She slept for over an hour. When she began stirring, he slipped back under the blanket with her, crowding her against the back of the couch. Her legs felt like silk; her breasts flattened gently against him, making his head spin. Gently he rubbed the back of one finger against the underside of a plumped-out breast, reveling in the satiny smoothness. He wanted to taste her, suck her, but his frustration level was so high he knew if he did, there wouldn’t be any stopping.
She stirred again, wrinkling her nose and making a disgusted sound, as if she hated waking up. Richard watched her closely, anticipating that moment when her eyes opened and awareness hit her. He couldn’t wait to hear what her first words would be.
She stretched, the movement rubbing her body all along his and making him grit his teeth. Her eyelashes fluttered, and sleepy blue eyes looked at him. “Hi,” she murmured, an incredibly sweet, drowsy smile curving her lips. She blinked a couple more times, focused, and he saw her eyes widen. She froze in his arms. “Oh my God,” she said.
He laughed quietly and kissed her temple. “Don’t panic.” He didn’t think his balls could survive another attack from her knee, even an inadvertent one.
Her face was crimson. “We—I—” she stammered, unable to look at him. She put her hand on his chest and then snatched it away, as if startled by the feel of bare skin.
“It’s okay, sweetie. Nothing happened.”
“The hell it didn’t,” she blurted, then blushed even more.
“I made you come.” He kept his voice calm. “I did it deliberately, to get you warm.”
“I would call that something,” she snapped.
“Then call it heavy petting, to use a high-school term. I sure as hell wouldn’t call it anything more, or I wouldn’t be as damn frustrated as I am.” Gently he brushed a curl back from her flushed face. “We need to talk.”
She paused, looking truculent, but finally sighed. “Okay. Let me get up and get dressed, and put on a fresh pot of coffee—”
“I like you right where you are.” Once she put some distance between them, she would throw up her defenses again, and he wanted some answers. Until he had them, he intended to keep her mostly naked and half under him. Touch was a powerful force, making babies thrive and gentling the most fractious of women. It had a powerful effect on him, too. Slowly he stroked his hand over her back, feeling the delicate vertebrae of her spine, the smooth warmth of her skin.
She must have sensed his determination, because she was motionless in his arms, waiting. “Unless you have an explanation for what’s causing you to go into shock this way, I’m taking you to a doctor,” he said. “Today. Even if I have to wrap you in this blanket and carry you the way you are.”
She exhaled through her nose, huffing her displeasure. She didn’t look at him but stared over his shoulder. Her evasion made him think there was indeed something going on that was causing her to have such drastic reactions. “Richard—”
“Sweetie,” he countered, with the exact level of impatience she had used. She darted a suspicious glance at him, not quite certain what he had said. He managed not to smile.
“All right,” she said abruptly. “I’m usually cold, but not like—not like today.”
“Or day before yesterday?”
“Or then,” she agreed. “Both times, I walked in my sleep the night before.” She pressed her lips together, looking both mutinous and worried.
She evidently thought that was explanation enough, but Richard didn’t. “I’ve never heard of sleepwalking causing anyone to go into shock.”
Mutiny began to override worry in her expression. “Well, that’s what happened, whether you believe it or not.”
There was more, and she was determined not to tell it. Without another word Richard got up and tucked the blanket around her, wrapping it tight so she couldn’t get even her arms free. Then he picked up his pants from the floor and stepped into them.
“Hey!” She began wiggling frantically, trying to fight her way out of the blanket.
“Don’t bother.” He zipped his fly and buckled his belt. “I’d just have to wrap you up again before I take you to a doctor, and you know I can do it. I’m a helluva lot bigger than you, and a helluva lot stronger.”
“Bully!” she threw at him.
“Yep, but a concerned one.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead.
Whether it was the concern or the kiss that did it, or maybe her realization that he meant what he said, he saw her expression change. The look she gave him was almost frightened. “It isn’t just sleepwalking,” she said, her voice so low he could barely hear her. “Both times I’ve painted something in my sleep, too.”
Sleep-painting? Interested, he sat down on the edge of the couch, trapping her between his hip and the couch back. “Why would that be such a shock to your system?”
She bit her lip. “There was an old hot dog vendor who worked a corner about four blocks from the gallery. He had the sweetest expression of anyone I’ve ever seen. Day before yesterday, when I got up I noticed the canvas I’d been working on had been moved, and another one was on the easel in its place. The p-painting on the easel was of the hot dog vendor, with blood coming out his nose and pooled around his head. In the painting he was dead. That was the first time it happened.”
“Painting in your sleep, or being so cold?”
“Both. That afternoon, I found out the vendor really was dead, though I had seen him just the day before.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. Bad coincidence? That was stretching the boundaries of logic, but unless she had a lot more to tell him, he couldn’t think of anything else it could be but coincidence. “And this morning?”
She gave a low, harsh laugh. “This morning, when I saw the canvas had been moved again and another was in its place, all I could think was that someone else I knew had died. I was too scared to look at it, because I was afraid—terrified—that I had painted you.”
The meaning behind that admission went through him like a bolt of lightning. He clenched his fists to keep himself from reaching for her. He didn’t dare touch her now, or they wouldn’t get out of bed until sometime tomorrow. The look she gave him was stripped bare of the layers of prickly defenses she usually kept between her and the world.
“Did you?” he asked, and managed to keep his voice calm. He had the feeling she was grateful he hadn’t pounced on that telling admission.
She laughed again, this time with real amusement. “No. I painted shoes. Two of them. One man’s, and one woman’s.”
He grinned at the incongruity. “Shoes, huh? This may start a new trend. Some people would be able to read all sorts of deep meaning into two lonely, mismatched shoes.”
She snorted. “Yeah, the same people who buy a VanDern and think they’ve bought anything a monkey couldn’t reproduce.”
The disdain in her voice made him laugh. Now he felt able to touch her again, so he lifted another curl and watched it wrap around his finger. He examined the curl, rubbed his thumb over it to separate the silky strands, and carefully considered his next question. Maybe it shouldn’t be a question at all. “Now tell me why you were convinced that if you had painted me, I would be dead.”
He glanced at her in time to see the panic in her eyes. “You’ll think I’m crazy,” she said.
“Try me. I’m not leaving you alone until I know what’s going on.”
She wiggled again, frowning impatiently at the blanket. “Let me out of this thing. I feel as if I’m in a straitjacket, and considering what I just said, it’s making me very uncomfortable.”
Smiling, he tugged hard on the blanket, loosening it. She started to push it aside, then remembered she was almost naked and settled for tucking it under her arms. She sighed. “About a year ago, weird things began happening.”
“Weird, how?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, traffic lights turning green whenever I approached, parking spaces at the front of the row emptying just as I got there, that sort of thi
ng.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Convenient.” He remembered how fast the trip from the gallery to here had been. It had been almost miraculous, the way traffic had cleared out of their way. It had irritated the hell out of him, because he had been looking forward to spending more time with her.
“Yeah, I kind of like that part. And I like the way the plants look. Before, they tended to die on me, but now, no matter what I do, they just keep growing and blooming.” She pointed at a plant with delicate pink blossoms. “That’s a Christmas cactus. This is the sixth time already it has bloomed this year.”
He rubbed his jaw. “I assume it isn’t supposed to do that.”
“Well, it never has before.”
“What else?” There had to be something else. Traffic signals and parking spaces wouldn’t make her this uneasy.
She shivered suddenly, alarming him. But her skin remained smooth, and he realized it was her thoughts that had made her shiver. She stared at him, blue eyes stark and haunted. “I began seeing ghosts,” she whispered.
CHAPTER
TEN
Sweeney couldn’t tell if he believed her or not, and for a moment it didn’t matter. The relief at having told someone else was enormous, and until now she hadn’t realized how much strain she had been under, facing this alone. His dark gaze never wavered from her face, and his hand remained gentle in her hair.
Then she realized that it did matter what he thought. It mattered very much. Three days before she wouldn’t have believed she could respond to any man the way she did to him. She was uncertain how he had become so important to her so fast, but she couldn’t argue with the truth. And it was because he was important to her that she cared about his opinion. What if he thought she was a crackpot and decided she was more trouble than she was worth?
Suddenly she couldn’t look at him, and she felt her face heating again. Oh, God, where had her sense of caution gone? How had she let a threat to take her to the doctor, of all things, convince her to spill her guts like that? She had even been thinking of going to a doctor herself, just to see if her constant chill was in any way caused by a physical ailment. As threats went, that one was a real wimp.
“I don’t know why I told you all that,” she mumbled.
He merely looked at her and continued to play with her hair. “Yes, you do,” he finally said in a mild tone. “How do you know they’re ghosts?”
“Because they’re dead,” she said irritably, and scowled at him. “When you go to someone’s funeral and then see him in the supermarket parking lot a month later, you pretty well know something strange is going on.” She didn’t know what to make of that cryptic “Yes, you do,” so she ignored it.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s a given.” His mouth quirked as if he was struggling to hide a grin, and she wondered just what it was about her that he thought was so funny. He frequently looked as if he was trying not to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are. You’re so busy trying to rebuild your fences to keep me out you haven’t realized I’m already in the pasture with you.”
“We agreed not to get involved—”
“That’s not exactly how I recall it,” he drawled. “We’re already ‘involved.’ We agreed not to have sex. We haven’t, though I have to tell you, sweetie, it was mighty tempting.”
He was doing something funny to her name, she thought, fluttering the n or something like that. Maybe it was caused by that remnant of a Virginia drawl that she had never before noticed, though she didn’t know how she could have missed it. And he really should put on his shirt, instead of leaning over her half-naked like that. The guy in the Diet Coke commercial didn’t have anything on Richard in the chest department. His chest was broad, and muscled, and wonderfully hairy, and she wanted to lay her hands on his pecs, feel his heart beating against her palm, somehow bank his heat against the cold hours when he wasn’t there.
“Tell me more about the ghosts,” he coaxed.
Well, she had already let the cat out of the bag, so she might as well tell him everything. He looked as if he had settled in for the duration, determined not to move until he heard the whole story. “The first time was in Clayton, a year ago. A little boy named Sam Beresford died of leukemia, and a month after that I saw him in the supermarket parking lot, trying to get his mom to see him, talk to him, anything.”
“Sad,” he commented, and she nodded.
“Then I began seeing more and more, and Clayton is such a small town I knew most of them by sight, even if I wasn’t actually acquainted with them. They’d wave, and I’d catch myself waving back, or saying hello, and people were beginning to give me really strange looks, so I knew I had to leave. There are a lot of ghosts here, but they’re New Yorkers; they rarely speak.”
He almost grinned again, but caught that one, too. “I guess seeing ghosts would be a problem in a small town,” he murmured.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” She sighed, her eyes somber. “I wouldn’t believe me either, if it wasn’t happening to me.”
“I didn’t say that.” He stopped playing with her hair and cupped her cheek. “I’m open on the subject of ghosts. Tell me more.”
She shrugged. “They’re sort of translucent, and two-dimensional. When they speak, the sound is tinny. And they always know I can see them. I don’t know how, but they do.”
“You saw the vendor, the one you painted? That’s how you know he’s dead?”
“He came up behind me on the street. He asked me to send a sketch I’d made of him to his sons. But how did he know I had made a sketch? I did it the night he died. I never had a chance to show him.”
“Did you send the sketch to them?”
She nodded. “Yesterday.”
“Do you still have the painting?”
She looked startled. “Sure. Why?”
“I’d like to see it. Just curiosity.”
She started to sit up and remembered her state of undress. Considering he had already seen her breasts, and touched them, and considering everything else they had done together, if she had been sophisticated, she would have nonchalantly gotten up and gotten dressed. “I guess this is proof I’m not sophisticated,” she said, looking up with a rueful smile to find his dark gaze already locked on her.
Her heart fluttered, or maybe it was her stomach. Something fluttered. He really shouldn’t look at her that way, there was no telling what sort of damage he was doing to her internal organs.
“What is?”
She gestured to her clothes. “Turn your back.”
“Ah.” He nodded in understanding, but he didn’t get up. That dark gaze was so intense she was afraid to try to read what was in it, though she didn’t know if she was afraid he wanted too much from her, or too little.
He rubbed his thumb over her lips, then lightly over one cheekbone. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then he said, “I’m expediting the divorce.”
So he could be with her. She couldn’t play games and pretend she didn’t understand the meaning behind that statement. He wanted her, and he was moving legal mountains to get her. It was exhilarating to be the object of such determination, but it was a little—a lot—frightening, too.
She was comfortable alone, comfortable with her life, but in that moment she accepted that things were going to change. He was going to change them. More important, she wanted them to change. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be part of a couple. She wanted to give this relationship thing a shot. Life was a lot more predictable when she had only herself to consider, but she wasn’t the island she had always thought herself to be. She couldn’t always be totally self-sufficient. Twice now she had needed him, and twice he had been there to help.
Having someone else on whom she could depend was novel, but intensely comforting. She had never known that kind of security before, not even as a child. Especially not as a child.
“Get dressed,” he said softly, standing up and turning his back.
>
Dressing was only a matter of pulling on her sweatshirt and stepping into her jeans, accomplished in seconds. She pushed her hair back from her face, relaxed and still a little drowsy, wonderfully warm. She didn’t feel any chill at all. All she felt was a sense of well-being, of physical contentment.
“This way.” She led the way to the studio, though in a four-room apartment it wouldn’t have been difficult to find. The studio was actually supposed to be the main bedroom, but her bed fit into the smaller room, so there was never any doubt about where she would sleep and where she would work.
She had put the painting of the vendor in the closet. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, but neither could she bear to have it out where she could see it. She went to the closet, but instead of following her, Richard walked around the room, pausing before each of the canvases she had already completed. Tension suddenly knotted her shoulders. Candra’s opinion of her new work had been important to her career, but Richard’s opinion was important to her.
“You’ve changed,” he said abruptly, stopping before a particularly vivid landscape she had propped against the wall. He squatted down so he was at eye level with it.
“I didn’t know you knew anything about my work,” she said, surprised, and still uneasy. She stared at the long line of his tanned back, well-defined muscles delineating the furrow of his spine. Why hadn’t he put on his shirt? He should have put it on, for her peace of mind if nothing else.
“Sure. I met a lot of artists through Candra, but I paid attention to the ones I liked.”
That could be taken two ways. “Professionally or personally?” she asked, her tone wary.
He glanced over his shoulder at her, a smile in his dark eyes. “In your case, both.” He turned his attention back to the landscape, reaching out to run a fingertip over a stream of water swirling around a rock in its path. Running water was difficult to execute, because you had to convey motion and energy as well as capture the play of light on the surface. Water that wasn’t muddy took its color from its surroundings; it would look blue under a clear sky, green in the shadow of a mountain, dull on a gray day. She had spent years painting the St. Lawrence and never tired of it because the water was always different.