His Darling Bride (Echoes of the Heart #3) (15 page)

“We talked at Grapes & Beans,” she reminded him.

“With Shandra and the entire dining room listening in. And we were agreeing that we weren’t going to see each other anymore. Why tell you then, when it wouldn’t have mattered?”

“You kissed me at my parents’ house.”

“You kissed me first.”

She gestured toward the artists’ portion of the loft. “You knew all this about my life, and I knew there was something up about the way you seemed so interested in my problems with my painting. And instead of coming clean about
your
life, you kissed me . . . because you didn’t want to risk my dad’s rehab?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Could he F this up any worse? “I wanted to kiss you—at McC’s, at G&Bs, at your parents’. Right now, damn it! I’ve just never been certain that you knew what you wanted. Please give me a minute.” A chance to take it all back and do it better so she’d stop looking at him the way she was. “I know this has caught you off guard.”

“You don’t know anything about me.” She glanced at his monitor, displaying images of her life that he’d started tinkering with as a break from working on Jeremy’s prints for the gala. “And vice versa.”

“You already know a lot more than anyone outside my family, except for George.”

It was alarming how radically Mike’s life could change, depending on what Bethany chose to do next.

She could go public with what she’d discovered. Connect Mike Taylor to the artist HMT. Or the Artist Co-op to JHTF, the way his mother had been dying to for years, since his first center in Seattle had gotten its legs under it. It should have had Mike sweating buckets—the prospect of being outed to the world. Except . . . he trusted Bethany, the way he hadn’t trusted anyone besides George in years.

“I’d like for you to know even more,” he admitted, as stunned by the revelation as she looked.

“I . . .” She moved toward him, but with the same wounded expression as when she’d been staring at her no-good ex. “Why do I keep falling for guys, thinking they’re being straight with me? And every single time they turn out to be strangers I don’t understand at all.”

Mike was the one looking at a stranger now as Bethany pressed onto the tips of her toes. She smelled like paint and a deeper scent that might have been red wine. And bubble gum. She pressed closer, his body responding with an instant need to love, cherish, and be more to someone than he’d thought he’d want to be again. But he could tell. She was saying goodbye.

Crazy.

This was crazy.

“I want to help you understand,” he said. “You said you’d give us that chance.”

“That was when you were just some nice guy I met.” Her bottom lip trembled. “And I was thinking maybe I could enjoy myself, and not take it all so seriously for once. Now it’s all tangled up, and we’re . . . I don’t know what my dad will do about his rehab. But I can’t do this with you. I’m already having a hard enough time figuring out my life. I can’t handle this, too.”

“You can’t handle caring about me?”

She pressed her lips to his.

She shook her head, her anger gone. “I’ve cared about a lot of men. That doesn’t mean they were right for me. Or that they were going to stick around long enough to try and make it right. You’re not an easygoing cowboy bartender with a heart of gold, Mike. You’re a professional wanderer who’s made a life out of not attaching to anyone—it sounds like since your brother died.”

“And you hide in plain sight, with your camouflage truck and crazy clothes, overdosing on painting when you’re not exhausting
yourself helping out your family or other people’s kids. It’s like you’ve decided which parts of your heart you can trust, Bethany. And you’re
locking the rest of you away, thinking you can live without it.”

“I’m trying to stick this time where I’m already loved. Instead of wasting more of my life thinking there’s something better for me somewhere else.”

“And I’m not going anywhere,” he pledged, even if he didn’t completely understand why. “Not like this.”

“Exactly like this.” She sounded resigned. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Harrison Michael Taylor. The real you. If you keep working with my father, if I ever paint in the loft again and you’re here in your studio, please stay away from me. I just . . . I can’t.”

And then she left him without a backward glance, heading through the door after her girlfriends.

Dru popped her head into the Dream Whip’s kitchen Wednesday morning. She waited silently.

Silently
made Bethany crazy. Especially when someone clearly had something to say at the butt crack of dawn. She stopped pretending she was ignoring her sister and looked up from prepping for the Whip’s eleven-o’clock open. She’d been hand-forming hamburger patties using the ground beef the butcher counter at Sweetie’s delivered fresh twice a week.

“You have a visitor,” Dru said.

It had been over a week since Bethany and her sister had really talked—except for hellos and goodbyes in passing at the Douglas house. Bethany had filled in Marsha and Joe Saturday about what had happened at the Artist Co-op. She’d asked them to let her siblings know. She’d made it clear she was done talking about Mike. But she’d asked her parents to keep his identity in the family. Whatever else the guy was, however much Bethany needed
not
to be part of it, Mike seemed to genuinely be trying to do something with his life. Bethany didn’t want to cause him problems. She’d never wanted to be anyone’s problem.

Dru and the rest of her adult siblings had no doubt heard it all by now, and had been talking it to death. Joe had had another session with Mike on Sunday. Bethany had made a point not to ask her mother about it. And not to contact Mike, the way he hadn’t tried to reach her. Everyone had been giving her even more space than before to sort things out. To hide in plain sight.

Until now.

“Who’s here at this time of morning?” Bethany checked her watch, her breath catching at the thought that it might be Mike. She used the back of her hand to wipe her bangs out of her eyes. “It’s not even seven yet.”

“I guess,” her sister said, “you’re not the only one who can’t sleep these days. I’ll finish the burgers.”

Bethany stripped off her gloves while Dru donned her own pair and took Bethany’s place at one of the stainless-steel work counters where Bethany had put in as many hours as she could the last few days. She’d needed to work. She’d needed to keep busy, to stick in Chandlerville where she belonged, and to stay out of Midtown Atlanta. She’d even asked one of the other youth center volunteers to cover her art classes on Sunday and yesterday. Meanwhile, Bethany hadn’t been able to touch her brushes and paints in her studio at the Douglas house. Instead, she’d stared each night till dawn at a room full of half-finished canvases.

“You know,” Dru said as Bethany headed for the door that led to the Dream Whip’s front counter and dining room, “maybe he really is sorry about how things played out.”

Bethany stopped, her hand pressed to the still-closed door, not bothering to ask whom her sister was talking about.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Sure it does.” Dru formed a ball of fresh hamburger and pounded it flat with the palm of her hand. “If avoiding Mike means the rest of us have to watch you avoid how you feel about everything else, it matters a lot.”

Bethany watched her sister apply too much force, squashing a patty that would never make the kind of juicy, meaty burger the Whip was famous for. She deserved Dru’s frustration. Clair’s and Nic’s, too. Since she’d driven back to Chandlerville Saturday night, she hadn’t returned her girlfriends’ calls or stopped by G&Bs. She’d barely spoken to them when she’d grabbed her backpack and all but sprinted from the co-op loft—asking only that they leave her be for real this time, until she was ready to talk.

“You’re not alone, remember?” Dru rerolled the ground beef into a ball. “You never will be. We’re not letting you go again, Bethany. You mean everything to us. We’re your family.”

Bethany blinked, angry tears pushing at the corners of her eyes. And the anger was at herself. Not at Mike. Not at her sister’s well-intentioned meddling.

For days she’d stared at her art at Dru and Brad’s house, trying to figure out what was missing in each canvas. But her painting of her foster home had been all she could see—the canvas that she’d left at the loft, because she’d been too much of a coward to go back for it and risk another possible run-in with Mike. And then what? He’d be the same great guy who’d inspired the maddening, ethereal landscape that was keeping her from working on something new. And she’d still want him, when he was an even bigger wild card now than before.

“I want to be exactly where I am,” she insisted to her sister.

“Exactly where you were five years ago, you mean.” Dru kept her eyes on her work. “You still don’t know what to do with the rest of us. Only now there’s some new guy making you feel things you don’t want to feel, while everyone else watches from a distance to see if you’ll bolt.”

“I’m not going to—”

“You told Mom and Dad that you’re thinking about giving up your residency at that art place. Because Mike’s turning out to be too good to be true?”

Dru cut Bethany with an exasperated expression.

“Dump the guy,” Dru said, “if tall, dark, handsome, and successful is a turnoff. But don’t give up your chance to figure out what’s going on with a gift like your art, when not being able to paint is tearing you up inside.” She went back to making burgers. “I don’t understand how you do what you do, or why you can’t do it anymore. But I’m pretty sure those people at your co-op could help you figure something out. Maybe even Mike could.”

“I’m handling it on my own,” Bethany insisted.

“Aren’t you always?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

“It shouldn’t be. Didn’t used to be. You loved painting. You
were
your paintings in high school. It’s the only time I’ve seen you really happy. But then Benjie happened, and you hit the road. And now it’s almost like you hate painting—while the family’s losing you to it again.”

“I’m right here.”

Bethany had come straight back to Chandlerville after leaving the loft. Each morning, she convinced herself to stay with her friends and family. She might not be able to talk to any of them yet about what she was going through. But this community was where she wanted to belong. Didn’t that count for something?

“Yes, you’re still here,” her sister agreed. “But . . . you’re also a million miles away. And I wish I understood. I wish I could help. It’s just . . .”

“It’s just what? I’m fine.”

Dru smiled, but it wasn’t really a smile. She walked to Bethany and pulled her into a hug using her upper arms and elbows, her glove-encased hands covered in hamburger.

“Tell that to your visitor,” she said. “You’d better get out there. She has to get to school by eight.”

Shandra?

Bethany hugged Dru back, absorbing her sister’s support. Bethany had apologized to Shandra over the phone Sunday, when she’d nixed their trip to Midtown for their youth center art class. But she’d felt lousy about it ever since, even though Shandra had sounded fine.

Dru nudged Bethany toward the swinging door that would take her to the dining room.

“Go,” Dru said. “I’ll take care of things in here until Willie shows up to fire the grill. At which point you’d better be long gone or he’ll sweet-talk you into working the rest of the day.”

Bethany nodded; she couldn’t remember ever feeling this exhausted. She pushed through the door and headed around the
front counter. Her younger sister was waiting at the front of the dining room, looking at the painting Dru had proudly hung there. It
was the one that had helped Bethany earn both her four-year JHTF
grant
to Pratt and her residency.

“Hey, girl.” She gave her sister a side hug.

Shandra tensed but kept staring at the canvas of a meadow just outside of town, one of Bethany’s favorite places in the world. Bethany looked, too, reliving the moment when Mike had handed her the fax of her scholarship application.

“I’m sorry again about skipping Sunday’s class,” she said. “We’ll make it to Midtown this weekend for sure.”

“Sure.” Shandra shrugged.

She was wearing an emerald-green tunic top she’d hemmed to mid-thigh length, over a pair of checkerboard-patterned tights she’d bought on a thrift-store shopping binge with Bethany. She’d tied a bright-pink, paisley-printed bandanna over her hair. When Bethany had attempted Shandra’s portrait, she’d used similar colors, wanting to capture her sister’s exuberance and the passion for living Shandra shared with the world, simply by entering a room and brightening the day of everyone inside.

“Or you’ll cancel again,” Shandra said.

“I won’t.” The funk Bethany had let herself slip into was hurting her sister. Her family. Herself. “I swear. I’m going to get my act together.”

Shandra sighed away the promise. “I hear people. I know more than everyone thinks I do. You’re spooked. You’ll stop pretending you’re not one day, and you’ll be gone. That’s why I came to tell you I don’t want to go down to the youth center this weekend, either. So don’t worry about it.”