“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll just pop over with my thermos later and I’ll have my lunch for tomorrow. Besides, that’ll give me a chance to see if you’ve really been working or if you’ve just been avoiding me seeing you in the yard.” Those dimples again were almost distracting enough to keep her eyes away from that towel.
Nora smirked, the tension that had been coiling inside her starting to ebb. “Trust me. I’m the slowest moving target you’ll ever see. If I’m not at home, I’m probably out buying paint or taking pictures. My circuit is a short one.”
Matt screwed up his face with something Nora interpreted as disbelief.
“What?” she asked, jamming her hands into her jacket pockets, utterly confused by his bemused expression.
“Nothing. Let me throw some clothes on and I’ll follow you right over.”
Oh, don’t bother with the clothes
, she thought, even as he disappeared into the house.
*
“Hey, Matt. Can you hold that lamp up for me?” As soon as Matt had stepped into the house, Nora put him to work. He hoped that meant she was getting comfortable around him.
“This one here?”
“Yes. Just hold it up high over the painting. I hate using the flash and it’s so damn dim in here. I want to make sure the colors are true to life in the photo without me having to do digital correction.”
Matt grabbed the ceramic lamp by the base and held it up a couple of feet over Nora’s restaurant painting. When he’d walked into Nora’s sunroom at her request, his eyes had automatically landed on the three foot by four foot photorealistic work. His temptation had been to reach out and touch it so he could feel the texture of the paint to validate her claims that it wasn’t a printed piece, but she implored him to resist because the paint hadn’t quite cured.
“It’s really good, Nora,” he repeated for the third time, shifting the weight of the heavy lamp from one hand to the other to spare his bum wrist.
“Yeah, you keep saying that,” she said, smiling behind her camera while she shot the canvas from several angles.
“How much do you think it’ll sell for?”
She shrugged and walked over to him, wrapping her fingers around his naked forearms and bringing the light down a little lower. Her gentle touch made the hair on his arms stand on end. “Hard to say.” He liked the electric feeling he got from being near to her and found himself subconsciously moving closer to her whenever she was nearby. She could never be close enough — not until there was nothing at all between them. He needed to change the subject and fast or he’d need to use the easel to hide his growing erection. As it was, every time she looked away, his eyes were cataloging her curves. He kept thinking about how his hands would feel encircling her naked waist and wondering if the most gentle way to take her the first time would be with her astride his body — or perhaps it would be more enjoyable for her if he eased into her from a spooning position.
Fuck.
“Hey, Nora?”
“Hmm?”
“How do you decide what to paint?”
She put her camera down and looked off to the side, seeming to ponder his question thoroughly. “Well, I take a lot of pictures of things I find interesting. When I get home and look at them on my computer screen sometimes they turn out not to be so interesting after all. Other times, things that I hadn’t intended to specifically capture pull my eye to some part of a photo I’d neglected and it’ll become its own thing.”
“Is that why you put the white tablecloths and candles on the tables? To draw attention to the cook?” he asked, cocking his head toward the easel.
“Hey, you get it!” she said, smiling wider than he’d ever seen her manage.
Matt stared. She was gorgeous: the kind of woman he’d love to have on his arm to show off to anyone who’d look and listen. “That’s my girl,” he’d say. “My Nora.”
“Hey, I read and stuff,” Matt countered, finally breaking free of her hypnotism and smiling himself. “Do you always put a little joke in all of your paintings?”
“Most of the time, yes. Sometimes the humor is already overt and I don’t have to add anything.” She tapped his shoulder to indicate that he could drop the lamp and put her camera away.
“What are you going to paint next?” Matt settled into the cushioned wicker chair half-strewn with catalogues and tubes of oil paint and rested an ankle on his opposite knee comfortably.
Nora sat on the tall stool in front of her easel and faced him, chewing her bottom lip. “That — I don’t know. I rarely work on projects this size on this sort of deadline and have ideas plotted out well in advance, so I’m at a loss here.” Her fingers went to the tails of her headscarf again, fiddling. He ached to reach over and grab her hand to stop her, to kiss those hands, but resisted using a well of willpower he rarely needed to access.
“Well, I don’t know what I could show you that’d you’d consider interesting enough to paint, but since you’re not enthralled in work at the moment, how ’bout you let me show you around some?”
Nora looked wary. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Nothing mundane, I assure you. Get me some credit for creativity, huh? Since you’re not from around here, I figured you’d might like a guide that’ll take you out to witness the majesty of the swamps.”
She gave him a doubtful look that made him laugh. “It’s not that bad, Nora. Mosquitoes are basically out for the year and the boat ride can be sort of serene, looking at all those trees with their leaves dropping off and the fish all lazy beneath the surface of the water.”
“Boat?”
“Mm hmm.” Matt heaved himself up and stretched his back by reaching his arms high over his head. He noticed Nora staring at the bit of hair that carpeted the skin between his navel and waistband and gave her three additional seconds to enjoy the show. “Canoe, actually. Ah, Nora. Your distrustfulness of me is downright adorable,” he said, climbing the three stairs up into the kitchen and picking up his thermos.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.” She followed him up and pressed a lid onto another container of soup for Karen’s dinner. “I’m just not sure if me and a boat in a swamp make the best combination.” She ran a strip of freezer tape around the container for insurance.
“It’ll be fine, I promise. Hey, I’ll make you a deal,” he said, chucking her under the chin playfully. “If you absolutely hate it, I won’t bring up the hunting issue ever again. I’ll find a new honey hole.”
Nora blushed and mumbled something about finding a plastic grocery bag. She’d caught the innuendo. Matt wanted to see just how far he could push.
“Fine,” she acquiesced. “But if I fall into the swamp you owe me big-time and not just for a new camera.”
“You got a deal.”
Nora was sweeping out the accumulation of rotted straw on the barn floor when she heard the sound of someone leaning on a car horn. She looked down at her old Swatch and couldn’t believe how she’d lost track of the time. She had been cleaning to the soundtrack from
The Phantom Menace
and was getting some good exercise in waving her rake around like a light saber between each heavy load she carried to the trash bin. She needed the distraction. She couldn’t do anything — not research, not sketch, not paint —
nothing
without thinking about Matt Vogel. That scared her. She hadn’t even touched the man yet and she felt like a floozy for the things she wanted to do to him — and where.
The person in her driveway had to be Bennie. She was supposed to have arrived around lunchtime, which for Bennie actually meant “around three,” so she was right on time at five.
Nora peeled off her gloves and ran out to meet her friend, who had finally got off her horn so she could climb up to the porch.
“Wow, this place is a dump,” Bennie said cheerfully while receiving the hug Nora offered.
“Thanks for noticing. It actually looks worse now than it did when I bought it, and when I bought it the house was nearly completely covered in vines. The electric company had a hell of a time getting into the yard to run a new line.”
“Jesus. I hope you’re upgrading to the current century’s technology,” Bennie said, flicking her shiny black hair from one shoulder to the other and raising a perfectly waxed brow at her dirty friend.
“Among other projects. But don’t worry — I booked a hotel room for you for tonight so you don’t have to sleep in the draft.”
“Excellent. Is your painting boxed up? Let’s go to the hotel now. Is it far? I’m starving. Let’s go have dinner in town. You
do
have a town here, right? It’s not all just swamps and corn fields?”
Nora edged her overwrought friend into the living room and let the door shut behind them. “Yes, Bennie, there’s a town here.”
Bennie stuck out her tongue and helped herself to a juice glass from the drying rack and drained some of Nora’s boxed Merlot into it.
“Who’d you borrow the truck from?” Nora asked while pulling her dirty hoodie over her head and heading toward the bathroom to shower.
“It’s my brother’s. It’s huge, right? I kept swerving into other lanes because I couldn’t tell how close to the line I was. Gas was outrageous. Remind me to never buy a full-sized SUV.”
“That’s not an SUV, Bennie,” Nora called over the sound of water drumming against the tub floor. “That’s a boat. You could have just let me ship the painting, you know.”
“No way, chick. That painting needs to be delivered in perfect condition, especially since it’s the first one. They’re going to photograph that thing six ways to Sunday to put into their marketing materials so it needs to be pristine. I’m sure the boys in brown are quite good at their jobs, but we don’t know the value of that thing. If one dent or ding is going to slash the price by thousands, I’m not going to risk it.” At that, Bennie walked into the sunroom to see Nora’s painting in person. She giggled at it and put her cup down to start padding the painting with the bubble tape and torn drop cloths Nora had piled on the wicker chair earlier. By the time Nora was out of the shower, Bennie had maneuvered the painting into the large box Nora had begged off Chad at the appliance shop. Nora thought he’d seemed oddly terrified at her presence there but didn’t question it. He just fetched the box from the storeroom and squeaked out a “Need anything else?”
“Are you going to let your hair down, girlie?” Bennie asked as Nora applied lip balm in front of the mirror on her mantle.
Nora shook her head and rubbed her lips together to distribute the flavorless product. “Nope. I’ve got a new blue fedora I’ve been dying to wear with a ton of hipster irony.”
Bennie rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth in the diva-esque way she was prone to. “Why do you even have hair if no one ever sees it? Just shave it off again.”
“Hey, it’s my hair. I can show it or not show it,” Nora said with a bit of a growl, her forehead wrinkling as she scrunched her brows.
“Fine.” Bennie shrugged, unaffected by her friend’s ’tude. “I just think that it’s cool and it’s a shame you don’t have the balls to show it.”
“Whatever. Let’s get that painting into the truck and go. We can drive separately since my house is missing entire exterior walls and I need to come back.”
*
“Come on down, Nora.” Matt crouched near the middle of the two-man canoe holding a gunwale with one hand and reaching out the other to Nora, who was standing near the launch ramp clutching her camera for dear life and making a pained face at Matt.
“Is that thing watertight?”
Matt laughed. “Of course it is. It’s holding my weight. It can take another hundred pounds or so at least. Come on, baby.” It took Matt a moment to hear his own verbal diarrhea and when he realized what he said, he cringed.
Nora raised a brow.
“Sorry. We’re big on pet names in the South,” he said, schooling his face back to stillness although his blood was pounding bombastically inside his head. Matt had never called anyone “baby” — affectionately, anyway.
Nora smirked, but extended her hand and let Matt take hold of her wrist as she waded the short distance into the water and threw a leg into the boat. “That-a girl,” Matt crooned as Nora settled into a seated position on the canoe floor. Matt pushed off from the marshy shore with his paddle and they were off.
Nora gripped the gunwales on either side of the boat, sitting very still and whimpering each time the small boat rocked the slightest bit. The water was calm and free of waves in the still inlet, and Matt was paddling so near the shore that if they capsized, they could just wade back to land. Nora swore an oath. “Talk to me,” she said to Matt, who was actively scanning the woods for whitetail deer.
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything.”
“Problem with boats?”
“Small ones, yes. Big ones don’t bother me because of the stabilizers. I cruise a lot.”
“Can’t swim?” He watched Nora check the closures on the life vest she’d borrowed from Karen one more time before she went back to gripping the canoe sides. “I’m a pretty confident swimmer, actually. My problem doesn’t have to do with fearing I’ll drown, but that I’ll be taken by surprise by a boat capsizing.”
“That’s a pretty specific fear.”
“Well, when I was eight I was on a pool float at a friend’s house and her brother came up from underwater and turned me over. I had been nearly asleep at the time so I ended up sucking in a lot of water. Ever since then I’ve been terrified that I’ll get dropped in against my will.”
Matt paddled in silence for a while and then said, “You know, the cure for that would probably be getting dunked a few times.”
“Yeah, let’s just pretend otherwise.”
“Fair enough.”
“So, what can you tell me about your friend Chad?”
Matt stopped paddling and spoke through clenched teeth. “Why?”
“He seems curious.”
“Do me a favor and turn around.” He pulled his paddle in and held it upright by his side.
“You want me to
stand
?”
“No, just swivel. You can scoot back onto the floor and get back up if you’re afraid of lifting your legs over the bench.”
Nora sighed and lifted her camera strap over her head. She looked at the space behind her, then the water in front of the boat as if she were resigning herself to the inevitable. “Uh … ”