One Man's Art

by Nora Roberts

  “And wash shirts in a fast stream.”

  “Every bit as well as you could,” Gennie tossed back. “You might have some advantage on me in mechanical areas, but I’d say we’re about even otherwise.”

  “A strike for the women’s movement?”

  Gennie narrowed her eyes. “Are you about to say something snide and unintelligent?”

  “No.” Picking up the can of starter fluid, he handed it to her. “As a sex, you’ve had a legitimate gripe for several hundred years which has been handled one way as a group and another individually. Unfortunately there’s still a number of doors that have to be battered down by women as a whole while the individual woman occasionally unlocks one with hardly a sound. Ever hear of Winnie Winkle?”

  Fascinated despite herself, Gennie simply stared at him. “As in Wee Willie?”

  Grant laughed and leaned against the side of the barbecue. “No. Winnie Winkle, the Breadwinner, a cartoon strip from the twenties. It touched on women’s liberation several decades before it became a household word. Got a match?”

  “Hmmm.” Gennie dug in her pocket. “Wasn’t that a bit before your time?”

  “I did some research on—social commentary in college.”

  “Really?” Again, she sensed a grain of truth that only hinted at the whole. Gennie lit the soaked charcoal, then stepped back as the fire caught and flames rose. “Where did you go?”

  Grant caught the first whiff, a summer smell he associated with his childhood. “Georgetown.”

  “They’ve an excellent art department there,” Gennie said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah.”

  “You did study art there?” Gennie persisted.

  Grant watched the smoke rise and the haze of heat that rippled the air. “Why?”

  “Because it’s obvious from that wicked little caricature you drew of me that you have talent, and that you’ve had training. What are you doing with it?”

  “With what?”

  Gennie drew her brows together in frustration. “The talent and the training. I’d have heard of you if you were painting.”

  “I’m not,” he said simply.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “What I want. Weren’t you going to make a salad?”

  “Damn it, Grant—”

  “All right, don’t get testy. I’ll make it.”

  As he started toward the back door, Gennie swore again and grabbed his arm. “I don’t understand you.”

  He lifted a brow. “I didn’t ask you to.” He saw the frustration again, but more, he saw hurt, quickly concealed. Why should he suddenly feel the urge to apologize for his need for privacy? “Gennie, let me tell you something.” In an uncharacteristic gesture, he stroked his knuckles gently over her cheek. “I wouldn’t be here right now if I could stay away from you. Is that enough for you?”

  She wanted to say yes—and no. If she hadn’t been afraid of what the words might trigger, she would have told him she was already over her head and sinking fast. Love, or perhaps the first stirrings of love that she had felt only a short time before, was growing swiftly. Instead, she smiled and slipped her hand into his.

  “I’ll make the salad.”

  * * *

  It was as simple as she’d told herself it could be. In the kitchen they tossed together the dewy fresh greens and argued over the science of salad making. Meat smoked and sizzled on the grill while they sat on the grass and enjoyed the last light of the afternoon of one of the last days of summer.

  Lazy smells … wet weeds, cook smoke. A few words, an easy silence. Gennie bound them up and held them close, knowing they’d be important to her on some rainy day when she was crowded by pressures and responsibilities. For now, she felt as she had when she’d been a girl and August had a few precious days left and school was light-years away. Summer always seemed to have more magic near its end.

  Enough magic, Gennie mused, to make her fall in love where there was no rhyme or reason.

  “What’re you thinking?” Grant asked her.

  She smiled and stretched her head back to the sky one last time. “That I’d better tend to that steak.”

  He grabbed her arm, toppling her onto her back before she could rise. “Uh-uh.”

  “You like it burnt?”

  “Uh-uh, that’s not what you were thinking,” he corrected. He traced a finger over her lips, and though the gesture was absent, Gennie felt the touch in every pore.

  “I was thinking about summer,” she said softly. “And that it always seems to end before you’re finished with it.”

  When she lifted her hand to his cheek, he took her wrist and held it there. “The best things always do.”

  As he stared down at her she smiled in that slow, easy way she had that sent ripples of need, flurries of emotion through him. All thought fled as he lowered his mouth to hers. Soft, warm, ripe, her lips answered his, then drew and drew until everything he was, felt, wished for, was focused there. Bewitched, beguiled, bedazed, he went deeper, no longer sure what path he was on, only that she was with him.

  He could smell the grass beneath them, sweet and dry; a scent of summer like the smoke that curled above their heads. He wanted to touch her, every inch of that slimly rounded body that had tormented his dreams since the first moment he’d seen her. If he did once, Grant knew his dreams would never be peaceful again. If her taste alone—wild fruit, warm honey—could so easily take over his mind, what would the feel of her do to him?

  His need for her was like summer—or so he told himself. It had to end before he was finished.

  Lifting his head he looked down to see her eyes, faintly slanted, barely open. Without guards, she’d bring him to his knees with a look. Cautiously, he drew away, then pulled her to her feet.

  “We’d better get that steak off before we have to make do with salad.”

  Her knees were weak. Gennie would have sworn such things happened only in fiction, yet here she was throbbingly alive with joints that felt like water. Turning, she stabbed the steak with a kitchen fork to lift it to the platter.

  “The fat’s in the fire,” she murmured.

  “I was thinking the same thing myself,” Grant said quietly before they walked back into the house.

  By unspoken agreement, they kept the conversation light as they ate. Whatever each had felt during that short, enervating kiss was carefully stored away.

  I’m not looking for a relationship, their minds rationalized separately.

  We’re not suited to each other in the first place….There isn’t time for this.

  Good God, I’m not falling in love.

  Shaken, Gennie lifted her wine and drank deeply while Grant scowled down at his plate.

  “How’s your steak?” she asked him for lack of anything else.

  “What? Oh, it’s good.” Pushing away the uncomfortable feeling, Grant began to eat with more enthusiasm. “You cook almost as well as you paint,” he decided. “Where’d you learn?”

  Gennie lifted a brow. “Why, at my mammy’s knee.”

  He grinned at the exaggerated drawl. “You’ve got a smart mouth, Genviève.” Lifting the bottle, he poured more wine into the sturdy water glasses she’d bought in town. “I was thinking it odd that a woman who grew up with a house full of servants could grill a steak.” He grinned, thinking of Shelby, who’d considered cooking a last resort.

  “In the first place,” she told him, “cookouts were always considered a family affair. And in the second, when you live alone you learn, or you live in restaurants.”

  He couldn’t resist poking at her a bit as he sat back with his wine. “You’ve been photographed in or around every restaurant in the free world.”

  Not to be baited, Gennie mirrored his pose, watching him over the rim as she drank. “Is that why you get a dozen newspapers? So you can read how people live while you hibernate?”

  Grant thought about it a moment. “Yeah.” He didn’t suppose he could have put it better himself.

 
; “Don’t you consider that an arrogant sort of attitude?”

  Again he pondered on it, studying the dark red wine in his water glass. “Yeah.”

  Gennie laughed despite herself. “Grant, why don’t you like people?”

  Surprised, he looked back at her. “I do, individually in some cases, and as a whole. I just don’t want them crowding me.”

  He meant it, she realized as she rose to stack the plates. There was just no understanding him. “Don’t you ever have the need to rub elbows? Listen to a babble of voices?”

  He’d had his share of elbows and voices before he’d been seventeen, Grant thought ruefully. But … No, he supposed it wasn’t quite true. There were times he needed a heavy dose of humanity with all its flaws and complications; for his work and for himself. He thought of his week with the MacGregors. He’d needed that, and them, though he hadn’t fully realized it until he’d settled back into his own routine.

  “I have my moments,” he murmured. He automatically began to clear the table as Gennie ran hot water in the sink. “No dessert?”

  She looked over her shoulder to see that he was perfectly serious. He packed away food like a truck driver, yet there wasn’t an ounce of spare flesh on him. Nervous energy? Metabolism? With a shake of her head. Gennie wondered why she persisted in trying to understand him. “I have a couple of fudge bars in the freezer.”

  Grant grinned and took her at her word. “Want one?” he asked as he ripped the thin white paper from the ice cream stick.

  “No. Are you eating that because you want it or because it gets you out of drying these?” She stacked a plate into the drainer.

  “Works both ways.”

  Leaning on the counter, he nibbled on the bar. “I could eat a carton of these when I was a kid.”

  Gennie rinsed another plate. “And now?”

  Grant took a generous bite. “You only have two.”

  “A polite man would share.”

  “Yeah.” He took another bite.

  With a laugh, Gennie flicked some water into his face. “Come on, be a sport.”

  He held out the bar, pausing a half inch in front of her lips. Up to her elbows in soapy water, Gennie opened her mouth. Grant drew the bar away, just out of reach. “Don’t get greedy,” he warned.

  Sending him an offended look, Gennie leaned forward enough to nibble delicately on the chocolate, then, still watching him, took a bite large enough to chill her mouth.

  “Nasty,” Grant decided, frowning at what was left of his fudge bar as Gennie laughed.

  “You can have the other one,” she said kindly after she’d swallowed and then dried her hands. “I just don’t have any willpower when someone puts chocolate under my nose.”

  Deliberately, Grant ran his tongue over the bar. “Any other … weaknesses?”

  As the heat expanded in her stomach, she wandered toward the porch door. “A few.” She sighed as the call of swallows announced dusk. “The days are getting shorter,” she murmured.

  Already the lowering sun had the white clouds edged with pink and gold. The smoke from the grill struggled skyward, thinning. Near the bank of the inlet was a scrawny bush, its sparse leaves hinting of autumn red.

  When Grant’s hands came to her shoulders, she leaned back toward him instinctively. Together, in silence, they watched the approach of evening.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shared a sunset with anyone, when he’d felt the desire to. Now it seemed so simple, so frighteningly simple. Would he think of her now whenever he watched the approach of evening?

  “Tell me about your favorite summer,” he asked abruptly.

  She remembered a summer spent in the south of France and another on her father’s yacht in the Aegean. Smiling, she watched the clouds deepen to rose. “I stayed with my grandmother for two weeks once while my parents had a second honeymoon in Venice. Long, lazy days with bees humming around honeysuckle blossoms. There was a big old oak outside my bedroom window just dripping with moss. Some nights I’d climb out the window to sit on a branch and look at the stars. I must have been twelve,” she remembered. “There was a boy down at the stables.” She laughed suddenly with her back comfortably nestled against Grant’s chest. “Oh, Lord, he was a bit like Will, all sharp, awkward edges.”

  “You were crazy about him.”

  “I’d spend hours mucking out stalls and grooming horses just to get a glimpse of him. I wrote pages and pages about him in my diary and one very mushy poem.”

  “And kept it under your pillow.”

  “Apparently you’ve had a nodding acquaintance with twelve-year-old girls.”

  He thought of Shelby and grinned, resting his chin on the top of her head. Her hair smelled as though she’d washed it with rain-drenched wildflowers. “How long did it take you to get him to kiss you?”

  She laughed. “Ten days. I thought I’d discovered the answer to the mysteries of the universe. I was a woman.”

  “No female’s more sure of that than a twelve-year-old.”

  She smiled into the dimming sky. “More than a nodding acquaintance it appears,” she commented. “One afternoon I found Angela giggling over my diary and chased her all over the house. She was …” Gennie stiffened as the grief washed over her, wave after tumultuous wave. Before Grant could tighten his hold, she had moved away from him to stare through the patched screen into twilight. “She was ten,” Gennie continued in a whisper. “I threatened to shave her head if she breathed a word about what was in that diary.”

  “Gennie.”

  She shook her head as she felt his hand brush through her hair. “It’ll be dark soon. You can already hear the crickets. You should start back.”

  He couldn’t bear to hear the tears in her voice. It would be easier to leave her now, just back away. He told himself he had no skill when it came to comforting. His hands massaged gently on her shoulders. “There’s a light on the boat. Let’s sit down.” Ignoring her resistance, Grant drew her to the porch glider. “My grandmother had one of these,” he said conversationally as he slipped an arm around her and set it into creaking motion. “She had a little place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A quiet little spot with land so flat it looked like it’d been laid out with a ruler. Ever been to the Chesapeake?”

  “No.” Deliberately, Gennie relaxed and closed her eyes. The motion was easy, his voice curiously soothing. She hadn’t known he could speak in such quiet, gentle tones.

  “Soft-shell crabs and fields of tobacco.” Already he could feel the tautness in her shoulders easing. “We had to take a ferry to get to her house. It wasn’t much different than this cottage except it was two stories. My father and I could go across the street and fish. I caught a trout once using a piece of Longhorn cheese as bait.”

  Grant continued to talk, ramble really, recounting things he’d forgotten, things he’d never spoken of aloud before. Unimportant things that droned quietly on the air while the light softened. For the moment it seemed to be the right thing, the thing she needed. He wasn’t certain he had anything else to give.

  He kept the motion of the glider going while her head rested against his shoulder and wondered how he’d never noticed just how peaceful dusk could be when you shared it with someone.

  Gennie sighed, listening more to his tone than his words. She let herself drift as the chirp of crickets grew more insistent….Dreams are often no more than memories.

  * * *

  “Oh, Gennie, you should have been there!” Angela, golden and vibrant, turned in her seat to laugh while Gennie maneuvered through the traffic of downtown New Orleans. The streets were damp with a chilly February rain, but nothing could dampen Angela. She was sunlight and spring flowers.

  “I’d rather have been there than freezing in New York,” Gennie returned.

  “You can’t freeze when you’re basking in the limelight,” Angela countered, twisting a bit closer to her sister.

  “Wanna bet?”

  “You wouldn’t have missed that
showing for a dozen parties.”

  No, she wouldn’t have, Gennie thought with a smile. But Angela … “Tell me about it.”

  “It was so much fun! All that noise and music. It was so crowded, you couldn’t take a step without bumping into someone. The next time Cousin Frank throws a bash on his houseboat you have to come.”

  Gennie sent Angela a quick grin. “It doesn’t sound like I was missed.”

  Angela laughed, the quick bubble that was irresistible. “Well, I got a little tired of answering questions about my talented sister.”

  Gennie gave a snort as she stopped at a light. She could see the hazy red glow as the windshield wipers moved briskly back and forth. “They just use that as a line to get to you.”

  “Well, there was someone …” When Angela trailed off, Gennie turned to look at her. So beautiful, she thought. Gold and cream with eyes almost painfully alive and vivid.

  “Someone?”

  “Oh, Gennie.” Excitement brought a soft pink to her cheeks. “He’s gorgeous. I could hardly make a coherent sentence when he started to talk to me.”

  “You?”

  “Me,” Angela agreed, laughing again. “It felt like someone had drained off half my brain. And now … Well, I’ve been seeing him all week. I think—ta-da—this is it.”

  “After a week?” Gennie countered.

  “After five seconds. Oh, Gennie, don’t be practical. I’m in love. You have to meet him.”

  Gennie shifted into first as she waited for the light to change. “Do I get to size him up?”

  Angela shook back her rich gold hair and laughed as the light turned green. “Oh, I feel wonderful, Gennie. Absolutely wonderful!”

  The laugh was the last thing Gennie heard before the squeal of brakes. She saw the car skidding toward them through the intersection. In the dream it was always so slow, second by terrifying second, closer and closer. Water spewed out from the tires and seemed to hang in the air.

  There wasn’t time to breathe, there wasn’t time to react or prevent before there was the sound of metal striking metal, the explosion of blinding lights. Terror. Pain. And darkness.

  “No!” She jerked upright, rigid with fear and shock. There were arms around her, holding her close … safe. Crickets? Where had they come from? The light, the car. Angela.

  Gasping for breath, Gennie stared out at the darkened inlet while Grant’s voice murmured something comforting in her ear.

  “I’m sorry.” Pushing away, she rose, lifting nervous hands to her hair. “I must have dozed off. Poor company,” she continued in a jerky voice. “You should have given me a jab, and—”

  “Gennie.” He stood, grabbing her arm. “Stop it.”

  She crumbled. He hadn’t expected such complete submission and had no defense against it. “Don’t,” he murmured, stroking her hair as she clung to him. “Gennie, don’t cry. It’s all right now.”

  “Oh, God, it hasn’t happened in weeks.” She buried her face against his chest as the grief washed over her as fresh as the first hour. “At first, right after the accident, I’d go through it every time I closed my eyes.”

  “Come on.” He kissed the top of her head. “Sit down.”

  “No, I can’t—I need to walk.” She held him tight another moment, as if gathering her strength. “Can we walk?”

  “Sure.” Bringing her to his side, Grant opened the screen door. For a time he was silent, his arm around her shoulders as they skirted the inlet and walked aimlessly. But he knew he needed to hear as much as she needed to tell. “Gennie, talk to me.”

  “I was remembering the accident,” she said slowly, but her voice was calmer now. “Sometimes when I’d dream of it, I’d be quick enough, swerve out of the way of that car and everything was so different. Then I’d wake up and nothing was different at all.”

  “It’s a natural reaction,” he told her, though the thought of her being plagued by nightmares began to gnaw at his gut. He’d lived through a few of his own. “They’ll fade after a while.”

  “I know. It hardly ever happens anymore.” She let out a long breath and seemed steadier for it. “When it does, it’s so clear. I can see the rain splattering on the windshield right before the wipers whisk it away. There’re