But he couldn’t do it to her. She looked so frail, and that wasn’t the woman he knew. That wasn’t the woman who had brought his daughter back to him so effortlessly, and had designed those magnificent costumes.
He’d wait and see. He just hoped to god he wouldn’t be left with some huge disaster to clean up.
“Here they are,” Jaspar practically squealed.
In moments both kids were down on their knees. A beleaguered Cairn terrier looked up that them as eight little puppies walked all over her.
“Aren’t they just so cute?” Tammy scooped one up carefully to show him the little brindle-coated pup.
Bill glanced at the owner, a big man relaxing comfortably in a small folding chair, he offered a friendly nod. “Your young ‘uns know the way of it.” His accent Kentucky or Tennessee, but with an overlay of watching too many episodes of Game of Thrones.
“Be ready to adopt in another month. The sire is over to yonder giving his all for Best in Show. Won’t get it, but we won’t be tellin’ him.” The man winked to show he was just glad to be here.
Perrin drifted up to Bill. She tentatively reached out and touched him lightly on the hand, asking permission. He wrapped his fingers around hers and she clamped down hard, proving that all of the sewing had made her a very strong woman indeed.
Not releasing his hand, she again glanced for permission, far more tentative than she’d been even half an hour before, then knelt behind the children. For a moment he feared that the life had gone out of her, as if that wild spark of life and fire were gone.
“Your dad swore that we’d never convince him to get a dog,” her voice was close to normal. “Not even if we all ganged up on him. What do you think, should we try?”
Okay. So, the spark wasn’t gone. She’d simply been asking if she’d screwed it up permanently. Not yet. His antenna were now out, but she was still okay.
He squeezed her hand briefly to let her know they were still okay.
“But no dog,” he told the three of them.
He hoped she’d ease up on her grip soon, before his fingers went completely numb.
It took a while to extract the kids, but Bill had made it out with his fingers intact, and no dog. But it had been a close thing on both counts.
In the sunny afternoon, they’d walked along the waterfront, doing all of the touristy things together. They rode the Seattle Great Wheel, the hundred-and-seventy-five foot Ferris wheel standing at the end of one of the piers, their gondola practically scraping against the low scudding clouds at the top of the trip. They poked into Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and made faces at the shrunken head and explored one of the most amazing kitsch collections he’d ever seen.
Jaspar had departed Pirate’s Plunder with an eye patch that he could see through, but looked opaque from outside. Tammy found a head scarf that made her look mature and, in pulling back her hair, exposed a younger version of Adira’s beautiful neck.
“That green color looks great on you, kid.”
Tammy had offered one of her enigmatic smiles.
“Makes you beautiful like your mom.”
That earned him the melty-happy expression he’d been hoping for.
It was only as they wandered into the Seattle Aquarium that he noticed Perrin wore an identical scarf.
“You like it? Tamara insisted we had to match.”
“What color is your hair? Really?” The scarf did look good on her, mixing the blond and the black into a soft cascade onto her back. He fooled with it a bit, relishing the softness.
“The white-blond is about as close as I’ve ever let it get. It was originally a gold-blond, but I left that behind long before I was eighteen. First goth black, then just any color that goes with my latest clothing design.”
He’d like to see that original color some day. See it grown out, all golden-blond. Maybe in that gold dress he’d seen the first day. But it wasn’t his place to tell her how she should look. And he liked the nutty style, it made her uniquely Perrin. But he’d wager that the true blond would be stunning. There must be something behind that eighteen line, all her stories stayed on this side of that line.
And that led him back to his earlier dark thoughts. Who was she, under the woman that she wore like a fine set of clothes? Who was the terrified creature he had glimpsed so briefly? The one who’d thought that he’d… He shoved the thought aside in disgust.
He knew he was falling in love with the first woman. He’d been in love with Adira, knew what that felt like even if they were so different. Adira his quiet anchor and Perrin who made him feel more alive than he ever had other than the first time he’d held his children. It was a shock, but he could recognize it in himself.
The second woman worried him. Worried him badly.
Chapter 10
“Jerimy!” Perrin raced into the Costume Shop and spotted him by a rack of Turandot costumes. He was boxing them for storage, they must be freshly cleaned.
“Perrin!” He shouted back and met her halfway. He gave her a strong and totally unjudgmental hug. She needed that right now. All Sunday and Monday she’d been so worried, fretting at the problem like a sore tooth.
Bill hadn’t changed how he treated her despite her panic attack at the dog show, but she’d felt different around him. Having revealed that awful fear inside her, she didn’t know how to go back to showing him only the carefree and happy woman she’d worked so hard to stitch together over the years.
Jerimy didn’t know any of that and she could just be her old, familiar self with him. He squeezed her hard enough that she had to gasp and giggle. She kissed him on each cheek before they let each other go.
“Do you knit? I need a bunch of knitters. Wait until you see. Where’s my portfolio?”
“The one in your hand, beautiful?” he teased.
“Well, no, but it will have to do,” she teased back and tossed it down on the table. Then she opened it and pulled out the final four drawings. She set them in a row and stepped back. These had come from somewhere deep. They were actually some of the best drawings she’d ever made, the women on the page practically breathed.
Jerimy didn’t gasp, he didn’t marvel, he didn’t exclaim. He did something far more respectful, he went very still and silent.
When she couldn’t stand it any more, she moved in to point at the yarn samples she’d taped along the side.
“They’re all hard jewel tones, but all in soft knit. Even the cables in their cloaks have a softness.”
“They’re pure light,” Bill said from close beside her.
Perrin actually cried out a little to find he’d come up so silently that she hadn’t noticed.
They were, pure light. “That’s the point. They are not tragic themselves, but are nonetheless caught in the Prince’s tragedy. It makes them so much more sympathetic.”
“I know these three women in real life. Who’s the fourth one?” he pointed at the Queen Mother.
“What are you talking about?” She turned back to inspect the drawings more closely.
Bill leaned forward, extending an arm between her and Jerimy to tap each drawing in turn. So close she could feel him, smell him. Her head whirled at the wonder of him.
“You, Perrin, in two roles, Empress,” he pointed to the drawing Jerimy had tacked on a corkboard on the wall, “and the True Love. Jo Thompson is the Princess and Cassidy Knowles her Maid-servant Confidant. I’d have expected that to be the other way around, but what do I know.”
Perrin looked at the drawings in surprise, he was absolutely right. Without realizing, she’d used the three of them as models rather than the opera singers she’d met at the rehearsals. Of course, Jo would be the Princess, for she was honor and truth incarnate as well as being typically ever-so reserved. Cassidy’s passion was a little closer to the surface though still reserved. She was the deep, quiet bond that strung them to
gether. Bill Cullen wouldn’t know that yet about either of her friends.
“Who’s the fourth one?”
Perrin looked at the Queen Mother, the quiet bedrock of the world.
“Mama Maria. You’ll meet her tonight.”
All he offered to that was a soft grunt. He knew her mother was a part of a past she wouldn’t talk about. He thought it was a choice, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t talk about it; not and retain her control, perhaps not even her sanity. But nor could Perrin explain Mama Maria in just a sentence or two.
“She looks nice enough.”
“She’s amazing.” Perrin had missed her so much. But, she and Hogan came back last night from their honeymoon. Tonight they’d be together again. She needed a subject change for her own sake, and fast. Oh right!
“Knitting!” she practically cried it out, loudly enough for the two men to jolt. “We need knitters, Jerimy. I’m okay, but I’m not good enough to do these, and not quickly. Please, please, please tell me you know some fabulous, gonzo, out-there knitters.”
“Pretty lady, do I ever! Patsy. You have a minute?”
A short, voluptuous redhead strolled over from where she’d been overseeing the packing of costumes. Unlike Jerimy, her freckles proved that her red hair was natural, though the lemon-yellow streak over the crown certainly wasn’t.
“Patsy is the gonzoest knitter in Seattle. And she’s a gang leader, if you can imagine a knitting gang.”
Perrin looked down at her. She stood maybe five-three. She wore an opera t-shirt that fit her in a way very differently from Perrin’s. She’d redone the collar to have a deep vee that exposed a well-freckled cleavage and a tattoo of a pair of knitting needles, as if her generous breasts were still being knit into reality.
“What have you got?” Her voice was biker drawl as if she led a motorcycle gang rather than a knitting one, whatever that meant. She leaned her elbows on the table and went silent for several minutes.
Perrin almost felt a need to shuffle her feet or something, but Jerimy’s smile reassured her, and she waited.
“The Princess’ cloak is gonna be the beast.”
That’s when Perrin understood what was happening, because it was something she did herself. Patsy was structuring the garments in her head, thinking how to execute them, potential problems, what worked and what didn’t.
“What if we felted it, to get that structure over the shoulders?”
Perrin nodded, that would work. “As long as you can keep it light enough to get the movement we need on the lower part when she rushes across the stage.”
“Maybe felt from the lower point of the shoulder blades and up, then knit onto the back of that structure for the rest of it. Shift these cables here and here as structural elements. Are the colors intarsia? Or do we alternate them like a Fair Isle? It will effect the flow of the cloak.”
They reviewed it piece by piece. Perrin was peripherally aware of when Bill drifted off. Jerimy hung close by, but added little. Clearly his assistant would be the master of these costumes.
When they were done, Patsy looked up at her. “Yeah, we got this. I’ll get the girls and we can get it done this week. Have to think about the gusseting so that they can be used on different singers.”
“That’s why I designed in this layer of buttons down the side as a common theme. I thought multiple sets of buttons might work.”
Patsy nodded. “I like it. Be better if we could lose them though, wouldn’t it?”
Perrin had to smile. It was fun to work with another designer who didn’t see any predefined box when they were doing their art. She didn’t even have to acknowledge that it would be better and that she’d trust Patsy to go ahead if she found it.
Jerimy hung the last four drawings with the others on the corkboard, completing the primary costumes for the opera. There was still an immense amount of work to be done to execute it, but the designs were all there.
Jerimy made fresh coffee, Perrin took tea, and the three of them pulled up stools in a circle to admire the display.
Perrin had always worked solo, until Cassidy had practically forced Raquel on her. She’d hated giving up the control at first, but over the last two years her tiny one-woman shop had grown past what she could handle. Russell’s amazing ads and Jo’s sharp marketing advice had expanded Perrin’s Glorious Garb past anything she’d ever envisioned. Other than the weekly meeting where they reviewed the books together and Perrin signed all the checks herself, she rarely had to think about the business itself anymore.
Raquel wasn’t a designer, but she was a very astute business woman. One who recognized how to take care of all the things Perrin didn’t give a single damn about. It had let Perrin handle all of the designs and construction, though she still outsourced some of the work to Georgie in Duvall. At Raquel’s insistence, all of the designs in the shop had long since been uniquely her own and it was working. They still occasionally sold items off the rack, but more and more they were moving into custom work. Raquel had shown the numbers to Jo, and Jo had concurred that the direction change was sensible, which was good enough for Perrin.
But she didn’t get to often sit with other designers and just talk shop. She could get to like this, just she, Jerimy, and Patsy sitting around together. It felt normal, real, as if she belonged and was accepted. Just the way Bill and the kids made her feel. As if it was normal.
“So, Patsy, what’s a knitting gang?”
For once it didn’t matter that sitting here quietly was the least normal thing on the planet for any of the incarnations she’d ever invented for Perrin Williams.
Chapter 11
Perrin had stepped out onto the sidewalk and was locking up the shop for the day when Bill pulled up in his car. He climbed out, even though she was clearly ready to go.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t hesitate.
He swept her up into his arms, drove her back against the door hard enough to knock some of the wind out of her, and kissed her as if they’d been apart for years rather than hours. She locked her arms around his neck and returned the kiss just as ardently.
She let herself become wholly lost in the taste, feel, smell of him. His body responded and, when he went to pull back, she partly wrapped a leg around him to pull him even closer, wishing she’d thought to wear slacks rather than a dress so that she could really get some leverage. Then he leaned into her shamelessly.
Bill was starting to slide a hand under her sweater, and she was on the verge of letting him, when some teenagers in a passing car honked their horn and shouted out encouragement. He pulled back abruptly.
“Uh,” he tried to help her straighten her clothes. “Hi.”
She leaned in and gave him the gentlest kiss. He really was decent, even when lust was raging through him, he was decent. He was so damn cute.
“Hi, yourself. If you’re going to greet me that way every time we meet, you have a winner plan on your hands, Mr. Cullen. Though I don’t know what your kids will think.”
He leaned his forehead against hers. “Can we, for a single night, pretend that I’m just a normal lust-filled guy who doesn’t have two kids?”
“I can. Can you?”
“Probably not. But it’s worth a try. For starters, you did say something about a request to be ravaged on a clothing design table. I happen to know that there’s one not far from here.” He eyed the darkened shop behind her suggestively.
Perrin almost wilted as he cupped his hands behind her and pulled her hips against his once more.
“If you keep doing that, you just might convince me to actually do something that crazy. Though we’d be late for dinner. And we can’t do that.”
“Dinner. Forget dinner. Order out. Much sex.” He sounded like a caveman. A deliciously handsome, well-built, wonderful caveman. Maybe she should clothe him in furs, she did have a partial bolt of faux leopard in the shop
.
Perrin kissed him again, locking her arms behind his head and pulling in so hard that her lips hurt before she let him go. He shifted down to nuzzle her neck.
“No. Later. I promise. After dinner.” She managed between desperate breaths totally failing at sounding like a lusty cavewoman.
He groaned without raising his head, “You drive a hard bargain, lady.”
“Bill.”
He slowly lifted his head until he looked at her from a breath away. She kissed him lightly.
“At dinner, you’ll meet the most important people in my world. Once you know them, then you’ll know me a lot better too. I’m hoping it will let you better judge whether we can still risk being together, you know, what with the kids I’m not supposed to mention and all. Because I’m way past being rational about you.”
“Says the woman being all practical.” His kiss, so soft, so thorough, actually made her moan. It wasn’t something she ever did unintentionally, but Bill drove it from her body. She’d have slid to the ground, if the door weren’t against her back and his hands on her waist, because her knees were totally gone.
“After dinner, do we still get to have sex?” His voice was rough with need.
“Oh god, yes!” The need vibrated through her just as it did through him. Even a night of meaningless sex with Bill Cullen would be worth almost any price.
But what if it were meaningful sex?
Perrin set that question aside carefully for the moment, and nudged him gently toward his car.
# # #
“Perrin!”
Bill watched from the doorway of a condo near Pike Place Market as a lovely woman in her late forties threw herself at Perrin. Maybe this was the Maria he was supposed to meet. Perrin leaned down and the hug they shared was so tender and so happy, he actually had to look away to give them at least a little privacy.
“Dinner,” Perrin had said. She’d failed to mention that the place would be packed solid with people and the air rippling with such amazing scents he seriously considered drooling. He couldn’t even begin to make sense of the crowd.
Where Dreams Unfold Page 12
