Walk in Beauty (15 page)

“Wow!” Luke whistled softly at the tangles of flowers growing in the room. Big windows lined one wall, and scarlet and white and peach flowers bloomed in pots of every description. The only flowers he recognized were the geraniums and begonias, but there were dozens of others in a splashy palette of colors. From the ceiling hung vines and coleus, and from the tops of every available surface were strings and tangles of plants. He touched a papery pink flower. “You really have a green thumb.”

“This is nothing,” she said with a smile. “You should see my studio. It’s really out of control.” She gestured, oddly formal, for him to sit down at the simple oak table by the window.

“I’d like to,” he said. “See your studio, I mean. I’d like to see your paintings.”

She shifted her head, neither a yes nor a no. He decided not to push it. He sat down, and an awkward little silence fell between them. The table was set with blue placemats and stoneware mugs and a plate of cookies.

“Tea?” Jessie said.

“Sure.” He cleared his throat and looked around.

“I didn’t have any herb teas or anything,” she said. “I don’t drink them.”

“This’ll be fine.”

A blue point Siamese wandered out from below the table to plainly bump Luke’s knee. “Hey, there,” he said, relieved at the diversion, and scooped him up. The cat purred loudly and instantly.

“That’s Blue,” Jessie told him, and she smiled a little more naturally. “He’s a glutton for affection and he’s annoyed with me for going away.”

The cat slumped, delirious with joy, and closed his eyes to lean into the fingers on his head. Luke scratched under his chin.

“Is Tasha okay?”

“Yeah. She’s in the courtyard.” He grinned to himself, thinking of Giselle’s collapse at the truck stop. “Giselle wanted Tasha to sleep with her.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.”

He shook his head. “Ah, she was just having a little breakdown. I had the audacity not to know she didn’t like pickles.”

Jessie laughed, and he found himself letting go of a breath at the natural sound of it. “She’s a monster when she’s tired. She has two speeds, fast forward and stop. When she hits the collapse point, she’s awful.”

“I just gathered her up and put her back in the truck. She was asleep in about five seconds flat.” He let the cat down and sipped his tea. It was hot and sweet. “Mmm. If I’d known she was that tired, I wouldn’t even have bothered to stop.”

Jessie shifted, reaching toward another chair, and Luke was struck with the beauty of her hair spilling over her arms and torso. The natural waves were deepened from the braid she’d worn all day, and it struck him that she’d let it down and brushed it out carefully before he got there. A single barrette caught some of it away from her face. When she straightened, a stack of photo albums in her hands, her hair moved with her, as sensual as silk over flesh. He swallowed and sipped his tea.

“I thought you might want to see these,” she said and glanced away a little shyly. “They’re pictures of Giselle.”

He didn’t reach for them right away. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see them, if he was ready to understand just exactly how much he’d missed. He didn’t know if he could manage any more emotion today.

Jessie, sensing his hesitation, looked up with her enormous golden eyes. “Please, Luke. I can’t make up for you losing the time, but maybe I can fill some of it in for you.”

He studied her and felt his gaze slipping over her face to the tenderness of her lips. A stirring heated his loins. “Tell you what,” he said. “Come sit over here and look at them with me, and it’s a deal.”

She smiled and scooted around, until he could feel her warmth, smell her perfume. Just right. He opened the first book. “Ah, baby pictures.”

It wasn’t as painful as he thought. In fact, it was somehow cozy to sit next to Jessie in her flower-strewn kitchen, feeling her arm brush his every so often, and see how Giselle had grown. More often he found his attention on the curve of Jessie’s cheek than on the photos of a time long gone. His gaze snagged over and over on the delicate silver earring she wore, on the simple curve of her neck, on her hands with their long fingers.

He began to feel restless, smelling her warmth and seeing all the details of her again, so close.

There was only one bad moment. Luke turned a page and found himself face-to-face with a picture of a two-year-old Giselle, laughingly embracing a similarly laughing Daniel. “Damn, he hasn’t changed at all,” Luke said, thinking the picture made Giselle look like Daniel’s child.

“Neither have you, Luke. Not really.”

Next to the first picture was another, this one showing Jessie in a pair of shorts, her long legs tanned and gleaming, as she held up a string of trout. Luke wanted to touch the open expression on her face, the trusting smile she was giving the camera, and wondered who’d snapped the shot.

There were a lot more pictures like that in the second book, pictures of the life Luke had missed out on, pictures of Jessie and Giselle on Christmas morning, pictures of Daniel place-holding where Luke might have been.

And yet, not even the jealousy and regret could blunt the growing wish he felt to have her close to him. As she closed the album, her hair brushed his hand and he turned his hand to let it flow over his palm, silky and heavy. A lock caught on his fingers and he hastily withdrew to let it free.

Before she could pick up the third book in the stack, he asked, “Will you show me your studio, Jessie? I’d really like to see the work you’ve done.”

She bent her head and plucked nervously at the edge of a photo album. After a long moment, she said, “All right.”

“Is it wrong to ask?”

“No.” She seemed about to say something else, but just shook her head as she stood. “This way.”

She led him to a room off the kitchen, probably used as a sun porch in other homes. The first thing that struck him was the smell—oil paint and thinner mixed with the moist notes of potted plants. It was peculiarly evocative and piercing—a smell he remembered and had stowed away in some forgotten place in his mind.

Plants crowded the benches along the windows, big and small, flowering and not, hanging from the ceiling and filling little jars lined up on the sills. He chuckled. “You’re right about the plants.”

She stepped aside, primly folding her hands in front of her. “The paintings are over there, against the wall.”

But he didn’t move right away. Instead, he stayed where he was, letting her get used to him inside her private sanctuary, giving himself time to absorb the intimacy of the smells and sights in the room. There was a futon against one wall, with a Navajo blanket flung over the back, and he saw by the artlessness of it that the blanket was used more for comfort than decoration. He imagined her sitting here late at night, the blanket around her shoulders, a cup of tea in hand.

A nearly completed painting rested on an easel, one of a woman nursing a child. He stepped forward, drawn by the warmth of the brown flesh tones, the curve of the baby’s cheek, the almost audible peace emanating from the painting. “Ah, Jessie,” he said quietly and reached out, not touching the work, but brushing his fingers in the air over it.

He saw a soft, pleased smile touch her lips, and a little of the tension left her shoulders. Encouraged, he moved toward the stack of canvases leaning against the wall and knelt before them. Here was the midwife she’d spoken of, and another of a gaggle of young Spanish women, laughing together in a little knot. Emotion filled his throat as he looked at them. There was exquisite detail and mood in the works, a maturing of the raw style he had so admired when she was younger.

Beside him, she gestured with a fluttery movement, sending the bracelets on her arms into a soft clatter. “I seem to always be painting women,” she said. “Don’t really know why.”

“Jessie… oh, honey.” He shook his head. “These are beautiful. Even better than I expected.” He looked up at her and straightened, intending to tell her more, to tell her exactly what he liked.

But behind her on the wall was the reason she’d been reluctant to bring him here, and it stole the words from him. A painful, sharp pinch touched his chest and he closed his eyes for a minute.

It was a portrait of himself, the painting Giselle must have meant when she told him there was a picture of him in her house. Like all of Jessie’s portraits, it had been rendered on a large canvas. It portrayed Luke ten years before, his hair long and caught back in a single braid that slipped over his shoulder as he bent to ruffle the fur of his dog, Boris. So simple. Luke, shirtless and barefoot beneath a pine, playing with a dog he still missed.

But as with all her work, the details and the mood made it powerful. In the paintings of the midwife, he felt the sturdy strength of a woman who’d spent her life tending expertly to the needs of others. In the mother and child, he felt the peace.

In this simple painting of himself was...love. It was in his face, in his hands, in the eyes of the dog—the love of the painter for the man in her work. It wasn’t blind love, for there was arrogance on his brow and too much pride in the tilt of his jaw, but it was clear and true and powerful.

I don’t think you’ll ever know how much I loved you, Luke.

He closed his eyes again, struggling to keep some semblance of control. Until this moment, until he saw her vision of him, Luke had not grasped how much leaving him had cost her. Thick emotion crowded his throat, pressed into his mouth, and he reached for her hand blindly. He pressed her fingers to his lips. “I’m so sorry, Jessie,” he whispered.

“I thought painting it would help,” she said in a small voice. “But it didn’t.”

There was only one thing he could do. He tugged her hand and pulled her beloved body close to him, folding her into his arms so he could press his lips to her hair. He held her tight, clinging for the strength she gave him, trying to find some way to breathe again. He tried to speak and could only say her name, over and over, like a prayer.

Jessie wept into his chest, curling her fingers into the flesh of his back with painful force. Luke embraced her, kissing her temple and stroking her hair, aching for all the things that could never be undone, all the days they had lost, all the broken dreams they’d shared. “Jessie,” he whispered, touching her chin.

She lifted her face. “You can’t imagine how many times I wished you’d just step out of that painting,” she said. Her slim fingers traced his jaw. “So many times, Luke. And here you are.”

“Here I am.” He bent to kiss her, gently brushing her lips, then the tracks of her tears. He kissed the side of her jaw and her eyelids and the end of her nose, asking forgiveness, offering the only healing he knew how to give. She leaned into him, her body ceasing to shudder and tremble, her spine softening under his hands. Her breasts and belly warmed him.

A thundering pounded in his blood, slow and deep. All he had ever really wanted was Jessie, and wood for his hands, and children to love. Once more he drank of her mouth, tasting the lingering sweetness of her tea and a hint of vanilla from the cookies. He curled his hand around the slender column of her neck, sliding his hand below her collar to touch the heat of her shoulder. Their tongues danced and swirled, making him dizzy. Her hands restlessly moved on his back. His knee bumped her thigh and he used the small awkwardness to pull her closer, lacing his legs between hers.

There was thick silence around them, the stillness of deep night and winter. But as Luke began to open the buttons of her blouse, he heard music all through him, the music of the wild ocean that was Jessie mingling with the deep, pounding drums of his blood. Her flesh was soft as doeskin, and he opened his palm over the upper swell of her breast. She swayed a little and clutched his arms, making a soft, warm sound.

Without hurry, he pushed the blouse from her and she let it fall to the floor. Luke found the clasp of her bra and tugged it open, and then her breasts were against his palms, warm and infinitely soft. “Oh, Jessie,” he whispered, stroking her. He stopped kissing her for a moment to see her, to give his eyes something to savor.

In the low yellow lamplight, her pale skin took on a sheen of warmth and her hair glittered around her like a shawl. He touched a length of the warm brown mass of it, caught it in his hand and lifted it to his face. “I love your hair,” he said. “I worried sometimes that you would have cut it off.”

She shook her head. “No.”

He raised a hand to curl it around her breast, stroking the rosy aroused tip with his thumb, gauging the fit against his palm. A smoky expression darkened her eyes, and she reached for the buttons on his shirt. “I want you,” she whispered.

He didn’t want to end up on the floor again, and glanced over her shoulder toward the futon in the corner. A part of him was afraid if he paused, she would have time to think, and would stop and push him away. Another part of him wanted to make sure this was something they did with their heads as well as their hearts.

He took her hand and led her to the futon. “Help me with this,” he said, tugging at the foot of it.

But she didn’t move. Luke yanked the futon into a bed. Then he straightened, meeting her eyes across the vastness of the mattress. With calm, deliberate movements, he unfastened the buttons of his shirt, then carelessly tossed it aside. He waited, wanting her with a wildness he kept hidden.

In the quiet of the night, she paused, staring at him with an unreadable expression in her eyes. Standing there dressed only in her skirt, her hair only barely cloaking her breasts, she was as powerfully sexy as she’d been that day on the rocks.

Her gaze flickered, straying from his face to lick at his body, and Luke knew that her hunger was as deep as his own. She met his eyes and ceremoniously lifted her arms to remove her bracelets, turning to carefully place them on the windowsill. She turned back and knelt on her side of the bed. She lifted her hand. “Luke.”

He dove toward her, snagging her close against his chest. “Touch me, Jessie,” he groaned, aching with long dampened hunger.

“Oh, yes,” she whispered, as she lifted her hands to stroke his chest and belly, his hips and the outside of his thighs. He cupped the sides of her breasts and suckled her neck.