Sculpting Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 2) (21 page)

I slid the pizza into the oven, set a timer, and rewarded myself for cooking dinner by pouring myself another glass of wine. Or rather, topping off my mason jar. I accidentally filled it a little too much, and had to quickly lift it up to my lips to slurp off the excess before it ended up spilling on the floor. Couldn't let perfectly mediocre wine go to waste!

Waiting for the pizza to cook, I flopped down on my couch, Salem immediately jumping up to join me. I still had my phone in hand, and decided to maybe send Carter a text. That made sense – this way, he wouldn't need to listen to my voicemail message! If he was in a movie theater, he could just read the message without having to hold his phone up to his ear.

I pulled up a blank text message, frowning down at the screen. "Been thinking about our status re. relationship," I typed out. "Need to talk to u asap. Let me know when u get this."

For a minute, I hesitated, wondering if I should make it more formal, spell out all the words. But that wasn't the point of a text message, right? Light and quick and direct. I hit the send button. Too late to rewrite it now!

Picking up the remote, I put on a mindless show about young people with disposable income choosing to build tiny houses out of trailers, but my eyes kept on straying down to the phone. Why didn't Carter text back? Maybe my message hadn't been clear enough. Maybe I'd used too much shorthand.

Impulsively, I grabbed the phone again. "New revelations," I texted. "Want to talk about moving forward. Important!! Can you talk now?"

There, that seemed more direct. I put the little electronic device aside after hitting SEND, but it was back in my hands before the next commercial break.

"Where are you? What are you doing?" I sent. Not talking about the relationship any more, didn't want to scare him off. Just curious. Like I would be if we were dating, for example. Wouldn't he normally tell me what he was doing, if we were going out? I needed to know that I could trust him, after all.

My mason jar suddenly didn't have any more wine in it. I frowned at it. Hadn't I just filled it up? I got up to go refill it, and also because a timer in the kitchen kept on beeping at me.

Oh right, the pizza! I turned off the timer and pulled the pizza pie out of the oven, waving aside a bit of smoke that also came out, trying to dissipate it before it set off my smoke detector. The pizza looked a little darker than the picture on the box, but not too bad. I set it down on top of the stove, dug my pizza cutter out of where it had wedged itself in a drawer, and did my best to cut the thing into somewhat even slices.

As my stomach rumbled up at me, I reached greedily for one of the pieces – and immediately yanked my hand back as I singed my fingers on the burning hot crust. "Yowch!" I called out, shaking my fingers and sticking them in my mouth.

While I waited for the pizza to cool off, I grabbed the half-empty wine bottle out of the refrigerator, pouring half the remainder into my mason jar. The bottle's cool glass felt good against my fingers, and I held onto it for another moment. I'd probably spilled some of the wine somewhere, I figured, the thoughts in my head suddenly feeling quite fuzzy. That's why the bottle seemed so empty already.

I took a few more gulps of wine and then, sensing that the pizza was still too hot to eat, lunged across my apartment for my phone. No message from Carter. "I can't believe ur ignoring me," I texted him, annoyed. "I want u, and now u don't want me? Call me." There, send.

Twenty minutes later, I picked up the second-to-last pizza slice, wondering whether I had enough room in my stomach for it. I'd really go for some ice cream right about now, but my freezer didn't offer any options on that front. "The more I eat, the less I'll have to put away," I reasoned, taking the slice.

As I balanced the still-warm slice of pizza on the fingers of one hand, I used the other to send another text. "Miss you. Sexy. Don't break up with me."

I paused as I watched that message send, frowning. If we weren't really dating, could he leave me? "Date me, don't break up," I added. Thank goodness for the predictive text thing! I was definitely making a ton of spelling mistakes, but the phone fixed all of them for me. Technology is amazing.

A couple hours flitted by, settling into a pleasant haze of sipping at the wine (despite being a screw top bottle, it seemed to get better with each sip), munching on my slice of pizza, and occasionally checking on my phone to see if Carter had replied. I didn't get any messages back from him, although I sent him one or two more - just quick short ones, to make sure that my phone was still properly sending texts at all.

I yawned, stretching my arms out and nearly knocking over my almost-empty mason jar. Disaster narrowly dodged! I quickly swallowed the last gulp of wine in the glass so that I wouldn't be in any more danger of spilling it.

"Don't leave me," I sent again to Carter, just in case he didn't get the message from the others. "I'll do whatever you earn."

Hold on. Not earn. I'd meant to say something else. I held the phone's screen up closer to my eyes, blinking as I tried to read the blurry words.

This wasn't helping me. I needed to get to bed. I glanced over at the almost empty bottle of wine sitting out on the counter, trying to keep my suddenly heavy eyes open. I hadn't left the oven on, had I?

A quick check confirmed that no, I'd turned everything off. There were only a couple more gulps of wine in the bottle, so I finished it off, dropping it into my recycling bin with a loud clink. There. No waste. Very efficient. Smokey the Bear would be proud of me.

I frowned. Maybe not Smokey, but someone. Some sort of environmental mascot would give me words of praise for recycling. Tomorrow.

But for now, off to bed.

Salem padded after me, following me up onto the bed. I didn't bother brushing my teeth, shrugged off my pants without replacing them with my pajamas, and burrowed under the covers until only my nose poked out. I felt a little guilty for not going through my usual bedtime routine, but another monumental yawn silenced that thought. I reached over, fumbled around until I managed to plug my phone into the charger, and then closed my eyes.

I was out before I even thought to get up and turn off the overhead light.

Chapter Twenty-Five

*

For once, I found myself hoping that I'd go the entire day without a single customer wandering into the Halesford Gallery.

It was Saturday, so Lizzie had the day off. She'd called me this morning, the buzzing of my phone cutting into my hungover brain like a power saw. I groaned, clawed my way out of the covers, and felt around blindly on the bedside table next to me until I managed to close my fingers on the vibrating phone.

"Hey, it's Lizzie!" the girl called out loudly after I managed to answer the phone. "I just wanted to remind you that I'm off today, since it's Saturday. I don't know if Mr. Halesford told you or not, but I can't work Saturdays. Anyway, I'm sure he told you already, so you can just ignore this call. Yeah?"

"Mrrph," I growled at the phone, wishing that she would lower her damn voice a bit. Why did she have to yell? It felt like dull knitting needles were stabbing into my brain.

"Okay, well, I've got to go, but maybe you'll get the weekend rush! Okay byeeeee!" She stretched out that last word, until my twitching finger finally managed to stab down on the right button and end the call.

I flopped over and blinked crusty eyes to stare up at the ceiling, fighting against the blaring pain inside my head. Did I really need to get up and go unlock the gallery? Surely, no one would want to buy artwork, and Uncle Preston would never really know if I skipped a day, right?

After another minute, I felt around for my phone and held it up. Just after eight in the morning. I needed to get moving if I was going to be at the gallery to open up by the posted time of nine AM.

"Aargh," I growled, the sound rising up from a throat that felt like someone had wallpapered it with coarse sandpaper during the night while I slept. "Fine! Dammit, I'm going!"

I fought my way out of the covers, managed to pull myself up into a sitting position on the bed. Salem lifted his head from the foot of the bed, blinking sleepily at me. "Rub it in," I snarled at him, but he just kept on staring as I forced myself up to my feet.

Despite the raging hangover, I somehow managed to get myself dressed in some semblance of decency, poured some day-old coffee down my throat in an effort to wash away some of that sandpaper, and drove to the gallery. I traversed most of the distance at a snail's pace, my head hunched forward and ignoring the honking coming from irate drivers behind me as I blocked their passage.

Despite arriving, through some minor miracle, on time at the gallery, I delayed opening the front doors for a few minutes. Instead, I headed to the back room, where a few minutes of rummaging through the messy back desk's paper-stuffed drawers turned up the forms that I needed. I just had to get de St. James to sign these forms, and he'd be an official collaborator with the gallery, able to put his art on display.

I returned back to the front of the gallery, unlocked the front door, checked outside to see if there were any waiting customers (there were not), and then settled back in behind the front desk. I picked up my phone, pulled up de St. James' number, but hesitated a moment before dialing.

"Testing. Hello. God, I sound awful," I croaked out. The sandpaper feeling hadn't left my throat, and I really did sound like I was doing my best to impersonate a Halloween witch! I grabbed a glass of water, gargled a bit, and finally called de St. James once I felt like my voice was once again understandable.

As I'd hoped, I got de St. James' answering machine. I left a quick message to tell him that he needed to stop by and sign some forms at the gallery and then hung up. Carefully, not wanting to move my head too suddenly, I lowered my face down until my forehead was pressed against the cool surface of the desk.

What happened to me last night? I dimly remembered finishing the bottle of wine, but it must have been half empty already, right? Maybe the alcohol in it had gone bad, or it somehow kept on fermenting because the screw top hadn't sealed it properly. God, I felt like an entire construction crew was inside my head and attempting to jackhammer their way out.

I just needed to keep on hydrating, make it through the rest of the day, and go home to sleep this off, I told myself. As long as no customers came in and bothered me, I could hopefully pull this off.

The morning drifted by, mercifully free of intrusions or old ladies tromping into the gallery and breaking the silence with their loud questions. As lunch approached, I started to hope that maybe, just maybe, I'd manage to make it to the end of the day, get past my hangover, without interruption.

Just as this thought popped into my head, however, I heard the ring of the bell above the front door. With a groan, I lifted my head up from the desk's surface, plastering my best attempt at a fake smile on my face to greet whatever senior citizen had decided to step inside.

But instead of a white-haired senior citizen, a slightly rotund man in perhaps his middle forties, well dressed, with sharp, strong features, stepped inside. He gave me a nod, and I frowned at him. Something about him looked strangely familiar...

He kept on holding the door, and I saw a second shadow approach from outside. I instantly recognized this second newcomer as he stepped in through the door.

"Richard!" I exclaimed, hopping up to my feet. The sudden motion made me wince at how my view shifted alarmingly, but I managed to suppress the faint urge to vomit from the rolling motion. "It's good to see you again! What brings you in here?"

"Well, this guy does," Richard replied, nodding to the first man, the one with the strong and strangely familiar features.

I turned my attention back to him, trying to figure out how I knew him. He had black hair, tangled and dense but recently shorn short. He also had a thick but short-cropped beard, trimmed to a dense rectangle around his chin and reminding me vaguely of an Amish patriarch. His face didn't look like it normally spent much time smiling, but his lips turned up every time that he glanced over in Richard's direction, looking almost shy...

And then, like a bolt of lightning, the connection finally clicked in my mind.

"No," I gasped, feeling my eyes widen as I stared at him. "It can't be - de St. James?"

"Perhaps you should just call me Dean," de St. James nodded, as the smile that had been dancing around his features finally broke free of its bonds and stretched into full life.

"I- but- you look-" I couldn't even finish a sentence. What had happened? When I'd last seen de St. James - Dean - just the afternoon before, he'd been a wreck, unshaven and dirty and wild-haired, practically a shell of a man! I could barely reconcile my mental picture of the artist with the smiling, shyly happy man who now stood in front of me. Just by cleaning himself up, he'd made himself look years younger.

"He looks much better, doesn't he? I certainly think so," Richard commented, stepping over to de St. James. As I goggled at both of them, Richard reached down and slid his fingers into de St. James' hand, holding it tightly. The smile grew even wider on de St. James' face as he held onto the fingers of his partner.