by Elle Pierson
Her elbows were loosely linked at the back of his neck, her fingers dangling against the top of his spine. She held his gaze bravely. “I love you such a lot,” she said, and her voice was a husky whisper.
He closed his eyes briefly, but not before she saw the intensity of his response. It was humbling, almost frightening.
“It won’t always be easy,” she felt compelled to warn him. “I can be absolutely awful.”
He snorted, and she glared at him. “We’ll argue. Possibly right now, in fact.”
“What, argue with such a conformist, humourless, biddable person as you? Never.” Mick punctuated the likelihood of such future arguments by tweaking her on the nose and receiving an irritable poke in response. “If you’re going to pinch at me like that, at least take it in a more interesting direction,” he added, with a mock leer that made Sophy laugh as she soaked up his happiness.
“Don’t proposition a sick person,” she said primly. “It’s tacky.”
Caught by his playful mood, she tightened her hold on his neck, and smiled into his eyes. “I love you,” she said again, still revelling in the fact that she could say it, could feel it so strongly. His hard features had never looked more open and revealing, his defences temporarily down. “So, so much. I never... I never expected…” She stumbled over the words, wanting to express herself properly, never quite able to translate the thought into the verbal.
“It’s like you’re a…a gift,” she said at last, and didn’t even feel silly. “And I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”
His kiss was hard and urgent, communicating his own feelings, his own gratitude, far more effectively than her fumbled speech. His hands were unsteady against her throat, cupping her shoulders, delving into her hair.
The door opened with a jubilant swing and banged into the wall, bringing them apart with a jump. Sean stood there with a large bouquet of wildflowers in one hand and an enormous grin on his face.
“What ho, future Hollisters all,” said the medical centre’s answer to Bertie Wooster. He looked from one to the other of them with an almost ludicrous expression of pleasure, like a Golden Retriever observing the movements of a tennis ball.
“This is great,” he said happily. “It’s like Tinker Bell falling in love with Captain Hook.” At their looks of mutual aggravation, he went hurriedly on, “I come bearing gifts and good tidings.”
“May I suggest you deliver them, then,” said Mick dryly, “before you find yourself making a short, sharp exit?”
His repressive tone didn’t seem to dim Sean’s spirits much. The other man proceeded uninvited into the room and pulled up the spare chair. Sophy found herself eyeing him with an unusual degree of cheer and goodwill; her head, in fact, was starting to drift down pleasantly fuzzy avenues. She had reached the enjoyable stage of loopiness, similar to that short window of time between the second glass of wine and the third. All the world is beautiful, but you don’t yet feel compelled to tell it so.
“Good news, first of all,” said Sean, a bit more seriously. “It sounds like the police in Christchurch have made a positive ID on the perp in custody and can link him to a number of assaults in the Canterbury area. So I would be extremely surprised if the bastard sees the light of day any time soon, and it won’t just hang on Sophy’s testimony.”
Mick looked as if he was biting back a number of questions, but after a quick glance at her, he merely stated, “Good.”
“Good,” Sophy echoed chirpily, not entirely sure to what she was agreeing but willing to go along with his opinion because he was so nice.
A grin tugged at Mick’s lips, and he hastily rubbed a hand over his nose.
Sean was eyeing her in open amusement.
Ignoring both of them, Sophy focused on the flowers in his hands. “Are those for me?” she asked brightly. “That’s nice.”
“Hmm? Oh.” Sean looked down at the bouquet and then presented it with a flourish. “No, my own offerings are forthcoming. I didn’t want to miss visiting hours. Or any of this,” he said, gesturing between them and returning an unperturbed smile for Mick’s scowl. “I ran into your art teacher outside. He says these are from the school with best wishes for a quick recovery, and he won’t come in and disturb you again, but will hope to see you back soon.”
He hesitated. “He also said that he thinks your work is unfortunately not salvageable. I’m sorry, Sophy. Was this the piece that Mick has been bending and flexing for?”
Mick had turned abruptly to look at her. “The sculpture was ruined?” he asked, looking aghast on her behalf. And possibly his own. Visions of further “bending and flexing” were probably dancing in his head. Silly. She still had the sketches, and in any case…
“That’s okay,” she said, the blow considerably more cushioned at that particular moment than it likely would be tomorrow. “I think Hades preferred to return to the Underworld.”
“You aren’t going to start again?” Mick still looked concerned. “When is the deadline for the competition?”
“I still have a month. I will start again, but not with that subject.” Sophy tried to give him a tender look, and lost her train of thought halfway through. The resulting expression felt a bit...droopy. “I think he was a one-off. Although he had nothing on the real thing.”
Mick and Sean both looked slightly pained.
“Oh,” said Sean unenthusiastically. “Anatomically correct, was he?”
“No.” Sophy frowned at him crossly. “It was only a head and torso. I left out the good stuff, but I hadn’t even seen it in the beginning.”
A strange sound came from the back of Sean’s throat.
Mick clapped a large hand over her mouth. “Poor thing,” he said to Sean. “Must have hit her head when she fell. Doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
Sophy tugged at his fingers, freeing her lips. She touched them gingerly a few times. No, they were still there. They suddenly tilted in a tiny, provocative smile.
“It’s okay,” she said again. “I have a very different mythological figure in mind this time.”
Epilogue
Eleven months later.
The rainbow trout flipped and twirled at the end of the line. Sophy stared at it with the dismay most fishermen reserve for a disappointing catch of floating weed. “Oh my God,” she said. “It’s a baby. Throw it back!”
Mick looked up from where he was re-threading his own line. “It’s not a baby,” he said, exasperated. “It’s a good-sized fish.”
“Its mother is probably down there looking for it.”
There was a silence, and then a muffled curse. Mick seized her rod, removed the trout from the lure with a gentle twist, and tossed it overboard.
Turning back to her, he unsnapped the two halves of the rod and stowed it in the side of the boat. “That’s it,” he said, resigned. “We can never come out fishing again. My nerves can’t take it.”
He sat down, and Sophy leaned back into her corner of the boat and propped her legs up on his lap. “I don’t know why that would be,” she said, grinning. “I’m very relaxed. You were right. This was a good idea.”
She had arrived at Mick’s house in an absolutely foul mood after a day of endless minor catastrophes in the studio. He had been in the process of making dinner, but had taken one look at her thunderous expression and marched her out to the boat for a twilight troll around nearby Lake Hayes.
After half an hour of sitting in the balmy summer air, feeling the light tug of the trailing fishing line and the muted thrum of the engine, the tension had started to drain out of each twitching muscle in turn.
Mick had been renting a home near the lake for the past six months. They both enjoyed the evenings on the water so much they had decided to look for a permanent base in the area. They were house-hunting with some difficulty, due to widely different budgets and opposing ideas on storage space. So far, they had seen three possible properties, all of which had a large airy garage that would make an excellent studio with the
addition of a few windows. Mick, however, seemed to think he could actually park his car in them.
It was an indication of how far she had come, Sophy thought, that she could contemplate their impending move together with excitement and no fear. Ninety-eight percent excitement and two percent fear, tops. Her mother, as usual, had been right. Mick was overprotective, bossy, and more safety-conscious than the diagrams in the back of airplane seats, but he was also intensely respectful of her need for solitude to work and recharge.
They had been apart for lengthy stretches of time in the first half of the year, while he worked out his notice with Ryland Curry. Every so often, she had breathed a sigh of relief and enjoyed the silence and the extra room in the bed. More often, she had missed him terribly.
He had sold out his holdings in the Napa vineyard six months ago and bought a full half-share in the Hidden Oak winery, not far from Silver Leigh. Which effectively made him the dreaded competition, but having him settle in town was worth the relentless raillery between he and her father at family dinners.
Hidden Oak at least hadn’t diverged into cheese production yet, which kept things relatively civilised, although dinner conversation had become completely single-minded since the grape harvests. They were a bit like two little kids arguing over whose train set was the fastest.
When they’d gone out for her twenty-fifth birthday, Sophy had requested a glass of wine from the distant Marlborough region, and had been all but booted from the table. Mutual disgust from both sides.
Leaning her head back against the seat now, she gazed across the shaky play of light on the darkening water and the festive twinkling along the shore. Somebody had decked out some of the trees along the bay with fairy lights for Christmas next week. Her eyes returned to Mick, and she watched the shadows create further grooves and hollows in his craggy features.
She remembered the first time she had seen him, at the exhibition that seemed a decade ago now, and how beautiful she had thought him from a purely artistic, aesthetic point of view. She couldn’t see him objectively like that anymore; his face and body were just facets of Mick as a whole.
He looked up and caught her smile. His own cheeks creased easily in response, his eyes relaxed and happy. “What’s that look for?” he asked.
“Just admiring you,” she said lightly, and he shook his head slightly.
“Artists,” he said. “Weird way of looking at the world.”
“No,” she replied. “I think we see things a bit more clearly than most people.”
He finished knotting a new lure to his line and cast it back out. It landed with a soft plunk and a silvery splash, sinking out of sight. Poor fish.
“By the way,” she said, “I had a call from Patrick Kirkland today. He definitely wants to buy my sculpture.”
“What? Sophy, that’s fantastic.” Mick reached out with his free hand, cupped the back of her head and planted a hard kiss on her mouth. “I hope you haggled on the price.”
“Oh, he was very generous,” said Sophy. She pursed her lips, not looking at him. “The other offer, the one from the gallery, was almost as much, but Kirkland swung the deal with the location.”
She raised her hands and made a frame with her fingers, peering through it. Her face was carefully blank. “He’s going to put it in the courtyard of the new bank building, right smack on the waterfront where thousands of people will see it every single day.”
She had placed eighth in the finals of the sculpture competition in June, with what the judges had called a “deliciously repellent triumph” of a Medusa sculpture. It had been the greatest technical feat of her life thus far to craft the head snakes, which extended out to almost one and a half metres from the skull. And it had been, if she did say so herself, an inspired piece of work.
In her defence, it wasn’t an exact likeness of Jennifer Nolan. After all, she never used sketches of people without their permission. And not only did she not want to get that intimate with the other woman’s features, she didn’t want Mick to have a constant reminder either. It had been extremely difficult to convey a definite likeness while leaving some ambiguity over the identity. People might not look at it and think that it was Jennifer, but an idle thought would almost certainly come to anyone who knew her and saw the piece in its very public glory. “Doesn’t Jennifer look a bit like Medusa? How funny.”
How beautifully apt.
It was the most childish thing she’d done in years, and she felt no remorse at all.
Mick had examined the work from all angles after its completion, and eventually, with faint amusement in his eyes, had solemnly complimented her on her skill.
Sean had proposed marriage on the spot.
“Who would have thought such a dark soul resides beneath that sparkly pink exterior?” Mick mused now, but he didn’t sound particularly bothered by the thought. He didn’t even flinch at the oblique reference to the other woman. Sophy thought he’d largely forgotten her existence.
His family was another matter, and a continuing problem, but thankfully it was a problem separated by a long stretch of water and most of the country.
“I told you I could be awful,” she said, yawning. The motion of the boat was beginning to lull her into a doze.
“I know,” he replied, tugging on his line. “I’m still waiting on the proof.”
She smiled without opening her eyes.
The tiny waves lapped gently against the hull and created a soothing rock. She really was going to fall asleep.
“Mick,” she murmured, shifting her feet in his lap, “do you think we should get married?”
He had been making small sounds on his side of the boat, the light rasp of friction between his arm and his lifejacket, the whine as he wound in his line a fraction, the quiet inhale and exhale of breath.
Everything went silent.
Nerves eventually drove her to open her eyes. He was staring at her. Just staring, his knuckles white around his rod. Then he propped it carefully in the back of the boat and reached into his pocket to remove his wallet. He withdrew a small bundle wrapped in cloth from the zipped compartment and tipped it out into his palm.
The band was gold and the stone was a rose, the petals in bloom, exquisitely carved from a ruby.
“I’ve been waiting for the right moment.” His fingers and his voice were slightly unsteady, but he managed a rueful smile. “When you came home and almost slammed the door off its hinges, I figured tonight wasn’t it.”
Sophy gazed down at the ring. The perfect, perfect ring. Her mouth was dry, and her chest moved rapidly. She pressed her hand there as if to slow the movements. If she had an asthma attack at this moment, she might as well heave herself overboard and be done with it.
Scrabbling in the pocket of her shorts, she pulled out a small parcel of her own, and his face changed. She lifted the tissue and revealed two wedding bands, handcrafted and carved from a blend of gold, silver and copper. The best of many, many tries at an art that was entirely new to her.
She met his gaze, and there was so much there she couldn’t speak for a moment.
“Great minds,” she managed, after a few seconds in which they could only sit and gaze stupidly at one another, more like victims of recent head trauma than lovers.
His hand, still holding the engagement ring, came to cover hers, and their fingers curved and knotted together, holding the three rings secure. His other arm wrapped around her neck, and his nose pressed to hers.
“Great life,” he corrected firmly.
And she smiled.
About the Author
Elle Pierson lives in New Zealand with her family and a very high-maintenance dog – the real-life (and more melodramatic) version of Sophy’s Jeeves. As well as reading and writing romantic fiction, she loves art and writes as a newspaper columnist. Her favourite methods of procrastination include baking, eating, sleeping, and staring at her enormous TBR pile, wondering where all those books came from. She also writes as Lucy Parker, and you ca
n find her on Twitter @_LucyParker or on her website: www.lucyparkerfiction.com.
Thank you for reading ‘Artistic License’, and I hope you enjoyed Sophy and Mick’s story!