Levi's Blue: A Sexy Southern Romance (29 page)

CHAPTER 32

LEVI

ALL I can think about as I walk through the rooms, gazing at the exquisite, vivid color of Evie’s newest paintings, is that the last time I was here I got to hold her in my arms.  I got to see that ready smile, spar with that quick wit, fall into those sparkling whiskey eyes.

I never would’ve thought I’d find myself here
this way—
watching her from afar, aching for something that’s slipping through my fingers, wondering how the hell to reassemble the pieces of my life when a life
without her
holds absolutely no appeal for me whatsoever.

Jesus, I never expected for a woman to turn my whole damn world upside down the way she has. Not that I regret it. The only thing I regret about the whole thing is that I hurt her, that I didn’t have the balls to tell her up front who I was and what I’d done.  Things might’ve gone a lot better if she’d found out from me rather than from a viper like Julianne.

But it’s too late now.  Julianne got what she wanted.
In that way
at least.

I took steps, though. I did what should’ve been done long ago.  Maybe Evie heard about it.  Then again, maybe she didn’t.

I’m guessing she did, though. It’s been pretty much all the buzz for a few days now. 

Maybe it made a difference to her. Then again, maybe it didn’t.

I hope to God it did. 

That’s why I’m here.

CHAPTER 33

EVIE

IT’S LIKE déjà vu.

I stop in the doorway and reach for the wall. The plaster feels good against my damp palms. Cool, refreshing.  Stable.  Just like before.

I’m nervous.  Just like before.

It’s hot in the next room. I feel the humid air gushing through the opening and caressing my face.  Just like before.

Eyes closed, I take a steadying breath and reach out with all my senses. I
hear
the shuffle of feet,
smell
the scent of perfumes,
feel
the presence of people nearby.  Even more people than before. I hear their murmuring, their movement, their socializing.

They’re here for me. Again.  To see my work. Again.  My new stuff, which there’s a ton of since I’ve done little other than work and have surgery since the night I found out about Levi.

Only this time is different. 

Different in a thousand distinct ways.

“…please welcome Evian de Champlain!”

I inhale.

I exhale.

And I open my eyes.

The light pouring through the lenses of my sunglasses is muted, hazy, shadowed.  I feel along the wall, moving cautiously until the plaster ends and I’m walking with nothing to hold on to.

My fingers flex and relax, flex and relax, missing the cane that they’ve gripped for thirteen long years.

Carefully, I make my way to Cherelyn.  I focus on the haloed shape of her, my best friend.  Her pale hair is like a beacon to me, and I aim for it.

What I see now is like looking at a fuzzy photograph.  I can’t see very well from a distance. Just vague shapes, the contrast between light and dark, and some muted colors thrown in for fun.  But just like that fuzzy photograph, the closer I get, the more detail I can see—different shades of color, better distinction of lines, clearer discernment of shapes. 

That’s why, as I walk toward Cherelyn, along one long wall filled with my paintings, I become distracted.  Seeing my work…
seeing
that my mental pictures turned out with such incredible vibrancy, such accurate details… It’s nearly overwhelming.  I find myself walking more slowly, wishing I had time to stop and stare, to take in the vivid blues, the stunning purples, the audacious reds, the brilliant yellows.  The images are identifiable for sure, but it’s the colors that make the paintings so beautiful.

Just like I saw them in my head.

I swallow a ball of emotion and turn my attention back to Cherelyn, focusing on her and what’s ahead rather than my work. I can wonder over it later. In private. When I can touch and stare and weep to my heart’s content.

When finally I stop at her side, I smile and take another deep breath before turning to face the room.  These faces…all these people…they came to see
my
work, to see the pictures excavated from the deepest part of my soul and blazed with flaming color onto canvas.  They loved what they could see when I could not, and I feel an odd sense of gratitude to each person here.

I scan the faces, one by one, noting the details I can make out. I see older men in tuxes, elegant women in gowns, servers in white carrying silver trays of drinks that catch the light and send a spike of pain hacking through my head.

As my eyes work hard to focus and my brain works hard to interpret, a moving figure tickles the right edge of my vision.  I glance at it and stop.  Cast in shadow, the face is a dark smudge topped with dark hair, perched atop a dark suit, but there’s something about it that gives me pause. 

The man moves toward the center of the crowd, weaving closer to the front.  Closer, closer, closer.

All my other senses turn off.  The hushed whispers of the crowd fade, the warm scent of their bodies dwindles, and the blurry sight of their shapes melts into the background. All I see is him.  The tallest man in the room.  And the only one I’ve ever seen before.

Past and present collide.  The planes and angles of a face I’ve
seen
, the shape and texture of one I’ve
felt
meld into a face that I
know
on the deepest level. 

My heart flutters.

My stomach knots.

My lungs seize.

Levi.

I’d know him anywhere, with or without my sight.

As he departs from the crowd and steps toward me, his long, thick, muscular limbs moving fluidly to close the remaining distance between us, I realize that the doctors were wrong.  I
did
see a face the night of the accident.  It
wasn’t
a result of my brain injury.

It was Levi.

I saw Levi.

His face was
the last one
I saw.

And now the first.

I saw him then and, even though I’d felt his face and imagined him almost exactly this way, it never clicked that
this
was his face. Not until just now. Not until right this minute.

He’s an angel and a devil, my dream and my nightmare. The last thing I saw thirteen years ago, and one of the first things I’m able to see thirteen years later.

He stops in front of me.  His hands come up to my arms, his big palms lightly skimming my bare skin, leaving a wake of chills everywhere they touch. 

“Evie?  Are you all right?”  It’s the concern in his voice that reminds me I’ve been standing silently in front of this crowd since I first caught sight of him. And I have no idea how long ago that was.  Ten seconds? Twenty? Two minutes? Three?

I don’t know.

“Evie?” he asks again.

He doesn’t know why I’m dumbstruck because he doesn’t know I can see.

Levi doesn’t know I can see him.

I wore the glasses because I was afraid the brightness would bother me, give me a headache.  But I
can
see.  Not perfectly, but enough.

Enough to see this beautiful man for who he is.

And who I wish he wasn’t.

I step around him, away from the touch that scrambles my brain and makes me forget all reason.  All of
my
reasons.

I address the crowd with a smile.  “Thank you for coming. I hope I don’t fall this time.”  They give me an obligatory laugh.  “Please, look around.  I hope you enjoy the show.  Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

I don’t care that this speech was just as shitty as the first time around.  I only know that I have to get out of here. 

I turn and walk as quickly and cautiously as I can in the opposite direction of where Levi stands, but before I can get out of the room, he is pulling me to a stop.  “Evie, please.”

“Please what?” I keep my face turned away.

“Please wait. Please don’t go. Please talk to me.  Take your pick.”

“Wh-what do you want, Levi?” I stammer, desperate to get away from him, knowing I can’t think straight when he’s near, especially now that I can see him. 
God, he’s so beautiful.

“Look at me, Evie,” he pleads quietly, slowly turning me to face him.

“I…I can’t.”

I squeeze my eyes shut behind my glasses.  Even when he reaches up to slip off the eyewear, I don’t open them.

“You
can’t
or you
won’t
?”

“Levi, please.” It’s my turn to beg. “Not here. Not now.”

“Then when?  Tell me when and I’ll be there. Tell me where and I’ll go.”

“I…I…”  I feel short of breath. My pulse is racing, my heart pounding so hard I can feel the beat of it thumping in my fingertips, my ears, behind my eyes. 

When Levi speaks again, his voice is but a stir of air that breezes over my face.  “I hoped you’d be able to see.”

“Why?”

“More than anything, I wanted you to get back that part of you that I had a hand in stealing. I wanted for you to feel whole again.”

“That’s very noble of you,” I say, trying to keep an edge to my voice, but I just hear…sorrow.

“But I had a selfish reason for wanting that, too.” 

I will my chin not to quiver, will my eyes to remain dry behind my closed lids.  “And what was that?”

“I wanted you to be able to see me.  Really
see me. 
See the expression on my face, the look in my eye, the sincerity I feel when I tell you something I’ve wanted to say for a while now.”

My heart is jabbing at my ribs, a boxer beating its opponent into submission.  It’s fighting harder, gaining ground, and my resistance is wearing thin.  I don’t know how much longer I can do this, how many more breaths I can take before I open my eyes.  And then, the instant that happens, I’ll be lost.  I know it. I can
feel
it.

There’s a slight tremble in my voice when I ask,  “What did you want to say to me, Levi?”

He doesn’t answer right away, but brushes his fingers over my eyes, tickling my lashes, teasing my lids.  “Look at me, Evie.”

My mind is screaming
NO!
, but my heart has already won.  Despite how much he’s hurt me, despite how afraid I am, despite all the warnings that I can’t trust him, that I can’t trust
anybody,
even after what he did to his father, despite
all that,
I open my eyes, and I look at him.  Because, once again, I can’t help myself.  He is my weakness.

Up close, I can see him even better.  The light shining from the display at my back shines onto his face, giving me even more detail than I could see in any other object as little as an hour ago.  My vision is getting better by the minute.

And the first color I see is blue.  The blue of his eyes.

A lump forms at the base of my throat, threatening to cut off my ability to talk, to breathe, so it’s with a fist of emotion choking me that I reach up to graze the orbit of Levi’s eye and whisper, “Levi’s blue.”

He closes those brilliant swatches of denim, pain etched in every taut line of his face. “Jesus, Evie, please.”

“Please what?” I ask in a strangled voice.

“Please believe me when I tell you I love you. Because I do.”  He opens up those fathomless dark blue eyes and looks straight into mine.  They’re unwavering, full of emotion. 
He
is unwavering, like he’s willing me to
see
and to believe.  “I love you.  And if you don’t believe me, if you
can’t
believe me, I honestly have no idea how I’m going to take my next breath, my next step.”

I raise a hand to cover my mouth, to muffle the soft sob that bubbles there. I shake my head, still trying my damnedest to fight, even though the fight is over. He’s won.  I know it, deep down, and soon he will, too.  “Levi, I…” I can’t even speak now. I can only
feel.

“Don’t shut me out.  Don’t make me go.  My life was
shit
until I met you.  It was plain and dull and
dead
. You don’t just paint with color. You
are
color. And I won’t ever see color again if you’re gone. I tried to set things right, but…I don’t know if it helped. Just…please give me another chance. Please let me prove to you that you’re the only thing that matters to me.”

“My vision,” I manage to eke out.  “My vision might not last. If there’s swelling…”

I see him frown, like he doesn’t understand the correlation.  “Do you think that will matter to me?”

I shrug.  “I…I don’t know. What if I’m different?”

“I love you, Evian de Champlain.  I’ll still love you, seeing or blind.  I’ll still want to be with you
and only you. 
You’re the
light
in my dark, miserable existence. 
I
was the blind one until you came along. You showed me
everything. 
Color, beauty, life. Love.  My world is nothing without you in it. I’ll be the one who’s blind.  Again. I’ll be blind forever without you. Forever.”

The last word rings like a bell of desperation. And I
feel
that desperation in Levi’s fingers when he winds them around my wrist and brings my palm to his heart, pressing it flat.  “Do you feel that?  That beats
for you.
I don’t know how else to say it, how else to show you, so maybe you can feel it. 
Feel me.
”

Everything narrows to the thud of his heart, tap, tap, tapping against my palm. 
That beats for you.

His heart, it beats for
me.

As mine does for him.

I take a single step toward him, leaning slowly forward until my forehead rests against his chin. The anxious huff of his warm breath beats down on the top of my head, heating me through and through, like his truth, his honesty, his
love
is raining down on me.

Cautiously, as though he’s reaching for a skittish deer, Levi wraps his strong arms around me and draws me close.  And I let him.  In submission, I turn my face to rest my cheek against his shoulder.