True Colors (8 page)

Max was mystified. “A unicorn?”

“It’s what I call a Dream Portrait,” Emma
explained. “I paint the person and surround her with her dreams.
Ava Lowery dreams of being a princess. What’s your first
language?”

“Russian,” Max said, his gaze riveted to the
painting. He picked a path carefully over the drop cloths for a
closer look at the canvas on the easel. The afternoon’s natural
light flooded through the glass wall of the great room, bathing the
painting in a warm, golden glow.

“Russian?” Emma said. “Really?”

“I was a toddler when my family came to
America,” he told her. “A year and a half old. For the first few
years we were in the United States, my parents spoke only Russian,
so that was what I learned first. I picked up English pretty
quickly, though.”

“Wow. Russia! Why’d they come here?”

He shrugged. “A better life. More
freedom.”

“So where did you grow up? Where did you
learn English?”

He finally tore his gaze from the painting to
look at Emma. Her face glowed even more beautifully than that of
the little girl on the canvas. He didn’t think his life story was
particularly interesting, but her eager curiosity touched him.
“Brighton Beach. It’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn where many Russian
immigrants live. Little Odessa, it’s called.”

“Sure, I’ve heard of Little Odessa. Before I
moved here, I was living in Dumbo.” He frowned, picturing the
cartoon elephant with the big ears. “Down Under the Manhattan
Bridge Overpass,” she explained. “It’s on the western edge of
Brooklyn. Lots of artists live there. Lots of lofts converted into
studios. It’s getting gentrified, so the artists will probably be
forced out soon by high rents.”

He’d known his way around Brooklyn pretty
well while growing up, but he had never heard of that neighborhood.
“Dumbo,” he said, then shook his head. “I gather Brooklyn has
become somewhat more upscale since I left.”

“You live in California now, right?”

“San Francisco.” He ambled around the loft,
careful not to trip over the wrinkles and bumps in the cloth
covering the floor. The view of the ocean through the glass wall
was spectacular. “I like living near the ocean.”

“This house qualifies,” Emma said, glancing
toward the glass wall for a moment and then gravitating back to the
easel. “You should keep it.”

“It’s a little far from San Francisco. I
would have a difficult commute to work.”

“Big deal. The U.S. has two oceans. You might
as well have homes near both of them.”

The idea was tempting. But this had been
Vanessa’s house, not his, not theirs. She was gone, and he wanted
her house gone, too. Perhaps that sentiment was irrational, but he
was rational ninety-nine percent of the time. He could allow
himself one tiny percent of irrationality.

“I guess that would be pretty expensive,”
Emma conceded. “Two houses. Sheesh. I can’t imagine owning even one
house. But if I were you, I’d dump the San Francisco place and keep
this one.” She studied her painting thoughtfully, then lifted a
paintbrush and dabbed a touch of shading to the castle’s main
turret.

“As I said, I work in San Francisco,” he
said, not adding that he could work on the east coast as easily as
the west. Computers, phones and airplanes could keep him connected.
And overseeing his foundation and his investments wasn’t exactly
the most demanding job in the world. He had Janet running the
office in San Francisco. She was alarmingly competent. And he was a
call or a text away if she needed to contact him.

He could work here as easily as there. He
could convert the magnificent loft into an office and manage the
foundation while gazing out at the ocean. His office in San
Francisco was on Market Street, which he supposed offered a pretty
enough view for an urban vista. But it wasn’t as stunning as the
view through the glass walls of his house.

Vanessa’s
house
, he reminded himself.

Emma took a step back from her easel and
scrutinized her painting. She had the easel positioned facing the
wall of glass so the daylight streaming through the panes would
illuminate it. He studied her profile. Her nose had a slight bump
in it, not visible when viewed straight on. Her chin was
surprisingly strong. Or maybe not so surprisingly, he thought. She
was clearly a tough woman, determined and stubborn. Did the shape
of a woman’s chin correlate to her personality?

She startled him by turning suddenly, so she
was facing him. “I’d like to paint you,” she said.

Her words surprised him even more than her
abrupt movement. His own words surprised him even more. “I’d like
to kiss you.”

Holy
crap
.

Staring at him, Emma had been thinking about
the stark lines of his face, the hollows of his cheeks, the vivid
blue of his eyes. She’d been thinking about how she would position
him on the canvas—three-quarter view would probably be best, with
him looking past the left shoulder of whoever stood in front of the
canvas, because his left side was just a tiny bit more interesting
than his right—and how she would capture the twining texture of his
thick, dark hair.

But now she was thinking only of his mouth,
wondering how it would feel pressed to hers, wondering how it would
taste.

Like a rainbow…

Of course not. Mouths did not taste like
rainbows. Kisses did not convey color. And she absolutely couldn’t
let him kiss her, because he was her landlord, and he wanted her
out of his house, and if they started something romantic, or just
plain sexual, the landlord-tenant power dynamic between them would
inevitably be a part of it. If she slept with him, would he reduce
the rent? If she didn’t kiss him, would he have the local constable
nail an eviction notice to the front door?

The possibilities tumbled and jumbled inside
her mind, making her queasy. “I don’t think…”

“No,” he said more to himself than to her.
“No, I—I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He spun away
and stared at the panoramic view beyond the glass wall.

He seemed oddly vulnerable, his broad
shoulders slumping, his hands buried in his pockets as if to
prevent himself from touching anything.

Touching her.

God, she wanted that. She wanted him to touch
her. She wanted to paint his hands as well as his face. She wanted
to paint his dreams, just as she was painting Ava’s little-girl
dreams of a castle and a unicorn.

“I should go,” he said.

She agreed. He should go. The air around them
was thick with unspoken thoughts, unexpressed desires. Yet she
didn’t want him to leave. “It’s your house,” she said.

He snorted a laugh. But he remained where he
was, making no move toward the stairs.

The silence stretched for a minute, and she
said, “So, can I paint you?”

At that, he turned. “What would painting me
entail?”

There he went, using the
word
entail
again.
She smiled. “Well, I could do it the way I’m doing Ava’s. I’d snap
a bunch of photos of you and then paint from the photos. Or you
could pose for me, but that would take a lot more of your
time.”

He nodded slightly, mulling over the
options.

“And then I’d have to ask
you a few questions—about your dreams.” It occurred to her that
asking him about his dreams might be terribly intimate, more
intimate even than kissing him. It wasn’t as if he were a little
girl who loved playing make-believe. He was her
landlord
, for God’s sake.

Yet he’d said he wanted to kiss her. If he
could cross boundaries with that comment, surely she could cross
boundaries by interrogating him about his dreams.

Or maybe not. A discrepancy existed between
them. He had the power to kick her out of the house. She had no
power at all.

None of this was right.
She’d been a fool to mention painting him. Typical of her—reckless,
barreling ahead without first considering the ramifications. She
should have thought about what painting him—what pursuing anything
beyond a landlord-tenant relationship—would
entail
before she suggested
it.

She started to tell him to forget the whole
idea, but before she could speak, he said, “Okay. Paint me. When
can we start?”

She blinked, stunned. The afternoon sunlight
glazed his face, bringing every angle and hollow into stark relief.
His eyes… She would have to mix cerulean blue with a bit of zinc
white and maybe a hint of cypress green to capture their unique
color. His skin tone? Amber, yellow ocher, a touch of gold. His
hair? A dense mix of burnt umber and perylene black. Colors danced
inside her head.

Max’s colors.

Another blink snapped her back to reality, or
at least to more pragmatic concerns. She had to finish Ava’s
portrait first. It was near completion; another day or two, and it
would be ready for framing. Emma needed to warm the castle up a
bit—she’d modeled it after some photos of medieval European
castles, which tended to be cold and dank and kind of foreboding,
not the stuff of a young girl’s fantasies. A bit more gold in the
stones would fix that. And she wasn’t satisfied with Ava’s hair; it
needed a touch more gold, too. Ava’s face was as close to perfect
as Emma could hope for, her dress looked lovely, and the scepter in
Ava’s hand looked like a little like a magic wand, which Emma
thought Ava would love.

Tomorrow morning she had an
art class with the doctor twins, Willy and Wally Stenholm. One of
them was a retired optometrist, the other a retired podiatrist—Emma
could never remember which was which—and their wives had insisted
that they take an art class with Emma because they had no hobbies
to keep them occupied in retirement, and they were getting on their
wives’ nerves. Their parents had run a millinery shop, back when
such things existed, and the two septuagenarians loved painting
hats. Whatever. They paid Emma well, and each week she created a
still life arrangement with a hat for them to reproduce on their
canvases. She’d picked up some interesting hats at the Goodwill
store, and Monica had introduced Emma to a friend of hers who
worked at the local high school and allowed Emma to borrow a few
hats from the theater club’s costume stash. Last week the doctor
twins had painted a police hat from the school’s production
of
Guys and Dolls
.
Tomorrow they would be painting an arrangement of old-fashioned
headwear from the local community theater. It wasn’t high art, but
she charged the doctor twins twice as much as she charged Abbie’s
and Tasha’s parents, and they happily paid.

“We could start on Friday,” she suggested,
then held her breath, waiting for Max to come to his senses and
back out.

“Friday. Good.” He nodded briskly, then
strode to the stairs and down, as if he wanted to leave before he
did that come-to-his-senses thing and returned to the subject of
leases and clauses and eviction.

Emma watched him as he reached the bottom
step and headed for the front hall in long, loping strides. She
heard the faint squeak of hinges as he opened the front door, the
solid click as he shut it.

This was definitely weird. Arguably crazy.
Would he still insist on her moving her operations out of his house
if she was painting him? Would he still demand that she pack up and
go? Would he render the artist he’d just hired to paint his
portrait homeless?

He hadn’t exactly hired her. They hadn’t
discussed her fee. She hadn’t printed out a contract for him to
sign. Maybe he expected her to paint him for free in exchange for
remaining in the house. Which might not be a bad deal.

Except… She shook her head as she once again
contemplated what a mismatch they were. He might be at the mercy of
her paintbrush, her vision and creativity, but she was at the mercy
of his property ownership. Painting him didn’t change the fact that
he could still force her out of his house.

***

Friday.

That gave him a full day to recover from
bizarre spell he was under. One entire day to take care of
business, drive down to Cambridge, visit with his mentor from MIT,
and remember who he was: Max Tarloff. Computer geek. Rich guy. San
Francisco resident. Property owner eager to sell the ocean-view
house he’d bought on Boston’s north shore two years ago, when his
brain had been outvoted by his heart.

Surely that wasn’t what was
happening now. His heart had nothing to do with Emma Glendon and
her fanciful painting. He was just…bewitched. Or bored. Or
something
.

He hadn’t felt so muddled when he’d first met
her. He’d considered her attractive, certainly, but he encountered
plenty of attractive women. He’d also considered her a problem,
which she was. He’d been annoyed with her. Angry. Exasperated.

What had happened to change his
perspective?

It couldn’t have been merely that he’d viewed
the painting she’d been working on, fascinating though it was. He’d
had no idea what her paintings were like when he’d offered to help
her find some studio space elsewhere in town. That offer had been
utterly irrational. His consenting to let her paint him was equally
irrational. Both decisions only dragged him further from his goal
of selling the house and getting on with his life.

True Colors.

The possibility that the song was what had
turned him around, paralyzed certain thought centers in his brain,
and made him lose track of his plans and goals, was as crazy as
everything else. Yet what else could have caused his mental
meltdown?

He consoled himself with the thought that
Emma seemed to have been transformed, as well. At their first
meeting, she’d distrusted him. She’d resented him. She’d
contemplated calling the police on him. And now…