Home to Laura

by Mary Sullivan

  The front door opened and there he was, big and muscular in his jeans and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and bare feet, the most masculine man she’d ever met.

  “Come in,” he called, and his deep voice sent shivers down her spine.

  She got out of the car and approached. So, she was to be invited inside.

  As she walked the pathway to the front door, his attention seemed to be focused on her legs and then her hips, and last, her lips, but that couldn’t be. She was imagining it.

  Her curiosity piqued about all things Aiden, she followed him down a hallway too quickly for her to get much more than the briefest impressions of rooms as they passed. She did notice, though, that it looked a heck of a lot more refined than the outside.

  They stepped into the kitchen and Olivia stared, stunned. If the outside of the house had been primitive, the kitchen was glorious, massive and made for someone passionate about food.

  It smelled of garlic and seafood. She noticed a bowl of shrimp waiting to be tossed into a pan.

  Aiden stepped behind her, startling her, and she jumped. “What—?”

  “I’m just taking your jacket.”

  Her jacket? So this would take a while.

  “Make yourself at home.” His breath whispered over her hair.

  How could she possibly relax with the man prowling near her with a knowing look in his eye and a smile hovering around his mouth?

  “I’m disturbing your lunch.” She stood beside the counter feeling as awkward as a schoolgirl.

  “I invited you to lunch.”

  “No, Aiden. You asked me over to see your recent work.”

  “It’s noon,” he said as though it explained everything. “Why would I invite you here at noon if I didn’t plan to feed you?”

  “You didn’t make it clear. You enjoy making me uncomfortable, don’t you?”

  He’d been about to open a bottle of wine but put the opener back onto the counter. She’d startled him.

  “Uncomfortable?” He strode to her. “No. I want you to feel at home here.” He placed his palm against her cheek and his big hand covered the side of her head. Calluses scraped her skin, sending a jolt of desire to her stomach.

  She didn’t know what to do with him. Was he making passes at her? He’d said he had work to show her. Was that why she was here? Or was it more?

  God, she didn’t know. The last time she’d flirted with a man had been in high school and that boy had become her husband. Tomorrow she turned fifty-eight. In all those long years, there’d been no lovers other than her husband. She didn’t know how to read signs. Didn’t know what was there and what wasn’t. Besides, men went for younger women, not older women.

  He returned to the stove as though nothing had happened.

  She was imagining things.

  He tossed the shrimp in a wok with butter—tons of glorious butter—and garlic and white wine. When they were cooked, he drained linguine and spread it onto two plates then covered it with the shrimp and sprinkled on parsley to finish.

  He motioned for her to follow him. The dining room was little more than a corner of the living room with windows on both sides.

  A basket of crusty bread sat beside a small crock of more butter.

  So simple and the man had thrown it together as though it were as easy as breathing.

  She took a bite of shrimp. Delicious. Aiden had depth and skills of which she hadn’t been aware.

  He handed her the basket of bread and she took the smallest slice. When he offered her butter, she shook her head. It was hard enough to stay trim without indulging.

  Olivia glanced out the window and gasped. Aiden had been hard at work. The still dormant garden was full of pieces of artwork, both in stone and in metal.

  The metalwork intrigued her. They were glorious, curvaceous, sparkling pieces, both rustic and elegant. Very like the man.

  Some were coy and some blatantly sexual.

  One item in particular appealed to her—a huge swooning petal with a melting stamen in its center so feminine in concept and so voluptuous in execution that Olivia was aroused just looking at it.

  Aiden’s sensibilities were growing, evolving. What would he come up with next? Quite simply, the man took her breath away on so many levels.

  “Beautiful,” she whispered.

  “Keep eating. Your food is getting cold.”

  “I’m overwhelmed, Aiden. Your pieces are gorgeous.”

  “There’s beauty all around us. We still have to eat.”

  She looked at him and laughed. “Says the man who creates art for days on end, but forgets to eat and to shave and who knows what else?”

  He smiled and watched her steadily.

  When his regard became uncomfortable, she gestured toward the metal pieces and said, “You’ve been taking chances.”

  “Aye. Life is about taking chances, trying new things. Isn’t that right, Olivia?”

  “Ye-es.” She wasn’t sure he was talking about art. Were they having the same conversation? Why did it feel as though Aiden had an agenda today that she wasn’t getting?

  “Eat, Olivia.”

  She took another few mouthfuls. She could feel the butter going straight to her hips.

  “I’m full,” she said. “It was wonderful. Thank you.”

  “You didn’t eat enough to fill a hummingbird,” he said, sounding disgusted. “You’re watching your weight, aren’t you?”

  Stung by his criticism and by his tone, even though he was right, she picked up her fork and took a large mouthful of linguine and shrimp. Oh, so delicious. So buttery. So garlicky. She spread her tiny slice of bread with butter and ate it.

  She didn’t stop eating until her plate was empty.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  “The question is,” he said, grinning, “are you satisfied?”

  Oh, she was. So happy. In heaven. She laughed.

  “I want those sculptures for my gallery. You need to have a showing.”

  Aiden nodded. “Say when.”

  “I want that one—” she pointed to the one that looked like a giant melting vaginal petal “—for my own.”

  “It’s yours.”

  “I’ll pay you whatever its retail value would be.”

  “I said, it’s yours. I’m not charging you. If you want it, Olivia, then I’m giving it to you.”

  She got chills. That gorgeous, sexy, weeping petal was hers? It was going in her bedroom. “Oh. Thank you.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “Model for me.”

  What? He’d stunned her. Left her speechless.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. I need a model.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Surely you can find someone in town younger than me who would be willing to pose for you? How about Laura? She’s beautiful.” And looking for a man and is more your age than mine. The thought of them together twisted the linguine in her tummy into a knot. Oh, Olivia, jealousy of your own daughter does not become you. You’re better than that.

  But she wasn’t. She didn’t want Laura anywhere near Aiden. She wanted him for herself.

  “I don’t want Laura,” he said, and Olivia rejoiced. “I want someone mature.”

  “You mean someone old.” The slightest bitterness clouded the statement.

  “Don’t change my words. I meant mature. I don’t want a girl. I want a woman.”

  “Laura isn’t a girl. She’s a woman.”

  “I want you.”

  Before she could object, he said again, “Model for me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Say yes.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Stop thinking. Say yes.”

  “O-okay. When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  On her fifty-eighth birthday.

  “The gallery is closed on Mondays.” He’d thought it through. “Do you want to see what I’ve done so far?”
<
br />   He’d already started?

  “Yes.”

  He took her to a solarium of windows that felt like part of the garden.

  “The light in here is perfect. All natural.”

  He was right. It was stupendous. Sunshine poured through the windows and the ceiling, lighting a vertical piece of stone slightly taller than she was. He’d already carved a head with a face that looked remarkably like hers.

  “How...?”

  “From memory.” He stood too close. She looked up at him, but couldn’t see his face clearly without her reading glasses. Reading glasses, for heaven’s sake. He didn’t need reading glasses.

  “You have a good memory.”

  “I observe people. I watch them when they don’t know it.”

  Meaning that he’d been watching her when she wasn’t looking. It should have felt creepy, but didn’t. She was flattered.

  “I need you here to get it right.”

  It was a large piece of stone. “Are you sculpting all of me?”

  “Yes, full body.”

  “What do you want me to wear?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What?” He was out of his mind. “I won’t model nude.”

  “I’m not asking you to. You’ll be wearing a sheet wrapped around you that I’ll provide.”

  “Oh. I see. Okay.”

  “Come after lunch. One o’clock. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes.”

  The rest of the conversation revolved around booking a Saturday to launch his new work. She left soon after, but spent the rest of the day and night trying fruitlessly to get the man out of her mind.

  * * *

  AFTER NICK LEFT, Laura took refuge in her apartment.

  She stared at the bed. Their lovemaking had been scorching. Stellar. Better than sex with anyone else. Ever.

  That’s how it was between her and Nick. At least last night, unlike on that first night years ago, there had been more than just sex. There had been warm conversation. Conviviality.

  But it had meant nothing.

  There would be no relationship. No baby. No family.

  Nick hated her.

  She hated him.

  “This sucks,” she cried out. “This isn’t fair.”

  She jumped up from the bed and stood on it. She tore at the colorful gauze hanging from her ceiling, pulled it down, shredded it. Goddamn her overpowering attraction to the man and her own passion that had undone her last night as it had that one night years ago.

  She carried her swooping gauze sheets out the back door and flew down the fire escape to the garbage can at the bottom of the stairs, where she stuffed the tatters of her heady unwise lust. She slammed the lid on top and climbed the stairs back to her apartment. Her rooms stood mute in quiet condemnation.

  Plus ça change.

  Nothing good ever came out of encounters with Nick Jordan.

  She should have remembered that.

  She called her mother. No answer.

  “Mom, I need you,” she whispered and called again. Still no answer.

  Later that day, in her industrial kitchen downstairs, she pounded out cinnamon buns as though she was mass marketing them, drinking water to hold off the nausea that the pill had caused. She didn’t want to vomit in case it screwed up its effectiveness.

  She kneaded yeast dough, formed loaves of bread and rolled pastries, working until her arms and back burned.

  Alone, long into the night, she worked.

  Plus ça change, indeed.

  * * *

  NICK SPENT SUNDAY afternoon on the phone until he found a professor, Arthur Hampson, who’d researched Western Indian affairs extensively and who was willing to advise Nick on Monday.

  Bedeviled by images from his Saturday-night lovemaking with Laura and filled to the gills with rage, he threw himself into clearing out his bedroom at the house, into packing up the boxes of his life until the room was empty and Nick was, once again, invisible.

  Emily decided to spend another night with Gabe and Callie. Apparently, they were camping, for God’s sake, since Gabe’s house wasn’t ready. The foundation hadn’t even been built.

  At loose ends on Sunday evening, he called Mort.

  “We’ll be staying here a few extra days. Just thought you should know in case you dropped by the house.”

  “Okay.” Mort sounded subdued. No wonder.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Good as c’n be.” He slurred his words. Mort had probably been drinking all day, alone in his house.

  Nick should be there for him. He and Emily should be home with him, making him dinner, keeping him company.

  Instead, Emily was off having a ball with other people while Nick lay on his bed alone, staring at a strange ceiling in a bed-and-breakfast, trying to reach out to a lonely old man. What a pair he and Mort were.

  What goes around comes around.

  Nick had spent too much time on business and not enough on people and it was coming back to bite him on the butt.

  Long after he hung up after finishing with Mort, he stared at the ceiling before sleep finally claimed him sometime in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NICK SECURED A room in the small library for Monday afternoon.

  Salem Pearce brought half a dozen elders with him, one man so old Nick thought they should have emergency responders stationed nearby. Just in case.

  Soft-spoken and intelligent, Pearce seemed noncombative and open to solutions that might not be readily apparent. If Salem had come to the meeting with harsh or unreasonable demands, Nick would have tossed him out and torn down the house and built without a touch of conscience, but he liked that Pearce was strategic and subtle.

  Not that Salem needed to know that. In business, it wasn’t smart to give in too easily.

  Nick had researched Salem on the internet. Heavily involved in his tribe’s history, he devoted his days to bringing it to light and to life, and to educating the young of his tribe.

  When asked, the professor had raved about Salem. If this project were going to work, so that Nick could still build his resort while honoring the native culture, he wanted to work with someone intelligent and reasonable.

  While they waited for the library to get the key, Nick talked to Salem and took his measure.

  “Tell me about what you’re doing to preserve your culture.”

  “I’ve been making CDs. I talk to the elders and they teach me the language and I record it. They are the last who know the language. If my generation takes no steps to preserve it, it will disappear.”

  Nick tried to imagine losing his language. It would be gut-wrenching.

  “What else?”

  “I want to preserve women’s art. Beading moccasins. Painting on tepees. Preparation of the food the elders grew up on.”

  “You’re really into it, aren’t you?” Nick asked, while the librarian approached from down the hallway and unlocked the door.

  “Totally.”

  Admirable.

  They seated themselves around a small conference table. Nick would have to make sure the resort housed good conference facilities to entice business people who wanted to hold meetings in the morning and then enjoy a round of golf in the afternoon.

  “The challenge, as I see it,” he said, broaching the heart of the problem, “is that there are no clearly marked burial grounds. There’s no way to know where individual bodies were buried.”

  He turned to the elders. “Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, that is so, but they are there. On that land.”

  Nick glanced at the historian, who said, “It’s true. I’ve looked through what limited archives there are and a migratory route did, indeed, run straight across your land.”

  “Is there any way that you—” he gestured toward the professor “—and you—” he gestured toward the elders “—could confer and come up with a good guess exactly where that route ran?”

  “What do you have in
mind?” Salem asked.

  “If it didn’t actually cross where the house now stands, I can go ahead and build.”

  When Salem would have objected, Nick raised his hand. “I know that you won’t want tourists running roughshod over burial sites, so I have an idea.”

  Salem smiled, a restrained slip of his lips, willing to listen but maybe taking things with a grain of salt. Native Americans had been burned in the past. “What’s your idea?”

  “There must be college students studying archaeology who would be happy to spend the summer on a dig in Colorado. I would fund the operation. The elders and the professor could make an educated guess where we could start. Every artifact or bone would be handed over to you.”

  “That would disturb our dead.” Salem shifted in his seat. “I’m not comfortable with that. Where would we bury them?”

  “If you can’t find a place, we can come up with a solution together.”

  “Still, uprooting our ancestors...”

  “There’s more,” Nick said. “I would be willing to build an education center on a piece of the land and devote it exclusively to Indian affairs.”

  “Okay, I’m intrigued. You have my interest.”

  “Enough to consider running it? I would pay a good salary.”

  Salem sat up straight. “Me?”

  “Are you interested?”

  He grinned, his teeth white against permanently tanned skin. “Hell, yes.” Handsome devil.

  “There will be a lot to work out, but I’ll pay you, the elders and Professor Hampson a consultant’s fee until we build.”

  Nick stood. “Professor, the second you and the elders have any idea where it’s clear for me to build on the land, let me know. I’ve got a construction crew sitting around on my dime doing nothing. This delay is costing me a fortune.”

  He left the room, but Salem stopped him in the hallway.

  “About the design of the building?”

  Nick nodded.

  “Could the architecture incorporate our heritage, our sensibilities, the things we used to use to decorate our clothing and tepees? Can the building harmonize with nature and honor the land as well as the people?”

  “Fair questions,” Nick said. “I’ll call the architect to see if he can get down here this week. He can look at the land and talk to you before he starts. Later, he can fine-tune it so it fits the land and the history of your people.”