“I’ll have more questions about that, but I think I’m starting to get a better picture. You think you’re going to help me, save the ogre from the swamp, so to speak.”
“Is that your question?” she countered.
He shook his head at her. “Oh no, Sheri. You’re not getting off that easily.”
A shiver of desire chased up her spine at the way he rolled her name off his tongue, only to be followed lightning fast with a tremor of unease. “So what is your second question?” Maybe his mother had some criminal record? There had to be some reason he felt like the contents of his own home weren’t his…
She’d almost lost herself to her thoughts again when his chair scraped the floor as he stood. Glancing up at him, she set her fork down. She hadn’t been eating anyway.
“My second question is what did your fiancé die of, Sheri?”
Her breath shuddered out and she blinked up at him, unable to speak.
Asking was akin to admitting he’d researched her, but her expression made it worth it. He knew there was something to the fiancé thread, but the confirmation etched in her suddenly pale features still gratified him.
Clearing the plates, he began putting away the leftovers without saying more. It cost him nothing to give her a moment to collect herself and might glean him more answers—inadvertent ones in her choice of phrasing and body language.
“It’s none of your fucking business.” The breathless quality of the words snapped his attention back to her. White-knuckled grip on the table, face still pale, breath rushed. He’d touched more of a nerve than he might have guessed.
“Again, hate to be redundant, but my house. You can leave.”
She swallowed hard, didn’t move and closed her eyes. He turned back to the cleanup, finding containers to store the leftover food.
“I know I’m not supposed to state the obvious, but you’ve been looking me up.”
“It’s my right. My space, you’re in it.” To him, that said enough. He didn’t allow many to get close to him, physically or emotionally, however nothing about their current situation fit with his normative behavior.
“Radcliffe, Preston is a very personal piece of my past. I don’t share that story with just anyone.” Her voice seemed to be getting stronger, finding solid ground in her complaint. He mentally chalked a point up to her for changing the tone of the discussion from emotionally charged to logical. That she’d picked up, this quickly, that he’d prefer logic to emotional outbursts suggested she was paying attention and capable of learning.
“Duly noted.” But not a valid reason for her to welch on her own agreement.
Her sigh translated to mean she understood he wasn’t accepting less than an answer. She stood and began helping him clean up and he continued to wait her out.
“I don’t know if you will understand this, but normal children make friends. Preston was my best friend. He taught me to climb trees. He taught me to ride a bike. When we got old enough, he taught me to kiss.” The tremble to her voice said more about emotions she wasn’t expressing than the words themselves did.
Silence stretched out, the word kiss lingering on the air between them like some forbidden promise. Radcliffe shook his head, wishing he could shake the romantic notions she wakened away. “So, childhood friend becomes first boyfriend? A story of first love being the deepest and all that?”
She made a soft noise that sounded like agreement before plugging the sink and turning the water on.
“When he got sick, we’d already been engaged for a year. We were young, so young, and it made sense to get married. Anyway, they said cancer.” She swallowed and went silent again. Her hands stayed busy, as if she could wash the memories down the drain with the pasta sauce.
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t say more, didn’t press for more answers. Survivor’s guilt…her love and he got sick and died. Horrible, tragic…
And whatever romantic notions he had about her were probably in vain. He couldn’t compete with a ghost.
He couldn’t even banish his own.
Chapter Five
Skittles were her go-to junk comfort food. She only liked the grape ones, but in a pinch orange or cherry would do. She never ate the green ones or the yellow, leaving a trail of uneaten Skittles in her past to mark life’s little bumps in the road.
Tonight? She cracked open a big bag, poured them into a bowl, and thumbed her tablet awake. Radcliffe wakened emotions she didn’t care to think about with his question about Preston. Remembering him—no, wiser to focus on her project than to linger on the past and things she couldn’t change. “So, Mister Mystery, you think you can get under my skin and out-research me? Bring it, dude, bring it.”
Searching his name, ignoring the bookmarks she’d created in her earlier research of him, she reread through article after article, trying to see if there was something she’d missed. Ones that skimmed over him, glossed over his less than stellar personality, and otherwise told her nothing she didn’t already know. Chewing two candies at once, she flopped backwards and closed her eyes.
Sitting back up, she opened her favorite online bookstore and searched his name. She’d promised to read two of his books anyway… Picking the first two that populated under bestselling, she purchased them and then opened the browser back up.
Assuming he was from this area, or at least his family might have been, she searched for the local newspapers—and there turned out to only be one. God love small towns…
And then reached blindly for more candy when she found the marriage announcement. “Holy shit, the ogre had a bride.”
Another five minutes of searching gained her a picture of his wife—stunning. No other word would describe Mrs. Lila McQueen with her porcelain doll face and athletic little body. Apparently the happy couple met at school in California, a lifetime away from the small town he now lived in.
No pictures of her downstairs…no pictures of anyone that wasn’t a thousand years old. Plus, she’d accidentally eaten a yellow candy.
Spitting it into the nearby garbage can, Sheri lay back and crossed her legs. If he hadn’t always been this dark and alone, if he’d once lived in the sunshine state with a beautiful bride, it suggested the dramatic personal changes were rooted in an event—one great personal apocalypse which changed the core of who he was and what meant acceptable in his world.
She could sympathize, having gone through a great personal apocalypse herself.
Sitting up so fast that she made the ancient bed squeak, she again grabbed the tablet and used her thumb and forefinger to make the picture larger. His face, in this picture, looked happy.
She tried to focus on that happiness and consider the whys of it, tracing the edge of his face with one fingernail. He’d been very handsome, if you liked tall, dark and kleptomaniac.
Opening the first of the two books, she breathed out a gusty grape-scented breath and wished she hadn’t started to realize she did like exactly that.
He’d actually gotten a blurb written the night before and hammered out two character sketches for his leads followed by five more for important supporting characters. Once he knew their backstory and conflict and wanted to know what happened to them, he’d knocked out ten thousand words before dozing off in his chair.
Waking with a crick in his neck, he blinked at the ceiling. He was still tired, eyes blurry with strain and head full of the cotton-like feeling he considered book hangover. Closing the dry, creaking lids again, he decided to go back to sleep, not sure why he’d waked.
Again in darkness, he heard the strains of music twining through the house like a siren’s call. He brought his computer back to life with a swirl of his mouse to peer at the time. He had to rub his hand across his eyes twice before he could focus on the clock enough to read it.
Four a.m.
What in the hell was Sheri doing at this hour? The whiskey-dr
enched sin of her voice wailed out, “At Last,” and his body stirred to life, adrenaline replacing exhaustion as his hormones responded before his logical brain could.
It was a sorry state of affairs indeed that her crooning out an old song brought more of a rise out of him than any number of willing and far more logical feminine choices in recent years. Deciding he wasn’t going to get any rest without knowing what she was up to, he planted his feet on the floor and strode to the door.
Fumbling with the lock, sleep-blurred brain confused as to why he’d locked himself in his office before remembering the exact thing that woke him explained the need for security, he managed to open the door. The sound of her singing echoed through the house with the barrier of the door removed and he paused, leaning on the doorframe, to let the music sweep over him.
Something about her voice, her tiny curvy body, her sweep of golden hair, reminded him he wasn’t standing with one foot in the grave as he so often felt lately. She made him feel strong, masculine…
Hungry. She brought back to life the long dormant side of him, the part he’d buried when he realized he wasn’t the kind of man made for relationships. One failed marriage told him all he’d needed to know about his ability to maintain that kind of commitment.
Shaking off the nonsense of his exhausted brain, still set—obviously—in romance mode from his work, he barreled into his old bedroom to see what she was up to that involved late night racket in his—his!—home.
And froze the minute he saw her.
A T-shirt that hit mid-thigh was the only garment he could see she’d bothered to cover her golden body with. From the swing of her breasts as she brushed a broad line of red across the canvas, it might be the only thing on her at all. Her hair floated around her, as free and unrestrained as her breasts under the paint-spattered fabric of the shirt.
The three-foot tall canvas showed her mastery of her craft—not finished, but already clearly a woman in profile with Spanish moss dangling from trees against a velvet sky behind her. Just a face, but the eyes, the swampy background— “Is that Mina?”
His words jarred Sheri out of her song and froze her mid-step, facing the canvas. For a moment, he wasn’t sure she’d answer him. When she spun, he recognized the blind, almost unfocused gaze as a creative haze much like the kind he experienced when he hit that glorious midpoint of a story—when the world was clear and the characters so loud they might as well be screaming in his ear what the next line of the book was.
“You can tell? Already? Yeah, I finished her story and I needed to get all those feelings down on paper. I only meant to do a sketch, but then I itched to get color and before I knew it, I needed paint—” Before she’d even finished speaking, she’d turned back to the canvas, adding more background and a highlight to the cheek of the image. As if she’d forgotten him already, she dipped her brush back into the water and began humming again.
He was sure, suddenly, that if he stood quietly, she’d forget him entirely and go back to singing.
Leaning on the doorframe, he did just that, and her voice began soft before finding purchase and wailing the words as she went back to work.
An hour passed, then probably two, and he’d eventually decided to sit cross-legged on the bed—which must have proved too heavy to haul to the fire pit so she’d thrown a blanket over it and made the wretched old thing look almost pretty instead. He simply watched her, since she didn’t seem to be aware of the world outside the image she created with broad and sure strokes while her voice rang out with unrestrained beauty.
He wanted to sneer at her actions, to find some fault in her voice or her raw talent, but he couldn’t resist being captured by the magic of it, of her.
Sunlight leaked in through the window when he woke again, blinking and not sure what disturbed his sleep. The silence echoing in the room seemed jarring after the mad artistic explosion of the night before. Searching for Sheri, he found her, finger still poised over her little music player and facing her canvas with a small smile and smudges of darkness under her eyes from lack of rest.
Following her line of sight, he considered her finished work. Mina, one of his characters, clearly gazed back at him from the canvas. Sheri had captured her in a way that no cover artist ever had, from the sad beauty of her cancer-slim face to the strength of her gaze.
“It’s beautiful,” he murmured.
Sheri’s smile couldn’t be described by any word other than beatific. “I’m glad you recognized her. Your book? It was good.”
Standing, he moved closer to the moment of time she’d chosen to focus on—when Mina realized she wasn’t long for this world but knew her lover, Gabriel, wouldn’t accept the harsh reality of truth. Mina gazed out at the bayou, at its constancy and the never-ending circle of life playing out in the darkness, and knew she’d have to leave him—because leaving him seemed less cruel than making him watch her die.
“You captured it.” He didn’t offer false praise. She’d captured the moment and all its poignant beauty and tragedy in each brushstroke.
“Because you did, with words. It’s an evocative book.”
As a writer, Radcliffe recognized the symmetry of the moment, of their gifts.
As a man, he looked at her tired face and wanted to stroke back her golden hair, marred a little with red paint she’d streaked across her forehead to dash a bit of brilliant color against the flaxen perfection of her tempting mane.
If she’d touched him then, he might have tried to be like one of his heroes.
Instead, she blushed and ducked her head, shoving her hair behind one ear. Backing away from him slowly, she muttered, “Sorry for waking you up. Sometimes the muse—” She broke off with one of those little shrugs she used when she ran out of words and spun to escape.
He nodded. She didn’t have to explain. Sometimes it grabbed you by the ass and you felt lucky to tag along for the ride. He got it.
She glanced back one final time from the doorway, her gaze almost shy in the intimate embrace of dawn and shared artistic understanding. “So, I’m going to sleep for a while. I’ll see you later.”
He didn’t speak, fearing he’d scare her if he said half the things he thought while watching her in the tiny T-shirt and the aftermath of creation.
She escaped, the thud of her pounding up the stairs a staccato beat that rang through him like a drumbeat of warning. She’d break through his walls, if he let her stay. He’d be better served to tell her to go, to hide from all that she woke within him.
Instead of rushing up the stairs to tell her just that, he turned and faced the creation of his imagination breathed to life.
She’d brought Mina to life.
He ran a hand through his hair and wondered if maybe he wanted to see if she could bring him to life too.
Chapter Six
She’d slept most of the day away and woke with the boneless pleasure she always reveled in after finishing a piece. Like afterglow of being with a really good lover, knowing she’d done something magical—brought an image from her mind to life on paper—left behind an almost overwhelming afterglow.
Knowing he’d been there watching added an almost sexual overtone to an already charged moment. She hadn’t meant to wake him, sure she could work in silence, but she’d gotten lost in her work, in her playlist and the application of color from palette to canvas, and he’d appeared in the doorway like some apparition to watch.
Usually she couldn’t work with someone watching but he’d been so silent, she’d forgotten he was there. Well, except for the pauses in between brushstrokes when she’d glanced at him once he’d fallen asleep on the bed that was too small for his so tall frame. Curled on his side, innocence not written on his stark features even in repose, she’d felt a thrum of attraction—the one that seemed to buzz deep in her belly every time his cobalt gaze landed on her—and it’d only added to the power she’d been able to
bring alive with application of paint.
She’d decided to let him sleep, to let him rest in a bed rather than propped up at his desk, and turned off the music only to see his eyes snap open at the silence. She couldn’t look at him, not once he’d woken, half afraid of his response to what she knew was one of her best pieces ever.
He might hate it. Mina had been a character that drew her in from the very first sentence, not letting her go until she’d wept at the final page. She might not have done her justice in her late night splattering of color and line.
But he’d gone still, looking at the image, and said simply that it was beautiful.
She blinked fast to keep him from seeing the tears caused by praise bestowed on her work from a man not given to flattery. And then she’d realized, with almost shattering clarity, she stood alone with him, only the silence of the morning and a T-shirt between them.
He didn’t move, only his eyes touching her, but for some reason it’d seemed one of the most erotic moments of her life. How could such a cranky, stubborn and closed-off man write a story that reached inside her? The book made her feel things she’d so long hidden from the world.
Then again, he’d warned her. “I’m not one of my heroes,” he’d said on that first day. He might write men who could reach off the page and capture her heart, but he wasn’t one of them—which made her choice to avoid his books seem wiser in retrospect, since it was better to keep clear lines drawn in her mind between where his stories ended and where the real man began. His walls were built high, spiked with barbed wire and possibly charged with electricity to keep others from reaching him.
Even knowing that, she’d felt a resonance, like some bell clanging deep inside her. He chose to come in that room, to watch her paint when he could have simply gone back to his office. And he stood there, looking at her with those sad, dark eyes, and waited as if he expected her to do something.
If she touched him, he’d have the upper hand. She’d lose herself in him and how could she help him if he swept her away with a story millions had read?
While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 Page 4
