Art-Crossed Love

by Libby Rice

  “Thank you.” For once.

  At the door, Sonu held out a cell phone, appearing slightly shaken but conscientious as ever. “Your brother calls the hotel again and again.” Made sense. Cole had silenced his and Lissa’s electronics so she could sleep.

  His long-time driver went on, looking at the floor while he spoke. “Sir, your brother’s wife…”

  Not this again. “What?”

  “She’s, well, she’s tried to kill your uncle.”

  The gasp that flew over Cole’s shoulder said Lissa’s rest would be short-lived.

  Chapter 34

  By the time Cole hung up, Lissa had packed her bag. He found her in her bedroom, stuffing medications into a carry-on. Dark lashes lifted from her pale cheeks as she met his gaze, pupils dilated with uncanny knowledge. Determination burned through the weariness he’d seen before. “You can explain what ‘tried to kill’ means on the way,” she whispered. “We’re going home.”

  Somehow he knew “home” meant Colorado.

  Reaching out, Cole passed a hand over her shoulder. She trembled beneath his touch—not so recovered after all. Her distress reached him where her earlier logic had not. “Why do you care so much? India and I are your golden tickets, remember?”

  She zipped her backpack with a yank and turned to face him head on. “You have to ask?”

  He couldn’t take his hand from shoulder. She shook, violently now. The initial tremors might have been weakness left over from the long night. This was anger. “I don’t understand, baby. You need what we’re building here.” More like he needed her to need it, giving him a purpose more noble than the lies he’d told about assuaging his guilt.

  Moisture obscured the intense look in her eyes before her lashes again drifted downward. “That’s not true anymore.”

  His stomach clenched with two years’ worth of fear. “What isn’t?”

  “I don’t need this.” She threw her arms wide, as though she could embrace an entire country with two slender hands. “I relied on my family, too much and then some. To escape the dependence, I leveraged your name. You were the nicotine patch to their three packs a day.”

  Lissa slowly opened her eyes. She’d gotten control, gaze bleary but tearless. “I don’t need either. I’ll trust my talent. Give it time.”

  “Like you did with me.” Lissa had challenged his judgment with each refusal to compromise. The tactic had worked. She had a new fan.

  He sucked in a long, painful breath. Lissa didn’t need him. And she wanted to leave.

  “Home” hadn’t meant Colorado after all.

  “Of course.” He looked away. The fear of losing her—or at least his chance to have her—gave way to the searing knowledge that he’d already lost. Time’s up. I cared too late. “Sonu will get us to the airport.”

  Hoping like hell the numbness he’d conquered would rise again and take over, Cole started across the suite with long, measured strides.

  “You idiot!”

  Her maniacal shout stopped him at the halfway point. Cole turned back. Color had swamped the parchment of Lissa’s cheeks. Without thinking, he pictured the first time he’d made her flush with emotion. He’d loved the look of her then.

  He loved her now.

  A smack in the chest brought him out of the quick reverie. Lissa stood in front of him, heaving, enraged. “You think I want to leave so I can flutter away and sell pretty pictures? That I got what I wanted and now I’m done?”

  Never particularly wise, Cole at least had the foresight to let the questions pass. With her hands almost around his neck, he took advantage. Grabbing her hips, he pulled her whole body flush with his. Even drug-logged and recently bedridden, his armful of pissed-off smelled like cake.

  She kept yelling.

  “I don’t need your name, Cole, to succeed. Or your help. What I need is a bit more basic.”

  Relief poured into his veins like a soothing balm. Fuck numbness. Numb couldn’t handle Lissa’s velocity, the fact that she sped from injured to accusatory faster than she switched from smelling like raspberries to frosting.

  Gripping her tight, he gathered his presence of mind. Curse her for being a perfect, perfect fool. His Lissa planned to throw away his help in favor of helping him.

  “Cole, I need you.” Her volume leveled out, and his chest tightened at the uncertainty masked within the bold statement, as though she worried her feelings might be unrequited. “All of you,” she asserted, softly now, “not just the part here with me here in India. I can lose this project.” She paused. “I can. But I can’t lose you to a past that’s already half eaten you alive. We have to go back to stop the feast.”

  No, no, no. Cole gently shackled her biceps and pushed her to arm’s length, searching her earnest face. Such irony—Lissa offered a sacrifice she could ill afford at the exact time he realized he didn’t need it. Kate had gone away, the how and why now reduced to nothing more than an intellectual puzzle. For too long he’d clung to the imagined perfection of a deeply flawed marriage with no place in his future. That image had joined Kate’s annihilated letter on his bedroom floor, in pieces ready to be swept away.

  But Lissa couldn’t know that. Nor would she take his word after overhearing Sonu’s announcement about the happenings in Colorado. Returning wouldn’t change a thing, not for him, but maybe it would prove to Lissa exactly how much everything had changed for them.

  A slight tug brought her back to his chest, and he pressed his lips to the roots of her hair. “Of course,” he said, repeating his earlier answer but with whole new meaning. “Sonu will get us to the airport.”

  Chapter 35

  January—Boulder, Colorado

  “What do you mean, ‘She’s still gone?’” Cole lowered himself to Trevor’s kitchen table, leaning toward the pill case resting at its center. A hired car, two planes, a bus, a cab, and thirty-nine hours had reduced India to a distant memory.

  Snow fell beyond the kitchen window in a steadily growing blanket that clung to the side of the house. A radio on the counter squawked about flight cancellations and a crawling morning commute. He and Lissa had landed just in time.

  Cole took a deep breath. He’d make this up to her.

  For now, something is rotten in Boulder.

  Trevor hunched over the opposite corner of the table, impossibly still. The heft of the man’s broad shoulders looked strangely diminished, like he’d shed twenty pounds overnight. Charm had abandoned his sunbaked features, and he spoke only when spoken to.

  Cole got the feeling Trevor battled a seething fury he wasn’t conditioned to manage, not after a life spent tempering the edges of his brutal size and looks with a core of decentness. If Rhea had purposefully compromised their uncle, the bars coming her way might be the only barrier that could save her from a husband more than ready to get back to what nature had originally intended.

  “I mean,” Trevor eventually answered, “the bitch bolted when Kent arrived with his epiphany.”

  Grimacing at Trevor’s harshness, Kent cut in with a comparatively glossed accounting—at least next to Trevor’s telling over the phone—of what Kent had started calling the “trouble with the Christmas tree.” He spoke of the memory of the lunch he’d cultivated for so long, his unannounced arrival at the bungalow, and Rhea’s abrupt departure. Unsure whether the nitro tabs would’ve helped, Kent made it clear he could forgive and forget for the sake of keeping the peace, ending with, “Rhea doesn’t even know about the pills.” The silent rider, “And she never has to,” reverberated off the kitchen walls.

  “No.” Trevor surged upright in his chair. “She doesn’t know we know about the pills.” The reproach in his tone warned them to give his wife the benefit of the doubt at their own peril.

  Lissa had hoisted herself onto the kitchen counter, legs dangling. Throughout the long explanations, she stayed unnaturally quiet. The meds had helped her condition, but the traveling hadn’t.

  As Kent and Trevor added logs to the fire of uncertainty
surrounding Rhea’s possible desire to hasten Kent’s demise, Lissa never revealed Kate’s suicide note or how Lissa had mentally linked Kate’s decision to take her own life with Rhea’s obsessive hostility.

  She let Cole keep his secrets.

  After forty hours and counting, they were left with little choice but to assume the worst of Rhea’s disappearance. Cole stood and dug through a kitchen drawer until he found a sandwich bag. He scooped up the pill case with a Kleenex and dropped it in the plastic pouch. “Do we call the police or lie in wait?”

  Trevor and Kent spoke in unison.

  “We call—”

  “We’ll wait—”

  Lissa hopped off the counter and left the room, reappearing with her coat and gloves. She didn’t vote for either of the passive alternatives on offer. Instead, she said the one thing guaranteed to get action.

  “I know where Rhea is.”

  ******

  Both highways leading to Melina remained open. Lissa didn’t doubt the physical ability to drive west, but the practicality of doing so thinned the air in Trevor’s truck. Blowing snow pelted the windshield. Ice overtook the glass at a rate that challenged the defroster, leaving only small half-circles of visibility in front of Trevor at the wheel and Kent in shotgun.

  Cole and Lissa flanked Sasha between them, riding blind in the backseat.

  Tense and silent, Trevor navigated with one sure hand on the steering wheel and another balanced on the stick shift. He whipped the four-wheel drive around the curves of Boulder Canyon, almost daring the cliffs rising to their right or the plunge into Boulder Creek falling to their left to smite him. “We will ski in if we have to.”

  Lissa opened her mouth to suggest they delay pursuing her hunch about Rhea’s whereabouts. They could do this later. Maybe next week. Before she could utter a word, a tight squeeze imprinted high on her thigh. Cole merely shook his head at her responsive eye daggers.

  Quiet, he daggered back.

  Perhaps she should have voiced her intuitions more eloquently. She could have said, “I might know where Rhea is,” or “It makes sense—to me at least, but what the hell do I know—that Rhea could be at Melina.”

  Instead, she’d injected her words with the certainty of an inspirational quote from the Dalai Lama. And, what do you know? The four of them were hugging a race track pregnant with black ice and horizontal snow on their way to Lissa’s proposed destination.

  An hour after vacating the bungalow, Trevor killed the truck in Melina’s circular drive. A relieved sigh escaped Lissa’s compressed lips, its purpose twofold. First, they were alive. Second, they’d parked next to Rhea’s vehicle.

  Inside, the house sat still. Lissa didn’t detect a television show or any music. Not even an indoor bike-a-thon disturbed the quiet. Despite the lull in activity, two plates bordered the kitchen sink. One held the remnants of a sandwich, the other only crumbs. Fitness magazines littered the counter, and a throw blanket hung drunkenly over one of the stools. Sasha found his sealed food bin and rested a massive head on the lid.

  The evidence of habitation, minus one specific inhabitant, made the constriction left over from the trip up the canyon cinch tighter in her chest.

  Lissa hadn’t wanted to be right.

  She opened the back door and examined the expanse of white spreading to the trees bordering Cole’s property. No footprints, but she supposed the snow fell too hard to expect a dead giveaway. Angling her head toward the trail she couldn’t see, Lissa considered their options.

  “I don’t know who should go first,” she said absently. “Rhea might have harmed Kent directly, so there’s a vote for him. She’s your wife, Trevor, so you’re fully invested. And then there’s Cole.” Rounding on the man in question, Lissa said something she knew the others wouldn’t understand. “Once married to the woman who brought Rhea here in the first place.”

  Their eyes met in a clash that changed everything. Tenderness bled into the set of Cole’s mouth, releasing the tension that habitually gathered at his eyes and in the set of his jaw. He took a slow step closer, shutting his relatives out. A curt shake of his head told her that, no, he wouldn’t be first in line for whatever she had in mind.

  His refusal to cooperate was nothing new. Yet this time the reticence came from a different place. Somewhere between the look that said she could have whatever she wanted except his desertion in favor of his sister-in-law and his close proximity that swept across her nerves like a physical stroke, Lissa realized why he wouldn’t follow along.

  Cole hadn’t come to Colorado or Melina for himself. He’d come because Lissa had asked him to. And he wouldn’t be leaving her behind.

  With an impatient chuff, Trevor lifted Lissa by the shoulders and set her away from the door, whirling her around so she stood back-to-chest against Cole. Then, peering between her face and the empty yard, Trevor scrutinized the direction of her automatic attention. “You think my wife is sitting at Kate’s grave,” he growled, his disbelief apparent. “On a Wednesday morning. In the middle of a blizzard.”

  Lissa swallowed, hesitant to meet Trevor’s stare. “I know she is.”

  ******

  In the end, Cole sent his uncle and his brother out together. He stayed behind with Lissa, who stood at the screen door tapping a finger to her lips, head cocked. He didn’t blame her trepidation. If Lissa’s theory held, Rhea had commandeered another woman’s grave, and she’d soon confront the wrath of a man she may or may not have nudged toward death’s door and a husband none too happy with her deceit.

  Trevor and Kent disappeared around the last visible bend into the trees, dressed for a coming of the next ice age like native Boulderites—North Face from the top down, convertible gloves, ear-flap hats, rubber boots good for January ice fishing or a muddy spring thaw. The layers might be their only insulation against an ugly awakening waiting around that corner.

  Lissa rubbed at the back of her neck. “You should go along.”

  Studying her, Cole found her expression too carefully neutral. He reminded himself that she too bore the weight of their search, perhaps more than any of them since this wasn’t her fight. “Why?”

  “We came thousands of miles for answers. At least take the last few steps.”

  The easy lie doubled as a dare, implying he couldn’t bear to hear news that might involve Kate. The trick pricked his temper. “I think you know I didn’t come for answers.” I came for you.

  She nodded. “But I did, and certainly not to get them for myself.” Right. She wanted them for him. What a pair they were.

  Lissa abandoned the view in favor of stacking the magazines Rhea had left on the counter. Next she folded the throw. Still ignoring him, she attacked the dishes. Bit by bit, order reclaimed the kitchen with only the occasional searching look flicked his direction. Towel and dish in hand, he swore Lissa’s gaze darted briefly to the latched door above the basement, but in a flash, her focus returned to the drying of Rhea’s cast-off plates.

  She was waiting him out.

  Cole stepped in and took the dish, then the towel. No matter what happened at that grave, he’d be solid. “Lissa, I don’t need—”

  “Shhh,” she said quietly, bringing her finger to his lips. She drew even closer, as though her message could only be said against his neck. “They haven’t returned, which means she’s there.” Warm lips landed on his jaw. “Go.” A nuzzle. “Don’t ask me why. This one last time, please just do it.”

  Well, when she asked like that…

  He ruffled Sasha’s fur and grabbed his coat off a kitchen chair. Voices rang out as he neared Kate’s garden. With the knowledge of impending closure, the burdens of guilt and amends lifted, floating into the ether like the snowflakes swirling in his wake.

  Hidden agenda or not, Lissa was onto something—facing demons became worthwhile when the act of facing them set them free.

  The scene in the trees stopped Cole short about fifteen feet from his wife’s headstone. The rock garden had been cleared of sno
w. Neatly shoveled paths darted around each boulder, and crimson poinsettias flanked the walkways, stark against the white. A few of the surrounding trees sparkled with slim ribbons of garland.

  Time and thought—likely a great deal of both—had gone into transforming Kate’s spartan resting place into a winter wonderland.

  Why?

  Rhea knelt before Kate’s engraving, her profile bleached as white as the ground. Tendrils of flaming hair whipped above shivering shoulders that swam inside an old coat taken from Cole’s mud room.

  Trevor crouched at her side, dangling the bagged pill case in midair. Kent stood a distance away, leaning on a rock and nodding to himself. “I was right,” he muttered.

  Cole stepped into the clearing. “About what?”

  Rhea’s head jerked to Cole with such force he wondered how she didn’t snap her neck. “About Kate.”

  Patience. “Let’s go with a little less cryptic.”

  Seemingly blind to Cole’s arrival, Trevor stared at Rhea with eyes soaked in intelligence and pain. He brought to mind an injured predator, fiercely loyal yet capable of lashing out when over-provoked. “Tell him,” Trevor demanded.

  Defeat settled over Rhea’s shoulders, and she slumped fully to the ground. Finally, after a few taut moments of reflection, she reached for Trevor, who stiffened but let her hold his free hand. A moment of visible understanding passed between the couple before Rhea’s voice, thick with dread, sliced through the wind. “It was me.” She swallowed. “The day you pegged Trevor and Kate at the hotel? I met Kate that day. Kent saw us. At first I didn’t know he’d been there, but over time he began asking questions, leading questions I couldn’t answer.”

  “Why would you care?” Cole wondered aloud.

  She ignored him, lost to the story. “I put him off with increasing… enthusiasm. But the fewer answers I provided, the more questions he asked. The morning of his heart attack”—she sent Kent a pleading glance—“we were loading the fridge as usual. He laid out a theory and threatened to tell you both.”