The Bride Wore Denim (20 page)

“So no talking about us either?”

“What do you want me to say about us? That I like how you kiss? That would be an understatement. That I was embarrassed when Mia walked in on us this morning? That would be an understatement, too. How do I reconcile the two?”

“Get over your embarrassment.”

“Didn’t I say it was too nice to argue about anything?”

He sighed. He’d harbored the silly, secret idea that getting her alone like this would soften her. Instead, she buried everything and frustrated him in far more ways than one.

Melanie welcomed them and let them into the warm blue-and-red kitchen. They were immediately accosted by Aiden showing off his latest schoolwork.

Small children delighted and befuddled Cole. They were like puppies with the ability to talk, and while that and the fact that they ruled their parents’ world a bit too easily scared him a little, he liked imagining what it would be like to have his own. He had no idea if he’d be any kind of a good dad, but he had his father as a role model. Russ had done all right given the hardships he’d endured.

Harper, on the other hand, claimed to have no ability with children yet took to them like she’d been born a parent. She was patient with Skylar, speaking to her with respect while understanding she was a teenager. She would make a terrific mom.

She explained her mission to Melanie with such enthusiasm, Cole didn’t see how the woman could refuse. And yet, somehow, she came awfully close.

“I know the kids would love it,” Melanie said, “but I’m not sure it’s appropriate. You’d have two young teenaged girls with an older boy. I know Nate, he’s friends with Marcus and a nice kid, but the girls really go for him. I would rather you do something at your house. Or maybe at the barn.”

“It’s honestly not the same, Mel,” Harper said. “The ability for them to find new scenery to paint—things they haven’t seen—is so valuable. And because they’re exploring and seeking out these places by themselves, it’s freeing.”

“But you just made my point exactly. I don’t like the idea of them wandering in the woods where they can possibly be alone and face temptation. Not to mention sleeping arrangements. It’s a regular house. You can’t exactly separate them by floors. You can’t be responsible for a sixteen-year-old boy and two young girls.”

A tinge of pink crept into Harper’s cheeks. She opened her mouth and closed it again. Cole didn’t think, he spoke.

“Oh, didn’t we say? I’ll be there, too. It’ll be my job to keep an eye on young Nate. There won’t be a problem.”

“Really?” Melanie asked.

“Uh . . . ” Harper stared at him but deftly covered her shock. “Yeah, really.”

“And you two? No bad role modeling for the kids?”

Cole couldn’t believe the words had actually come from Melanie’s mouth—was there anything the woman wouldn’t say? He bit his cheeks hard to keep from teasing her with some snide remark and looked to Harper for support.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that even a little.”

Well, that wasn’t even close to the kind of support he’d had in mind. She’d sounded entirely too okay with the good role model part.

“I guess if that’s the case, I might be willing to ask Skylar if she’s interested. Is it okay if I bring her in here now? Go over a few rules if she wants to go?”

“Sure.” Harper chirped like a happy canary.

To nobody’s surprise, Skylar was over the moon. Even her mother’s warnings and instructions couldn’t dampen her excitement. It was nice to see—she’d been so down lately.

“All right!” Harper said when Skylar had agreed to all the conditions. “It’s settled. We’ll leave here Friday early afternoon. I’ll e-mail you, Lily, and Nick with a list of things to bring, okay?”

“Thank you!” Skylar threw her arms around Harper’s neck and then shocked the heck out of Cole by doing the same to him. “This is going to be the best weekend of my life!”

“T
HIS IS AWESOME!
Oh my gosh, thanks for bringing us here. I think I could sit right in the house and draw all weekend.”

Lily was the talker of the group, and Harper laughed as the fifteen-year-old entered the half-empty ranch-style house Cole had grown up in and stared around bug-eyed as if it were a fully decorated and functioning mansion. Before she’d passed away, Charlotte Wainwright had shared many a decorating session with her friend Bella Crockett, and they’d both turned out beautiful rooms and décor. Even though the Wainwright house had been unlived in for three years, some of the stylish earth-toned furniture and art remained. Russ had taken only what he wanted and lived frugally in Jackson. Cole kept the house up when he was home, and Sam had used it as a guest house on occasion. There were two empty bedrooms and two still fully furnished, a sofa bed in the den, and one oversized, overstuffed, comfortable couch in the living room. Plenty of space for five people.

“There’s a TV room past the kitchen that way.” Harper pointed. “There’s a pool table in the basement. I have no rules about when you can or can’t use them, but I hope you’ll take this weekend seriously and spend some time creating. I’ve got a couple of art activities for you, so this will meet the criteria of a school field trip. Cole and I will make the meals, but you all have to help clean up. You can stay up all night if you want to, but no wandering around outdoors other than to the edge of the first field to the lookout spot after dark—it can be dangerous at night, as you all know. The rest is up to you guys, okay?”

As Harper expected, there wasn’t much painting that evening. Nate and Skylar played pool while Lily cheered them on. Then she and Skylar watched a romantic comedy while Nate and Cole built a fire in the fireplace and teased the girls about their sappy movie.

Cole moved about the house like a wolf in his home den, confident, alpha, and protective. He took to the kids naturally, doing exactly what he’d advertised to Melanie—making sure there was nothing untoward or dangerous going on. Yet Harper knew he didn’t do any of it consciously. Nate gravitated to him. Skylar mooned over him. Lily talked his ear off. For all Harper had been shocked at his announcement he was coming, it was blissful to have him there.

The smiles he sent her from across a room, the way he role-modeled chivalry by helping with dinner and dishes, the way his movements—hands, back, torso muscles, legs, butt—made for a better movie than anything they could put in the DVD player, gave her a sense of contentment she’d rarely known.

She wanted to hold onto it forever. But there was Chicago. Now there was Cecelia. And Mia.

Mia. She closed her eyes and made herself analyze the whole sister code intellectually for the first time. She’d always felt it was real—you didn’t date someone your sister had loved.

But, why not? Really, honestly, why not?

The usual list was easy to make: It was wrong to hurt your sister by taking a man she’d left behind and cruelly remind her of a love gone bad; it was wrong to make your sister feel like you’d won someone she couldn’t keep; it was wrong to make your sister wonder if the sex was better with you.

Sister. Sister. Sister.

Harper stopped herself. Why was this only about Mia?

Because where Cole was concerned, she’d always been in Mia’s shadow. Mia was the captured princess. Mia was the homecoming date. The prom date. The girlfriend.

Mia had let him go.

What did she, Harper Lee Crockett, want?

She sat in an armchair in the basement and ogled Cole, who bent over the pool table helping Nate line up a shot. She wanted to stare at him like this without guilt. Kiss him without feeling like she’d stepped out of line with her sister.

She wanted to deserve him.

She’d never deserve him. But couldn’t she enjoy him?

She’d wounded him when she’d said she didn’t want him comparing her to Mia, but whether he did or not wasn’t something she could control. She either trusted him to love her for herself or she didn’t. For her part, she’d never dwelled on his physical relationship with Mia. If she did that, he’d have the right to think about all the men she’d been with.

The truth hit her over the head like a rap with a pool cool. She didn’t care about Mia and Cole’s past. She was worrying about things from her childhood—things she’d conditioned herself to believe were obstacles.

Could it be that simple? Let the past go? Her eyes misted with tears of disbelief. It couldn’t be.

Nonetheless, she balanced her sketch book against raised knees and moved her pencil carelessly and quickly over the paper. A dozen rapid studies of Cole’s body quickly filled four pages, several sketches a page . . . his hands on the cue, his shoulders hunched to take aim, the long line of his back. This one was of his seat and the back of his leg, a firm, muscular, denim-covered curve leading into taut, broad hamstrings. She captured the shapes and then filled in the detail of belt loops, tucked-in shirt, and pocket stitching after he’d moved from his position.

She caressed the drawing with her pencil strokes, adding the folds of denim around his backside from memory, staring at the paper, remembering how safe that body had made her feel a mere three nights before, sleeping on the sofa. She shaded the pocket carefully. She’d snuggle up to this backside in a heartbeat were there no children around . . .

“What are you working on so intently?”

His unexpected voice elicited a full-fledged gasp from her, and her gaze flew to his. With flaming hot cheeks she could only stare a moment, her mouth too dry to form words. And for the first time, she didn’t feel guilt.

“You okay?” Amusement filled his eyes.

“Uh, lost in the moment.” Her voice was raspy. “It happens.”

“Can I see?”

She managed to flip the sketchbook pages slowly, closing it without revealing the embarrassment that would accompany letting him see his rear end in her drawings. “Nope,” she said blithely. “Nobody sees the pre-sketches until I know what I’m doing.

For a second his smile seemed too knowing, as if he actually had seen what she’d done and was only teasing her. Then he nodded. “Fair enough. Want to play?”

She looked across the room to where Nate was hanging up his pool cue. The very last thing she wanted to do was play. The heat creeping through her body needed to dissipate. That wouldn’t happen sharing the pool table with Cole.

“Thanks,” she said, and uncurled herself from the chair. “But I think I’d like to walk out to the lookout and see if the moonlight is casting any fun shadows. I haven’t worked on a night painting for a long time.”

“Okay,” he replied.

“Maybe I’ll ask the girls, too. You boys have any desire to join us?”

“Nah,” Nate said. “I thought I’d try sketching some things I saw along the trail today from memory.”

“Sounds like an awesome idea.” Harper turned to Cole, raising her brow in question.

“Ask the girls. Maybe I’ll build a fire out back.”

Her heart battled between relief and disappointment. “Okay. That’ll be a good way to end the night later.”

The girls agreed to go with her and gathered their sketchbooks and cameras. Harper grabbed a carrying case holding her portable easel and a set of paints. With promises to be back soon, the three of them set out on the quarter mile walk across the Wainwright’s old backyard, through a shallow stand of trees and out into a clearing on the top of a small bluff. It wasn’t high enough to pose a falling danger but stood elevated enough to provide a stunning view of every kind of landscape feature this part of Wyoming offered.

Even in nine o’clock darkness, and although she’d seen this view hundreds of times, the scenery left Harper breathless. The waxing moon hung high enough to turn the valley before them into purple-and-periwinkle shadows. The Kwinaa River, which wound through the entire ranch, was at its widest here, circling the base of a bluff taller than the one they stood on. Beautiful pastureland stretched beyond the river, rising slowly into undulating hills that rolled on toward the same part of the Teton Range visible from the main part of Paradise Ranch.

“Tell me what colors you see,” Harper said. “What paints would you pull out?”

Their answers flew. Purple, black, blue, azure, white.

“Do you see the forest green? How about yellow ochre?” Harper asked.

“Red.” Skylar pointed to a near shadow.

“Yes,” Harper agreed. “My point is, you all see this differently. Everyone could paint this scene and not one finished piece would look like another. That’s the magic of art.”

The girls wandered the bluff, ooh-ing over new perspectives, each finally settling in a different nook. Harper set up her easel and a thin piece of canvas board. In the light from a low-watt flashlight, she squeezed six colors onto a paper palette, used an elasticized hairband to affix her flashlight to the easel so it shone on the canvas, and took out a pencil.

For a long time she sketched in basic perspective lines and the rough outlines of a few key features. She glanced at the girls periodically and smiled at Skylar’s attempts to use a rock as a camera tripod. For the most part, however, she lost herself. They’d left things in status quo at the hospital, and Joely’s care was in the doctors’ and God’s hands; the cattle gathering had been rescheduled for next week. For one perfect moment, there was nothing she could worry about. Her first brushstrokes flowed onto the canvas.

The colors began to pop, and the scene emerged—a study in darks from blacks, blues, purples, and greens layered with diamond splashes of brights: gray, yellow, and pink moonlight. She squeezed a final color onto her palette, now smeared with her mixed hues, a bright turquoise she mixed with purple to get the halo around the fat, gibbous moon.

“I don’t know which takes my breath away more, the real scene or what you captured of it.”

She spun in place and stared at Cole, her brain as fuzzy as if she’d been sleeping, not working. Immediate panic shot her pulse rate through the roof, and she stared around wildly for the girls. Understanding dawned horribly. She’d gone into the crazy trance that overtook her when she loved a painting. She’d failed to keep Skylar and Lily safe.

“Oh no, where are they? What happened?”