True Colors (15 page)

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“I love cooking,” she said. “When I was growing
up, we cooked everything from scratch. We had chickens. There’s
nothing like fresh eggs from your own chickens—who haven’t been fed
antibiotics and commercial feed. The yolks are such an intense
yellow. Like the heart of a daisy.”

He settled on one of the stools at the center
island; it had a molded seat and a backrest and was much more
comfortable than the stool in the loft. Emma’s movements as she
whisked the eggs mesmerized him—yolk and white liquefying and
blending into yellow. Not the heart of a daisy, unfortunately. A
paler yellow, almost lemony.

“Did you grow up on a farm?” he
asked.

“Not a commercial farm.” She turned from him to
swing open the refrigerator again, this time to remove cheese,
mushrooms and chives. The refrigerator’s shelves weren’t as barren
as his usually were—he was a huge fan of take-out, and he stocked
only the essentials in his fridge: milk, beer, a couple of apples,
a bag of bagels that lacked the chewiness and sour undertone of the
bagels he’d grown up eating in Brooklyn. And leftover take-out
containers. Always a varied collection of those.

She pulled a knife from its slot in a wooden
block and began to chop the chives. “My parents are
back-to-the-earth hippies. They were middle-class suburban kids who
met in college and decided to buy a few acres in Vermont and make a
go of it. We had a big vegetable garden and the chickens. We had a
cow for a while when I was really little, but raising dairy cows is
a lot more complicated than just carrying a pail out to the barn
and milking the animal. So my parents wound up selling the cow to a
neighbor who ran a commercial dairy farm, and we’d get our milk
there. It was all very rustic.”

She turned from him once again, this time to
retrieve a loaf of bread and a tub of butter. She clicked a dial on
the stove, igniting one of the burners, slapped the pan onto it,
scooped a blob of butter into the pan, and got busy grating the
cheese.

“Brooklyn must have been quite an adjustment
for you,” he said. He knew full well that there was nothing rustic
about that congested New York City borough.

She grinned. “I went to Boston University.
After four years in Boston, I was used to traffic and noise and
crowds. And eggs that weren’t quite so yellow.”

“Growing up on your parents’—well, whatever it
was. Not a farm.”

“Just a piece of land in the middle of
nowhere,” she said.

He nodded. “So when you grew up there, was your
dream to live in a city?”

Her gaze met his across the center island. If
she could ask him about his dreams, he could ask her about hers,
couldn’t he? Even if he wasn’t going to paint her, even if he was
going to sell this house and return to San Francisco, he could
still ask her about her dreams.

She didn’t seem as uncomfortable as he’d felt
when she’d questioned him. “I can be happy anywhere,” she said.
“City life, rural life, it’s all good.” She poured the beaten eggs
into the pan, creating an appetizing sizzle. “My dream is to have a
roof over my head and some studio space with good
lighting.”

And by selling the house, Max was going to deny
her that simple dream.

But he’d promised to help her find new studio
space. Maybe he could find her housing, too.

Maybe he could bring her back to California
with him.

He stifled a sardonic laugh. That wasn’t going
to happen. She might have given herself to him this morning, but
last night outside the tavern, she’d warned him she wouldn’t make
love with him because he was a businessman. And a landlord. She’d
said that as if landlords were evil.

Perhaps, when they were evicting tenants, they
were.

But she
had
made love with him.
So maybe he had a chance of… Of what? No, he couldn’t bring her
back to California with him.
Get real,
Max.

She deftly flipped the omelet in the pan, then
layered in the cheese and mushrooms and folded the egg around it.
“Can you check the toast?” she asked.

A few minutes later, they were seated side by
side at the center island, each with a plate full of steaming
omelet and golden toast, and a mug filled with coffee she’d
reheated from earlier that day—she apologized about that, but it
tasted fine to him. “This is delicious,” he said after taking a
bite of his omelet. “Obviously, your talents extend beyond
painting.”

“They extend beyond cooking, too,” she reminded
him, twirling her fork to break a stretchy thread of melted
cheese.

Her wicked smile made him grin. “Indeed they
do,” he said, thinking he’d sure as hell like to see how those
talents of hers manifested themselves on a surface more comfortable
than the stairs. Taking a bite of toast, he pondered various
strategies to get her into bed, or at least onto the sleek modern
couch in the great room. Then he reproached himself. He owed her
something more than a satisfying orgasm. He could make her dream
come true, couldn’t he? “So,” he said, “we’ll make sure you have a
well-lighted studio and a roof over your head.”

She seemed momentarily taken aback by his
having changed the subject. Then she shrugged. “I have that now,”
she reminded him. “Right here.”

“No,” he said swiftly, then shook his head and
belatedly tried to soften his words with a smile. “I can’t let you
stay here. I have to sell this house. I’m sorry, Emma.”

“Is it a financial problem? You need the
money?”

The last thing he needed was money. “No. It’s…a
personal matter.”

“This house means something to you,” she
guessed. “Something bad?”

He really didn’t want to discuss it with her.
But he couldn’t lie to her, not when she was so sweet and open with
him. “I bought this house for my fiancée,” he told her.

“Oh.” Something went cold in her face, her eyes
no longer radiant, her lips tightening. “You should have told me
you were engaged.”

“I’m not. Not anymore.”

She thawed slightly. “You got rid of the
fiancée, and now you want to get rid of the house.”

“Something like that,” he agreed. “Except that
I didn’t get rid of the fiancée. She got rid of me.”

The light in Emma’s eyes changed again, warm
with sparks of emerald and gold. “Did she break your heart? The
bitch!”

He was amused and touched by her rush to his
defense. “My heart healed,” he assured her.

“Not completely.” Before he could argue, Emma
explained, “If it had, you wouldn’t be attaching emotions to this
house. It’s just a building, right? A beautiful building with
fantastic natural light—but you wouldn’t be so anxious to sell it.
If you were completely over the bitch fiancée, you’d double the
rent and make some money on this place. I shouldn’t have said
that,” she added with a self-deprecating smile. “If you doubled the
rent, I’d have to move out anyway. I couldn’t afford it. Monica
might be able to, though. Now she’s stuck trying to decide whether
to relocate to a teeny-tiny apartment at the inn or to move in with
her boyfriend, who—just for the record—is an asshole.”

Max wanted to
refute her claim. Of course he was over Vanessa. The only reason he
wanted to sell the house was that he saw no reason
not
to sell it. His life
wasn’t in Massachusetts. He had no use for the house. It was just
more thing to own, one more responsibility, one more liability.
Emma was correct in pointing out that he could increase the rent
and turn the house into a source of income, but he didn’t need any
more income.

He couldn’t say any of those things, though,
because he was too intent on trying to suppress his laughter. He
loved the matter-of-fact way she referred to Vanessa as “the bitch
fiancée,” and her succinct assessment of Monica’s boyfriend. And
then the urge to laugh faded as he acknowledged the truth in her
words. The house was just a building. An asset. If he were truly
over Vanessa, he wouldn’t care about the house’s fate, one way or
another.

Yet it
wasn’t
just a building.
It was Emma’s home. She was the one acutely aware of the building’s
beauty, its natural light. Selling it meant subjecting her to
upheaval, both personal and professional.

“Let’s not talk about the house,” he said. He
didn’t want his mind crammed with Emma’s words, her wit, her sharp
observations. He didn’t want to reflect on that upheaval his
actions were likely to cause her. He ate another forkful of
omelet—damn, it was tasty—and turned the conversation back to her.
“Let’s talk about your ex-boyfriends.”

“Ex-
boyfriends
? Plural?” She grinned.

“I have no doubt you’ve broken dozens of
hearts.”

“Dozens! Yeah, sure. I started dating when I
was three.”

“Up there in the wilds of Vermont?”

“Hmm, you’re right. The only other kid I saw
when I was three was my brother. Who I didn’t date.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“My high school was pretty small,
too.”

“You went to Boston University. That wasn’t
small.”

She conceded with a shrug. “You’re right. There
were at least a dozen guys there. I tried my best to break their
hearts, but I’m not sure I succeeded.” She noticed his plate was
empty and slid off her stool to clear the dishes.

He stood, gathered their mugs and carried them
to the sink. “Surely you broke at least one heart,” he
teased.

“Maybe. If I did, it wasn’t
deliberate.”

They worked together smoothly, rinsing the
dishes, stacking them on the dishwasher racks. “I find it odd that
you’re unattached,” he justified his curiosity. “You’re beautiful,
you’re talented… You’re very sexy.”

Her cheeks grew
rosy. She was even more beautiful when she blushed. He recalled the
blush of her naked breasts, the intensity of her well-kissed lips
when their bodies had been joined.
Beautiful
seemed a woefully
inadequate word to describe her.

“I was with a guy in Brooklyn,” she told him.
“Claudio. He was a painter, too. Abstract expressionist. He liked
dark colors painted with big, strong swipes of the brush. All his
paintings looked like anger to me. But then he developed an
unexpected yearning to paint portraits—of one particular
woman.”

“I take it that woman wasn’t you?”

“No. She was an artist’s model. I guess she
knew some good poses.” Emma shrugged, not seeming terribly upset.
“In retrospect, I think the worst part was that when Claudio and I
broke up, I had to move out of the apartment, because it was his. I
really hate being homeless.” She sighed, shook the excess water off
her hands and dried them on a towel. When she turned to him, she
was smiling. “It’s not your problem,” she said. “You want to sell
this house. That’s your right. I’ll find somewhere else to live.
But now—”she put down the towel and checked her watch “—I’ve got to
find somewhere else to paint. I told Nick Fiore I’d drop by the
community center today to see if he could scare up a studio for
me.”

Max didn’t know
who Nick Fiore was. He
did
know he ought to phone Janet. He had a foundation
to run—even if she could manage the office well enough in his
absence. He ought to phone Stan Weisner, too, to see if they could
arrange a dinner down in Cambridge. He ought to check in with
Andrea to get the house listed for sale. He ought to carry Emma off
to bed and make love to her properly, on soft sheets, on a plush
mattress. Languorously. Indulgently. Wickedly.

But she wanted to go to the community center.
“Can I come with you?” he asked.

An hour passed before Emma and Max left for the
Brogan’s Point Community Center. They decided to shower first. And
even though the house had three and a half well-appointed
bathrooms, they wound up showering in the same bathroom, at the
same time, which slowed things down considerably.

Max’s body was an esthetic masterpiece. Emma
was not just a woman who had experienced several mind-boggling
orgasms, thanks to that body; she was also an artist. She couldn’t
keep herself from admiring the supple, graceful contours of his
physique, the ridges and indentations of his bone structure, the
sleek undulations of his musculature. The sprinkle of hair across
his chest, tapering down to the taut, slightly rippling surface of
his abdomen, transformed from gentle curls to dark streaks as the
shower soaked his skin. His eyes were simultaneously dark with
passion and bright with amusement as he skimmed her body with soap
and watched her twist and writhe come beneath the steaming spray of
water.

She wanted to paint all of him. Not just his
face, not just his dreams but every part of him, from his neatly
angled toes to his knobby knees, to his narrow hips, his navel, his
pecs, his broad, sturdy shoulders, his amazingly beautiful face.
And his groin. She’d like to paint that thick, hard erection, maybe
gild it in gold, frame it in filigree and hang it over her bed to
admire every time she lay there.