True Colors (17 page)

Gus felt all the
tension drain from her spine, her muscles, her nerves. The
champagne cork came free with a festive pop.
He’s tough,
she thought.
He’s fine.

***

Emma seemed to think she’d won the lottery. Her
smile, always a thing of beauty, now looked laser-bright, and her
eyes glittered like Fourth-of-July sparklers. All because that guy
at the community center, Nick Whatever, was allowing her to use a
storage room as her studio.

She wouldn’t yearn for that horrible little
windowless room—and she wouldn’t have to machete her way through
acres of red tape and bureaucratic paperwork—if Max allowed her to
remain in the house. He could do that so easily. He didn’t need the
money selling the house would bring him. And she did need the
house. The loft offered so much space, so much light. If he were
painting her dream portrait, it would feature her face, so open, so
lovely, her angular cheeks and narrow chin shaping a valentine, and
her resplendent hair, and her wide green eyes—glowing not like
sparklers but like fireworks bright enough to illuminate the sky.
And the dream surrounding her would be the loft in his house,
filled with her easels and paints, her energy and
creativity.

She was excited about the room at the community
center because it was her only option. Max had given her no other
choice, and she was the sort of woman who could view no choice as
the greatest opportunity in the world.

He hated himself.

One word, one minor change of plans, and the
house could be hers. He didn’t need it. She did.

Except that he’d bought that house for another
woman. A woman who, he’d learned too late, had loved him only
because he could buy her things. He’d been so crazy in love with
Vanessa, he hadn’t been able to refuse her anything. She wanted a
house on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean? No problem. It was
hers.

Emma hadn’t asked for the house. She wouldn’t.
Unlike Vanessa, Emma had no idea how easy it would be for Max to
give her that house, and three more just like it, if she wanted
them. Even though much of his money was now controlled by his
foundation, he still had more than he could ever hope to spend in
his lifetime. If Vanessa had stuck around, she might have been
pleasantly surprised to discover that, despite establishing the
foundation, he was still absurdly wealthy.

He ought to tell Emma the truth. He ought to
let her see his true colors, just as the song urged. But if he did…
It would change everything. She’d stop viewing him as a Russian
immigrant who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement and felt uncomfortable
discussing his dreams. Of course he felt uncomfortable discussing
them, especially with a woman he desired as much as he desired
Emma. What was he supposed to say to her? “My dream is to be loved
for myself, not for my wealth.” That made him sound so
pathetic.

And how the hell was Emma supposed to paint
that dream, anyway?

“This is just so cool,” she yammered, her words
tumbling over one another in her excitement. “Not only do I have a
place to work, but I’ve got another job! Or I will, if I pass
muster with Nick’s board. I don’t have a teaching credential, but
I’ve got plenty of experience working with kids. In high school and
college, I spent my summers as an art counselor at a camp. And I’ve
taught art to individuals—in gross defiance of zoning laws. Shame
on me!” she added gleefully. “I should get letters of
recommendation from Abbie’s and Tasha’s parents. I really hope this
committee isn’t hung up on stuff like art education credentials.
Nick implied the job pays crap, so they can’t expect me to be some
sort of art professor, right?”

She paused when the bartender appeared with a
bottle of beer and a slender fluted glass of champagne. The bubbles
streaming upward through the pale liquid reminded him of Emma’s
personality: round and fizzy, rising as high as they could
go.

He felt like shit.

“Of course, I still need to find a place to
live,” Emma said after taking a sip of her drink. “But as long as I
have a place to work, I’m good. I can always buy a
tent.”

“You don’t have to buy a tent,” he said
curtly.

“Just joking.” She reached across the table and
gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “But at least now I don’t have to
worry about finding a place to live where I can also
work.”

He drank some beer straight from the bottle,
relishing its sour flavor. Closing his eyes, he pictured that
small, windowless room in the community center, its linoleum floor,
its cinderblock walls, its sheer ugliness. She was thrilled because
she thought it was her only option. But it wasn’t.

“Look, Emma—if you want, I’ll take my house off
the market. I don’t have to get rid of it. If you want to continue
to live there…”

She’d raised her champagne flute to her lips,
but his words clearly startled her enough to make her lower the
glass and gape at him. “But you came to Brogan’s Point to sell the
house.”

“It can wait.”

“And I can’t keep teaching there. You said so
yourself. There are those nasty zoning laws. And insurance issues,
and liability. All that legal stuff.” She pressed her lips
together, effectively smothering her radiant smile. “Taking the
room at the community center means I’ll be able to teach there this
summer in Nick’s program. So I’ll earn a little more money and
maybe make contact with more people who might want to commission
Dream Portraits.” She shook her head. “I can make it
work.”

“You could make it work in my house, too. Stay.
Stay as long as you want. We’re not a landlord and tenant anymore.
We’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we?”

She stared at him, suddenly wary. “What do you
mean?”

He wasn’t sure what was troubling her. “Emma.
We’ve made love. Several times.” Several spectacular times, he
wanted to add. “You can stay on in the house. Forget about the
rent. That’s the least I owe you.”

Her expression
went from wary to deflated, from deflated to suspicious. Her voice
was cool, barely an inch from icy. “You don’t owe me anything,
Max—unless you want to pay me for your portrait. I can’t calculate
the cost until I figure out what the painting
will…
entail
.” She
seemed to trip over that last word, for some reason. “But as far as
the house… I don’t need you to do that.”

“Do what? Take it
off sale? It isn’t even
on
sale yet.”

“You don’t have
to let me stay on in the house because we had sex. I didn’t make
love with you because I wanted something in return. You
don’t
owe
me
anything.” She sighed again. The fireworks vanished from her eyes,
extinguished by a layer of tears. Extinguished by Max. “What
happened this morning was special. It was freely given, at least on
my side. And now you’re offering to pay me for it. I put out, so
you’ll let me live on your property rent-free. Just so generous of
you, Max.” Her voice cracked and she averted her
gaze.

“Emma.” He kept his voice low, as unthreatening
as possible. He wasn’t sure what he was dealing with right now,
other than an irrational woman. Math he could understand.
Computers. Code. But women? He was totally at a loss. “I’m just
trying to make things easier for you,” he said.

“Did I ask you to
do that? Do you think I need you to make my life easier? I made
love to you because I wanted to, because you turn me on,
because…because that stupid song convinced me I saw your true
colors. But I think I’m seeing them now. I slept with the landlord,
and now the landlord
owes
me a favor. The hell with that.” She slid out of
the booth and stormed toward the door.

Max raced after her, shooting the bartender a
look he hoped she would read as a promise to return and pay his
tab. Yes, he was diligent about paying what he owed—a trait Emma
seemed to believe was highly objectionable.

He caught up to her just outside the tavern’s
front door—the place where he’d first kissed her, where he’d first
realized how much he wanted her. “Emma.” He grabbed her forearm,
closed his fingers around the slender limb. “Stop.”

She turned to face him. She wasn’t crying, but
he saw a few glistening rivulets streaking her cheeks where tears
had skittered down to her chin. “It’s okay, Max,” she said. “I was
wrong. I thought I knew you better than I did. The song…” She
lowered her eyes and shook her head again, just as she had inside
the tavern. “I’m an artist. I see colors. I think they’re true, but
maybe sometimes they aren’t. Artists tend to see things the way we
think they are, not always the way they really are. We see
dreams.”

“You’re not
seeing
me
,” he
argued. “I care about you, Emma. I want you to work in a big, open
space with lots of light. I’m offering to let you continue to do
that in my house.”

“No, thanks,” she said, easing her arm from his
grip. “I’m going to take a walk, Max. I need to clear my head.” She
spun away and stalked down the street.

He watched until she turned the corner and
vanished from sight. What was her problem? He was trying to make
things easier for her, and she was acting as if he were a
creep.

Let her take her damned walk, he though as he
yanked the door open and headed back inside. Let her walk until her
feet ache. He didn’t care.

He shook his head
at his own self-deception. The fact was, he cared too much. He
cared so much, he wanted to tell her the truth about himself—that
he was richer than she could imagine, that he was practically
richer than
he
could imagine. That making her life easier would create no
hardship for him. That he could be her patron as well as her lover.
That he could arrange things so she would never have to worry about
where she would live and where she would work.

And either she would embrace him—because she
wanted his money to make her life easier—or she would hate him for
trying to buy her. Either way, he would lose .

The long walk up the hill was exactly what Emma
needed. The air was humid enough that anyone who saw her hiking
back to the house would assume she was sweating, not crying. And by
the time she reached the house, she wasn’t crying anymore,
anyway.

How could a day that had started so wonderfully
turn rotten so abruptly?

The day wasn’t completely rotten, she reminded
herself as she unlocked the house and let herself in. She’d lined
up a new work space—nowhere near as nice as the loft; Max was right
about that. But the room at the community center would do. And she
had a new potential source of income. Thanks to the community
center, she’d be able to paint. She’d be able to teach. She’d be
able to take care of herself.

Emma had a remarkably well-developed gene for
responsibility. Growing up, she’d eaten food her family had grown
on their own land or bartered for with their neighbors. She’d
learned from her father how to repair a leaky roof, and from her
mother how to sew a shirt. She wasn’t averse to accepting gifts—she
liked getting gifts, actually—but only gifts freely given. Like the
boots Claudio had given her, simply because she’d seen them in a
boutique window and said, “Aren’t those gorgeous?”

Sex was a gift, too. You gave it to someone you
liked, someone you loved, someone to whom you were irresistibly
drawn. Someone who fit you in all the right ways, like the
interlocking shapes of an Escher drawing.

She’d shared something powerful with Max. She
had reveled in every moment of it, every sweet, sharp sensation. It
had been something pure, something generous and open. No
conditions. No strings. Something as true as the colors in a
rainbow.

And then he’d
transformed it so it was about a landlord and a tenant and
him
owing
her
something.

She cursed.

“Wow, you’re in a good mood,” Monica said,
emerging from the kitchen and joining Emma in the entry hall as she
turned the bolt on the front door. Monica must have driven her car
into the garage; Emma hadn’t seen it parked on the road in front of
the house. Monica had changed from the conservative work apparel
she’d had on that morning into a droop-shouldered sweater and a
pair of stylish jeans. A glass of white wine in her hand, she eyed
Emma up and down. “You should have let me know you were hiking the
hill,” she said. “I would have driven down and picked you up.
What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Emma muttered, then sighed.
“Everything. Is there more wine?”

“I just opened a bottle.” Monica beckoned her
toward the kitchen. “Come and tell me what happened.”

Emma settled on one of the stools at the center
island while Monica moved directly to the refrigerator to fetch the
wine. She had begun dinner preparations—a package of chicken sat
defrosting on the counter, and an onion, some carrots and a flowery
crown of broccoli lay beside the sink. Ignoring the food, Monica
filled a second wine goblet with chilled Chardonnay and handed it
to Emma. It wasn’t champagne, for which Emma was very
grateful.