A Broken Kind of Beautiful (14 page)

“How did you like the plantation?” Sara asked.

“It was definitely beautiful.”

“Grandfather used to take me there. The home had some amazing artwork. I remember one piece in particular. A Rembrandt. Oh, it was exquisite. And the gardens. I remember those too.” Sara didn’t just talk. She moved. Her whole body spoke.

“I think your brother loved it.”

“I’m glad.”

“So, Sara …” Ivy fidgeted, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She wanted to know more about Sara’s blindness. Like how it had come to be and why Davis refused to talk about it. She also wanted to know more about Davis himself. Like why somebody with his talent would quit. Or why he acted like a man suffering from multiple personalities. “Do you work here at Something New?”

“Sort of. I’ve helped Marilyn for a few months now. To be honest, I’m just starting to get used to this blindness thing. If a person can ever really get used to it.”

Ivy blinked. Sara had opened the door, and Ivy’s curiosity was all too eager to clomp over the threshold. “How long have you … been this way?”

“Almost two years.”

“What happened? I mean, how did it happen?”

Sara scratched Sunny’s ear. “I fell down a flight of cement stairs and hit my head on the railing. When I woke up in the hospital, my vision was gone.”

She told the story like one might read an overdone news article, like that
one fall hadn’t changed her life in a profound and irrevocable way. “Wow.”

“Tell me about it. Most clumsy people deal with some bumps and bruises, the occasional spilled drink or broken vase. I’m an extreme case.”

“What did you do … before?”

“I went to college at the university. I was going to major in art history. I wanted to be the next Mary Cassatt or maybe a curator. I could never decide.” A frown sculpted her lips. She lifted her shoulders as if to shrug it away. “Now I get to pour my creative energy into music. I compose. I’m not very good, really, but it’s an escape. When I play the piano, it’s almost like I can see again.”

Ivy fingered the pearls wrapped around her neck. “I’d like to hear you sometime.”

The front doors of Something New flew open. A gust of heat swept across the floor and wrapped around Ivy’s calves. Davis strode toward them, camera clanking against his chest, a frenzied look in his eye. Ivy adjusted her veil. For a moment, talking with Sara, she’d forgotten herself.

“Are you that desperate to see me?” she asked as he reached the mirror.

His eyelids fluttered as if her presence startled him. And she saw it. Finally. A glimpse of desire peeking out from his pupils. He liked the way she looked in this dress. He shook his head, as if to rattle himself from a daze, and returned his attention to Sara. “I can’t believe I forgot about your tutoring session. I got into this storyboard thing for Joan and completely lost track of time.”

“It’s not a big deal. We can reschedule.”

Davis looked pained. By his expression a person might think forgetting this one appointment was a matter of life or death.

Ivy pointed to his camera. “I like the new look.”

He yanked the strap off his neck and clutched the camera at his side—like he’d been caught with incriminating evidence. Before Ivy could inquire or tease him over the strange reaction, Rachel Piper spotted Davis from across the boutique and flapped her arms like a distressed bird.

“Davis! It’s bad luck to see the bride in her dress! Don’t you know that?” Rachel looked at Ivy, who rolled her eyes as if to say
Silly groom
.

Davis’s forehead wrinkled.

“Congratulations! I’m so happy for you,” Rachel called.

Davis turned his wrinkled forehead toward Ivy. “Did you tell Rachel about the photo shoot?”

Ivy nodded. “Apparently she’s very enthusiastic about it.”

Marilyn returned and hooked her arm around Davis’s elbow and motioned toward Ivy’s reflection. “What do you think?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “It looks fine.”

Sara laughed. Ivy couldn’t help herself. She laughed too.

It seemed to make Davis’s wrinkles scrunch closer together. “If we hurry, we can catch your tutor before she leaves.”

“Why doesn’t Ivy come?”

“I think she has work to do with Marilyn,” Davis said.

Marilyn waved her hand. “Not at all. We’re finished for today.”

“Maybe we can grab a bite to eat afterward,” Sara said, standing from her seat.

“That sounds like a great idea. Thanks for the invitation, Sara.” Ivy smirked at Davis. “Your sister and I are going to be good friends. I can just feel it.”

His eyes darkened—like thunderclouds rolling across blue sky. He shifted, the movement bringing something into Ivy’s line of vision. An eleven-by-fourteen black-and-white photograph, framed and mounted on the wall behind Davis. Marilyn in a white dress, clasping on to the groom’s arm. A man who epitomized handsome and confident. He flashed a charming, white-toothed smile at the camera and shielded his bride from showers of rice.

James. Her father.

The smirk on Ivy’s face melted away. Never once had he smiled at her like that. Never once had he shielded her from anything. Now that he was in the ground, she’d never get the chance to ask him why.

13

Sara followed Sunny to the front doors of the tutoring center across from the marina, squished between Berry’s Pizza Palace and Sunn and Swimm Water Sport Rental. The tutoring center taught it all. Foreign language. Braille. Sign language. Davis watched Sara disappear inside the building as the vinyl in the backseat squeaked and he glanced in the rearview mirror. Ivy hadn’t spoken a word on the short drive to the marina. She’d sat as still as a statue in the back, gazing out the window.

Davis twirled his keys around his finger and stepped into the sunshine. He opened her door. While she joined him in the sun, he bent inside the car and pulled out his sketchbook. The one he’d used to draw up some ideas for the storyboard.

After his visit to Primrose, after seeing the architecture of the home, the rhythm and movement of the grounds, two years of pent-up creativity unleashed with a fury, cramping his mind with ideas. So he’d grabbed the sketchbook, picked up some bridal magazines from a convenience store, and let his vision ooze onto the paper.

He wanted to share his thoughts with Ivy. After all, she’d done more editorials than he had. Not only would her approval set his own insecurities at ease—insecurities that came with an extended absence from his craft—it would give them something safe to talk about while they waited for Sara to finish up in the tutoring center. He waved his sketchpad at her.

“What do you have there?” she said.

“Ideas. For the photo shoot.”

“How exciting.”

He ignored her dry tone. “I was hoping you could help me out. Give me some feedback.”

“You want my opinion?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I’m the model. My opinion doesn’t matter.”

She was going to be the focal point of every photo. How did her opinion not matter? He leaned against the car and squinted at her. “I’m not following your logic.”

She batted her hand, as if to shoo away the entire conversation, and grabbed his Nikon from the backseat of the Mazda. “How about we ditch the sketchpad and do some practice shots down by the beach.” She pulled the strap over her head and brought the camera to her eye. “Or I could take pictures of you. You’re not too shabby to look at, you know.”

Davis tucked the sketchpad under his arm.

“Smile for the camera, Davis. Show me sexy. Show me naughty.” The shutter clicked several times. “Come on, at least show me something.”

“Give it here, Ivy.” He reached for the camera.

She stepped back.

He frowned.

“Ooh, frustrated. I like that. Give me more.”

“Cut it out.”

“More, Davis. I need more of you.”
Click. Click
.

Her words unsettled him. “Come on.”

She laughed, only the sound came out hollow. “Give me everything.”
Click. Click. Click
. “Everything, Davis. Until nothing’s left.”

He caught her elbow with a gentle hand. “Hey.”

She hid the camera behind her back.

He reached behind her and pried the camera away. Ivy stopped laughing. She stopped moving. All of a sudden, Davis felt her closeness. And his body responded.

Her chin tipped in invitation. But her eyes held him back. Twin pools of honey filled with a world of contradictions—depth and emptiness, pain
and laughter, invitation and refusal, and behind all those incongruities, longing. One that could swallow him whole if he let it. A longing too big and too wide for him or anybody else to fill. It didn’t just flicker like a candle; it raged like a forest fire. It made him step away.

One corner of her mouth quirked. “And here I thought you were going to kiss me.”

He took another step back, hoping the distance might cool him down. “Let’s say for a second I would have. What would that accomplish?”

“Why does it have to accomplish anything?”

He pushed his fingers through his hair. His kiss would be like a drop when she needed a downpour.

“It’s okay to kiss me, Davis. Most men do.”

“Would that make you happy—if I kissed you? Would that make everything better?”

“You think too hard.” She slid her hands into the pockets of her shorts and took a step back herself. “Why does it have to make anything better? Why can’t it just be fun?”

“Because I don’t think it’s fun for you. I don’t think that’s why you do this.”

Her smile soured. “Okay, Dr. Knight, since you’re psychoanalyzing me now, why do I do
this
? Whatever
this
is.”

“I think you’re looking for something in me that you’re not going to get.”

“Like?”

“Love.”

She tilted her head back and let out a laugh. “Well, then, I guess I should thank you for your honesty. Now that I know you couldn’t possibly love somebody like me, I’m free to expend my efforts elsewhere.”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t love you. I’m saying I don’t think my love would be enough.”

She crossed her arms. “This is a bizarre conversation. All I wanted was a kiss, and you turn it into love. Well, Dr. Knight, not one part of me is searching for that.”

Her impassioned words pinched his heart. Who was she trying to convince, him or herself? “Ivy, I’m not trying to—”

“Davis!”

The familiar voice had him swallowing a groan. Violet Bogden, the marina manager’s wife, waved from across the parking lot, wearing magenta capri pants and an excited smile. She bobbed across the uneven concrete—half running, half walking, as a cloud overhead cast her pink body in shadow.

“How good to see you two here at the marina.” She turned to Ivy and put her hand against her sun-splotched chest, dimpling her freckled skin. “I’m so sorry about the loss of your father. To have died so young. He was such a handsome, successful man.”

Ivy’s face froze into a beautifully chiseled ice sculpture.

Violet was undeterred. “To hear the delightful news after something so sad tickled me pink.”

“You’re definitely pink.”

Ivy’s deadpan comment would have made Davis chuckle, but he was too distracted by Violet’s words. Delightful news? Surely she wasn’t referencing the photo shoot. There was no reason for that to tickle her when she had nothing to do with it.

“You two will make such beautiful babies.”

His confusion quadrupled. Babies? With Ivy? Davis pulled at his earlobe. “I’m sorry, but did you say
babies
?”

“I just got off the phone with Trudy Piper. She was at Something New this morning, helping her daughter Rachel pick out a wedding dress, and she told me the news.”

Davis turned to Ivy. A hint of a smile thawed her frozen expression—like she’d tucked an amusing secret into one corner of her mouth.

“Mrs. Bogden, Ivy isn’t pregnant. Or, I mean, if she is …” His attention
traveled to Ivy’s stomach. If she was pregnant, it had to be very early. “Well, if she is, it’s not my child. We aren’t … I mean, we haven’t …” His cheeks burned. How had he gotten into this conversation?

Violet winked at Ivy. “He’s such a gentleman.”

Ivy nodded emphatically.

“So when’s the big day? When are you two lovebirds tying the knot?”

Davis coughed. “Tying the what?”

“Getting married.” She chuckled. “My, Davis, you sure are being bashful about this. People get married all the time. You should know, seeing how many future brides buy dresses from your auntie.”

He flattened his palm over the crown of his head. “I’m not embarrassed. I’m confused. What makes you think Ivy and I are getting married?”

“I told you. Trudy called a bit ago to share the news.”

“There must have been some sort of mix-up.” Judging by Ivy’s smile, she was the mix-up. Or at least the source of it. “Ivy and I aren’t engaged. We’re not even dating. She’s in town because I’m doing a photo shoot with her for Marilyn.”

“Oh.” Violet deflated like a flyaway balloon. “I didn’t know you modeled.”

“I don’t model. I’m going to take the pictures.” He held up his camera as if that should clear up the misunderstanding. “I’m a photographer.”