Chapter Eight
Holy crap.
Staring at him, Emma had been thinking about the stark lines of his face, the hollows of his cheeks, the vivid blue of his eyes. She’d been thinking about how she would position him on the canvas—three-quarter view would probably be best, with him looking past the left shoulder of whoever stood in front of the canvas, because his left side was just a tiny bit more interesting than his right—and how she would capture the twining texture of his thick, dark hair.
But now she was thinking only of his mouth, wondering how it would feel pressed to hers, wondering how it would taste.
Like a rainbow…
Of course not. Mouths did not taste like rainbows. Kisses did not convey color. And she absolutely couldn’t let him kiss her, because he was her landlord, and he wanted her out of his house, and if they started something romantic, or just plain sexual, the landlord-tenant power dynamic between them would inevitably be a part of it. If she slept with him, would he reduce the rent? If she didn’t kiss him, would he have the local constable nail an eviction notice to the front door?
The possibilities tumbled and jumbled inside her mind, making her queasy. “I don’t think…”
“No,” he said more to himself than to her. “No, I—I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He spun away and stared at the panoramic view beyond the glass wall.
He seemed oddly vulnerable, his broad shoulders slumping, his hands buried in his pockets as if to prevent himself from touching anything.
Touching her.
God, she wanted that. She wanted him to touch her. She wanted to paint his hands as well as his face. She wanted to paint his dreams, just as she was painting Ava’s little-girl dreams of a castle and a unicorn.
“I should go,” he said.
She agreed. He should go. The air around them was thick with unspoken thoughts, unexpressed desires. Yet she didn’t want him to leave. “It’s your house,” she said.
He snorted a laugh. But he remained where he was, making no move toward the stairs.
The silence stretched for a minute, and she said, “So, can I paint you?”
At that, he turned. “What would painting me entail?”
There he went, using the word entail again. She smiled. “Well, I could do it the way I’m doing Ava’s. I’d snap a bunch of photos of you and then paint from the photos. Or you could pose for me, but that would take a lot more of your time.”
He nodded slightly, mulling over the options.
“And then I’d have to ask you a few questions—about your dreams.” It occurred to her that asking him about his dreams might be terribly intimate, more intimate even than kissing him. It wasn’t as if he were a little girl who loved playing make-believe. He was her landlord, for God’s sake.
Yet he’d said he wanted to kiss her. If he could cross boundaries with that comment, surely she could cross boundaries by interrogating him about his dreams.
Or maybe not. A discrepancy existed between them. He had the power to kick her out of the house. She had no power at all.
None of this was right. She’d been a fool to mention painting him. Typical of her—reckless, barreling ahead without first considering the ramifications. She should have thought about what painting him—what pursuing anything beyond a landlord-tenant relationship—would entail before she suggested it.
She started to tell him to forget the whole idea, but before she could speak, he said, “Okay. Paint me. When can we start?”
She blinked, stunned. The afternoon sunlight glazed his face, bringing every angle and hollow into stark relief. His eyes… She would have to mix cerulean blue with a bit of zinc white and maybe a hint of cypress green to capture their unique color. His skin tone? Amber, yellow ocher, a touch of gold. His hair? A dense mix of burnt umber and perylene black. Colors danced inside her head.
Max’s colors.
Another blink snapped her back to reality, or at least to more pragmatic concerns. She had to finish Ava’s portrait first. It was near completion; another day or two, and it would be ready for framing. Emma needed to warm the castle up a bit—she’d modeled it after some photos of medieval European castles, which tended to be cold and dank and kind of foreboding, not the stuff of a young girl’s fantasies. A bit more gold in the stones would fix that. And she wasn’t satisfied with Ava’s hair; it needed a touch more gold, too. Ava’s face was as close to perfect as Emma could hope for, her dress looked lovely, and the scepter in Ava’s hand looked like a little like a magic wand, which Emma thought Ava would love.
Tomorrow morning she had an art class with the doctor twins, Willy and Wally Stenholm. One of them was a retired optometrist, the other a retired podiatrist—Emma could never remember which was which—and their wives had insisted that they take an art class with Emma because they had no hobbies to keep them occupied in retirement, and they were getting on their wives’ nerves. Their parents had run a millinery shop, back when such things existed, and the two septuagenarians loved painting hats. Whatever. They paid Emma well, and each week she created a still life arrangement with a hat for them to reproduce on their canvases. She’d picked up some interesting hats at the Goodwill store, and Monica had introduced Emma to a friend of hers who worked at the local high school and allowed Emma to borrow a few hats from the theater club’s costume stash. Last week the doctor twins had painted a police hat from the school’s production of Guys and Dolls. Tomorrow they would be painting an arrangement of old-fashioned headwear from the local community theater. It wasn’t high art, but she charged the doctor twins twice as much as she charged Abbie’s and Tasha’s parents, and they happily paid.
“We could start on Friday,” she suggested, then held her breath, waiting for Max to come to his senses and back out.
“Friday. Good.” He nodded briskly, then strode to the stairs and down, as if he wanted to leave before he did that come-to-his-senses thing and returned to the subject of leases and clauses and eviction.
Emma watched him as he reached the bottom step and headed for the front hall in long, loping strides. She heard the faint squeak of hinges as he opened the front door, the solid click as he shut it.
This was definitely weird. Arguably crazy. Would he still insist on her moving her operations out of his house if she was painting him? Would he still demand that she pack up and go? Would he render the artist he’d just hired to paint his portrait homeless?
He hadn’t exactly hired her. They hadn’t discussed her fee. She hadn’t printed out a contract for him to sign. Maybe he expected her to paint him for free in exchange for remaining in the house. Which might not be a bad deal.
Except… She shook her head as she once again contemplated what a mismatch they were. He might be at the mercy of her paintbrush, her vision and creativity, but she was at the mercy of his property ownership. Painting him didn’t change the fact that he could still force her out of his house.
True Colors Page 10