by Alison Kent
Oh, God, what had she done? Where did they go from here?
Jace exhaled raggedly. “Definitely not one of my finer moments.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, the uncertainty of the moment a sharp pain.
“I graduated from getting it on in a car way before I got out of school. I can’t remember the last time I did this. I can’t even remember if I ever did this.” He scrubbed one hand down his face. “I’m getting old.”
“You’re not old.”
“Then what excuse do I have for losing my mind?” he ground out.
Chagrin set in. She was as much a part of this as he was. “Don’t blame yourself, Jace. I—”
“Don’t blame myself? I know better.” He stiffened beneath her. “I know better.”
She sat straight on his lap, adjusted her collar, smoothed down her sleeves, stared at the fogged windshield. He caught her chin and pulled her around, and she bit her lip.
“How pregnant are you, Eden?”
“Twenty weeks.”
“No. In layman’s terms.”
“I’ve got four months left.”
“And what does your doctor say about sex?”
Sex. Not making love.
“As long as I feel no discomfort, it’s fine.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “My doctor doesn’t know I’m alone. She thinks I have a disinterested partner, which at the time I began seeing her was true. But the way I figure, discomfort is the least of my problems.”
“Name another.”
“Logistically, sex isn’t even a question. Look at this boulder I’ve got in the way.”
“I think we worked around it just fine.” He reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, stayed to cup her jaw and stroke her cheek with a tender caress. “So what now? Do we go inside and do this right?
She nodded, then said, “No,” and felt him deflate beneath her.
“Then you’d better go in. I’m about to run out of gas.”
“It has been a long day.”
“Not me. The truck.”
“Oh, right.” The truck had been running the entire time, the whole—what, fifteen minutes, the heater keeping her warm now that she’d lost Jace’s fire.
He opened the door, pivoted in his seat, and set her gently on the ground. He followed her out of the truck and stripped to the waist, wadded his soiled shirt in a ball and tossed it in the floorboard of the truck.
Slamming the door, he took her elbow and guided her around to the driver’s side.
He stood before her, bare-chested and brilliant beneath nature’s pale moon. She glanced at her house, frowned at the light she’d left burning in the kitchen, then dropped her gaze to the ground.
“So where do we go from here?” she asked.
“Tonight we don’t go anywhere. I’ve been as noble as I’m going to get.” He kicked the rim of one tire, then stepped up close to her side. “When you decide what you want, you know where to find me.”
Turning for her house, she left him standing there, her brave, injured warrior, and didn’t look back until her screen door whacked behind her. Even then she allowed herself only the briefest glance.
Head hung low, he stared at the ground, shaking his head. Then he spun around and slammed his palm flat on the bed of the truck.
The metallic cry rang again and again. And Eden’s heart broke as she truly fell in love for the first time in her life.
EDEN HADN’T LEFT THE kitchen light burning after all. Chloe had been by. She’d dropped off her finished composite of sketches, along with the cryptic note, “At last, it is finished.”
Eden thought of the frown Chloe had worn the past week and the girl’s refusal to say more than she couldn’t get her last piece quite right. Directing her gaze to the first picture, Eden saw nothing.
Her entire focus lay fixed on the sound of Jace gunning his engine, the screaming battle of wheels fighting gravel, the crack of the truck bottoming out against the steep pitch of her drive, the squeal of tires pressed into abuse as he laid rubber the length of Main.
Eden laced her hands until her fingers lost circulation. Drawing in one slow, deep breath, she struggled for balance in a world tilted askew. Searching for a reason to keep from running out the door and after Jace, she studied Chloe’s pictures.
As she concentrated on the picture of Molly and Tucker Hansen, despair subsided, her breathing leveled, her heartbeat slowed. And Eden couldn’t help but smile.
They resembled newlyweds, feeding one another a bite of Molly’s brownies. Chloe was a genius, not only in her vision of inanimate objects but in her insight into emotion.
Strangers would see Norman Rockwell America, grandparents who’d started as young lovers and lived a lifetime of vows. But Eden saw more, every tiny nuance Chloe had captured.
Eden sniffed back a wealth of emotion and studied the next drawing. Chloe had added a touch of color to the face of Obadiah Parsons.
The ruddy stain highlighting his cheeks told of his struggle for perfection. One great paw of a hand cupped a pillar of wax; the other wielded a knife like an extension of his arm.
Few people saw beneath the beauty of his work or the gruff exterior of the artist. And Chloe had shown the world exactly what it was missing. A man whose artistic temperament had cost him a marriage. A man who cared for nothing now but his work.
Stone Healen’s portrait told an entirely different story. At least six foot four, the gentle giant of a man wore his standard uniform of baggy overalls and long-sleeved thermal undershirt.
Not only did the top protect him from the bits of fragile glass with which he worked, it showed off a body as rock hard as his name.
He held a piece of stained glass, a rainbow of cathedral colors anointing his skin. Michelangelo’s David. A vision of male perfection waiting to explode beneath a shaft of sharp red light. Chloe had captured the mad glint in his eye, a man with no qualms about physically ensuring the turtle pace of his life.
Eden forced a deep breath past the wedge in her chest and moved to the picture of Nick Angelino. With an economy of strokes, Chloe had given her father life.
Hunched over his potter’s wheel, sweat dripping from his brow, Nick fought to give spirit to a cold lump of clay.
Eden knew without a doubt the formless face was Chloe’s mother, and that Nick was searching for the reason his wife had chosen death over him.
Chloe spared no heartache in the raw scene but silently begged for help in the only way she knew how.
The picture at the center of Chloe’s frame lifted Eden’s spirits. No two people could be more at odds than John and Annette Philips. John commanded attention in bold slashing strokes, while Annette floated over the page in swirls and curves.
Eden assumed the next portrait to be of Chloe’s art teacher, Jenna Priestly. Though she’d never met the petite young woman, Eden immediately sensed the bond between artist and teacher. Jenna had the patient strength a childlike Chloe needed, and Eden prayed Jenna would always be there for Chloe.
The next three pictures were women Eden only knew in passing. The first was Onellia May, whom the town had quietly labeled a healer of sorts, infusing her baskets of potpourri with aromatic spells.
The next portrait showed Miss Barbara, proprietress of Dolly’s Clinic, tending to a one-eyed doll. Her sister, Miss Nancy, of The Coffee Bean next door, provided full-service tea parties to the owners of the recovered patients.
But it was the final picture in the row that brought Eden to her knees. Her legs buckled, along with her resolve to be strong, the minute she saw herself through Chloe’s eyes.
No more than a smudged outline, she seemed to have no form at all, as if her size and shape held no importance, as if nothing mattered but her soul. And her eyes. Sharp and clean and detailed to the last lash, her eyes exuded a sparkling strength of spirit. The buoyant joy of a mother-to-be. The frightfully honest vulnerability of a woman in love with a man.
And her too-bright gaze was focused acr
oss the page at Jace.
Chloe had depicted Jace half-naked and wild, the way he’d appeared that day they’d gone to see him about the frame. His chest gleamed in the afternoon sun. The bandanna around his head resembled a native headdress, the carpenter’s apron hung at his waist a warrior’s loincloth, his stance a belligerent show of defiance.
His pale blue eyes glittered with hunger, yes, the same hunger he’d shown in the truck but more, so much more. Eden ran one finger over the black-and-white sketch, but everything she saw was in color. His deeper hunger was tempered by fear and held on a tight rein.
A small moan escaped her lips and Eden backed up. Her knees connected with a chair and, blindsided, she sat. Why had it taken her so long to see? It wasn’t regret over failing his friends that had driven Jace Morgan here. It was deeper. Something they’d both skirted the edges of more than once.
No. What Jace Morgan feared was opening himself up to be sucked into the world that had destroyed him. A world in which she kept one foot. A world he’d never be able to share with her, even should he want to share her life. They had no future. They lived their lives as depicted on the canvas—separate and apart.
Yet Jace had opened himself to her in a manner that went deeper than the physical. It meant that in some way she’d given him hope. Enough hope that he’d been willing to take the next huge step, the ultimate risk of the act of love.
Jace didn’t have affairs. She wondered how long he’d been celibate.
And then she wondered why she’d let desire destroy a friendship they both desperately needed. For how could they go back to that now? Now that he knew how easily she came apart at his touch. Now that she knew that she loved him.
Now that she knew what she’d once thought was loneliness was nothing compared to losing a chance she’d never really had.
Chapter Fourteen
“YO, MORGAN. HAND UP that Phillips head, will ya?”
Jace leaned against the corner brace supporting the four-by-eight beam he stood on. He snagged the screwdriver from the belt around his waist and handed the tool to Stone Healen.
With a wave, Stone disappeared to the far side of The Emporium’s roof, making less noise than Jace would’ve expected from a man half the other’s size.
Shaking his head, he leaned down, twisted another hook into the beam and hung the length of electrical cord draped over his shoulder in place.
Why he’d ever let Molly talk him into helping out on this Festival committee thing, he still couldn’t figure. But she had, and he had, and here he was, working as part of a team instead of on his own.
Long-term memory aside, he couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
Strangely enough, he liked the feeling. And though it pained him to admit it, he’d missed that good ol’ boy companionship these last three years.
Even more so, he missed his friends. It was time to do something about that. He’d told Eden he didn’t have an address for Robert or Marv and he wasn’t sure where in Colorado to find Kevin. But as she’d reminded him, he did have a telephone—even if he didn’t have internet at the barn or a data package on his cell—and he knew how to dial information.
He was going to do that. Very soon. Set at least one part of his life to rights. Sure, he’d failed his friends, but he’d failed himself in equal measure by thinking for so long that he could go through the rest of his life on his own.
He figured Eden had a lot to do with the way he was looking at things these days, especially since, for the past eighty-four hours, she’d played a part in every thought that crossed his mind.
Today was Saturday. He hadn’t seen her since Tuesday night, even though he’d spent a portion of the three days between at her place, finishing up her kitchen.
He’d managed to be there when she wasn’t, or at least when she was upstairs resting. Once he heard Molly heading out, he packed up his gear and left. He just wasn’t up to facing Eden yet.
And he wouldn’t be until he figured out what the hell he wanted to say.
Yesterday he’d passed Chloe on his way out of The Fig Leaf. She’d walked by without a word. Just carried her paints and brushes up the stairs like he didn’t exist. No telling what kind of bad psychic vibrations were bouncing off his aura and into her uncanny mind.
No doubt she sensed he was to blame for... well, anything, everything, whatever. It was all about Eden.
Thinking about what had happened in his truck on Tuesday night had him hard. Eden had lit his fuse and he’d burned beneath her hands, flamed at the touch of her mouth, her fingers destroying a control he’d never before questioned. A control he’d never regain.
Even now his skin sizzled, his breathing quickened. On unsteady legs, he straightened. Shimmying his way down toward the makeshift stage area, he glanced up from securing another hook and found two of Obie Parsons’s urchins watching him, bug-eyed.
It was the same awed look he’d worn when he’d watched from behind a chain link fence as cranes hoisted steel beams into place and fearless ironworkers walked the sky overhead.
Those days had been the beginning of a dream, the tiny seed of his future. A seed that had taken root and blossomed into a forest of opportunity.
Jace looped another length of cord and damned himself for losing the focus of the goal, for allowing success to come to mean status instead of satisfaction.
And friendly rivalry to destroy friendship.
Eden had hammered and pried and dug at his deepest secrets until he was admitting things to her that he hadn’t yet admitted to himself. She knew him better than anyone. Only Chelsea had seen him as naked.
And he’d sure let himself get to some sorry state when no one knew him better than his dog.
Eden had taken him apart that night in the truck, and he’d driven away physically exhausted as if they’d spent hours rather than minutes making love. Because what they’d done wasn’t physical at all. The act was raw emotion, a kindred hunger.
So where do we go from here? she’d asked, and all he could think of was twining his fingers through hers, leading her up the stairs and following her down into blankets and bliss.
Instead, he’d gone back to his barn, to his solitary, safe way of life. Keeping his distance seemed to be the best way to keep from failing those closest to him.
If he hadn’t already done that with Eden.
“JOHN SURVEYED THE RESIDENTS this morning before the shops closed up for the dance. Profits look good.” Annette Philips leaned across Eden to give Molly the word.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Molly said, inclining her head in return. “No one who looked at that Angelino girl’s drawings left the booth before he’d emptied his pockets. I had no idea she was so talented.”
The conversation continued, and Eden listened absently while all around her the evening’s festivities got underway. She nibbled on a piece of grilled chicken, not the least bit hungry, but after Molly had gone to the trouble of fixing her a plate she wasn’t about to refuse to eat.
The lawn chair Molly had provided was comfortable enough. It just wasn’t as serviceable as one of the picnic tables scattered around the periphery of The Emporium’s parking lot.
To reach the tumbler of iced tea she’d set on the ground, she had to lean to the right—a movement that pitched her center of gravity offsides and threatened to capsize her chair.
Since she had no lap on which to balance her plate, Molly had insisted on cutting Eden’s chicken, like she was three rather than thirty.
Then, to add insult to injury, she had to use the plateau of her belly as a table—the very belly that prevented her from sitting at the picnic tables to begin with.
She was tired of not having a lap. She was tired of sitting on the sidelines missing all the fun. She was tired of being pregnant.
She felt like an invalid, an old woman, a helpless victim of hormones. Like if she didn’t have these babies soon, she was going to come totally unglued.
Who said pregnancy had
to take nine months? Why not seven? Or even five? Why couldn’t she just sit on an egg for a couple of weeks? How did elephants stand it for a year? And how—
“Are you not feeling well, girl?”
Eden glanced up from her destructive musings to find Molly’s never-ending compassion aimed her way. She drew up a heartfelt smile. “I’m fine. Just trying to figure out how I’m going to fit all the things I need to do into the little time I have left.”
“Things like what?”
Eden sighed. Where to begin? “I have to take inventory now before the twins are born—”
“Why don’t I come by Monday morning?” Molly interrupted. “I’ll give you a hand and—”
“I wish it were that easy,” Eden cut in. “This week has been great for sales, but the store is a mess. I can’t inventory until I’ve reorganized, which is what I should be doing now.”
Instead of watching other people have fun. Instead of feeling sorry for myself Instead of wondering about Jace.
Molly leaned forward as if to block any exit Eden might attempt. “What you should be doing now is exactly nothing.” She patted Eden’s knee, her touch as firm as her tone. “I told you before, if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be of any use to those babies. Business will wait.”
Eden mashed the tines of her fork into her potato salad. “It’s not just business. I haven’t had time to buy a single thing for the twins. I don’t even have diapers or sleepers or blankets or sheets. And I still have cribs to assemble—”
“Quit putting so much pressure on yourself to do everything. Take one thing at a time and take help when it’s offered. Tucker or David and David Jr. can take care of those cribs tomorrow. And as for those necessities...”
Molly’s voice trailed off and Eden glanced up in time to see her send Annette a look brimming with conspiracy. “The ladies of Arbor Glen would be pleased to give you a baby shower next Sunday afternoon.”
Eden glanced from Annette to Molly and back. Her chest swelled. True friendship had never seemed so dear. So real. Or so needed. God, she missed Jace. “A baby shower?”
