Chapter Fifteen
Emma didn’t need to look at the photos she’d taken of Max, let alone print them and pin them to a board beside her easel for reference. His image was imbedded on the insides of her eyelids, emblazoned on her soul. She could see his vivid blue eyes, fringed with dark lashes. She could see the angle of his chin, the slight hollows beneath his cheekbones, the sharp line of his nose, the dark, silky waves of his hair, which always seemed just a bit windblown. She could see his strong shoulders, his leanly muscled chest. She could feel the heat of his skin against her palms as she touched him…
She gave her head a resolute shake. The temperature of his skin had nothing to do with her painting of him.
She’d never before painted a portrait from memory. But Max… She had him memorized.
“I don’t see his true colors,” she said aloud, her voice barely a whisper in the quiet house. Monica had headed off to spend the night with Jimmy. She might not want to do his laundry or clean up after him, but as she’d told Emma, he was good in bed.
Monica’s departure had suited Emma fine. Tonight she was restless, revved up, and she didn’t want to explain her midnight spasm of creativity to her friend. She just wanted to paint and paint and paint. Being alone in the house meant not having to justify herself.
“I don’t see his true colors,” she said again, her voice hovering like a tendril of smoke in the airy loft. “But I’ve got his dream nailed down.”
Adrenaline pumped through her veins. She’d thought about brewing a pot of coffee, but she didn’t need caffeine to keep her awake. Instead, she’d brought the open bottle of Chardonnay and her wine glass upstairs to the loft, and she fortified herself with occasional sips of the cold, crisp beverage.
Wasn’t wine supposed to make you drowsy? If so, this wine had failed in its mission. Emma simmered with energy, hummed with it, trembled with it. Her nerves were strung tight, sensitive to the spread of light on her canvas, the play of colors as she dabbed nurdles of paint onto one of the old ceramic dishes she used as a palette and blended the nurdles to get the precise degree of darkness for his hair, the right mix of pink and tawny brown for his complexion. His eyes… Damn, it was hard to recreate that crystalline blue. A dab of cerulean, a dab of cobalt, a generous blob of zinc white, a hint of silver. She mixed the paint studied it, mixed it some more, and added a little more cobalt and a little more zinc white. There. The true color of Max Tarloff’s eyes.
How could she see him so clearly? How could it feel as if he were in the loft with her, posing for her, watching her, wanting her as much as she wanted him?
What if she’d completely misunderstood him? Judged him unfairly? He’d offered to let her stay on this house because he’d wanted to help her. Had that been such a bad thing?
It had forced her to acknowledge the inequality between them. It had reminded her that he was her landlord and that her housing situation depended solely on his whims. It had made her feel dependent on him, indebted to him. Maybe he hadn’t meant to emphasize the difference in their status—she the impoverished renter, he the generous landlord—but that was how she’d felt. If he hadn’t realized she would take his gesture that way, well, he hadn’t seen her true colors, either.
Dumb-ass song.
She continued painting, her brush strokes precise and controlled, and Max slowly revealed himself on the canvas. When it came to painting, at least, she knew his true colors. The face and upper torso taking shape on her easel resembled not the man who had sat awkwardly on a stool while she’d snapped photos of him, and who’d been so reluctant to discuss his dreams, but rather the man she’d kissed, the man she’d caressed, the man against whose warm skin she’d traced teasing patterns with her fingertips.
As for his dream, the one dream he’d shared with her… She might be completely wrong about it. He might have just told her to distract her, to prevent her from digging deeper into his psyche. He’d put so much effort into concealing his true colors. But she had the one dream he’d confessed to, and as the painting materialized beneath the bristles of her brushes, that one dream seemed right. In fact, it made her wonder whether he’d offered to let her stay in the house not because he’d had sex with her but because he wasn’t yet ready to let go of his dream.
What would she do with the painting, once it was done? She couldn’t sell it to him. She doubted she could keep it. Yet there it was, the swirls of his hair defined by glints of light, his face in semi-profile, his eyes gazing off to the left, toward the view he dreamed of. Something in her rendering of him made him appeared both wistful and satisfied, anchored in this place even though he didn’t live here. Was he from Russia? Brooklyn? San Francisco? No matter. In Emma’s portrait, he looked like someone who had been searching for a home and had found it at last.
He’d probably hate the painting. She supposed she could keep it for herself, a memento of a man she’d given her heart to, even though he’d kept his heart locked away from her, refusing to let her artist’s eyes really see him.
Stupid, stupid song. She hated it. She hated that it had bewitched her and made her fall in love with a man who had deliberately kept his true colors hidden from her.
Yet she found herself humming it as she worked.
True Colors Page 21
