by Libby Rice
She’d known he owned it, but seeing her favorite work hung with care in the house his wife built… “You still love her.”
A careful answer bounced off her back. “Always.”
Glimmerings of disappointment balled in Lissa’s stomach, and she refused to turn and acknowledge the defiance she knew she’d find etched in his features. The writing—or the painting, she should say—was on the wall. “She’s why I’m here, isn’t she? You love her, and she loves my work. You’re using me to prove yourself to a woman.”
Damn, damn, damn.
Blinding drive had rendered Lissa purposely obtuse, so much so she’d rationalized why Cole might choose a partner he didn’t particularly care to work with, one he didn’t respect. Instead of addressing the obvious, she’d allowed herself to be persuaded by Cole’s persistence and her desperation.
Liar, you turned a blind eye because he looks hot and acts cold, and you wanted the pleasure of thawing him out.
Stunned by her own naiveté, she sputtered, “Is this some kind of game? Desperate husband proves his willingness to sacrifice by working with the lowly, struggling abstract expressionist who happens to appeal to his estranged wife?” Sure, Lissa faced challenges. Many viewed her marginal success as a nepotistic boon, but to be a pawn in a man’s marital discord?
“I wish,” he said quietly.
She could do nothing but laugh. “Where is she?”
“Here.” The answer catapulted her way, quick and low, like a well-placed dart. Surprise!
Her head snapped around before the blow could land.
But Cole didn’t look defiant, not like she’d suspected. His gaze rested on the painting hanging across the room, eyes soft and head cocked, a stolen moment that ended the second he noticed Lissa’s attention. A subtle tremor rippled through his body, and he began to slowly inch from the room, that familiar veneer of indifference falling into place.
“She’s buried outside, beneath the rock garden she always wanted.”
Chapter 3
An enduring silence followed Cole’s announcement. Lissa drew a breath, but the air didn’t do any good. Pithy responses had always come easy. Yet Cole’s news left her opening and closing her pout like Clara’s nutcracker. When she didn’t snap into action, he turned and walked away.
After a few warbles, Lissa started down the hall in slow, quiet pursuit, each hesitant step calling forth the realization that she’d have to let him go. This time. The unyielding lines of his retreating back and his silently swinging arms told her to leave well enough alone for at least a little while.
A day? Two?
In the end, she returned to her room without uttering a single word. Let him play mysterious lord of the manor. Her bedroom didn’t harbor any such demons and welcomed her with open arms. In fact, all of Melina held a warm charm her uptown brownstone in Manhattan couldn’t duplicate. Now she knew why—Kate Rathlen, the architect who’d obviously stolen Cole’s heart, had built him a love nest and then been torn away, leaving her husband to feather that nest alone.
Lissa instinctively tore through the suitcase that held her painting supplies. A working studio could soothe almost anything. In minutes, a familiar setup—an adjustable easel, jars of brushes, a palette, scrapers, water-soluble oil paints, rags, acrylic gesso, and finally a bare canvas—began to ease the frayed nerves pitching to and fro inside her chest.
Aligning her easel with the window, she surveyed a vista that stretched away from the house. Miles separated her from a group of peaks jutting into a cloudless afternoon sky. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that kind of uninterrupted blue. Between her and those mountains lay a world of possibility.
Before she could overthink the kinks of her arrival or what Cole had revealed, she gathered dollops of color on her palette and dove in, instinctively checking and dabbing and then looking again. Paint flayed the canvas in short, whipping strokes until an image began to take shape, but not one of rocks or trees or wild azure skies. The painting radiated life of the angry variety. Not a man, but the essence of one.
From the intermingling streaks of red and blue and black, a clear color break evoked a strong jaw. Above, three dark slits suggested a pair of hopeless eyes and a mouth held slightly ajar. Only these basic nods to the human face interrupted the pandemonium of furious color that cried unfair.
No forehead, no neck, no hair—nothing to indicate the owner of such torment. But when Lissa brushed two menacing yellow slashes over the fathomless eyes, she jerked in shock. She’d painted with a sense of floating detachment, but suddenly recognition streaked from her shaking fingers to her incredulous mind. This wasn’t a general sense of anger and pain. She’d painted Cole wrapped in a furious grief he could neither release nor share.
Her peaceful landscape had morphed into the coming of Cole’s personal apocalypse. This wasn’t supposed to be about him. Sure, life had dumped her in Colorado to paint what he demanded, but this particular effort had been about her, about the release painting always brought.
Now he’d polluted her art with his secrets. A painful past hadn’t shown up in her research. In an age of oversharing, she tended to forget that unless a person became extremely famous, he controlled his own flow of personal information. Cole maintained a flashy, picture-rich website and was on the usual suspects in terms of social media, but only in a professional capacity. No talk of lost loves and lingering sorrow.
Needing to escape the evidence of her subconscious fascination with Melina’s owner, Lissa slammed her brushes into a glass of water and left the painting to brood. On the front steps, she barreled into a super-sized Cole. The man had light hair like Cole’s, but instead of a tangled free-for-all, his had been trimmed close to the scalp. His face was set in familiar sharp angles, but where Cole was tall and lean with a seductive, almost feline quality to his striated lines, this guy was built like a citadel. A predatory one she could envision eating babies for breakfast.
Before she could tumble down the stairs, he steadied her with an arm that looked capable of lifting a subway car. “You must be the painter.”
The deep voice held a note of curiosity, not the threat his looks telegraphed. Maybe he hadn’t come to rape and pillage. “You have to be a brother.”
He nodded, then held up a grocery bag. “I brought food.”
“You people come twice a day?”
He didn’t budge. “Uh, no.”
She retreated into the house, letting him fall in step behind her. “Kent was already here.”
“Shit,” he said without much rancor. “This was my week. I think. I’m Trevor, by the way.”
“Lissa,” she provided over her shoulder, automatically heading for the kitchen. “What does Cole think of the coddling?” At least she’d learned why the family insisted on stopping in. If one of her brothers ever lost a spouse, she, too, would pull some serious, Oh, just passing through.
Trevor set the bag on the counter and began extracting more freezer containers full of pre-made meals. What did the Rathlens have against TV dinners? “Mostly”—he held up another bag of Skittles—“Cole stays quiet. But the food seems to disappear.”
Lissa eyed Trevor with open speculation, wondering how much info she could pry out of this maybe not older, but definitely bigger, brother. “Any other family members I should expect? Maybe there’s a random food-truck owner in the mix? I’m a sucker for a cupcake from a truck.”
Kent pulled out box of brownie mix. “Afraid these will have to do. Once I make them, that is.”
The giant baked. Too bad a burnished wedding ring hugged his finger. “Cole told me about Kate.”
The unloading came to a sharp stop. “Did he now?”
Lissa nodded. “He mentioned that his wife is buried here at Melina and then disappeared.” Calling it “mentioned” might be too casual. “Can I ask what happened?”
Trevor folded his reusable bag with a resigned smile, flashing a pair of dimples set low on his cheeks. “You can ask,
” he conceded. “You already know her name and that she’s gone, so I think you’re doing all right for a couple of hours. Keep at it. Cole takes a bit of tenacity.”
The dregs of the caution Lissa had felt on the front steps drained away. Dimpled goliaths who delivered food to grieving brothers using reusable totes didn’t eat babies.
“Why?” she asked.
“Mostly because he’s a stubborn sonofa—”
“No, why won’t you tell me the story?”
His eyes turned thoughtful. “Kate is Cole’s story to tell.” Then he paused, musing on the statement for a moment before his lips parted as if to go on. Slowly, he closed his mouth and shook his head with a shrug, as if to say, Sorry, can’t help.
She sighed. Wouldn’t Trevor explain if Kate’s death had been run of the mill? Of course, few deaths were when they occurred in a person’s late twenties or early thirties. “At least tell me what’s up with the food.”
This time Trevor capitulated, barely. “We want Cole to eat.” He opened the new bag of Skittles and helped himself, not noticing that Kent’s duplicate beckoned from next to the fridge. “Cole wasn’t doing enough of that for a while. Now he is.”
“When did she die?”
Trevor cast Lissa an indulgent look, but one that said she was pushing her luck. “Two years come January.”
A hazy picture began to form in Lissa’s mind. Cole had lost his wife to… fill in the blank… more than a year before. In the aftermath, he’d holed up in Timbuktu, letting basic necessities, like eating, slide. The family had rushed in to remedy that most pressing problem, but feeding a man only went so far. Now Cole kept his body in fighting form but had become reclusive and antisocial. At least that was her guess given her strained interactions with him in New York, on the phone, and now at Melina.
Time had obviously come for Cole to get back in the saddle, which is where Lissa came in. He’d received a prestigious grant, probably resting on past laurels, and while Cole didn’t want to work with the likes of her, he felt obligated by the loss of a woman who’d been Lissa’s Number One Fan.
Lissa had to chuckle. Leave it to her to channel her big break through post-mortem favoritism. At least her dad believed living people might appreciate her work.
Knowing what she did, she wondered whether Cole had owned up to scraping Lissa off the bottom of the barrel. “What has Cole said about me being here?”
“Very little,” Trevor said, “but he rarely explains. Don’t mistake tight-lipped for insult.”
“You know nothing?”
“Not ‘nothing.’” Without a hitch, Trevor repeated the bones of the project—Cole would take photographs, and Lissa would paint the same scenes, first here and then in northern India.
On the phone before her arrival, Cole had been adamant about strict adherence to representationalist ideals. Lissa was to keep it real, so to speak. Her paintings were to depict his chosen sights exactly as seen in real life. “Do you know what I paint?”
Trevor’s tone edged toward flippant. “I’m hoping whatever’s in front of you.”
“No.” Barely ever, in fact.
“So enlighten me.”
Might as well lay it out. “I’m an abstract expressionist. That’s emotional, subconscious creation. Think highly idiosyncratic and often seen as anarchic, even radical.”
Instead of showing surprise or worry over the success of his brother’s project or the unique choice in partners, Trevor burst out laughing in hard belly-clenching hilarity that doubled him over his handful of candy. “This,” he wheezed, “is going to get good.” A few chuckles later, he managed, “You… are… perfect.”
What the hell? “How so?”
Trevor unfurled from his slouch, and she could tell he fought for a straight face. “Hit him over the head with this, Lissa. Go for shock and awe.” When she didn’t jump in, he grew serious. “Cole’s dug so deep into his rules, like he’s afraid to believe in, or even imagine, anything that isn’t staring him in the face. If you can change his ways, even a little, that’s progress.”
Healing Cole. The idea hadn’t occurred to her, though changing him had. She and Cole were about to embark on an intensely creative process, one that would require them to rely on each other, believe in each other, respect each other. Together for all the wrong reasons, success would elude them until she shook her partner to his foundations.
Lissa returned Trevor’s infectious grin, concealing the ball-busting plan forming behind her innocent façade.
She knew exactly what to do.
Chapter 4
The next morning Cole cranked a winch, hoisting steel high into the air. He intended to feed deer, not attract bears. Dry wind whistled through the dimness lingering between the trees clustered a quarter-mile from the house, swinging the heavy container to and fro on its chain and threatening to send feed flying. Each wind-and-weight-defying pull of the lever sparked against the flint of his memory.
Lissa thought him stoic. Yank. If only she knew what he wanted to do with her taunts. Push. With the mouth that delivered them. Repeat. Each time she’d spun one of her caustic remarks—the frozen food, the salivating dog, the delight at his stiff discomfort over her incessant questions—he’d wanted to toss her to the nearest surface, flat or otherwise, and show her a thing or two about stiff and the ways she could loosen him up.
After endless months without so much as a spark, he’d woken up in the pre-dawn darkness with the wrong name on his lips. Instead of blond hair and soft curves, he’d envisioned a sleek brunette with intense brown eyes and delicate hands that his dream-self had wasted little time placing on his body. He’d slid over her, skin to skin, until the wrongness of it had jerked him awake.
Sasha had no such qualms. The animal hadn’t come to bed last night. When Cole had gone looking, he’d found his dog glued to Lissa, head to that tantalizing chest, while she’d stroked along his glossy coat and cooed in his ear.
Traitor.
Finished with his chore, Cole prowled out from the trees toward the house. He planned to start Lissa’s training with something easy, say, a chair sitting empty on the veranda. Surely the woman could paint a recognizable replica of a piece of furniture, and simplicity in form and function would facilitate a direct comparison between his photograph and her painting. From there, they’d work their way up to more complex objects, then landscapes, animals, people, and so on.
With the maze of trees receding behind him, Cole shifted his focus forward and stopped short. Barely past dawn and Lissa stood, easy as you please, in the driveway. Her easel faced the house, and she appeared to be mixing colors on a worn palette.
Fitted jeans tapered to where they slid into a pair of leather riding boots. On top, a thick sweater hung just below the waist. Its bulk merely highlighted the pert perfection below.
Nearly two years had passed. Intellectually, he knew he had every right to enjoy the view, though he had to remind himself again that Lissa’s slender, almost fragile appearance masked the heart of a flame-spitting dragon.
He jerked his gaze to her work.
The canvas should have been blank, primed to be the recipient of the training he had in mind. Instead, swirls of anemic color united in indistinguishable shapes sure to have an unreasonable explanation.
After weeks of telecon prep over how the project would unfold, she still balked at painting a scene’s likeness, insisting that true divergence in their respective art forms lie in how each interpreted what they saw, not simply in which tools they used to depict life on paper or canvas.
“You demand regurgitation,” she’d spat at the end of their last call.
How wrong she was. Talent didn’t lie in morphing a scene into whatever you wanted it to be; magic came with the discipline and restraint required to show life for what it truly was.
The mixing stopped, and she set the palette down on a nearby folding table. “I know you’re there.”
“Amazing, your powers of deduction.”
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nbsp; He approached from behind. Her body partially shielded the developing work, but a man would have to be blind to miss the two arched shapes occupying opposite corners of the image. The silhouettes gave the impression of a wrenching tear—two halves of a whole that couldn’t reunite for the road winding between them.
A road strangely reminiscent of the one he and Lissa presently occupied.
Each arching mass looked to have been flooded with rich color—red—before life had leached it away, leaving only a faded white stain and an occasional flash of former glory behind dilapidated windows.
Cole stepped forward to see the rest. Like a Taser gun, her meaning arced out of the canvas and zapped him in the chest. His lips mouthed a question, but no sound came out. An answer would be superfluous anyway.
He already knew.
“The house,” Lissa explained without prompting. She sounded confident on the surface, but he heard the faintest tremor beneath her ease. She knew she’d overstepped. Their first full day, and she’d done her best to blow them up.
He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against his shoulders. “Why?” he drawled. Her wayward brush had tracked him like prey, as though she’d looked through some forgotten, unshuttered window to his life and thrown the vision to the canvas.
“This is what I see.” Her answer didn’t hold sarcasm or spite, but something worse, the soberness of true belief.
A hand brushed against his arm. He opened his eyes and stepped away, forcing his retreat to be deliberate, controlled. “Never touch me.” That kind of intimacy still felt reserved for another, not a witch who tried to manipulate him with visceral reminders of a past he already couldn’t forget.
She drew back casually. “All right. But you have to communicate. What does the painting tell you?”
The same touchy-feely question had come up at the gallery, then too often on the phone. Next she would ask, What do you feeeeeel? He couldn’t stop the growl that sounded from deep in his chest. “That you’re a haughty, self-righteous bitch who’s ignored everything I’ve said since I found you in that gallery in New York. You accepted the job with no intention of doing what’s required.”