Dance Away with Me(36)

“A smart move on your part.”

He shrugged that off. “She hired a construction crew and created buzz about the show with all her celebrity friends. It cost her over a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow. Why would she put herself out like that?”

“She had so many people controlling her career—agents, photographers, clients. I think she needed to be in control of something herself, and I was it.” He looked directly at her, making no effort to avoid eye contact. “I sold over a million dollars’ worth of work in three weeks. That quickly, I was the new hot commodity in the art world. Everything took off for me. She made my career.”

“It was your talent that made your career.”

“That’s not really true. I’d hit rock bottom. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d be dead by now.”

Tess thought about what it would feel like to owe so much to another person. He lit the fire he’d laid inside the potbelly stove. “And Bianca fell in love with you.”

He didn’t deny it. “She fell in love easily.”

“But you didn’t love her back.”

He closed the door of the stove. The flames highlighted his strong cheekbones and cast hollows beneath. “You saw how she was. Seductive. Charismatic. I owed her everything, and I was enchanted by her. Yes, I loved her. But like a brother for a kid sister.”

“And she wanted more.”

He moved away from the fire. “She kicked me out when she realized that wasn’t going to happen. It was right around the time I got my first big mural commission. I didn’t need her anymore.”

“And yet you stayed in her life.”

“For a couple of months, she refused to see me—wouldn’t take my calls. Then she fell into a bad relationship. . . .”

“And you were there for her.”

“Always. She’d been my caretaker. I became hers. She made messes. I cleaned them up.”

Tess rubbed a rough spot on her thumb. “When did you start to resent her?”

“How could I resent her? She saved my life. I would have done anything for her.”

“You did.” She gazed down at Wren in her arms. “And now, you have one more of her messes to deal with.”

“The biggest one yet.” He sank back into the couch. “For all the poking around you’re doing in my life, you haven’t told me anything about your own.”

She couldn’t imagine telling Ian North about Travis Hartsong. “A former nurse midwife. Currently employed as a nanny by an enigmatic street artist with a semisour personality that, I admit, I’m gradually warming up to. On temporary leave from a side job at a decidedly untrendy coffee shop in backwater Tennessee. No solid plan for the future. How’s that?”

“Now who’s dodging?”

She scooped up the baby. “Come on, Wren. Let’s get you a dry diaper.”

*

She’d been at the schoolhouse for ten days. Paul Eldridge had shown up once to help Ian sink the support posts for his studio tree house. If Ian wasn’t working on the tree house, he was out on one of his woodland excursions, bringing the smell of fresh air with him when he returned. He did everything but paint.

With the exception of another trip to Wren’s pediatrician and their brief visit to the Eldridge farm, Tess hadn’t been out of the house, and the outdoors beckoned her as enticingly as the smell of Cinnabons in a shopping mall. If only the third week of March hadn’t brought such raw, dreary weather, she’d have taken Wren outside for a walk, but it was too chilly for a newborn.

When she couldn’t stand the confinement any longer, she set Wren’s sleeping nest on the couch, and as Ian returned from wherever he’d been hiking, she tucked the drowsy baby inside and grabbed her coat. “See you later.”

He stood in the entryway, the scent of pine drifting off him in the same way other men smelled of expensive cologne. “Where are you going?”

“Out! I can’t stand being cooped up inside another minute.”

“You can’t—”

“Oh, yes I can!” She spun toward him, one finger pointed toward his head. “And she’d better be alive when I get back!”

Short of tackling her, there was nothing he could do to keep her inside.

*

Dirty snow still lay in shady spots and the wind stung her cheeks, but she was outside, and she didn’t care. A crust of ice clung to the banks of Poorhouse Creek, and the filaments of algae growing on the rocks trailed in the fast-moving current like witches’ hair. Another plank in the wooden bridge had come loose. She remembered the way the bridge had swayed the morning North had charged into her life.

Without the perpetual pressure of the sling, her shoulders eased. But as she stepped off the bridge, an unsettling anxiety ruffled the pit of her stomach.

“Being around fragile things isn’t good for me,” he’d said.

But being around fragile things had been Tess’s life. The babies she’d delivered. The frightened new moms she’d cared for. What if Wren woke up and started to cry? Would North pick her up? Would he check on her to make sure she was still breathing? Wren had been glued to Tess’s body from the day she’d been born. And that’s where she belonged. Against Tess’s body.

She turned to rush back to the schoolhouse, only to make herself stop. She was behaving like a frightened new mother. Something she wasn’t.