A Season of You Page 8

  So why did he feel like he was back in junior high trying to figure out how to ask Hannah Shapiro out on his very first date?

  He wiped his palm on his jeans.

  Knock. Smile. Give her the Tupperware. See what happened next.

  Man up.

  Suddenly he’d forgotten how to breathe, but he managed to raise his hand and knock. The sound seemed to echo. Then, silence.

  Shit. Was she even home?

  But before he could work out what his Plan B was, there was the skittering sound of dog claws on floorboards, followed by a happy bark and Mina’s somewhat muffled voice saying, “Sit.” Then the door opened.

  Mina.

  Wearing an old white shirt and tight black jeans that showed off her long legs and looking somewhat surprised to see him. “Will?”

  “Er, hi,” he said. God. Gorgeous. Every time he saw her, that was all he could think. She’d worn some sort of dark green complicated sweater wrap thing at the meeting that had hidden her shape. But her white shirt hung open and beneath it she wore a tight black tank that followed the lines of her body with devotion. He wrestled his reptile brain back into submission and lifted the Tupperware container. “I brought this back for you.”

  “Oh.” She looked at the container, but before she could say anything else, Stewie lunged past her and stuck his nose at Will’s crotch. Or maybe he was after the spiced apple muffins Will had grabbed from the bar’s kitchen before he’d left that were currently in the paper bag he had in his free hand.

  “Crap. Stop,” Mina snapped, grabbing for his collar. “Sorry,” she said as she hauled Stewie back.

  “No problem,” Will said. “Dogs will be dogs.” He looked at her hopefully, willing her to invite him in. He held up the bag with the muffins. “I brought you a couple of Stefan’s muffins. They’re pretty good. Not as good as your cookies. But don’t tell him I said that or he’ll cut off my supply.”

  “You brought me muffins?”

  “Anyone who sat through that meeting deserves a reward.” He held out the bag. “Apple spice. They’re good.”

  Stewie whined a little, straining his nose toward the bag. Apparently he agreed with Will’s assessment of the muffins.

  “Oh,” Mina said again. “That’s … nice of you.” She stepped back, keeping hold of Stewie. “Do you want to come in?”

  He wasn’t going to wait to be asked twice. “Sure,” he said. Keeping the muffins out of Stewie’s reach, he followed her into the house and down the hall to the kitchen.

  Last time he’d been here, the place had been closed up, blinds down, not many lights on, and he’d been too focused on Mina to pay much attention to his surroundings. Now the light seemed to come from all around him, making the room almost dazzling. He squinted a little, taking in the view of endless ocean beyond the headland that seemed to fill the windows forming half the wall on the far side of the room. The effect was slightly disconcerting, like the house was actually surrounded by the waves.

  Too much water.

  Turning, he put the Tupperware down on the counter along with the muffins. “You better keep these out of Stewie’s reach,” he said, pushing the bag toward Mina. “We had a Lab when I was a kid. He was huge. And good at stealing food off counters.” Stewie was now sitting by Mina’s feet, gazing intently up at the exact place on the counter where the bag sat, doing a good impression of a dog who hadn’t been fed in days.

  Mina smiled down at the dog. “Stewie’s mostly well behaved.” She opened the bag to inspect the contents. “Would you like one of these? Or coffee?”

  He wasn’t going to say no to that invitation. “Both.” He nodded toward the small coffee machine. “I can do coffee if you do the muffins.”

  Mina hesitated. “That kind of feels like asking you to do your job in my house.”

  “I like making coffee,” he said. “That’s why I do it at the bar and not Stefan.” He moved over to Mina’s small espresso machine. If he was remembering correctly from the night he’d stayed over, the coffee beans were in the farthest of the set of bright blue canisters that sat on the counter next to it.

  “In that case, sure,” she said. “Though if you can’t be bothered, I have one of those pod gizmos as well.”

  “Perish the thought,” he said.

  She laughed. “I guess I shouldn’t confess to you that half the time I use that instead of bothering with the machine?”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “Will Fraser. Coffee snob.”

  “Not a snob. I’ll drink most forms of caffeine. But I like espresso best.” He reached for the coffee. “By the way, if you want notes from the meeting for Bill, I have mine.”

  “Notes?”

  “I noticed you stopped taking notes. Thought maybe your head was hurting.” Angie’s meetings were enough to give anyone a headache. “How is your head by the way?”

  Mina flushed. “Practically good as new.” She stared up at him, expression … nervous.

  Had he said something wrong? He searched his memory. Muffins. Coffee. Meeting notes. Nothing controversial.

  “Can I draw you?” Mina blurted.

  That wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting. Not your average conversational opener. “Draw me?”

  “You know. Paper. Drawing stuff. Pictures.” Her hand made a fluttering gesture in the air. He wasn’t sure if she was picturing the moves she’d make with a pen or trying to wave off the fact she’d made the request at all.

  “No, I don’t know,” he said. “I can just about draw stick figures. I saw you…” Wait. She might not want to know he’d realized what she was drawing. “… doodling in the meeting. You draw seriously?”

  A shoulder hitch. “I paint, mostly.”

  She painted. How had he lived on Lansing for over five years and didn’t know that Mina Harper painted? Secrets were hard to keep in a place this small. “What kind of paintings?”

  “Watercolors, mostly. Landscapes. Seascapes. That kind of thing.”

  “And you want to draw me?” He couldn’t quite get his head around the idea. Or what it might mean.

  “Sometimes I like to sketch too.” Her cheeks had turned pink, as though she was regretting she’d brought up the subject at all. “If it’s a problem, then don’t worry—”

  He moved, caught her hand before she could wave him off. “It’s not a problem.” Hell, if it meant spending more time with Mina, he’d probably do any damn thing she wanted. Which meant he was a fool, but not fool enough to give up the opportunity. He let go of her hand before she could get uncomfortable with the contact. Tried to pretend his hand wasn’t tingling where he’d touched her.

  Drawing. He’d think about that instead. “Here?” He looked around the kitchen and the cozy living room beyond it. No sign of any art supplies. You needed easels and whatever to paint, didn’t you?

  “No. Upstairs.”

  Ah. Right. The mysterious staircase. It made sense, now he was thinking about it. The upper floor of the cottage, which only took about two thirds of the space of the lower, judging by the outside, had windows on all sides. Big windows. Lots of glass. He’d always assumed—not that he’d ever thought too hard about it—that it was to take advantage of the views from the headland. But maybe it was about light. Painters liked light, didn’t they? He’d suffered through art classes in elementary school and a few compulsory ones in junior high, but none of his teachers had ever suggested he explore any further.

  Fine by him. He’d always been more interested in the sciences. The chemistry that his grandfather had told him about. So he knew jack shit about painting. Only that Mina liked it apparently, so he was going to have to try and not sound like a dumbass. “Now?”

  She nodded. “Good light right now.”

  Light. Right. He’d been correct about that then. He folded the top of the muffin bag back down.

  “Ready?” she asked, practically bouncing on her toes.

  He nodded at the staircase. “Sure. L
ead the way.”

  The staircase was dark. There was a door at the top of the flight of stairs as well as the bottom, closing off any view of what lay beyond. He followed Mina up the stairs, trying not to stare at the sway of her hips. When she opened the door and light poured down, dazzling him.

  He emerged into the room beyond the doorway, blinking, unable to see anything for a minute. When his vision cleared, the first impression was that he was floating somehow. Everything that wasn’t glass was painted white, and everything that was glass was flooding light into the room, so the ocean visible out of the windows on two sides of the room and the land on the other one seemed oddly close. The wall with the door was more solid, the only windows running along the top foot or so of it. But even looking there didn’t give much relief as nearly every inch of the plaster was covered with paintings.

  The ocean, he realized as they came into focus. A thousand moods of blue and gray and green. Not just the view out the windows—though that was there in multiple versions—but other beaches and seas and oceans. Some of them had to be other parts of the island, but some of them, he thought, might be other places. Or maybe imaginary.

  He moved closer as Mina bustled around the room, dragging a wooden chair from against one of the walls to the center of the room, studying the images. Mina’s seas were gorgeous. But restless. No calm waters. No, these had waves and eddies and sprays of white crashing into sand. Some were outright stormy.

  And what exactly did that say about her?

  Not to mention the fact that there wasn’t a person to be seen in any of them. Not so even as much as a boat. Just miles and miles of endless ocean. He turned back to Mina. Those eyes, a shade that would fit right in with the stormier of her seascapes, were fixed on him.

  “Come sit over here.”

  She stood by an old wooden chair set before an empty easel almost as tall as she was.

  He would have liked to study the paintings a little longer, to see if there was any secret to be found in the images she’d made, but the sound of her voice drew him toward her as surely as she had him on a line. His heartbeat seemed loud in his ears, pounding as she watched him. The expression on her face was … well, the closest he could come was sexual. The last time a woman had seemed quite so fascinated by his face had ended with both of them naked.

  So he sat, feeling those eyes on his skin and trying not to think about how much he wanted to touch her.

  That was pretty much a lost cause. Near impossible to think about anything else with her watching him that way, pupils flared despite the bright light. He didn’t dare move. Didn’t want to risk shattering the moment.

  The sun warmed the left side of his face, the light stronger from that direction. But he stayed still, breathing in the smell of her. He wanted to taste the scent of her, like he would breathe in a great whiskey. Letting the separate parts that made up the whole sink into him until he had her memorized. She wore perfume, something spicy and warm. That was the strongest note. There was ginger in that scent and something smoky. But not the earthiness of wood smoke, something more exotic. Like incense or the smell you might get if you burned some exotic flower. But there was more to it than that. The salt of the sea, perhaps, and a tiny thread of something herbal from shampoo or body lotion. And then the note that wove through it all. The smell that was purely Mina.

  But just when he thought he might have gotten all of it, she moved away, breaking the spell. The floorboards protested with a screech as she dragged the easel away and replaced it with another battered wooden chair. After she’d placed that to her satisfaction, she moved again, movements almost a prowl, lowering sheer blinds over several of the windows, including the one facing him.

  When she had the light corralled to her satisfaction, she pulled a big black sketchbook out of a drawer in an old cabinet standing in one corner of the room and a handful of pencils out of another drawer and finally, finally came back to him, sinking onto the chair facing him.

  “Am I meant to pose?” he asked, as her gaze settled on him again.

  “No. I need to look for a little while.”

  “Look all you want.” The words came out a little more fervently than he intended.

  God, he was going to make an idiot out of himself.

  Mina was here, focused on him. Interested in his face. Drawing him. He had no idea what it meant, but it was several steps past vaguely knowing who he was. Or inviting him to Thanksgiving. Him and his brother. That was politeness, he suspected. Possibly prompted by Lou. Sympathy for the outsiders combined with Mina wanting a way to make it up to him for Stewie damaging the car.

  But this? This was just Mina and him. She’d asked him to pose for her. She wanted to draw him. Him. And he wasn’t willing to give up a single second of it. Even if the closest he ever got to her was her pencil tracing the lines of his face on paper. “I’m good,” he said, moving his hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I get kind of lost in it. So yell if you get a cramp.”

  Lost in it. He knew how that felt. He could get lost in her face. He didn’t think he’d ever really had a chance to just sit and look at her for quite this long. It wasn’t cool to stare at women and it was downright creepy when they were clearly involved with someone else, so he’d kept his eyes to himself.

  He’d tried to forget everything he knew about Mina’s face. To erase the sharp chin and big eyes and the hair that was dark but threw reddish highlights like sun glinting off whiskey when she was in the light now that she’d stopped dyeing it black. He’d locked it away. Dated other women. Which hadn’t worked out.

  And now here he was, alone with her. Able to watch her. To count the smattering of freckles across her nose. To see how her mouth curved as she focused on the paper, apparently pleased with whatever it was she was getting down. And just now, to envy the fact that she was able to get something down on paper to keep her memory alive. It was enough to make a man want to take up art. Unfortunately he knew his artistic limitations. Like he’d told Mina, stick figures were about it. He left the artistic side of the business to Stefan.

  “I’ll try and hold your attention,” he said.

  “Probably won’t have to try too hard,” Mina said, almost absently.

  If he hadn’t already been sitting still, he would have frozen in place.

  What could he possibly say to that? Mina found him attention-worthy? Not what he’d expected to hear. And maybe she’d given away more than she’d intended—in fact, watching as pink stole over her cheeks and her teeth caught her bottom lip just for a second he was certain she had—but that little slip of her tongue had made his day. Though, watching the exact spot where her teeth dented the soft curve of her mouth, he wanted to make it even better.

  He fought to keep still, to not rise out of his seat and pull her close and find out just what that lip tasted like. That way lay disaster. His fingers dug into his thigh, his gut tightening with the same force.

  Mina Harper was dangerous up close it seemed.

  If she could do this to him with just her gaze, then what might the rest be like?

  Incendiary, if he had to guess. The kind of heat that left scorch marks and a hunger for more.

  But he’d never know if he did something stupid and spooked her. She was a widow. She’d been wrecked by life once—twice when you counted losing her father—and had survived. He wasn’t going to be the one who wrecked her a third time. So he would tread cautiously. Treat her with the care she deserved. Wait and see what happened. Let her set the pace, if there was any pace to be set.

  Even if it killed him.

  Which judging by how fiercely he wanted to touch her when this was only the third time he’d been in any sort of close proximity to her, it was likely to do.

  But he’d rather die frustrated than regretting having hurt her.

  So he would sit here and burn.

  Or think of a distraction.

  Like conversation. There was an idea. He wasn’t sure he remembered how to stri
ng two words together, but sounding like an idiot had to be better than sitting here hoping she couldn’t read everything he was feeling in his face. Or his body. He’d hadn’t been this glad of the tail of a shirt lying over his lap since he’d been in the grip of teenage hormones.

  Talk, idiot.

  Right. Move mouth. Make sound.

  Distract the hard on.

  He cleared a throat that felt suddenly like he’d swallowed a mouthful of Lansing Island sand.

  “So, you’re an artist,” he said. “Why didn’t I know that?”

  Gray-green eyes lifted their focus from the sketchbook to him. Then lowered again. “Not many people do.”

  “Why not?”

  She lifted her head again, expression suddenly wary.

  “I mean, I’m no art critic but those paintings are amazing.” He waved at the wall behind her.

  She twisted to look in the direction of his gesture. When she turned back her cheeks had pinked up again. He was beginning to be very fond of that flush of color over her skin. It warmed her eyes. Made her look a little disheveled. He’d like to see what she looked like if he ever got to muss her up properly. Find out what other parts of her body might flush and warm like sunrise pouring over all that creamy skin. He swallowed. Art. They were supposed to be talking about art.

  “It’s kind of new,” she said. “So it’s not something I wanted to share until I knew what I wanted to do with it.”

  “You didn’t paint before? When you were—” He cut himself off before he finished the sentence. This wasn’t the best time to bring up Adam. “Younger,” he said instead. Lame save, but better than blurting the word “married” into the middle of whatever this thing that might be starting between them might be.

  “I did art in high school.” She looked back down at her sketchbook. “But then life got … busy.” Her pencil was moving steadily over the paper, the rasp of it like a whisper.

  He couldn’t see what her drawing looked like—the sketchbook was tilted back toward her. But then, he was more interested in the woman than the picture.

  Busy. She’d married at eighteen. He knew that much. The first time he’d ever seen her, she’d been standing on the dock down in Cloud Bay, waiting for the ferry. He’d been minding his own business, waiting for Stefan who’d gone to L.A. for the day. They’d only been on the island a month or so. Finding their feet. And then he’d seen Mina, standing in the sunlight, wearing a simple red tank top and tattered denim shorts, dark hair piled up on her head, and looking so goddamn carelessly beautiful that for a moment he’d lost his breath entirely as the world shifted beneath his feet.