His Darling Bride (Echoes of the Heart #3) (17 page)

“Bethany,” Brad called from the front of the Douglas house. “It’s for you.”

Bethany’s brother-in-law had stopped painting the living room with a fresh coat of taupe to answer the doorbell. The living room was the last project on Brad and Dru’s must-do-before-the-wedding home improvement list. Bethany was bent over, still taping trim. Without standing up, she looked behind her toward the door.

Which left her practically standing on her head, butt in the air, gaping between her legs at the cowboy stepping into the Douglas foyer. Mike’s smile was even more gorgeous upside down.

“Um . . .” she said. “Hey?”

“Hey, yourself,” he answered.

She righted herself, blood rushing and making her dizzy. Wiping her bangs from her eyes seemed like as good a way as any to stall for time. Until the wetness on her cheek reminded her that a few minutes ago she’d brushed the sleeve of one of Brad’s faded plaid shirts against a freshly painted wall.

“Shoot!” She scowled at Mike’s chuckle.

“Need this?” Dru handed over the rag she’d been using to wipe up spills on the drop cloth protecting Vivian Douglas’s rug.

Bethany snatched the hole-riddled kitchen towel and dabbed at her face. She threw it back at her grinning sister.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Dru asked Mike.

Bethany shook her head at him.

She’d planned to hunt him down herself, to deal with what she’d run from at the loft. And with what she and Shandra had talked about. But now that he was there, it was getting all mixed up again. What she needed to do, what she wanted to do, and the crazy things he made her feel. All while she had no idea he wanted anything more with her than to have a little fun for a few weeks.

“I’d love some water,” Mike said. “And some milk for Bethany, to go along with these.”

Bethany’s attention zoomed to the signature pink box Mike held. “From Dan’s?”

Her mouth had already been watering at how good he looked: cowboy hat again, long-sleeved shirt, lovingly fitted jeans. He stepped closer and opened the pastry carton. She swallowed, barely keeping herself from attacking its contents.

“Strawberry cupcakes
and
blueberry scones.” Dru whistled, nodding her approval. “Excellent groveling.”

“Guy’s got chops.” Brad wiped his hands on his own paint rag and relieved Mike of the box. “We’ll take these into the kitchen and give you two some privacy.”

“What?” Bethany stared at her Benedict Arnold sister and soon-to-be brother-in-law, who were walking away. “No, I—”

“It’s great to see you, Mike,” Dru said as the kitchen door swooshed shut behind them.

Bethany stared after her family, loving them desperately. There’d certainly be no other reason for putting up with them.

She glanced back to the front of the house and found herself alone. She rushed into what had once been Vi Douglas’s formal sitting room. Mike—HMT—was standing before her easel, beside an ancient folding table loaded down with her disarray of oil paints and cloths and brushes.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said, repeating his words when he’d found her in his loft, gawking at his high-priced photographs.

Surrounding him now, leaning against all four walls, were her cast-aside canvases. Dozens of them. Natural light sparkled through the bay windows, washing everything in a gentle golden glow. While an intensely focused, world-class artist, the brim of his Stetson pulled low, took his time scanning the disappointing results from each frustrating attempt to create something meaningful and lasting for her parents.

Bethany held her breath, waited, needing him to understand—when she didn’t know how to be comfortable needing anything from him.

“They’re amazing.” He slowly made his way around the room. “Realistic, but surreal somehow. This isn’t how you painted in the samples you submitted for your residency. These are almost . . . dreamlike.”

“The landscapes in my scholarship and residency submissions were from high school. I can’t paint that way anymore.” She stepped to his side. She couldn’t seem to be anywhere else when he was around. “This keeps happening now, even if I’m working from photos of people and places I’ve known for years. They’re all failures.”

He shook his head, browsing through several canvases that had been set aside together. “They’re your heart. And they’re terrifying you.”

She tried to step back, and realized she and Mike were holding hands. “Please stop.”

“You’re not ready to give them everything,” he said, not looking up from her pieces. “You’re angry at what’s happening. But you keep trying. That’s courage, Bethany, not failure.” He let her go. The concern and . . . wonder in his tone kept her close. “Unless you keep deciding to give up.”

“I . . .” The truth was even closer with him there, than when she’d talked with Shandra. “I’ve quit so many times. I’ve already told my parents I might give up my residency.”

She finally had his attention. “Because of me?”

She shook her head. “Because of me. Because it’s what I do, when I think something’s over anyway. And my art’s been over since high school. I want to paint something for my parents, for people I love. But I can’t.”

“You are.”

“For a while, when I first start each new project. And it feels like before, when I could spend hours and hours on a canvas and never even notice. But then it stops. Or I stop. Or it doesn’t feel safe anymore, so I make it stop. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I shouldn’t have applied for the residency. Another artist who can actually produce something should have that spot.”

“So you’re just going to walk away from your art? From us?”

“Us?”

“I told myself I wasn’t going to make coming here about us. We haven’t even figured out if there is an
us
. But you’ve flat-out decided I’m no good for you. Now your residency isn’t good for you. Don’t do that. You’re too talented, Bethany. If nothing else, I can help you with your creative process.”

“But you want more than that, right?” She squared her shoulders, aware of her deplorable appearance. “And I want more than that.”

A relieved smile softened his features. “Then let me in. Let me help. Let me show you what I see when I look at all you’ve done.”

“When you look at what?”

She waved at the cluster of the landscapes she’d attempted when she’d first picked up a brush again. She’d been living in her tiny place above Dan’s and thinking it would be so easy to just dive back into painting now that she was ready.

“These are of the same meadow in your fax,” she said, staring with him at her dozen or so attempts to re-create the oil that hung near the entrance to the Whip. Different times of the year, different seasons. She hadn’t come close to finishing a single one of them. “There’s no life in them, no light. It’s not working.”

“Do you mind if I take some pictures?”

The idea made her sick to her stomach. “Why?”

“Because they’re your first love.”

“What?” Something inside Bethany clicked, like a piece of a puzzle locking into place.

“Art was your first love in high school, not that mongrel Benjie. And I can see how maybe you lost it for a while when he hurt you.”

“Painting started hurting, too.” Anger flooded her along with the memory. “I couldn’t create anymore. I couldn’t go to art school. While Benjie moved on, at least partially because of work that I’d done. And after that I couldn’t stay here with my family and friends, wanting to fight back against all of them, because . . .”

“You thought you’d lost the one thing you needed most?”

Mike scanned her canvases as if they were treasures—the same way he’d looked at her just now, when he’d arrived and found her sweaty and covered in paint.

“Your love for painting is in every one of these,” he said. “You’re struggling with your creativity, just like you’re struggling to stay with your family. But believe me, you haven’t lost anything. You’ll get your art back, better than ever.”

The world-renowned HMT had his phone out, looking like a kid in a candy store, eager to photograph the unfinished attempts she’d never meant for anyone to see. He waited to make certain it was okay. Bethany hesitated, then nodded, trusting him while she clung to his confidence in her ability. He worked quickly, businesslike in his intensity. But his smile never dimmed. He was having a blast.

He started with her landscapes. He crouched in front of another grouping, sifting through and shooting each unframed piece with equal care. They were some of her more recent work, since she’d moved in with Dru and Brad.

“What made you so indecisive about these?” he asked.

Indecisive?

He was kneeling in front of the first portrait she’d attempted. It was of Camille. Bethany rode out a wave of disappointment.

“I’m looking for something special for my parents. Dru and Brad are getting married on Marsha and Joe’s wedding anniversary. I want to present a painting to my parents at the reception. And Camille’s been such a special surprise for all of us . . .”

Bethany knelt, too, and studied the work she hadn’t been able to look at in weeks.

“What stopped you from finishing her?” Mike asked.

“I . . .” Bethany flashed back to her talk with Shandra. “I think sometimes you fight the hardest against the things you want to care about the most.”

She was suddenly eye-to-eye with Mike, his gaze warming at her admission.

He was a too-good-to-be-true man who’d taken his first pictures so he could bring the world back to his sick brother. He was a man who’d then spent a year photographing Jeremy’s bucket list, and had donated the money he’d made from the sales of the prints to help other kids and families and struggling artists like Bethany.

He was a man who was kissing her. Or was she kissing him again? All she knew was how right it felt to touch Mike, even as she ducked her head away.

“I wish . . .” She brushed her fingertips across Camille’s half-finished image.

Mike hugged her to his side and pressed his lips to her temple. “What do you wish?”

“That I could show my family how it feels to belong to them. Just once, even if it’s the last thing I paint.”

“Show your family, or show yourself?”

Bethany shook her head, not questioning anymore the way he seemed to understand.

“What about when you were in high school?” he asked as she inched away.

“I guess it was easier to pretend then.” She stared out the bay window’s gauzy curtains at the muted world beyond.

“Before that asshat Carrington got into your head?”

“I’d started believing things were going to finally work out in my life.” Bethany leaned her weight against Mike. “And my paintings were getting better and better. They were dreams I could make happen with merely a brush in my hand. Then it all just fell apart when Benjie and I did. Or I ripped it apart. I ripped up every painting I’d ever done, except for that one of the meadow Dru has at the Whip. The images I submitted for the residency were the photographs my dad took of my work when I was a teenager. I was pissed at the world back then and needed to destroy something, I guess.”

“I understand.”

Bethany laughed. “Well, I don’t. Benjie was nothing. I know that now. I wish I had then. Before I did the kind of damage to my life that maybe it’s impossible to undo.”

Her knees gave out and she landed on her butt.

Mike sat beside her, crossing his legs, the two of them surrounded by her attempts to capture the very best of the home she was finally determined to keep. He curved her into the warmth of his body. She could sense him listening, when she didn’t know how to say more. She didn’t know how she’d managed to get what she had out. Or maybe she did.

“I keep forgetting who you are.”

“Who am I, darlin’?”

She sighed. “An easy-come, easy-go cowboy. A part-time, drifting bartender. A grieving little brother. A healer who’s helping my dad, even if Joe’s not so good at being helped. A celebrated, philanthropic artist who sees way more than the rest of us can. A man who wants to help and be needed, but never long enough to need anything or anyone himself.”

Mike chuckled.

“You and your family make easy-come, easy-go damn near impossible,” he said. “And you see plenty yourself. A lot more now, I’m betting, than when you were a teenager, when you first started
dreaming while you painted. And maybe that’s part of the problem.”

“What problem?” she asked, the answer bubbling inside her, just out of reach.

“That you can’t pretend anymore. Painting was your escape when you were a kid. But your first love knows how hard life can be, too. And now, if you want your art back, you have to deal with reality as you create.”

While Bethany watched Dru and Brad start their lives together. And Oliver and Selena make their future with Camille a dream come true. And Marsha and Joe—beating the odds and fighting back after Joe’s heart attack and surgery, refusing to consider that it was time to maybe scale down their foster home full of kids like Shandra, who’d be lost without them. Everywhere Bethany looked, there was love. The kind that never gave up, and never backed down from a challenge.

And she kept trying to paint it all. Even though, when she was being totally honest with herself, just her and her brushes and paints, what she’d kept finding herself thinking about was . . . leaving it all behind again.

She looked at her recent attempts, at the colors she’d mixed and layered and applied. She’d poured her feelings into each stroke, hoping something beautiful would emerge. Something that wouldn’t hurt when she looked at it. Something she could see through to the end.

“I was glad it was gone for a while.” The awful truth came tumbling out before she could catch it. “My art. The escape it had been. It all seemed like such a lie.”

Mike gave her a supportive nod. “So you ran from it, when you left your foster family.”

She shook her head at the years she’d wasted. “I didn’t make it far. And I never belonged anywhere else. Wherever I went, I was desperate to get away from there, too. I was always searching for a home to come back to.”

His gaze jerked to hers, their connection stronger than ever. Their pasts and present and more colliding.