Loving Grace (21 page)

Grace sobbed and clung to him, burying her
face against his chest. She wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t.
Nevertheless, she had loved him so long, and she’d been so alone,
missing him, wanting him. She felt his hand cupping the back of her
head, his other around her lower back, and felt the heat of his
skin, breathed him in until she ached with it. “Just make love to
me. You don’t have to make promises. Hold me, Noel.”

He did more. He picked her up and carried her
to the room he used. Lowering her to the covers, Noel followed
swiftly, kissing her, tasting her tears and feeling her
shudders.

Grace was famished, wanting and needing to
feel him. In moments, she was pulling off her clothing, sliding off
his jeans, and pulling him atop her as they kissed hungrily. Noel
moved, dragging his mouth over her chin and throat, down to cover
her breast while his hand sought and found her damp heat.

Grace arched and held him to her, too
intensely hungry to wait. “Please. Now.”

He slid up, filling her swift and deep,
moaning in his throat as she twined around him and her teeth sunk
into his shoulder.

It was a rough and untamed ride. Too lost in
the feeling to savor, Grace cried out as he quivered, hearing his
whisper in her ear. His promise to give her more.

He rolled off, went to the bath and returned
to clean her. Then he spent an hour driving her wild with strokes,
caresses, kisses and intimate words, until his fingers teased her
beyond holding back. With his mouth full of her breast, he brought
her over the edge, stopping only to join their flesh again, to ride
her through the fiery storm, and beyond it, not stopping until her
body was replete.

Grace lay still while she listened to his
breathing beside her. She glanced at the clock. “I need to shower.
They’ll be back soon.”

He captured her hand and sat up.

Grace pulled it away. “I need some time.” She
slid off the bed and went to her room for fresh clothing before
going to shower.

~ * ~

Noel stayed as he was, hearing the sounds
from down the hall and feeling a sick hollowness in his stomach.
Maybe he’d waited too long, and it was too late. He had suspected
he was in love with Grace six years before, but known it by the
time he’d painted her again and again. He hadn’t had anything to
offer Grace then, no matter what she had seen in him. But she’d
given him something over time, over that year, it had become
clearer and clearer to him. Once Seth stopped sending pictures of
her, he’d felt the void. The affair, the sex with a woman he’d met,
hadn’t filled it or caused it to vanish as he’d hoped.

He sat up and slid to the side of the bed,
seeing the sun setting through the window. He knew when he saw her
again, before he’d even parked or walked through the door. He’d
known that weak in the knees feeling. In the living room that first
day, when she’d finally accepted his embrace, Noel had fought not
to bury his face in her neck, to make love to her right there.

Now, even after doing so, he wanted only to
be with her, to love her until they couldn’t move, and to never let
go of her. To have more than her body. He wanted her heart. Now, he
knew what the dreams of painting her were about, they were about
needing, wanting Grace in his life, for the rest of his life.

He sighed and slid on his jeans, and went
down to the basement bathroom to clean up. When he emerged, Grace
was sitting on the sectional, her feet under her, watching for
him.

He sat close but not close enough and turned
to her.

Her eyes moved over his face before resting
on his own. “It’s too much like before, Noel. Too fast after so
long apart. I had sex with you after a seven-year absence, now a
six-year one. Do you think I want to feel this? I don’t. Over the
six years I’ve waited for the feelings to go away, and I’d hoped if
I ever saw you again, that I’d feel nothing but a warm affection, a
nostalgia maybe, for what we once had.” She rested her elbow on the
arm and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t want to love you
enough to say yes to a life that won’t work, and may end in divorce
years down the road.”

“I’m not the man in the media, Grace. You
know that. You know the real me no matter how long it’s been.” He
heard the door open above. They both did. Moreover, the pound of
his son’s feet racing through the house, calling his name. “I’ll
get him ready for bed. I’ll spend the day with him, I need to. But
this isn’t finished Grace.” He got up, met his son on the stairs,
and made himself put his problems with Grace aside, so he could
give Jared his full attention.

Chapter Twenty-Four

While they were gone Friday, Rosalind told
Grace she wanted to cook them a special meal. Grace took her work
to the kitchen table and was doing that when Rosalind returned from
shopping at the local markets. The woman hummed as she prepared the
food. Grace wore an absent smile of amusement while she went over
lists of numbers. Noel’s mother liked to sing and hum a lot, and
her voice was really quite good.

She made some phone calls to clients and
called Jared’s soccer coach. She also ran down some items with the
PTA president. By the time Rosalind sat watching her and sipping
coffee, the meal was simmering and Grace had worked through a stack
of files. After talking to a lawyer who sometimes consulted with
her, she put her work in her briefcase and made one last call to
the city league member, planning to help with a fund-raiser. She
hung up, thanking Noel’s mother, as the woman brought her a cup of
coffee and sat down at the round table.

“Did I tell you, Grace, what a fantastic
mother I think you are?”

Grace sipped and smiled. “Thanks. I try.”

Rose’s eyes were thoughtful. Her thumbs
stroked the cup she held in her palms. “I wasn’t that good with
Noel. He saw the worst of Jared and I. I married very young and was
full of passion and drama.” Her blue eyes met Grace’s. “We really
did love each other, but he was a stoic and reserved man, and very
contained. I needed attention. I wanted him to be madly in love
with me, to make me the center of his world. She smiled. “When I
grew old and wise, I realized I likely was that center. I was just
too caught up in my own drama to realize it. We were lovers, even
after the divorce, because we possessed the things each craved. We
couldn’t help ourselves. But my mistakes, my insecurities, tore us
apart.”

“I didn’t know. Noel said—”

“I know what he thinks. However, he saw the
tears and heard the fights, and he’d come to my studio, to find me
weeping, painting furiously. I think that kind of deep pain made an
impression on him. His father may not have understood my art or the
creative drive, but Jared was drawn to me because it was me. I was
challenged, drawn to him, for his strength, his intellect, that
cool control. He seemed to have the things I admired, but did not
have. I realized later, too late, that we would have been perfect
together if we’d only tried to understand each other.”

“I think you did a good job with Noel. He’s a
special man.”

“That trial nearly shattered him.” She
sighed. “He was a strong boy, a contradiction of strength,
independence, and sensitivity. He and I were together more, so he
tried to be strong for me, to step into the role of protector and
counselor. Moreover, even when he was young, he would tell me, “I
will love you, mama, I will dry your tears.”

Rosalind smiled sadly. “How wrong it was of
me to lay such a burden on him. His father did not know how to get
close, to be intimate. It wasn’t in his upbringing. In addition, I
think he didn’t want Noel to paint because he feared Noel would
have the same strong passions I did, and it would drive a wedge
between them. He said things that he thought would provoke Noel to
be more like himself, to be a businessman.”

She took a sip of her coffee, lowered the cup
and added, “As a young man who wanted his father’s approval, who’d
grown up more challenged by thinking his father was not capable of
love. Noel ran off to find his dream, and by the time Jared died,
it was too late.”

Grace nodded, able to see where things had
gotten to that point, particularly if Noel was young and torn
between his love for his mother and the need for a father to be
proud of him.

“I was so fearful during the trial. He’d
lived his life in defiance, possibly angry with himself that he and
Jared never came to understand each other. He’d had many beautiful
women like Elise. Which I am sure kept him from having to have a
serious relationship.

“By the time he met her, I believe he was
trying to work through that, maturing. He wouldn’t let me come
here, he refused to admit what that woman and her lover did to him.
He would say, I am fine. It is nothing, Mother, and near the end,
he would speak of you.”

“Of me?” Grace swallowed and looked down at
her cup.

“Yes. He spoke much of you, Grace. You were
the opposite of me, you see? A strong and fearless woman, who never
once wavered in her belief of his innocence. You have no idea what
your faith did for Noel. A man in a country with no friends, no
family here and who had his last attempt to believe in love
shattered. Not only that, the art that was a contention between
himself and his father, proved to be a curse. His dream proved his
downfall, and yet you and your brother believed in him.”

“I wasn’t always up front.”

Rosalind laughed. “Ah, well, I thought it
very romantic, and very cunning a ruse. My son is a flesh and blood
man after all, and he was drawn to you. But also flattered by your
attraction.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing new to him.”

Rosalind set her cup down and tilted her
head, looking Grace over. “What you have with Noel is not as Jared
and myself. You were, are, in love with him because of whom and
what he is. You love him as he is.”

Grace stilled, not looking up from the
table.

Rosalind spoke quietly. “When he came to
Milan, he did not paint for a year. Once the pictures came of you
carrying his child, he painted you and he carried a sketchbook
—always drawing you.”

“That’s not love, even he would say so.
You’re an artist, you know it’s that part of person or subject that
is inspiring. He was, by the fact we’d made a child and I carried
it, and because I’m Jared’s mother.”

“Grace, our world, our friends are creative
people, very expressive and emotional and yes, dramatic. Affairs
and chaos tend to be the norm. But for all of that, Noel has never
sought some life or death love affair. In spite of his actions and
choices, he, like most of us, wanted that one person in the world
who loved him as he was, and saw in him the strength and the
weaknesses and accepted him nonetheless.”

The older woman sat back, shaking her head.
“You do not realize what you did, Grace. You believed in him,
fought for him, risked everything in your own life for him—and
selflessly wanted to have his child—even when he had nothing to
offer. Do you know, for Noel, what that meant? He has told me many
times over the years, that he came close to wanting to end his life
at his deepest, most alone moments. What had he to live for? He
could no longer paint, he would never find that love, and there was
nothing to show for all of his years but mistakes.”

Grace trembled, not having known that, but
feeling her stomach flip to think he’d been that desperately
low.

Rosalind continued. “But he couldn’t do it,
because there was one person who kept pushing him. In his dreams,
his mind, he saw your eyes. The way you looked at him, the way you
stood in the face of his bitterness and coldness and challenged
him. He could not give up because of you.”

Shaken but trying to hide it, Grace said,
“I’m glad to have given him something. He gave me so much that is
beyond words, an acceptance. I think he too freed me from so many
old ghosts. Noel gave me wings and confidence that had nothing to
do with my intellect, and everything to do with being a woman.”

“Oh, Grace.” The woman reached over and took
her hand. “Doesn’t that prove that it is more than art? It’s life
and real and you cannot throw away chances. I should know.”

“Has he said anything to you, recently?”

“He doesn’t have to. I see him watching you,
looking at you, I see a man longing so deeply for the woman he
loves.”

Grace dropped her hand and rested her elbows
on the table. Her eyes burned as she held her head in her palms and
stared down through the tears. “Women aren’t so different. You and
I aren’t. But my love for him frightens me. It’s so intense and has
lasted through years and distance. The way I love him scares me
enough to consider that I wouldn’t be best for his life, nor he
mine, because our worlds and our characters are so different. I’m
just a woman, no braver or more sacrificing than any other. If I
admit he loves me and accept it, if he’s mine, I’ll open the
floodgates and underneath, needing and wanting more from him
than...”

“Grace.” Rosalind came close and hugged Grace
as she wept.

She cried for some time, finding comfort in
the older woman’s arms, knowing she understood as a woman, a
mother, a friend, and all those things Grace needed at that
moment.

When Grace pulled away and dried her eyes,
Rosalind said, “In the morning you will all sit for me, in the back
lawn. Jared has promised to behave himself.” She chuckled. “I want
you to promise me that you will look at the finished painting with
open eyes.”

“I promise.” Grace bit her lip as emotions
tumbled through her.

“Now. Go and rest, do something while I
finish cooking. Often when I begin painting, I work day and night
to finish it, and I want to get it done before I leave. You’ve a
lot to think about, my dear.”

Grace did think. She could do little else.
That evening when Jared and Noel returned and cleaned up for
dinner, she sat at the table thinking, watching, listening to them,
the three. They laughed and chatted about the events of the day,
and Noel and his son looked at each other, burst into laughter at
some amusing incident. Or her son rolled his eyes at Noel for
having gotten lost and driven past the same statue time and again,
expecting his son to read the map and help him get un-lost.