team of paramedics over him.

  Aria was standing on the ground looking up at him anxiously.

  “Are you okay?” she said. “I mean, going up the ladder with your … your …”

  “The leg’s not a problem,” he called down to her as he ascended. “I know what I’m doing.”

  It was true that the leg wasn’t that big of a problem. He’d lost some of his range of motion, sure. But he had full strength in the leg, and he’d been doing all of his usual work—including climbing ladders—for months now.

  The issue, in his mind, wasn’t what he could or couldn’t do. The issue was what a sexy woman on the ground thought he couldn’t do.

  Fuck his goddamned leg, and the accident. And fuck the goddamned crisis of confidence that had him up on this ladder instead of down on the ground making a move on a deliciously attractive woman.

  He had to get his shit together, and soon.

  Aria went back into the barn and wondered what kind of signals she should send to Liam—and whether she should send any at all.

  She saw the looks he’d given her, and she knew he was attracted. The looks didn’t lie.

  She had hoped maybe he would make some kind of move, but he hadn’t. Was he still too hung up on his ex to start anything with someone new?

  Maybe. And even if he wasn’t, there was a chance Liam was the kind of guy who wouldn�
��t be interested in something casual with a woman he’d barely met.

  Liam had a big, tight-knit family, so maybe he was traditional about relationships. On the surface, he seemed like the sort of man who might enjoy the occasional fling or one-night encounter. But Gen had suggested that Liam’s surface didn’t match what was going on underneath, and Aria had gotten that same sense herself.

  If Liam Delaney was looking for someone to sip lemonade with on the front porch before taking her inside for dinner with Mom and Dad—well, that was a sweet and appealing thought, but she just couldn’t do it. If that was what he wanted, she’d be better off steering clear now instead of later.

  Chapter Five

  The skylight wasn’t going to take long to fix. A quick look at the thing showed that a couple of roof tiles needed to be replaced. That and some fresh sealant, and he’d be good to go.

  He had some sealant in his toolbox, but he would need to go to the hardware store to get the roof tiles. He was pleased with how that was going to work out, because it would give him an excuse to come back out here and talk to the artist again once he had the necessary supplies.

  He climbed down the ladder carefully, then folded it, leaned it against the side of the barn, and stood in the doorway with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops.

  “Well, it looks like I’m going to have to put in some new roof tiles,” he said, trying to sound like doing it would be a pain in the ass.

  Aria was at the worktable with a pot of glue and a pile of trash, making one of the long rod-like things she was using for the frame of the yurt. She looked up at him with sunshine from the skylight shining on her face.

  “Thanks for doing it,” she told him. “It’s supposed to rain again on the weekend.”

  He shrugged in a way that was supposed to say it was no big deal, while at the same time communicating that he was putting himself out for her benefit. It was a lot to expect from a shrug.

  “A man’s got to maintain his property,” he said. “Just part of my job.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Still, I appreciate it.”