Dawn in Eclipse Bay

chapter 11

An hour later Gabe bundled her into the Jag and made to close the passenger door. Impulse struck. She gave into it without examining the decision.

“Would you mind if we stopped at my studio on the way back to the apartment?” she said. “I forgot a few things this afternoon when I went there.”

“Sure. No problem.”

He closed the door, circled the car and paused long enough to remove his jacket. He put it down in the darkness of the backseat and got in behind the wheel. She gave him directions but she had the feeling that he already knew where he was going. He drove smoothly out of the parking garage and turned the corner.

A short time later he stopped at the curb in front of the brick building in which she rented studio space.

“This won’t take long,” she said.

“There’s no rush.”

He got out of the car and opened her door for her. She walked beside him to the secured entrance. He waited while she punched in the code.

They went up the stairs to the second-floor loft in silence. When she inserted her key into the lock she realized that her pulse was beating a little too quickly. A sense of anticipation mingled with unease quickened her breathing.

Why had she brought him here? she wondered. Where had the urge come from? What was the point of showing him the studio tonight? He was a businessman with no use for arty types.

She opened the door and groped for the switches on the wall to the right. She flipped two of the six, turning on some of the lights but not all, leaving large sections of the loft in shadow.

Gabe surveyed the interior.

“So this is where you work.” His voice was completely uninflected.

“Yes.” She watched him prowl slowly forward, examining the canvases propped against the walls. “This is where I paint.”

He stopped in front of a picture of her great-aunt Isabel. It showed her seated in a wicker chair in the solarium at Dreamscape, looking out to sea.

Gabe looked at the painting for a long time.

“I remember seeing that expression on Isabel’s face sometimes,” he said finally. Absently he loosened the knot in his tie and opened the collar of his shirt. He did not take his gaze off the picture. “As if she were looking at something only she could see.”

Lillian crossed to the large worktable at the far end of the room, propped one hip on the edge and picked up a sketchpad and a pencil. “Everyone has that look from time to time. Probably because we all see something a little different when we look out at the world.”

“Maybe.”

He removed the silver-and-onyx cuff links and slid them into the pocket of his trousers. Again, his movements were casual and unself-conscious; the easy actions of a man relaxing after a formal evening.

He moved on to the next picture, rolling up the sleeves of the charcoal-gray shirt as he crossed the space, exposing the dark hair on the back of his arms.

She watched him for a moment. He looked rakish and extremely sexy with his tie undone and his shirt open at the throat. But what compelled her was the way he looked at her paintings. There was an intensity in him that told her that he made a visceral connection with the images she had created. He might not like the arty type but he responded to art. Unwillingly.

She began to draw, compelled by the shadows in her subject.

“You meant everything you said about Dr. Montoya tonight, didn’t you?” she asked, not looking up from her work.

“He was the closest thing I had to a mentor.” Gabe studied a picture of an old man sitting on a bench in the park. “I was a kid from a small town. I didn’t know how to handle myself. Didn’t know what was appropriate. I had no polish. No sophistication. No connections. I knew where I wanted to go but I didn’t know how to get there. He gave me a lot of the tools I needed to build Madison Commercial.”

“Now you repay him by allowing him to send some of his students into Madison Commercial every year.”

“The company gets something out of it, too. The students bring a lot of energy and enthusiasm with them. And we get first crack at some bright new talent.”

“Really? I’ve heard my father talk about what a nuisance student interns are for a busy company. They can be a real pain.”

“Not everyone is cut out to work in a corporation.”

Her pencil stilled for an instant. “Me, for instance.”

He nodded. “You, for instance. And apparently your sister and brother, too. You’ve all got strong, independent, entrepreneurial streaks. You’re all ambitious and you’re all talented but you don’t play well with others. At least not in a business setting.”

“And you think you’re so very different? Give me a break. Tell me something, Gabe, if you were only a vice-president instead of the owner, president, and CEO of Madison Commercial, would you still be on the company payroll?”

There was a short pause.

“No,” he said. Flat and final.

“You said that not everyone is cut out to work in a large corporation.” She moved the pencil swiftly, adding shadows. “But not everyone is cut out to run one, either. You were born for it, weren’t you?”

He pulled his attention away from a canvas and looked at her down the length of the studio. “Born for it? That’s a new one. Most people would say I was born to self-destruct before the age of thirty.”

“You’ve got the natural talent for leadership and command that it takes to organize people and resources to achieve an objective.” She hunched one shoulder a little, concentrating on the angle of his jaw. Going for the darkness behind his eyes. “In your own way, you’re an artist. You can make folkssee your objective, make them want to get there with you. No wonder you were able to get that initial funding you needed for Madison Commercial. You probably walked into some venture capitalist’s office and painted him a glowing picture of how much money he would make if he backed you.”

Gabe did not move. “Talking her out of the venture capital funds I needed wasn’t the hard part.”

She glanced up sharply, her curiosity pricked by his words.

“Her?” she repeated carefully.

“Your great-aunt Isabel is the one who advanced me the cash I needed to get Madison Commercial up and running.”

She almost fell from her perch on the worktable.

“You’re kidding.” She held the point of the pencil in the air, poised above the paper. “Isabelbacked you?”

“Yes.”

“She never said a word about it to any of us.”

He shrugged. “That was the way she wanted it.”

She contemplated that news.

“Amazing,” she said at last. “Everyone knew that it was her dream to end the Harte-Madison feud. Hannah figures that’s the reason she left Dreamscape equally to her and your brother in the will. But why would she back you financially? What would that have to do with ending the old quarrel?”

“I think she felt that the Madisons got the short end of the stick when Harte-Madison went into bankruptcy. She wanted to level the playing field a little for Rafe and me.”

“But when Harte-Madison was destroyed all those years ago, everyone lost everything. Both the Hartes and the Madisons went bankrupt. That’s about as level as it gets.”

“Your family recovered a lot faster than mine did.” He concentrated on the painting in front of him. “I think we both know why. So did Isabel.”

She flushed. There was no denying that the tough, stable Harte family bonds, not to mention the Harte work ethic and emphasis on education, had provided a much stronger foundation from which to recover than the shaky, shifting grounds that had sustained the Madisons.

“Point taken,” she agreed. “So Isabel, in her own quiet way, tried to even things up a bit with money.”

“I think so, yes.”

“What was the hard part?”

“The hard part?”

“You said that getting the backing from her for Madison Commercial wasn’t the hard part. What was?”

His mouth curved reminiscently. “Structuring the contract so that Isabel got her money back plus interest and profit. She didn’t want to do things that way. She wanted me to take the cash as a straight gift.”

“But you wouldn’t do that.”

“No.”

Madison pride,she thought, but she did not say it out loud. She went back to work on her drawing. Gabe moved on to another picture.

“I was wrong about you, wasn’t l?” She used the tip of her thumb to smudge in a shadow.

“Wrong?”

“Watching you at the banquet tonight, it finally hit me that I had leaped to a totally false conclusion about you. And you let me do it. You never bothered to correct my assumption.”

He gave her his enigmatic smile. “Hard to imagine a Harte being wrong about a Madison. You know us so well.”

“Yes, we do. Which is why I shouldn’t have been fooled for even a minute. But I was.”

“What was the wrong conclusion you leaped to about me?”

She looked up from the sketch and met his eyes. “You aren’t suffering from burnout.”

He said nothing, just watched her steadily.

“Why didn’t you set me straight?” She returned to her sketch, adding more depths and darkness. “Because it suited your purpose to let me think you were a victim of stress and burnout? Did you want me to feel sorry for you?”

“No.” He started toward her down a dim aisle formed by unframed canvases. “No, I sure as hell did not want you to feel sorry for me.”

“What did you want?” Her pencil flashed across the paper, moving as though by its own volition as she worked frantically to capture the impressions and get them down in all the shades of light and dark.

He came to a halt in front of her. “I wanted you to see me as something other than a cold-blooded machine. I figured that if you thought I was a walking case of burnout, you might realize that I was human.”

She studied the sketch for a moment and then slowly put down the pencil.

“I’ve always known that you were human,” she said.

“You sure about that? I had a somewhat different impression. Must have been all those comments you made about how I wanted to date robots.”

He reached for the sketchpad. She let him take it from her fingers, watching his expression as he looked at the drawing she had made of him.

It showed him as he had appeared a few minutes ago, standing in front of one of her canvases, his hands thrust easily into the pockets of his trousers, collar and cuffs undone, tie loose around his neck. He stood in the shadows, his face slightly averted from the viewer. He was intent on the painting in front of him, a picture that showed an image that only he could see. Whatever he saw there deepened the shadows around him.

She watched his face as he studied the drawing. She knew from the way his jaw tightened and the fine lines that appeared at the corners of his mouth that he understood the shadows in the picture.

After what seemed like an eternity, he handed the sketch back to her.

“Okay,” he said. “So you do see me as human.”

“And you saw what I put into this drawing, didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “Hard to miss.”

“A lot of people could look at this sketch and not see anything other than a figure standing in front of a canvas. But you see everything.” She waved a hand at the canvases that filled the studio. “You can see what I put into all of my pictures. You pretend to disdain art but the truth is you respond to it.”

“I spent a lot of the first decade of my life in an artist’s studio. Guess you pick up a few things when you’re surrounded by the stuff during your impressionable years.”

“Yes, of course. Your father was a sculptor. Your mother was his model.” She put the sketch down on the worktable. Guilt and dismay shot through her. “I’m sorry, Gabe. I know you lost your parents when you were very young. I didn’t mean to bring up such a painful subject.”

“Forget it. It’s a fact, after all, not something you conjured up out of your imagination. Besides, I thought I made it clear that I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. Sort of spoils the Harte-Madison feud dynamic, you know?”

“Right. Wouldn’t want to do that.” She hesitated. “Gabe?”

“Yeah?”

“When you stated on the Private Arrangements questionnaire that you didn’t want any arty types, you were telling the truth, weren’t you?”

“I thought we’d decided that I pretty much lied through my teeth on that questionnaire.”

“I don’t think you lied on that issue. Did you make a point of not wanting to be matched with so-called arty types because of your parents? Everyone knows that they didn’t give you and Rafe what anyone could call a stable home life.”

He was silent for a moment.

“For years I blamed most of what wasn’t good in my childhood, including my parents’ deaths, on the fact that they were both involved in the world of art,” he said finally. “Maybe, in my kid brain, the mystique of the wild, uncontrolled, temperamental, artistic personality was convenient. Better than the alternative, at any rate.”

“What was the alternative?”

“That we Madisons were seriously flawed; that we couldn’t manage the self-control thing.”

“But you’ve proved that theory wrong, haven’t you? I’ve never met anyone with more self-control.”

He looked at her. “You don’t exactly fit the image of the temperamental, self-centered artist who has no room in her life for anything except her art, either.”

“Okay. I think we’ve successfully established that neither of us fits whatever preconceptions we might have had.”

“Why did you bring me here tonight, Lillian? I know it wasn’t because you needed to pick up some supplies.”

She looked around at her paint-spattered studio. “Maybe I wanted to find out how you really felt about arty types.”

He raised one hand and traced the cowl neckline of her black dress. His finger grazed her throat. “Let’s see where we stand here. We’ve established that you don’t think I’m a machine.”

She caught her breath at his touch. “And you don’t think I’m typical of what you call the arty type.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

He lowered his head until his mouth hovered just above hers. “I think we ought to find out, don’t you?”

“Sex is probably not the best way to explore that issue.”

He kissed her slowly, lingeringly. When he raised his head she saw the hunger in him. She felt her blood heat.

“Can you think of a better way to explore it?” he asked.

She swallowed. “Not right at the moment.”

He put one hand on her knee just beneath the hem of the little black dress. His smiled slowly and eased the skirt higher. She caught the ends of his silk tie in her hands and drew him closer.

He took the invitation the way a shark takes prey; smoothly and swiftly, leaving her no time to consider the wisdom of moving back into shallower waters.

Between one heartbeat and the next, he was between her knees, using his thighs to part her legs and open her to him. The black dress was up to her hips now, leaving only a scrap of midnight-colored lace as a barrier to his hand. It proved woefully inadequate to the task. She felt the silk grow damp at his touch.

She gripped the ends of the necktie and hung on for the ride.

He roused himself a long time later, sated and content. For the moment, at any rate. He sat up on the edge of the worktable. Beside him Lillian was curled amid scattered sheets of drawing paper, brushes, and tubes of paint. Her hair had come free from the sleek knot in which it had been arranged earlier in the evening. The little black dress that had looked so elegant and tasteful at the head table was now crumpled in an extremely interesting, very sexy and no doubt less-than-tasteful manner. But it looked terrific on her that way, he thought.

His tie was now looped around her throat instead of his own. He grinned, remembering how it had gotten switched in the middle of the lovemaking.

She stirred. “What are you staring at?”

“A work of art.”

“Hmm.” She nodded once in appreciation. “A work of art. That was pretty quick, Madison.”

“Pretty quick, you mean for a man who is still recovering from a truly mind-blowing experience?”

“Gosh. Was that your mind?” Her smile was very smug. “I didn’t realize.”

He grinned. “I handed you that line on a platter. Admit it.”

“I admit it. You’re good, you know that?”

“At the moment, I’m a lot better than good.” He leaned down to kiss her bare hip. “I’m terrific. What about you?”

“I think I’ll survive.” She hauled herself up on her elbows and surveyed herself. “But the dress is dead meat.”

“I’m sure there are plenty more where it came from.”

“Probably. Department stores are full of little black dresses.” She noticed the tie around her neck and frowned. “How did that get there?”

He eased himself off the table, stood and stretched. “Some questions are better left unanswered.”

He studied a canvas propped against the wall directly across from him as he zipped his trousers and buckled his belt. It was another one of her unique, riveting creations, all hot, intense light and dark, disturbing shadows. He felt it reaching out to pull him into that world, just as her other works did. He had to force himself to look away from it.

He turned his head and saw that the sensual, teasing laughter that had gleamed in her eyes a moment ago had evaporated. She was watching him in the same way that he had looked at the painting, as if she were wary of being sucked into his universe.

“Does this mean we’re having an affair?” she asked.

Curious. Polite. Very cool. Just asking.

Her deliberately casual air wiped out a lot of the satisfaction that he had been enjoying. Whatever was going on here was a long way from settled.

“Yes,” he said. I think we’d better call this an affair. I don’t see that we have any real choice.”

She sat up slowly and dangled her legs off the edge of the worktable. “Why is that?”

She had small, delicate ankles and beautifully arched feet, he noticed. Her toenails were painted scarlet. And here he’d never considered himself a foot man.

He walked back to the table, fitted his hands to her waist, lifted her and set her on her feet. He did not release her. “Be sort of awkward to have to admit that we’re into one- and two-night stands, wouldn’t it?”

“Might make us both look extremely shallow and superficial.”

“Can’t have that,” he said easily. “Come on, let’s go back to your apartment. We need some sleep. Got a long drive back to Eclipse Bay tomorrow morning.”