While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 (4 page)

Her sigh translated to mean she understood he wasn’t accepting less than an answer. She stood and began helping him clean up and he continued to wait her out.

“I don’t know if you will understand this, but normal children make friends. Preston was my best friend. He taught me to climb trees. He taught me to ride a bike. When we got old enough, he taught me to kiss.” The tremble to her voice said more about emotions she wasn’t expressing than the words themselves did.

Silence stretched out, the word kiss lingering on the air between them like some forbidden promise. Radcliffe shook his head, wishing he could shake the romantic notions she wakened away. “So, childhood friend becomes first boyfriend? A story of first love being the deepest and all that?”

She made a soft noise that sounded like agreement before plugging the sink and turning the water on.

“When he got sick, we’d already been engaged for a year. We were young, so young, and it made sense to get married. Anyway, they said cancer.” She swallowed and went silent again. Her hands stayed busy, as if she could wash the memories down the drain with the pasta sauce.

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t say more, didn’t press for more answers. Survivor’s guilt…her love and he got sick and died. Horrible, tragic…

And whatever romantic notions he had about her were probably in vain. He couldn’t compete with a ghost.

He couldn’t even banish his own.

Chapter Five

Skittles were her go-to junk comfort food. She only liked the grape ones, but in a pinch orange or cherry would do. She never ate the green ones or the yellow, leaving a trail of uneaten Skittles in her past to mark life’s little bumps in the road.

Tonight? She cracked open a big bag, poured them into a bowl, and thumbed her tablet awake. Radcliffe wakened emotions she didn’t care to think about with his question about Preston. Remembering him—no, wiser to focus on her project than to linger on the past and things she couldn’t change. “So, Mister Mystery, you think you can get under my skin and out-research me? Bring it, dude, bring it.”

Searching his name, ignoring the bookmarks she’d created in her earlier research of him, she reread through article after article, trying to see if there was something she’d missed. Ones that skimmed over him, glossed over his less than stellar personality, and otherwise told her nothing she didn’t already know. Chewing two candies at once, she flopped backwards and closed her eyes.

Sitting back up, she opened her favorite online bookstore and searched his name. She’d promised to read two of his books anyway… Picking the first two that populated under bestselling, she purchased them and then opened the browser back up.

Assuming he was from this area, or at least his family might have been, she searched for the local newspapers—and there turned out to only be one.
God love small towns…

And then reached blindly for more candy when she found the marriage announcement. “Holy shit, the ogre had a bride.”

Another five minutes of searching gained her a picture of his wife—stunning. No other word would describe Mrs. Lila McQueen with her porcelain doll face and athletic little body. Apparently the happy couple met at school in California, a lifetime away from the small town he now lived in.

No pictures of her downstairs…no pictures of anyone that wasn’t a thousand years old. Plus, she’d accidentally eaten a yellow candy.

Spitting it into the nearby garbage can, Sheri lay back and crossed her legs. If he hadn’t always been this dark and alone, if he’d once lived in the sunshine state with a beautiful bride, it suggested the dramatic personal changes were rooted in an event—one great personal apocalypse which changed the core of who he was and what meant acceptable in his world.

She could sympathize, having gone through a great personal apocalypse herself.

Sitting up so fast that she made the ancient bed squeak, she again grabbed the tablet and used her thumb and forefinger to make the picture larger. His face, in this picture, looked happy.

She tried to focus on that happiness and consider the
why
s of it, tracing the edge of his face with one fingernail. He’d been very handsome, if you liked tall, dark and kleptomaniac.

Opening the first of the two books, she breathed out a gusty grape-scented breath and wished she hadn’t started to realize she did like exactly that.

He’d actually gotten a blurb written the night before and hammered out two character sketches for his leads followed by five more for important supporting characters. Once he knew their backstory and conflict and wanted to know what happened to them, he’d knocked out ten thousand words before dozing off in his chair.

Waking with a crick in his neck, he blinked at the ceiling. He was still tired, eyes blurry with strain and head full of the cotton-like feeling he considered book hangover. Closing the dry, creaking lids again, he decided to go back to sleep, not sure why he’d waked.

Again in darkness, he heard the strains of music twining through the house like a siren’s call. He brought his computer back to life with a swirl of his mouse to peer at the time. He had to rub his hand across his eyes twice before he could focus on the clock enough to read it.

Four a.m.

What in the hell was Sheri doing at this hour? The whiskey-drenched sin of her voice wailed out, “At Last,” and his body stirred to life, adrenaline replacing exhaustion as his hormones responded before his logical brain could.

It was a sorry state of affairs indeed that her crooning out an old song brought more of a rise out of him than any number of willing and far more logical feminine choices in recent years. Deciding he wasn’t going to get any rest without knowing what she was up to, he planted his feet on the floor and strode to the door.

Fumbling with the lock, sleep-blurred brain confused as to why he’d locked himself in his office before remembering the exact thing that woke him explained the need for security, he managed to open the door. The sound of her singing echoed through the house with the barrier of the door removed and he paused, leaning on the doorframe, to let the music sweep over him.

Something about her voice, her tiny curvy body, her sweep of golden hair, reminded him he wasn’t standing with one foot in the grave as he so often felt lately. She made him feel strong, masculine…

Hungry. She brought back to life the long dormant side of him, the part he’d buried when he realized he wasn’t the kind of man made for relationships. One failed marriage told him all he’d needed to know about his ability to maintain that kind of commitment.

Shaking off the nonsense of his exhausted brain, still set—obviously—in romance mode from his work, he barreled into his old bedroom to see what she was up to that involved late night racket in his—
his!—
home.

And froze the minute he saw her.

A T-shirt that hit mid-thigh was the only garment he could see she’d bothered to cover her golden body with. From the swing of her breasts as she brushed a broad line of red across the canvas, it might be the only thing on her at all. Her hair floated around her, as free and unrestrained as her breasts under the paint-spattered fabric of the shirt.

The three-foot tall canvas showed her mastery of her craft—not finished, but already clearly a woman in profile with Spanish moss dangling from trees against a velvet sky behind her. Just a face, but the eyes, the swampy background— “Is that Mina?”

His words jarred Sheri out of her song and froze her mid-step, facing the canvas. For a moment, he wasn’t sure she’d answer him. When she spun, he recognized the blind, almost unfocused gaze as a creative haze much like the kind he experienced when he hit that glorious midpoint of a story—when the world was clear and the characters so loud they might as well be screaming in his ear what the next line of the book was.

“You can tell? Already? Yeah, I finished her story and I needed to get all those feelings down on paper. I only meant to do a sketch, but then I itched to get color and before I knew it, I needed paint—” Before she’d even finished speaking, she’d turned back to the canvas, adding more background and a highlight to the cheek of the image. As if she’d forgotten him already, she dipped her brush back into the water and began humming again.

He was sure, suddenly, that if he stood quietly, she’d forget him entirely and go back to singing.

Leaning on the doorframe, he did just that, and her voice began soft before finding purchase and wailing the words as she went back to work.

An hour passed, then probably two, and he’d eventually decided to sit cross-legged on the bed—which must have proved too heavy to haul to the fire pit so she’d thrown a blanket over it and made the wretched old thing look almost pretty instead. He simply watched her, since she didn’t seem to be aware of the world outside the image she created with broad and sure strokes while her voice rang out with unrestrained beauty.

He wanted to sneer at her actions, to find some fault in her voice or her raw talent, but he couldn’t resist being captured by the magic of it, of her.

Sunlight leaked in through the window when he woke again, blinking and not sure what disturbed his sleep. The silence echoing in the room seemed jarring after the mad artistic explosion of the night before. Searching for Sheri, he found her, finger still poised over her little music player and facing her canvas with a small smile and smudges of darkness under her eyes from lack of rest.

Following her line of sight, he considered her finished work. Mina, one of his characters, clearly gazed back at him from the canvas. Sheri had captured her in a way that no cover artist ever had, from the sad beauty of her cancer-slim face to the strength of her gaze.

“It’s beautiful,” he murmured.

Sheri’s smile couldn’t be described by any word other than beatific. “I’m glad you recognized her. Your book? It was good.”

Standing, he moved closer to the moment of time she’d chosen to focus on—when Mina realized she wasn’t long for this world but knew her lover, Gabriel, wouldn’t accept the harsh reality of truth. Mina gazed out at the bayou, at its constancy and the never-ending circle of life playing out in the darkness, and knew she’d have to leave him—because leaving him seemed less cruel than making him watch her die.

“You captured it.” He didn’t offer false praise. She’d captured the moment and all its poignant beauty and tragedy in each brushstroke.

“Because you did, with words. It’s an evocative book.”

As a writer, Radcliffe recognized the symmetry of the moment, of their gifts.

As a man, he looked at her tired face and wanted to stroke back her golden hair, marred a little with red paint she’d streaked across her forehead to dash a bit of brilliant color against the flaxen perfection of her tempting mane.

If she’d touched him then, he might have tried to be like one of his heroes.

Instead, she blushed and ducked her head, shoving her hair behind one ear. Backing away from him slowly, she muttered, “Sorry for waking you up. Sometimes the muse—” She broke off with one of those little shrugs she used when she ran out of words and spun to escape.

He nodded. She didn’t have to explain.
Sometimes it grabbed you by the ass and you felt lucky to tag along for the ride.
He got it.

She glanced back one final time from the doorway, her gaze almost shy in the intimate embrace of dawn and shared artistic understanding. “So, I’m going to sleep for a while. I’ll see you later.”

He didn’t speak, fearing he’d scare her if he said half the things he thought while watching her in the tiny T-shirt and the aftermath of creation.

She escaped, the thud of her pounding up the stairs a staccato beat that rang through him like a drumbeat of warning. She’d break through his walls, if he let her stay. He’d be better served to tell her to go, to hide from all that she woke within him.

Instead of rushing up the stairs to tell her just that, he turned and faced the creation of his imagination breathed to life.

She’d brought Mina to
life
.

He ran a hand through his hair and wondered if maybe he wanted to see if she could bring him to life too.

Chapter Six

She’d slept most of the day away and woke with the boneless pleasure she always reveled in after finishing a piece. Like afterglow of being with a really good lover, knowing she’d done something magical—brought an image from her mind to life on paper—left behind an almost overwhelming afterglow.

Knowing he’d been there watching added an almost sexual overtone to an already charged moment. She hadn’t meant to wake him, sure she could work in silence, but she’d gotten lost in her work, in her playlist and the application of color from palette to canvas, and he’d appeared in the doorway like some apparition to watch.

Usually she couldn’t work with someone watching but he’d been so silent, she’d forgotten he was there. Well, except for the pauses in between brushstrokes when she’d glanced at him once he’d fallen asleep on the bed that was too small for his so tall frame. Curled on his side, innocence not written on his stark features even in repose, she’d felt a thrum of attraction—the one that seemed to buzz deep in her belly every time his cobalt gaze landed on her—and it’d only added to the power she’d been able to bring alive with application of paint.

She’d decided to let him sleep, to let him rest in a bed rather than propped up at his desk, and turned off the music only to see his eyes snap open at the silence. She couldn’t look at him, not once he’d woken, half afraid of his response to what she knew was one of her best pieces ever.

He might hate it. Mina had been a character that drew her in from the very first sentence, not letting her go until she’d wept at the final page. She might not have done her justice in her late night splattering of color and line.

But he’d gone still, looking at the image, and said simply that it was beautiful.

She blinked fast to keep him from seeing the tears caused by praise bestowed on her work from a man not given to flattery. And then she’d realized, with almost shattering clarity, she stood alone with him, only the silence of the morning and a T-shirt between them.

He didn’t move, only his eyes touching her, but for some reason it’d seemed one of the most erotic moments of her life. How could such a cranky, stubborn and closed-off man write a story that reached inside her? The book made her feel things she’d so long hidden from the world.

Then again, he’d warned her. “I’m not one of my heroes,” he’d said on that first day. He might write men who could reach off the page and capture her heart, but he wasn’t one of them—which made her choice to avoid his books seem wiser in retrospect, since it was better to keep clear lines drawn in her mind between where his stories ended and where the real man began. His walls were built high, spiked with barbed wire and possibly charged with electricity to keep others from reaching him.

Even knowing that, she’d felt a resonance, like some bell clanging deep inside her. He chose to come in that room, to watch her paint when he could have simply gone back to his office. And he stood there, looking at her with those sad, dark eyes, and waited as if he expected her to do something.

If she touched him, he’d have the upper hand. She’d lose herself in him and how could she help him if he swept her away with a story millions had read?

She’d backed off, nervous and feeling like some green girl not sure how to handle men, and left him alone with her representation of Mina.

Would he look at her like he had in the early morning hours? Would the tension snap between them like some live wire arcing out to make her crave the cover of night and the sound of him losing control from her touch?

Racing through a shower, she took a few extra minutes on her hair, her clothing, hoping to feel that spark and breathless energy pouring over her.

When she got downstairs, she faced his locked door.

No problem, she’d make some coffee, wait for him to wake up.

When the sun set and he hadn’t made an appearance, she made a tray of food and knocked at his door. He didn’t answer and she slunk off to her room, feeling like an interloper and an unwelcome one.

The next morning, the tray sat outside his door, empty, but he didn’t make an appearance. She made another tray, left it by his door, and waited for him to collect it.

She gave up around noon and went for a walk. She called her brother. She gazed at the property that burst with brilliant colors as fall erupted with fury around his broken-down farmhouse.

When she couldn’t stand another moment alone in her own company, she headed back to find the tray empty and the door closed, locked so she couldn’t even enter if she wanted to.

She peeked in the keyhole to find him bent over his computer, fingers flying across the keys and silence echoing out of the room. He seemed oblivious to the world around him and focused on his work.

She told herself she could respect that—hadn’t she herself been buried so deeply in her work she’d tuned out the world when she’d created Mina?

Heading back upstairs, she tried to convince herself she didn’t feel shut out—ignored and helpless to do a thing to bring him out from behind the locked door.

Sadly, the one person she tried to convince of those facts didn’t believe a bit of it.

Leaning back, he rubbed his eyes. Eyestrain was his enemy, making the words blur and the glow of the screen burn his eyes like acid. The story rode him hard, pouring out of his fingertips as fast as he could get it down. He’d meant to go find her, to tell her about it, but he’d simply sat down and written more words when he’d found the food, long cold outside his door. When he’d remembered, between chapters, he’d eaten it—cold and tasteless—and replaced the tray. He’d only meant to reread the last chapter he’d written before seeking her out and ended up tossing down another five thousand words instead.

It was either the best thing he’d ever written or complete dog shit. He couldn’t be sure, too lost in the world and the problems of the two stubborn characters to separate quality from frantic creation. Glancing at the clock, he realized he’d lost the better part of two days, but he’d made good progress.

Better progress than he’d made in a long time. Congratulating himself on the cleverness of allowing her to stay as a mental laxative for his literary constipation, he decided to take a shower. He’d dozed in between bursts of words, but he could smell himself. Never a good sign.

The shower revived him and took up some time, making it almost a decent hour of morning. Going to the kitchen, he brewed a cup of coffee—double-brewed it, running the hot water soaked with coffee back through fresh grounds to make it stronger—and then stood at the base of the stairwell, mentally beckoning her to come down so he could tell her about the book—about the story. He wanted to tell someone.

She apparently wasn’t psychic because she didn’t appear.

He paced back to her impromptu art studio to find the piece she’d created of Mina and gazed at it for a while, awed that she’d captured the character so well using just paints when it’d taken him the better part of a hundred thousand words to say as much.

Then back to the stairs, looking up as if she’d appear simply because he willed it.

An inner debate started, one that shouldn’t have surprised him. He did, after all, spend the better portion of most days talking to himself—usually in multiple voices. It was his job to create dialogue.

This debate, however, involved whether or not he should wake her up.

On one hand, it suggested an intimacy he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to encourage. If he woke her, all sleepy and rumpled and sexy as hell, wasn’t it akin to saying there were no barriers between them? An overstep of the roommate agreement, so to speak, although they had no such contractual clauses to their unusual circumstance.

On the other hand, it was his house. She’d chosen to invade it. If he wanted her company, shouldn’t he be allowed to demand it? Hell, she’d practically invited such intimacies with her invasion of his personal space. If she wanted to know more about him, how better to do so than to let him use her for a sounding board when he practically burst, like some overfed tick, with words?

Then again, sleepy and rumpled offered up temptation. In his present state of mind, he wasn’t sure if he was far enough removed to ignore the sweet delicacy of her lips if she licked them, as she was prone to do, and looked up at him with those intelligent eyes as if he were the center of her galaxy and nothing could distract her from her calling to save him from himself.

But wasn’t he above such carnal and physical demands? He was an artist, so was she, so she’d no doubt understand on some level this kind of frustrated need to share while the story was rich and palpable in his head.

Besides, she’d interrupted his sleep. And again, his house…

Decided, he took the steps two at a time only to pause outside her door, hand poised to knock, but unable to make contact.

She saved him from having to make the decision, opening the door to peer up at him—as warm and sleepy-looking as he’d expected—and stretching her face into a jaw-popping yawn. “Is the house on fire?”

He blinked at the question, shifting from foot to foot. “No.”

“You pounded up the stairs like there was an emergency. Are you okay?”

Another yawn erupted on the last sentence, garbling the words, but he understood them well enough. “I’m fine.” He wanted to dance out of his skin. He needed to tell her about the story she’d inspired.

She seemed to be coming more awake by the second, eyes squinting as she considered him. “You’ve showered?”

“Yes.” And if she kept asking such banal, stupid questions, he might scream at her. Where was her curiosity, her probing questions which seemed to sink right to the marrow of a matter?

“I take it you’ve been writing the past couple days?”

He resisted rolling his eyes, but barely. “Yes.”

“Well, good for you. I’m tired so…”

She started to close the door in his face and he almost screamed in frustration. Instead, he snapped a hand out and stopped the door from shutting. “You wake me up when I’m sleeping.”

She blinked at him, as if not comprehending the meaning of his words.

He waited.

“So because I’ve woken you up when you’re sleeping, you can come wake me up? What, are you bored? Require company? Mister Hermit has decided it’s social time so I’m supposed to jump because you’ve remembered I’m here?”

He didn’t answer. When she put it like that, it seemed far less reasonable than it had in his inner debate. She waited, glancing once at his hand still holding the door open.

“Well, you’re the one who wants to talk to me.” It grated that he was the one to point it out.

Her lips, the full and tempting curl of them, turned out in a pout. “You’ve ignored me for days. How am I supposed to help you when you lock me out of your office and then just appear—at an ungodly hour, I might add—and expect me to do tricks like some circus puppy?”

“I’m ready to talk now.” He didn’t feel further explanation necessary.

“Well, bully for you, buddy.” She reached out to move his hand physically and he turned his wrist, capturing her hand. “How come I’m not supposed to touch you, but you’re allowed to manhandle me and push me into corners with your size?” She grumbled the last and scowled up at him, which was really quite a buzz kill for his writing high.

“I wish I could write your dialogue. You say all the wrong things, do you know that?” He snapped out the words, riding a wave of frustration, and released her wrist with a sigh. “You can’t touch me because I won’t be responsible for what I do if you push me.”

That light, the brittle gleam of intelligence which both fascinated and repelled him, glittered suddenly bright in her eyes. He backed off a step, but she followed him. “So, it’s not that you don’t want me to touch you, it’s that you’re afraid of what you’ll do if I touch you?”

Not at all the conversation he’d planned with her, so he backed another step away from her terrier-like advance. “I didn’t say that.”

Her smile filled with womanly mystery and power, and he froze, powerless, to see what she’d do with her newfound knowledge. “You also didn’t disagree. Look, give me a few minutes to wake up, pour me a cup of that coffee I smell, and I’ll meet you in the kitchen to hear whatever you’re bursting to say.”

He opened and closed his mouth, searching for the scathing words to gain back the ground he feared he’d lost, and found nothing. Her door closed and he still hadn’t found them. Stomping back down the stairs, he decided he would meet her in the kitchen, much less intimate ground than the door to her bedroom, but he’d be damned if he made her coffee.