Wild Man Creek (Virgin River #14)(57)

He swung her around, laughing, kissing her. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Jilly!”

“And don’t think you can get away with working around the truth like that with me!”

He stopped moving. He looked down at her, his eyes dark and serious. “Jilly, if you ever get anything but the most profound truth from me, call me on it. I’ll kill myself on the spot.” He shook his head. “I have lots of reasons to keep things from my brothers—they’re known for being in everyone’s business all the time. But I’d never keep anything from you. I wanted to be completely honest with you from the start.”

She was deeply touched by that, but felt a twinge of guilt. She bit her lip as she looked up at him. “I haven’t exactly unburdened myself to you,” she said, and they both knew what she was holding back. He’d asked her more than once what the last man in her life had done to hurt her.

“It’s okay, honey,” he said, touching her nose. “When you’re ready. But I know you haven’t lied to me. I know that.”

Colin noticed things gradually changing in Jill’s garden. He learned that tomatoes needed eight hours of sun a day and that Humboldt County in the mountains wasn’t exactly known to be sunny and warm, even in spring and summer, but it was known for rich soil. Everyone in town talked about the great success that Hope McCrea had had with her garden and everyone was happy to know that Jill had brought it back to life.

Another change involved Colin—he began painting in the sunroom quite often—he preferred it to the artificial light in his cabin or the outdoors once the weather became hot in the sunny afternoon. He liked being able to look down on Jillian’s work in progress and watch as she tilled, sprayed, planted, moved plants from the greenhouse into the ground, scooting around the property in her garden-mobile. The UPS truck was a daily arrival; Jilly was constantly buying supplies. After painting for a couple of hours Colin would wander down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, then out onto the porch to take a break. If Jill saw him, she stopped work and spent a little time with him. What he liked even better was when she came silently up the stairs and sat on the floor behind him, watching him paint. More and more of his work made the move to the Victorian and it remained there. He still went out with his camera, but a lot of Colin’s time was spent painting in that big room with all the windows, the two skylights and so much natural light. And many of his nights were spent in the bed he’d bought her.

There were paintings he still kept in his cabin, covered and turned toward the wall so that if he and Jillian spent a night there, she wouldn’t peek. He worked on them only when he was alone. One was of a gardener wearing calf-high rubber boots, gardening gloves and a wide-brimmed straw hat—and that was all. She was turned to the side; only the lower half of her face was visible, the strong line of her jaw and her beautiful, plump, pink lips in a secret smile. Also visible was a side view of her nude body—the soft curve of her breast, the round arc of her perfect butt, her long, elegant legs, graceful arms and delicious shoulder. It was Jilly as he pictured her.

That painting’s twin was the nude gardener crouched between rows of plants, small spade in hand, grooming. No one but Colin would know how perfectly each of those curves fit into his big hands, how soft that velvet skin felt against his rougher skin, how much pleasure those exquisite lips brought him.

She had become the answer to prayers he hadn’t known he whispered.

After an afternoon of perfect light, Colin cleaned up his brushes, put away his paints and washed up in the upstairs bathroom. He heard a scraping sound from the room right below him and was still drying his hands on a small towel when he walked into the maid’s quarters. He found Jillian had pushed the bed away from the wall and was measuring the size of the room.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She turned toward him with her eyes glowing. “I’ve had an offer on my town house. I’m accepting it. I asked the Realtor to hire a moving crew to pack up all my things and deliver them to me here. It’s either store them here where I live and have plenty of space, or rent a storage facility. I don’t have that much—my town house is pretty small. So—we’re going to make a change—this bed will go upstairs and I’m going to put my desk, credenza and shelves in here. This will be my office. What do you think?”

Colin tilted his head and frowned slightly. “Don’t you want to go back there to close up your house? Pack up your own stuff? See your friends again? Because I could help manage the garden with Denny if you need to be away.”

“I’m not even going back to close on the sale. Until I got settled in here, I didn’t even realize how little that town house meant to me. It was no more than a crash pad. I spent all my time at work. If I end up going back there, I’m going to find something different.”

“You must have friends from work you miss,” he said.

She drew a deep breath and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think maybe I’m ready to tell you about it. About him. About what happened to me.”

Colin sat down beside her. “Only if you want to.”

“I want to. It’s become kind of blurry and surreal in my mind—I still can’t believe it really happened.

“He was a man on a mission. And he was relentless….” Twenty minutes later Jillian had shared with Colin many of the details about her relationship with Kurt, telling the story with brutal honesty.