Dance Away with Me(86)

She couldn’t see him, only felt his hands on her skin and imagined what they were creating. The room was too hot, the sensations too intense. He molded the canvas to her bottom, his finger straying.

Now he was in front of her again. Paint smeared his bicep and stippled his hair. Her underpants were in his way. He pulled them off and spread her legs. He worked carefully, painting the tiniest design high on her thigh. The back of his hand brushed her intimately as he worked there until she lost her balance and sank to her knees in front of him.

Their eyes met and held. A spatter of white paint clung to the stubble at his jawline. A dab of green hovered at the corner of his mouth. Keeping her eyes locked with his, she cupped her breasts and rubbed the paint that remained there on her hands.

“Now you,” she whispered.

He groaned as she splayed her palms on his collarbones and dragged them down his chest to his waist.

*

When he felt her fingers opening the snap of his jeans, pulling out the condom, he lost the last of the control he’d so rigidly clung to and pulled her to the floor on top of him. He tunneled his paint-streaked hands into her hair and kissed her, inhaled her. They rolled over, mouths together, both of them struggling with the barrier of his jeans, their breathing heavy, their movements clumsy. An elbow here, a knee there, the wayward scrape of a fingernail—no graceful choreography. Bodies slick with paint and sweat.

He turned her. Under him. Over him. The slip-slide of pigment between their bodies. On her knees. Cupping her from behind, smearing what was left of the patterns he’d made.

Turning her again.

The paint pots tipped, and pigment spilled onto the floor. They rolled in it. The two of them, out of control, out of their minds.

And then he was inside her. Part of her. This lush, giving body. This woman with glazed, violet-blue eyes and midnight hair wreathed in a chaotic corona around her head.

The sweat poured from his body as he held himself back. Waited for the arch. The cry. Her arch. Never—never so much restraint.

He drove deeper. Holding her. Riding her through her torrent. Through his own. Into an explosion of the spectrum.

When he came back to himself, he saw they’d turned his careful work into mayhem, a beautiful nightmare of smeared paint on olive skin. She picked up one of the untouched canvas squares from the cart and pressed it to a smudge of paint on his side. She pressed another to his chest. Her hair tumbled forward, shrouding her face, the strands streaked with ultramarine and cinnabar. She stamped his thigh. His groin. One place after another.

He lay still and watched her work even as panic began to grow inside him, beating harder and faster. He hid it behind a smile and a quip. Hid it as they showered together, unearthing paint from all the secret crevices. Hid it as they took each other again.

When the sound of crying came through the baby monitor, Tess grabbed a robe and disappeared, her wet feet leaving imprints on the floor. He went back into the studio and set each of the canvas squares out to dry before he cleaned up the mess they’d made. Still, the panic wouldn’t leave him.

He had to get away from this place. From her.

*

Not even Tess’s belligerent co-workers could spoil her mood the next day. She picked up Wren at Heather’s and drove to the schoolhouse, still thinking about the crazy insanity of last night. When she reached the schoolhouse, a Nissan Ultima was parked crookedly in front, and a man she’d never seen stood on the porch ready to knock. As she got out of the car, he turned to look at her.

He appeared to be in his late twenties, unshaven, with rumpled light-brown hair and clothes he might have been wearing a few days too long: wrinkled chinos, a long-sleeved tan shirt turned at the cuffs, and an old khaki safari vest with multiple pockets.

Leaving Wren in the backseat, she walked up the path. “Can I help you with something?”

“Are you Tess Hartsong?”

“Yes. And you’re—”

“I’m Simon Denning.”





Chapter Nineteen




Tess stalled for time. She opened the front door and invited him inside then returned to the car to get Wren. As she reached in, she banged her head on the doorframe. She grabbed the car roof to steady herself and blinked her eyes hard against a sudden urge to cry, not from the bump but from the feeling that the world was once again poised to crash in on her.

Wren was wide-awake, her eyes the deep navy of a Van Gogh sky, her fist on an erratic course toward her mouth. Tess picked her up and tucked her into the curve of her neck. The pulse beneath the baby’s fontanel tapped against her cheek. She kissed the downy softness and turned to face the new demon who’d invaded their lives.

He stood in the hallway exactly where she’d left him. With her free hand, she flipped the light switch on the schoolhouse globes.

“Is that the baby?” he asked unnecessarily.

“This is Wren. Yes. My daughter.”

He shoved a hand in the pocket of his chinos. “You wouldn’t happen to have a beer handy? And a bathroom. I’ve been traveling for most of two days.”

She directed him toward Bianca’s old room. He stopped on the threshold and gazed at the geode interior. “Damn. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Yes, it’s unusual.”

“Incredible.”

She held Wren close as she retrieved a beer from the refrigerator. She moved robotically, trying to convince herself this man was a nomad with no desire to raise a child. But if he didn’t want Wren, why had he traveled all this way to see her? And where was Ian? She wanted him here, by her side, even as she knew this was her hurdle to cross alone.