HE WASN’T a morning-jog kind of person, but this was the third time this week he’d seen the sun come up as he pounded six miles on the pavement.
The most erotic dreams—all starring Ella—were disturbing his sleep, and they’d only gotten more explicit since he returned from Chicago on Sunday night. He’d wake up with raging hard-ons and, with zero chance of getting the subject of his nighttime fantasies to act them out, he fell back on the age-old way of releasing tension.
Mind-numbing, sweat-producing, energy-expending exercise.
In the past few weeks, he’d increased his distance by a mile and still decreased his time. He could give Ella and Roscoe a run for their money now—not that he’d have the opportunity.
He was in the best shape of his life.
His breath came in steaming puffs as he stopped at the corner store for a newspaper and a bottle of water. He’d take a shower, grab some breakfast and be at the driving range by nine.
He took the stairs two at a time to the third floor and fished out his keys as he turned down the hallway toward his apartment. He read the headlines as he walked, so the voice that greeted him as he neared his door caught him by surprise.
“Matt! I was just looking for you. I didn’t expect you to be out and about so early on a Saturday morning.”
Gillian stepped toward the door as he opened it, and he waved her in. She had a small bag from the neighborhood bakery in her hand.
“Best time to run. What can I do for you?” He tossed the paper and his keys on the counter as he rounded it and headed into the kitchen. “Coffee?”
She shook her head and leaned against the arm of the couch. “I just wanted to thank you. She’s great.”
“Who’s great?”
“Your friend. Ella Mackenzie. Some really good work.”
That got his attention. He drained the last of the water in his bottle before he spoke. “Ella?”
“Yeah, I got images from her yesterday. My boss is going to love her—regional, mostly self-taught—the promo is going to write itself.” She grinned. “Since I, of course, will be claiming all of the credit for discovering this Outsider talent, I brought you a cookie in thanks.” She held out the bag to him.
He took it absently and set it on the counter. “Ella sent you images? Of her paintings?”
“You’re a bit slow today, aren’t you?” She spoke very slowly, as if he was a dim bulb. “Yes. Ella sent work for evaluation. It is good. I am going to call her. Thank you for sending her my way.”
“I’m just surprised she sent anything. She seemed so against the idea when I mentioned it.”
“Well, she obviously changed her mind. And thank goodness she did. The gallery is doing a ‘New South—New Talent’ exhibition in March, and I’m going to offer her space.”
Good for Ella. He wasn’t sure if he should be proud of her or for her, but either way he was happy for her. He’d known she had talent with just one look at her art. The feeling of being proven right was a pathetic consolation prize, though.
Gillian stretched and wiggled her fingers, obviously pleased about something. “I’m going to celebrate my fantastic new discovery with the boots I saw at Nordstrom’s last week.” She watched as he wiped sweat off his neck and wrinkled her nose. “I sincerely hope your next stop is the shower, so I’ll leave you to it.” Gillian stood. “I can show myself out.”
He walked her to the door anyway, unstrapping his iPod holder from his arm as he went.
Gillian was completely out the door when she stopped and said with a grin, “Oh, and let me just say…yowza.”
Huh? “Yowza?”
Her grin got bigger. “That one of you—I assume it’s you, right?—is smokin’ hot.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Honey, if you want to make some cash on the side, I know plenty of people who’d hire you to model.”
Was she on drugs? Gillian wasn’t making any sense at all. “Hold on a second. First of all, I don’t pose for anything. Second—what ‘one’ are you talking about?”
Gillian’s forehead furrowed in confusion. “Ella sent twelve works for me to look at. All of them were landscapes, except for the last one, an oil portrait, which she said wasn’t quite finished. When I saw it, I just assumed the man in the painting was you. You said you two were pretty close friends, and it certainly looks like you.” She paused, and her eyes widened. “You mean you didn’t know?”
He stepped out in the hall and closed the door behind him. “Show me.”
Gillian led the way to her apartment—which, while it had the same floor plan as his, definitely showed her more-artistic side, with abstract art lining the walls and eclectic furniture. A black laptop, completely at odds with the riot of color around it, sat on her coffee table.
A few clicks of the mouse and Gillian was in her e-mail account. “She attached them in a PowerPoint presentation. She’s a bit of a computer geek, isn’t she?” She laughed, but when he didn’t join her, she sobered instantly. “Let me scroll through.”
Images flashed across the screen. He recognized a few of the paintings as ones he’d seen in her apartment that day. Cityscapes, beachscapes—all showcasing Ella’s fascination with the play of light.
“Here it is.” Gillian passed him the laptop. “She mentions that it still needs some finishing, but I think it’s very captivating. It shows a lot of skill—I mean, just look at the attention to detail. Even the underpainting is…”
Gillian’s voice faded to a drone in the background as Ella’s bedroom in the Chicago apartment filled the screen. He’d have recognized it anywhere. It was a night scene, the bedroom dark and the area around her bed only faintly illuminated from the streetlight he knew was just outside that window. A square of light and a woman’s shadow stretched across the floor from the front of the painting, as if the woman had opened the door between Ella’s living room and the bedroom and stood looking in the doorway with the light behind her. That light only touched the edges of the room, but Matt could see where the walls were bare and boxes sat stacked in the dim corners. A T-shirt and a pair of jeans lay on the floor, dropped and forgotten.
But the focal point of the painting was the bed and the man who filled it. Big and broad-shouldered, he was shirtless as he slept on his stomach. Blue-striped sheets tangled around him, exposing one leg from the knee down, and bunched at his waist. He was alone in the bed, one arm thrown over where the shadow woman might have been sleeping previously.
Recognition and realization slammed into him, and the air left his lungs. Ella had painted him. Him. Sleeping in her bed. It was surreal, but the boxes, the bedroom—it was exactly as it had looked weeks ago as he’d helped her pack. That had to be him in the bed. Maybe his shoulders weren’t really that broad, but the hair was right. And how many other men spent the night in her apartment while she was packing?
Gillian continued to praise the painting, fully in critic mode now as she pointed out different aspects. “This is very different from her watercolor landscapes, telling me she has great versatility. That sharp contrast between the light and dark you see is called chiaroscuro, and Ella has it down pat. I’m going to encourage her to do more oils in the future.”
Her finger traced over the screen as she talked, and he was hard-pressed to pay attention to what she was saying—especially since it was him, front and center.
Her finger brushed across the man. “That is you, right? I mean, the features aren’t clear, but, honey, I recognize those lats and delts from the weight room downstairs.” Gillian clicked to the Notes section. “She calls it Fling.”
His stomach clenched. Fling. Trust Ella to put a fine point on it. That’s exactly what they’d had. But still…
“E-mail this to me.”
Gillian drew back. “I can’t go forwarding her work around without permission.”
“Just send it.”
He left Gillian sputtering on her couch and went back to his apartment.
Turning the shower on as hot as it would go, he stripped and stepped under the spray. Thousands of tiny needles tried to beat the tension from his muscles without success.
Ella had painted him. She hadn’t even bothered to mention it to him. He thought back to that weekend-gone-wrong at her house. He’d seen a draped canvas on an easel but hadn’t asked about it. He’d had other things on his mind at the time—namely getting her horizontal—and it had disappeared to another room shortly after his arrival. Had that been the painting under the sheet? Not that he had a clue as to how long it would take Ella to paint something like that, but she had to have been working on it for a while to be able to send a photo of it to Gillian—unfinished or not.
Maybe the “finishing” Ella mentioned to Gillian involved adding horns and a devil’s tail.
At the same time, it was satisfying to think she’d been affected enough by their time together to even consider painting him—fling or not. Regardless of how it all ended, she hadn’t been able to completely dismiss him from her mind.
He turned the water all the way to cold for a minute, then turned it off completely and reached for a towel. This thing with Ella was one giant mess. He’d found the perfect woman. Only she lived in a different state, had a hair-trigger temper and possessed deep-rooted problems where relationships were concerned. Just his luck to fall in love with a woman who wanted nothing to do with him.
His hand stilled, as the reason for that hollow feeling in his stomach became clear with that thought. He loved Ella. How or when or even why—for God’s sake—he didn’t know, but it was the only possible explanation.
And it explained so much. Not that he had any prior experience with the feeling, but the feeling of utter rightness that settled around him told him he’d identified the emotion correctly.
He loved Ella.
But Ella didn’t love him and didn’t want to hang around to see if she might one day. This had to be some kind of cosmic punishment—karma, as Ella would say.
Karma sucked.
At least Ella got something out of all this. He could take away small comfort at being the subject of one of her paintings.
Her paintings…
Something niggled at the back of his mind. Something Ella had said about painting…
“All of those places are special to me. It’s like I have an emotional attachment to them. I guess you could say I have to love it to paint it.” She’d said it with a shrug, an offhand explanation for both her subject matter and why she kept all the canvases.
“I have to love it.”
Knotting the towel around his hips, he headed for his bedroom. He pulled his laptop out of its briefcase, sat on the bed and waited impatiently for it to boot up. He logged in to his e-mail and ignored the ones from work as he scanned for Gillian’s return address. She’d better have sent it…
There it was: “I could get fired for this. Don’t spread it around—remember I know where you live.”
Another click and Fling filled his screen, bringing a flood of memories now that the initial shock had passed. He didn’t have time to reminisce, though; he was on a quest for answers. A closer look this time showed the unfinished aspects of the picture. Many of the details were missing, rough sketches where she planned to add to the background temporarily filling space.
But the man—him, for God’s sake—was complete. He zoomed in, astounded by the detail. If he looked closely, he could see the fine shading that gave the muscles their definition and created the shallow line of his spine. He could almost count each and every hair on his head. If the digital image showed so much, he could only imagine the detail of the real thing.
But it was the glow around the man, caused by the play of light, that proved his case.
If she had to love what she painted, then she loved this man. Every tiny brushstroke showed the care and attention to detail only someone in love with the subject would take.
Ella loved him.
Then why had she pushed him away?
In that moment he decided he didn’t care why. Ella loved him, and he loved her, and that was all that mattered. He’d do whatever he had to do to get her to admit it.
They would work the rest of the details out later.
He had the area code for south Alabama punched into the phone before he stopped himself. This wasn’t exactly a conversation that would work well over the phone. If she even answered once she saw his name on the caller ID. Ella was trying to get away from this emotional tangle, so she’d probably avoid him at all costs—just like she did last weekend.
He sent an e-mail to his assistant, telling her he’d be out Monday and probably Tuesday, as well, and provided instructions for his current projects for the paralegals to take care of. That gave him three days to get through to Ella. Hopefully she wouldn’t prove too stubborn about it. But if she were, at least his prime piece of evidence would be close by.
Showing up unannounced on her front porch again might get him arrested for attempted stalking, but it was the only plan he had at the moment. It wasn’t much of a plan, granted, but he had a nice long drive to work out the details.
Feeling better than he had all week, he went to pack for the beach.