Her body grew so warm from his praise that she threw the blankets aside and sat up. “Do you like the ones of you?” Her favorite shot was one of Joe with his arm around one of Hunt’s alternative citizens, perched way up in an old oak tree in the backyard.
“I like the one of us.”
It took her a long moment to find her voice. “I didn’t mean to give you that one.” Cover up, Lindstrom! Most people saw only themselves in photos. Just because she thought she looked like a love-struck teenager didn’t mean Joe would notice. “I’m not photogenic.”
“You are in this one.”
He’d noticed.
Her temperature shot up another few degrees. She slipped from bed and, balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder, opened the window wide. She’d need a blast of Canadian air to cool her blood down to a safer level.
He was talking, but it took a couple of seconds before she zeroed in on what he was saying. “. . . So I should get there by tomorrow night.”
“Want me to make dinner?” She thought of her calamitous scrambled eggs and laughed out loud.
“I’ll eat on the plane.”
“Airplane food is notoriously terrible, Joe.” She was smiling broadly in the darkened room. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The silence between them was warm and filled with longing.
“It’s late,” she said finally. “You’d better get some sleep.”
“Promise me you won’t meet me at the airport tomorrow.”
“I promise.”
“Sleep well, Margarita.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist and shivered. The sound of his voice was enough to curl her toes.
After they hung up, she stood by the window and looked down over the tops of the trees and the bright lights of Hunt’s studio across the yard. There were other, more urgent promises they had made to one another on the night of the full moon. Promises she was eager to keep.
#
The seat-belt sign flashed off, but Joe was no fool. He wasn’t about to loosen his only ties with safety until that ridiculously small commuter plane he was in landed in New Hampshire.
Beneath the smog and the gathering dusk, New York lay dark and dangerous, and he was glad to be leaving it far behind. It felt good to leave granite and glass behind. New Hampshire’s mountains and lakes had never seemed more alluring than they did now that Meg waited for him there.
After their long and elliptical conversation last night, he’d been too keyed up to sleep but too tired to work. Instead, he spread the photos she’d given him out on the pale beige bedspread and marveled at her sense of line, the way she played tricks with perspective and contrast until her black-and-white pictures of Hunt and his imaginary village turned into what Joe imagined Alice would find through a twentieth-century looking glass.
He couldn’t help but concentrate most of his attention on the photos Meg was in; the beautiful structure of her face and shimmering hair drew his eye back again and again. So when he showed Renee the photos over breakfast that morning, he was surprised when her eye was immediately drawn to the sequence that depicted Hunt completing work on a sculpture of three little girls in 1950s party dresses sitting on a park bench.
“Joe!” Renee’s voice had been incredulous when she picked up the final print. “Where have you been hiding this woman? She’s phenomenal.”
He leaned over to see which photo had made his normally unflappable agent sound like a teenage groupie. “Great, isn’t it?” he asked, taking a bite of everything bagel. “Like something from the Mad Hatter’s tea party.”
“Or a hallucinogenic dream.” She sifted through some of the other photos, stacking a selection near the Alice in Wonderland marvel she was holding. “How on earth did she get this effect?”
“You’re asking the guy whose talking Minolta told him to get his money back?”
“Trust me, nobody is going to tell this Lindstrom woman to get her money back.” She brought the photo nearer for close inspection. “She’s special.”
Joe pushed his chair closer to Renee so he could take another look at the shot. It was an extraordinary picture and Joe didn’t stand a chance in hell of comprehending the mechanics of it. If Meg had told him she had just photographed what was there in front of her, he would have believed her without question. There was no other rational explanation for the photo.
So when Renee asked to borrow a few of the prints, he had been more than happy to say yes. Back in the days when he was just starting out, many a terrific career break had come about because another writer or friend had helped him in just such a networking opportunity. So today he’d been thrilled that Renee, a woman whose opinion he respected, had seen something special in Meg’s work.
However, now that he was on his way back to New Hampshire in this rickety deathtrap, he was afraid he’d acted too hastily. He had no doubt that Meg was a photographer to her bones; hadn’t he seen her wedded to her Hasselblad ever since they arrived at Lakeland House? But on Sunday night, the night of magic and dreams, she’d let him peer inside that solitary heart of hers, and he’d seen more than a glimpse of the fears that had followed her since her sister’s death.
What he’d done amounted to nothing in the scheme of things, no transgression or slight. But on some unspoken level he knew she wouldn’t take it that way, that his eagerness to have her talent appreciated would be seen as meddling, that his love would be construed as control.
Renee could keep the pictures for now but as soon as he returned from the sojourn at Lakeland House, he’d ask her to return them, and that would be the end of it. If by some chance Meg asked for them back before then—well, he’d deal with that when, and if, it happened.
A flight attendant stopped near his seat with a cart of beverages. “Would you care for anything, sir?”
He scanned the assortment. “Cutty Sark, rocks.”
Moments later he settled back in his seat. The sky was growing quickly dark as they flew north; the more urban areas were spreading out into the rugged and wooded New England landscape. He sipped his drink, letting its warmth take the edge off the apprehensions that gnawed at him. He shuffled through the photos on his lap until he came to the one of Margarita with her head resting dreamily on his shoulder, both of them cradled on the lap of Hunt’s Earth Mother.
His worries about giving the photos to Renee, his fear of flying that usually tilted his stomach sideways—everything disappeared as he looked into those dark and mysterious eyes of hers and sank once again into the world of fantasy.
He looked at his watch and smiled. Fantasy that in two short hours would be reality.
He settled down to wait.
Chapter Nine
“Pass me the index on sculptors, would you, Margarita?” Joe was lying on his back near the fireplace, reading the list of accomplishments Hunt had submitted for consideration. It was Friday afternoon, three days after his return from New York.
Meg sifted through a few of the dozens of papers scattered on the floor around her, then tapped him on the head with a sheaf of five stapled pages. “Here you go.”
He mumbled his thanks, and she smiled. She loved the way he threw himself into each aspect of the project. His love for Anna and the Colony she had created was evident in the way he tackled even the most boring and routine of jobs necessary to compiling information for the history. He was a man of deep conviction and strong loyalties, and Meg found herself respecting him more with every day.
Joe leaned up on one elbow. “You realize Hunt has ten times the talent of any of these guys, don’t you?”
She glanced at the photos scattered around her. No doubt about it, the artwork was second-rate when compared to Huntington’s imaginary village. “You’re right,” she said “A blind man could see it.”
Joe sat up, glasses slipping toward the end of his nose, hair falling into his eyes. “Then why can’t we include him in the compendium? He deserves it.”
It w
as old territory. “You remember what Patrick said. Only participants who registered before July are eligible.”
“Of all the arbitrary, half-assed—“
“Whoa!” When roused he had the temper of a righteous angel and she almost hated to stop him. “I want to include Hunt as much as you do, but we have to have rules, don’t we?”
Joe jumped to his feet, and now he stood near the fireplace, the heat of his anger surpassing the fire in the grate. “Talent is the first rule, Margarita. Talent makes its own rules.”
“Maybe talent should make its own rules,” she answered, “but in the real world that’s not the case. We each have someone standing over us, defining our boundaries for us, don’t we?”
Joe said nothing, but it was clear from the look on his face that he disagreed.
“Your editor makes boundaries, doesn’t she?”
“And I keep butting my head against them. But we’re not talking about boundaries on creation. There’s no question that they’re detrimental. I’m talking about an arbitrary rule that will keep Hunt from getting a little publicity. I can’t buy that.”
“You saw the guidelines Patrick drew up with Anna. We can’t circumvent them, Joe, no matter how badly we want to.”
He frowned, grew quiet for a moment, then exploded with another burst of energy. “Why don’t we present Patrick with the idea of adding a list of artists to watch out for in the coming year? We could update it every fall, make it a guide to stars of the future.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You work yourself up into an emotional storm, then manage to come up with a solution so logical it defeats all arguments.” She shook her head. “You’re amazing, Joe.”
“Obsessed is more like it.”
He had a point. Meg knew that if the bomb dropped smack on Lakeland House right now, Joe’s last thoughts would be of getting Huntington Kendall IV listed in the history of the Kennedy Creative Colony. It was passion in its purest form: a passion for life. She watched him as he crossed to the window, memorizing the strength and beauty of his body, the beauty of his soul.
It would be so easy to fall in love with a man like that.
#
Joe wiped away some condensation on the window and looked down at the yard. Since early morning, Hunt and Ivan had been covering the sculptures in bright red blankets and systematically loading them in Hunt’s beat-up van in preparation of Hunt’s departure the next morning. The yard, which had once been peopled by Hunt’s fertile imagination, seemed desolate, a ghost town. The yard reminded Joe of life before Lakeland House, of his life before meeting Margarita. It was no wonder his creativity had been so badly blocked. His life had grown so narrow, so arid, that his ideas had no chance to take root and grow. The daily contact with Meg, the constant dual stimulation of her fine mind and equally fine beauty, seemed to break through whatever barriers his subconscious had created, and he found himself unable to stem the flow of ideas.
Even without turning around, Joe could feel her watching him with those dark, intense eyes. His entire body seemed sensitized, vibrating with awareness as her gaze lingered upon him. He knew when her eyes swept across his shoulders, when they slid along the muscles of his back. It sounded bizarre, especially from a man who had been celibate for the past six months, but the sensation of simply being watched by a woman like Margarita did more for his libido than having another woman in his bed.
Behind him he heard Meg leap to her feet. “It’s after four! I’d better start getting ready.”
He laughed and walked toward her. “We don’t meet Patrick until seven. Unless you’re planning a total make-over, you have plenty of time.”
“Are you crazy? I have to wash my hair, do my nails—“ She glanced down at her tan cords and baggy blue sweater and grimaced. “Believe me, Joe, I need every minute I can get.”
He was about to dispute her statement when she riffled through a stack of photos on the desk, then looked up at him. “I almost forgot to ask you. Do you still have the pictures I gave you when you went to New York?”
A vivid image of himself handing Renee a sampling of Meg’s work rose before his eyes. He felt as if his clothes had grown too tight. “I—“ He stopped and cleared his throat. “Up in my room. I haven’t finished unpacking.”
She pulled her sweater down over her narrow hips. “Don’t bother. I meant to tell you before that they’re just contact prints. I have a finished set for each of us on some Multigrade paper—the contrast and detail show up so much better. You can toss the others.”
He felt as if he’d been granted a full pardon from the governor. Giving the photos to Renee was no big deal, at least he hadn’t thought so when he did it, but he was staring to have doubts.
#
The restaurant was in the front part of an old brick house, with the main dining room dominated by an enormous stone fireplace. Candles flickered in wall sconces, and the faint, unmistakable scent of mountains and pine filled the air. Patrick had reserved a round table near the fireplace, and he welcomed them all with almost fatherly pride and affection.
Meg went easy on the champagne, delicious as it was, because she was driving that night. Besides, she was so giddy with excitement and pleasure that champagne was superfluous. She had attributed her high coloring to the proximity of the fireplace, but she—and probably everyone else in the room—knew that was a lie. Sitting next to Joe, knowing that the next day would find her in his arms, was enough to send her blood bubbling through her veins.
From appetizer to entrée to dessert, she’d been hard pressed to keep her mind on the conversation around her. Being as visual a creature as she was, Meg found herself mesmerized by the candlelight. Its soft glow surrounded all of them, and she relished the sight of Patrick gazing fondly at all three of them and the way Hunt’s face seemed somehow young and vulnerable.
But it was Joe who held her gaze. Half of his face was in shadow, the other half was lit with a golden glow from the candles on the table. Now and then a flicker of flame was reflected in his dark green eyes, and she found her pulse quick in response to the promise she saw there.
“There’s just one thing missing from Mario’s,” she said as she finished her cheesecake. She caught Joe’s eye and smiled. “There should be dancing.”
“Ah, but there used to be such dancing,” Patrick said, pouring Hunt his third demitasse. “They had a band that was the talk of five counties. My Pegeen and I used to come here every Saturday night and fox trot.”
Hunt’s bushy brows lifted. “Fox trot?”
“An ancient courtship ritual,” Joe said dryly, “usually performed as a mating ritual by twentieth-century men and women to the accompaniment of Big Band music.”
Everyone chuckled, and beneath the table Meg quickly patted Hunt’s hand. For the last day or so, he’d seemed terribly young, and her heart went out to him. His veneer of sophistication, his counter cultural, sarcastic wit, had disappeared with the last remnant of Indian summer’s warmth, and he seemed no more than a young artist about to conquer the world with only his talent to shield him from heartbreak.
“There’s a cruel bunch, Meggie,” he said as he gulped down his third demitasse. “Only you understand the soul of an artist.” He glared at both Joe and Patrick, but Meg could see the sparkle in his blue eyes. “You Philistines will eat your words when I return to Lakeland a hero.”
Patrick raised his cup of coffee to Hunt in salute. “I’ll plan a parade for you, Huntington,” he said with a smile. “We’ll have a marching band heading down Main Street in your honor.”
“I’ll design a float,” Meg said, catching the spirit from Patrick. “We’ll have scads of balloons all attached to a papier-mache replica of Earth Mother.” She looked to Joe.
“You will come back a hero, Kendall.” Joe’s voice was serious and that took her by surprise. “You have it in you to break through any barriers you choose.”
Meg’s eyes unexpectedly flooded with tears. With two short sentences, Joe ha
d given the young man the greatest gift of all: confidence. From one artist to another, it was the most generous act imaginable. Her admiration for Joe Alessio tripled on the spot.
For a second the mood at the table changed as the future, held at bay during most of the dinner, intruded upon the four of them. But this was to be a celebration as well as a farewell, and sentiment, however lovely, was out of place.
She was about to start a conversation about the days when Joe worked on Star Trek novels when a sudden burst of taped music filled the dining room. She realized it was an old Cole Porter tune, not at all her normal taste in music, but something she loved nonetheless.
“Come on, Meggie,” Hunt said, unfolding his long frame from the hardback chairs and extending his hand to her. “Why don’t you teach me one of those fox trots you were talking about?”
“I was the one who mentioned the fox trot,” Joe said with a good-natured scowl. “I should be the one dancing.”
Hunt’s long face lit up with a wicked smile, his cosmopolitan veneer slipping back into place. “Don’t worry, dalring,” he said over his shoulder as he led Meg to the dance floor. “I promise I’ll save you a spot on my dance card.”
Meg proved quite inept as a dancing instructor, and before she had a chance to attempt a fox trot with either Patrick or Joseph, the music ended, replaced with some bland, easy-listening music that made for hard dancing.
They lingered over coffee as Patrick and Joe tried to top one another with tall tales, and it wasn’t until the maitre d’ approached them to say the restaurant was about to close that any one of the four of them made a move to end the evening.
They piled into Meg’s limousine and laughter filled the car as she drove Patrick home.
He shook Hunt’s hand heartily. “I want full reports from you, Kendall,” he said, his voice rich with emotion. “It’s not often that I can say, ‘I knew you when. . . ‘” Hunt mumbled his thanks, turning suddenly shy. Patrick got out of the limo and closed the door, then leaned in to say good night to Meg and Joe. “Remember we have a progress meeting at my office on Tuesday.”
The Edge of Forever Page 11
