Dance Away with Me(22)

She reached for a baby blanket with her free hand. “Take her. I won’t be any part of this.”

He stepped back. “All right! You win. What do you want?”

She wanted him to be a father to this tiny speck of a human, but that would take a while. “Don’t leave her.”

“You want me to stay at the schoolhouse?”

The last thing she wanted. She wrapped up the baby. “If that’s where she is, that’s where you are.”

And where Tess would have to be, too. Tess had been so fixated on the importance of keeping father and daughter together that she hadn’t thought about the misery of sharing space with him, but she couldn’t see an alternative. “You even think about leaving her, and you’re on your own. Am I clear enough?”

His lips barely moved. “More than clear.”

Wren had begun to stir again. “I need to change clothes, and you can’t put it off forever. Sooner or later you’ll have to hold her.”

“Later. I have a cold, remember.”

“You seem to be over it.” She stopped herself before she said more. If she had to coexist with him, she needed to broker some kind of peace. She knew how many disguises grief could wear, and she had to do what she’d sworn she wouldn’t do when she came to Tempest. She kept her voice steady. Her eyes dry. “I understand mourning better than you might think. I lost my husband. He was young, and he shouldn’t have died.” She sounded strong, as if it had happened long ago, and she’d recovered. So far from the truth.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” No pity. A direct statement.

“I’m only telling you this so you won’t think I’m unsympathetic, but you have a daughter, and she needs a father. Right now, that might not seem like much consolation for losing a wife, but maybe it will before long.” The words sounded hollow, but at the same time they might be true. If she and Trav had had a child . . . But Trav hadn’t been ready.

North set his unfinished doughnut on top of the paper sack. “You still haven’t figured it out, have you?”

“Figured what out?”

He rubbed the scar on the back of his hand. “Bianca wasn’t my wife.”

Wren let out a tiny mew of protest. Tess stared at him. “But—” Bianca had repeatedly referred to him as her “husband,” and since Bianca had hardly been a slave to convention, Tess couldn’t imagine her being ashamed of an unmarried pregnancy. “Why would she say that you were her husband?”

He grabbed his car keys. “I have some things I need to do at the house. I’ll come back for you.”

“Wait! You can’t walk out like—”

But it seemed he could.

*

Ian shrugged off his jacket and flung it on the schoolhouse couch. His shirt was stuck to his chest with sweat. He’d lied about having things to do here. Lied because Tess would want an explanation, and when it came to Bianca and himself, explanations were complicated.

He gazed around the open room. This house on top of Runaway Mountain should have been a perfect retreat. No sycophantic gallery owners or wannabe apostles banging on his door. In Manhattan, everybody in the art world wanted something from him: his approval, his mentorship, his money. He’d thought he could escape here. Figure out who he was as a thirty-six-year-old artist instead of a rebellious kid. Find a new direction that made sense. But then he’d given in to Bianca’s entreaties to come with him. Now she was dead, and he had to deal with the aftershocks, including the disturbance that clung to Tess Hartsong as tightly as that baby.

He gazed toward the back of the room and the closed door that shut off the place where Bianca had died. Leave it to her to tell Tess they were married.

Even though Bianca was gone, he kept waiting for the phone to ring, as it had rung so many times.

“Ian! I booked a new job. A pop-up store for this fantastic new menswear designer. He’s amazing! I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

“I’m flying to Aruba for the weekend with Jake. . . . He’s incredible. You’ll see. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.”

“Ethan wants me to move in with him. Oh, God . . . He is so amazing. I don’t care if he’s an actor. He’s different.”

“Ian, I’ve had a shitty day. Can I come over?”

“Ian, life sucks. I’m bringing wine.”

“Ian, why do people have to be such shits? Come get me, will you?”

Now she’d made one more mess for him to clean up. And he’d do it. He always did.

*

The schoolhouse was warm, but without Bianca rushing to the door to welcome her, it felt empty to Tess. Ian headed toward the open staircase with her suitcase in one hand and the things she’d asked him to order for the baby in the other. “The two of you can take my bedroom upstairs.” He sounded as unfriendly as a winter ice storm.

The schoolhouse had only two bedrooms, which meant he’d be left with the one down here. The room where . . .

The shadow of Bianca’s death hung everywhere. Tess instinctively curled Wren closer. Living in the same house with him, if only for a few days, was impossible, and yet, how else could he bond with this child he’d so far rejected?

“You won’t see much of me,” he said as he disappeared up the stairs. “I’ll be in my studio.”