Dance Away with Me(43)

Tess Hartsong wasn’t a woman you could take against a wall. But he’d wanted to. His every base instinct urged him to do exactly that.

Which would have made him a complete bastard. He was guilty of a lot of things, but riding roughshod over women wasn’t one of them. And hadn’t he proven that by walking away from the sight of Tess stretched out on the couch? By going to his easel?

He finally let himself look at what he’d done. An intricate detail of her bare foot. A delicate sketch of her shoulder. The curve of her neck.

It was crap. The worst kind of formulaic, sentimental crap.

He ripped the paper from the easel. This wasn’t what he did! He created huge, bold pieces. He cut giant stencils with X-Acto knives. Shaped his murals with acids and bleach, nozzles and rollers. He worked big, with no room for the old and refined, the musty and mundane.

He went to the window and threw it open to cool off. He’d come here looking for reinvention—a new path that would let him breathe fresh life into his work. But all he’d done was exactly nothing. First, it was Bianca, and now it was Tess. One distraction after another.

The candles sputtered in the draft from the window. Tess’s fierceness and determination, that sarcastic mouth, the strength she didn’t seem to know she possessed . . . All of it distracted him, and now here he was, producing bullshit greeting card art. He was a cliché. An artist who had to live a selfish life. Picasso might have been able to whip up masterpieces with all those wives and mistresses in his life, but Ian was cut from a different cloth. If he wanted to work through whatever was blocking him, he had to keep his emotions and his sex drive locked up. That’s the way it had always been. The way it would always be.

A frozen band of loneliness wrapped itself around him. He leaned down to blow out the candles. One by one their flames flickered and died.

*

Wren woke at five in the morning with no intention of falling back to sleep. “Would it kill you, just once, to sleep in, you little butthead? Huh? Would it?”

Apparently, it would.

On the other side of the window, the sun shone. Tess lifted the sash. The air was cool and fresh. It was as if spring had arrived overnight. Last night in the studio seemed like a dream. The couch. The candles. What had she thought would happen? More upsetting, what had she wanted to happen?

It was too soon. She wasn’t ready to deal with this newly awakened part of herself. Her skin itched. Her body ached to move. To dance. It had been weeks since she’d danced.

Instead, she changed Wren and fed her. “Now would you please go back to sleep?”

Wren stuck out her little pink tongue.

“Did you really do what I saw you do?” Tess pushed her feet into her sneakers. “All right, young lady. It’s warmed up outside, and if you’re strong enough to give me attitude, you’re strong enough to get used to the great outdoors.”

She bundled the baby in a fleece onesie and a warmer hat, tucked her in the sling, and headed out.

The birds were celebrating the extra kiss of warmth in the air with a noisy cantata. Instead of going to the cabin, she chose the trail leading up the mountain to the abandoned Pentecostal church. A pair of squirrels searched for the nuts they and their pals had hidden in the fall. The old fire tower rose in the distance. Wren’s cap slipped over one eyebrow, but she was wide-awake and attentive, her gaze fixed on the shifting patterns of light and shadow as they passed beneath the trees. Tess heard the distant barking of a dog. One of the Eldridges’?

The trail opened onto a rutted road that had once carried the faithful to worship. What was left of the church sagged on its foundation. Weeds encroached on the rotting wooden siding, and a tree grew through an opening by a chimney. Where the front doors had once been, a hole gaped. Through it, Tess could see the broken altar window.

Despite the decay, the church was a friendly sight, alive with birdsong and speckled sunlight. Off to the east, the last tendrils of mist uncurled in the low spots of a small clearing. Among those tendrils, a figure moved in a slow, methodical choreography.

Defying the morning chill, Ian was shirtless, the muscles of his chest perfectly delineated as he extended one arm and then the other in a slow-motion pantomime punch, both measured and powerful. Mesmerized, she watched him turn his arm. Change the position of his hand. Every movement deliberate.

A knee came up. He raised a leg to the side with absolute control. He pulled the knee back and thrust it out again. Twice, three times, four . . . His torso remained perfectly upright, his resting foot as steady as if it had sunk roots deep into the ground. He brought the other knee up. Once again, that perfect balance.

His movements quickened in a beautiful martial arts ballet of slow squats and meticulous kicks. She’d wondered how he stayed so muscular. Now she knew.

He hadn’t seen her, and she didn’t want him to. This was a private ritual. Wren squeaked, but he was too far away to hear. Seeing this private part of him discomfited her. She’d been aware of his physicality from the beginning, but witnessing this was something else entirely.

The more she knew about Ian North, the more complicated he became.

*

After what had happened in the studio last night and what she’d just witnessed, she wasn’t looking forward to the awkwardness of seeing him right away, but as it turned out, they didn’t encounter each other again until that afternoon. As she bundled Wren in a warm towel from her bath at the kitchen sink, she heard voices coming from the other room. Adult voices, not teenage girls.