by Bella Andre
His voice was clipped. Definitely different from the way he spoke about his siblings. Did that mean the tight unit didn’t extend to his father?
“My cousin Mia is a Realtor in Seattle. She got a tip about this place coming up on the market for the first time since it was built as a hunting cabin fifty years ago. She’s the master of knowing just what people need.”
“I could use someone like her in my life right about now.” Though Rosa said it softly, she already knew that Drake didn’t miss a thing. “How long did it take your father to recover from losing your mom?”
“He hasn’t.”
Her eyebrows went up. “But it’s been thirty years.”
“Exactly. She was his muse. His obsession. His everything. He stopped painting the day she left. And that’s why I always swore I wouldn’t ever paint women. Because I never want my art, or my life, to be tied that closely to just one person.” He looked down at the sketchbook in his hand. “You’re the first woman I’ve ever painted. The first woman I’ve ever had to paint.”
If someone else had said something like this to Rosa, she probably would have been flattered or creeped out, depending on how weird the guy was. But with Drake, she felt as though warmth infused her, way down deep inside where she’d grown used to feeling so cold.
“These are extenuating circumstances,” she supplied for him, not wanting him to feel bad about breaking his rule—and not wanting to let herself build this up into anything more than two strangers hanging out together for a couple of hours. “I’m sure painting me isn’t about anything more than getting your juices flowing. After I leave, you’ll be off and running again like you were before, and then you can throw that sketchbook into the fire.”
“I promised you I wouldn’t show these paintings to anyone. But I won’t burn them, Rosa.”
She licked her lips and tried to calm her racing heart. She should get up and leave before the sexual tension sparking like crazy between them combusted and made her life even messier—and his too. But leaving was the last thing she wanted.
What she really wanted was to walk over to Drake and beg him to put his shockingly talented hands on her already overheated skin.
The dinging of the timer on the old red enamel oven broke through her inappropriate thoughts. “The lasagna is ready,” she said. “I’ll get it out.”
But her voice was full of far more suppressed lust than an Italian dish warranted.
Chapter Eight
Drake’s cabin didn’t have a dining room table. He’d cleared out most of the furniture when he’d moved in so that he could fit more easels into the space. If the weather was good, he ate at the picnic table outside. If it was bad, he sat in the leather chair by the window and unfolded a small card table for his meals.
Since the rain had come in again, he set up the table, then went and got a couple of folding chairs out of the closet. Rosa had served up the lasagna on the chipped brown and orange plates that had come with the cabin, and he ripped off paper towels to use as napkins.
His kitchen was small enough that they kept brushing up against each other. Just little touches that wouldn’t normally have registered—an inch of her hip against his, the tip of his elbow across her stomach—but with Rosa, nothing was normal. And when they suddenly found themselves face to face between the fridge and the peninsula, neither of them moved. Hell, he wasn’t even sure either of them breathed.
All he could do was stare.
And want.
Drake wanted to run his fingertips over her flushed cheeks so that he could finally find out just how soft her skin was.
He wanted to trace his tongue over the full curve of her lower lip to finally know if she tasted as sweet as she looked.
He wanted to run his nose along the curve of her neck and into her silky hair so that he’d never be able to forget her scent.
He was so far gone, in fact, that he didn’t notice when Oscar walked into the kitchen and suddenly leaned—hard—against Rosa’s side. Clearly, she didn’t see his dog coming either, because where she’d been able to keep her balance before, this time she was so surprised by the heavy weight that her knees buckled.
Drake reached out and caught her before she could hit her head on the corner of the kitchen counter, and it was pure instinct to pull her against him so that their bodies were flush and tight and their faces barely a breath apart. Her lips parted and her hands tightened on his waist where she’d reached out as she fell.
“Rosa.” He couldn’t form any other word but her name, couldn’t think about anything but her.
His mouth was nearly on hers when the sketchbook he’d put on the counter fell off and hit the floor, the metal rings holding the sheets together making a surprisingly loud slap on the wood floor. Loud enough, anyway, to startle Oscar into barking. Which, of course, sent Rosa jumping from Drake’s arms.
She bent down to pick up the sketchbook and was about to put it on the counter when she stopped with it still in her hand. “Can I see?”
Most people didn’t wait for his answer. But though Rosa should have felt his sketches were fair game given that her face and form were inside, she obviously wouldn’t look if he said she couldn’t.
“Sure.” The lone word was raw with unquenched desire from coming so close to tasting her mouth...but not nearly close enough.
She opened up the sketchbook on a drawing he’d done a few weeks back of Oscar having a moment of silliness rolling on the moss outside and laughed. “You’ve captured him perfectly!” Her laughter was such a pretty sound that it actually made headway into Drake’s frustration. “And wow...” She’d turned to a sketch he’d done of the rolling ocean waves. “How are you able to make everything come so alive with only a pencil?”
But before he could answer, she was turning to his first sketch of her, when she’d sat on the leather seat in the corner looking wary and unsure about her decision to let him paint her. He couldn’t read her expression as she went to the next drawing—her laughing while a too-big Oscar tried to climb into her too-small lap. In silence, she turned the pages one by one on which he’d wanted to show all her different sides—her joy and empathy, her bravery and fear, her strength and her softness. But it wasn’t until she reached the final sketch that he realized he’d also captured desire, the flush that had been in her cheeks before she’d popped up to take the lasagna out of the oven mirrored by the flush that colored them now.
“You really are an amazing artist.” She closed his sketchbook and put it back on the counter. “And your lasagna is probably getting cold, so we should eat.”
Drake had always been the rare kind of artist who was confident enough in his own vision to not particularly care what other people thought of his work. But, yet again, things were different with Rosa. “You don’t like my sketches of you.”
She was halfway to the folding table when she stopped and turned. “It’s not that.” She shook her head. “You see so much. Too much. Even things I’m not sure I see myself.” She seemed to battle with herself for a few moments before finally turning to meet his gaze. “I’ve spent years in front of cameras and endless hours in editing booths watching myself on screen, but what you drew on those pages is really different.” She ran a hand through her hair. “God, I’m doing it again. Tripping over both your dog and all my words. It’s probably best if I fill up my mouth with some of your great-smelling lasagna instead of continuing to say all the wrong things.”
He wanted to tell her she wasn’t doing or saying anything wrong, wasn’t feeling anything she shouldn’t. He wanted to admit that he was falling for every one of the facets of her that he’d drawn. He wanted to say that he already knew fifty years wouldn’t be enough to capture them all.
But, unfortunately, he also knew just how fast—and far—she’d run if he did that. Especially when just looking at his sketches had made her so uncomfortable. Hell, he should be uncomfortable too, shouldn’t he? Wasn’t this exactly the kind of connection he’d been fighting hi
s whole life—one where it already seemed far too likely that creative interest could spin into obsession?
Thankfully, as she sat down and tucked into her food, she seemed to forget all about his drawings for the moment. “This is so good.” She forked another bite into her mouth before she’d even finished chewing the first. “Did you get it at the general store too?”
“I made it.”
She stopped with another forkful halfway to her mouth. “How?”
He knew she wasn’t asking about sheets of dried pasta and meat sauce. “My dad wasn’t much of a cook. If we wanted to eat a meal that didn’t come out of a box, we made it ourselves.”
“All of your siblings can cook?”
“Alec and Harry are the oldest, so of the four of us, they’re the best cooks.” Alec, in particular, liked to use his kitchen prowess as an ace in the hole with women. He often bragged to the rest of them that nothing made a woman hotter than a billionaire who turned out to be even better in the kitchen than his French chef. “But Suz and I can hold our own when we need to.”
Whenever he talked about his siblings, Rosa got a wistful look on her face. Her current situation was so off-the-charts crazy that he needed to tread carefully, but since she hadn’t been shy about asking him questions, he figured it would be okay to ask one. “How many siblings do you have?”
“You really don’t know that I have two younger brothers?”
“I’m not a reality TV fan.” When she winced, he belatedly realized just how insulting his comment had been. “Rosa, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay. I know what I do isn’t exactly Shakespeare.” When she put down her fork, Oscar decided that meant it was okay to put his big muzzle in her lap. She stroked his head as she sighed and said, “You said those pictures aren’t my fault. But they are.”
“How the hell can you say that?”
“Because I’ve done dozens of photo shoots where I’m barely covered at all. My mother was right that it isn’t anything people haven’t seen before.”
Her mother said that? Drake didn’t have a prayer of pushing his fury away. “First of all,” he said as his fork hit his plate with a clang, “you made a decision to do those photo shoots. You looked at yes, you looked at no, and you chose yes. But the guy who snuck the pictures in your hotel room didn’t give you a choice, did he?”
“Well, no, but—”
“No buts. Just no. As for your mother—” He should get up from the table, go outside, and cool off in the rain. But, damn it, he couldn’t stand the thought of Rosa’s mother having said that to her. “She should be protecting you, doing whatever it takes to keep you safe, down to her very last breath.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is.”
“No, it isn’t. After my dad died, we nearly lost everything. I know most people think reality TV is a joke, but it saved us. My mom did what she needed to do to make sure my brothers and I had food on the table for every meal and a roof over our heads and clothes for school. She did what she thought was best.”
“Including condoning people selling naked pictures of her daughter?”
Rosa pushed back from the table and stood. “I shouldn’t have come here. And I definitely shouldn’t have stayed. Thanks for the lasagna and for towing and fixing my car. I hope your painting goes well from now on. Take good care of Oscar.”
Damn it, she was saying good-bye. Because he couldn’t leave well enough alone. Because he’d pissed her off by sticking his nose into her family business. Because he hadn’t made sure to tread carefully when he knew it was exactly what she needed when everything was this raw.
Oscar stood in the middle of the room looking like his world was ending. He turned baleful eyes to Drake as if to say, Fix this, you idiot, or she’ll never come back.
“I shouldn’t have pushed so hard.” Drake was on his feet now too, barely keeping himself from leaping in front of the door and begging her to stay. “It’s just that I hate what happened to you. And I hate that you’re willing to take the blame for what everyone else did to you.”
She stopped with her hand on the doorknob and turned to look him in the eye. “I’m not a victim.” Her expression shifted as if she’d just had an epiphany. “I’m not a victim,” she said again, her voice firmer this time. “You’re right that I didn’t have any control over the guy who snuck the pictures of me in the bathtub, but I could have said no to being on the show at any time if I thought it wouldn’t hurt my family for me to leave. And if starting over wasn’t the hardest thing in the world.”
“Why do you think it has to be hard?”
She looked a little startled. “Why do I think starting my life over and trying to be taken seriously in a new field would be harder than being wined and dined all over the world while I’m filming my show?” She looked at him like he was nuts. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Because you’re such a reality TV expert?”
“You’re right, I don’t know anything about the world you’ve been living in. I have family in the entertainment business, but that doesn’t mean I understand what your life has been like. All I know is that something about you makes me want to break all my rules. You make me want to risk the very thing that completely destroyed my parents. That’s how strong you are. That’s how much power you have. The power to do, to achieve, to have absolutely anything you want.”
Her jaw dropped at his impassioned soliloquy, and she stared at him for several long moments. “Do you know what the most dangerous thing about you is? How much you care about everything, even a stranger who hasn’t ever done anything good enough to deserve it.”
She held his gaze for a long moment in which he silently prayed she’d decide to stay instead of go. At last she said, “Good-bye, Drake,” and walked out the door, closing it quietly behind her.
Chapter Nine
Rosa hadn’t thought things could get any more complicated. But she’d never seen Drake Sullivan coming. And she’d never met anyone with so much passion that it simply overflowed from him. Not only onto his sketchbooks and canvases, but also to his mouthwateringly good lasagna.
And especially to every single hungry look he’d given her in his cabin.
She’d never felt so tempted by a man before. She could so easily lose herself in him and temporarily forget her worries in his arms. But she wouldn’t let herself do that. And not because staying away from a potentially complicated relationship was the smartest thing to do at this juncture.
She would keep her distance—would handcuff herself to the old scratched-up bedpost at the motel if that’s what it came to—because she wasn’t good enough for him.
I’m not a big fan of reality TV.
Only eight little words, but they spoke volumes. He hadn’t said them in a mean way. Hadn’t even said them in a judgmental way. But she’d been called plenty of bad things over the years—trash, one step down from a stripper, media whore—so it wasn’t hard to read between the lines.
She didn’t need to know about the art world to guess how prestigious Drake’s work was. All she’d needed was to see his paintings for herself.
Drake Sullivan was talented beyond measure and he was clearly close to his family, who all sounded really great and normal. He could have anyone. A nice girl without a nutso career making duck faces for selfies and oversharing “personal” things with utter strangers.
She hadn’t yet figured out her next step, but she knew one thing for sure: Drake should be with a girl whose naked body hadn’t been viewed by millions of people on cell phones and computer screens and TV sets and magazines all over the world.
Which was why she needed to make herself forget him. Needed to forget the heat in his eyes. Needed to erase that too-potent visual of how strong and sexy his hands were as he speed-sketched her in one moment, then served her lasagna the next. And especially needed to forget how he’d leapt to her defense when she’d overshared about her mom.
&
nbsp; He’d been her knight in shining armor more than once. First on the wet road, then by getting her broken car fixed without blowing her cover, then again in his fury over what her mother had said after the naked pictures came to light.
She understood his fury—it was a large part of why she’d fled. But as she’d told him, things truly weren’t that simple. Rosa knew her mother loved her. And even though Rosa had run from her family and was deliberately hiding out in Montauk, the feeling was mutual. But somewhere along the way, things had gotten weird. Worse than weird―downright bad. And now, Rosa had no idea whether she could ever make them good again.
Could she be a part of the Bouchard family without being on their show? Or did leaving the show also mean leaving the people who meant the most to her?
After forty-eight hours of distance, her family had to be worried about her. She hadn’t called or texted, hadn’t given them any information at all about where she was, didn’t even have a working cell phone so that they could trace her whereabouts. Guilt pooled in the pit of her stomach, thick enough that even though she wasn’t ready to go home, she had to at least let them know she was okay.
She was almost past the general store’s parking lot when she decided to pull in. She’d had good luck going incognito yesterday, and she was pretty sure she’d seen prepaid cell phones for sale. It was fairly easy to track a call from a cell phone, but could she use it to connect to her email without giving away her location?
The truth was, she hadn’t actually missed her phone at all. If there was any other way she could think of to get an immediate message to her family, she would have chosen it, if only to have more than a two-day respite from the ever-present technology.
Rosa kept her head down as she headed through the parking lot and into the store, but the woman behind the counter obviously remembered her. “I’m so glad you’re back! You forgot your change yesterday.” She reached under the counter and handed Rosa several bills and coins.