The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(89)

And now it’s time to try with someone else.

After my last class of the week, instead of heading to the coffee shop to meet Bridget for tutoring, I head back to the high school. I have a bound proposal printed on linen paper, the knowledge that I’m walking into a meeting with the devil with the gate to my heart swinging wide open, and a grumpy lumberjack expecting me in two hours with no idea that I might be a total disaster.

But I need to do this.

Not because it’s the mission Gigi set out for me after she choked on that steak but because I want to do this.

For me.

And for Tickled Pink.

When I get to the school’s third floor and turn down the corridor leading to the art room, I discover Gigi isn’t here.

Niles is, and he’s painting.

Not the walls but a canvas.

He’s making art.

I tilt my head and study the landscape on his easel. He’s captured the square in Tickled Pink with a gorgeous mix of colors that makes the town seem basked in a sunset inspired by heaven.

This place.

It eventually gets to everyone, doesn’t it?

“That’s beautiful,” I say softly.

“Aaaah!” He leaps sixteen feet in the air, dropping his palette and flinging his brush across his canvas and smearing a bright-blue slash over the square.

I have momentary visions of giving Gigi’s lover-butler a heart attack, and I drop everything to rush into the room even as it strikes me that Gigi picked the art room because her secret boyfriend is an artist. “Don’t die! Oh my Oprah, don’t die!”

He tilts a furry brow at me, clearly annoyed, as he bends to grab the paint palette smearing all over the art room floor. “I’m not that old that a little fright will take me out.”

I might be. My heart is threatening to pound out of my chest. “My apologies.” It’s getting easier to say those words. Helps that I feel better in ways I didn’t expect when I offer them. “I thought you heard me. Or that you would be as paranoid as the rest of us about Gigi sneaking around and seeing things she shouldn’t.”

There’s that ignorant child look again. “Your grandmother’s a cream puff.”

I snort.

Yes, me, Phoebe Sabrina Lightly. I snort.

It’s literally the only appropriate response.

“She is,” he insists. “Nobody sees it, but she is. You think she calls you her granddaughter because she didn’t want anyone to know Margot’s indiscretion? She calls you her granddaughter because family’s more than blood. She has her faults, but she knows it wasn’t your fault how you were born, and she admires the hell out of you.”

Heat prickles over the usual parts of my body that go numb when I remember every goal I ever had in life until recently was around what I believed to be in my DNA. “How long have you been dating her?”

He could be glaring at me for ruining his painting, or scowling at me for asking the question everyone else has wanted to know for weeks, or angry with me for leaving her alone to choke on that piece of Kobe beef, but instead, he gazes at me with nothing but sincerity as he wipes his hands on a paint rag. “In love with her.”

My face twists.

I can’t help it.

And he smiles.

Smiles. “Can’t help who you love. And love’s never made the world worse, has it?”

“But she keeps you a secret.”

“Ever occur to you that I’m the one asking her to keep us a secret?”

My lips part.

And that question is still on my brain when I finally locate Gigi in the basement of the school, personally picking through the piles in the janitor’s office, with Tickled Pink Floyd beside her.

“Why on earth would anyone keep so many worthless pieces of junk?” she demands of the old janitor.

“Lack of shine don’t make it junk, just like polish don’t make it good hearted,” the old janitor replies.

I clear my throat before Gigi can slice him open with her tongue for the subtle insult. “Excuse me, Gigi, could I please have a minute of your time?”

Her gaze lingers on Tickled Pink Floyd for a long moment before she turns to me. “Of course. Anything for one of my grandchildren.”

That’s how it’s been all week. Anything for one of my grandchildren.

No mention of the fact that I’m not technically related by blood. Just pretending the drama never happened, much like everyone did for the thirty years before this.

The difference is I know now.

But is Niles right?

Does she actually love and admire me for who I am and not because I was raised a Lightly? “Do you call me that to keep up appearances or because you truly feel it?”

Floyd makes a noise and disappears under a pile of junk. Part of a wall moves.

So that’s how he sneaked in.

I’m exploring that secret passage later.

If I still live here later.

Gigi’s narrowed her eyes at me again as though I’m the one she’s planning on eviscerating for displeasing her. “How long have we known one another, Phoebe?”

“The answer to that question is entirely too complicated to unpack in a single sentence.”

She’s wearing a white blouse again, though this one is streaked with dirt, and her hair is mussed in a way that’s unusual. Maybe Gigi is human. “We’ve known each other long enough for you to know that I don’t suffer fools, and were you not worthy of being my granddaughter, you would not currently be standing before me.”