Into the Storm (Signal Bend #3)(86)

When she had the walls on the first floor bare, the few photos Show had left stacked neatly on the sideboard in the dining room, Shannon worked her way up, taking Norman Rockwell prints off the wall going up the stairs. When she got to the top, she looked down the hallway and saw Show, in the room at the end of the hall—the biggest bedroom. The master bedroom. He was sitting on the floor at the side of one of the beds in that room. Earlier, she’d been surprised and saddened to see that there were two beds, not one.

Even though he’d told her he and Holly hadn’t slept in the same bed, it was sad to see that it was true.

He was looking down at something in his hands, and Shannon stood there and watched, feeling a little stuck, not sure if she should go in there or go away, say something or be quiet. Finally, she put down the box she was using to collect the things she’d been taking off the walls, and she walked down the hall to Show.

He was reading. There was a big grey metal box, like an old lockbox, open on the bed, and he was reading. As she got nearer, she saw that he was reading a journal, the writing round and girly, written in purple ink. There were other journals in the lockbox, and a few on the floor at his side.

He looked up as she came close. His eyes shone. “Hey.”

“Hey. You okay?”

He sighed. “Yeah. These are hers—Daisy’s. The first one—that pink one with the daisy on the cover—is from when she was eight. This one is from when she was thirteen.” He looked down at the book in his hands. “I missed a lot. God. I missed so much. She had this whole life going on in her head. Some of the things she wrote are stories. In this one, probably half of it is stories she made up. I didn’t even know she liked to write. How did I miss something like that about my own kid?”

Shannon picked up the journals on the floor, and she sat next to him, holding the brightly colored books on her lap. “Maybe she didn’t want you to know. Maybe that was her thing to keep for herself. That’s why it’s in her journal.”

“I guess.” He began to read again, slowly flipping through the pages. Shannon watched him. She was curious about the journals, but they weren’t hers to read, so she didn’t look down at the pages he was reading, and she didn’t open the books in her hands. But she read Show’s face. He looked both pained and captivated, delving into the young mind of his dead daughter.

When he was about halfway through, he suddenly closed the book and put it behind him, up on the bed.

“Shit. I gotta stop.” He raked his hands through his hair—earlier, when the heat had been intense, he’d taken off his beanie. “She had plans. She wanted so much. She was…restless.”

Shannon set the journals down and put her hands around his arm. She rested her forehead on his shoulder. “I wish I knew what to say.”

He laid his cheek on her head. “Nothing to say. Just shit I gotta make room for.”

“Do you think you can live here?”

“Do you?”

The question made Shannon’s heart pound. She wanted to think about it rationally. Objectively. She’d spent the day in this house with him, removing Show’s old life—or, no, removing his ex-wife’s old life— from it. She wanted to be with him. She understood why he wouldn’t sell the house and buy something else, and she understood why he didn’t want to live in her little apartment. He filled that space uncomfortably. The only solution, then, was this house. The house in which he’d raised a family with another woman. The house in which his daughter had been so horribly hurt. But if he could live here, then why couldn’t she?

“Can we redecorate?”

She could feel his pleasure in the way his body relaxed against hers. “We can do whatever you want.”

She sat up straight and looked him in the eye. “No—what we want. I want you to be here, too.”

“I don’t care, hon. Paint, pictures, curtains—doesn’t much matter. Do what you want.”

She thought of all the froufrou that she’d been taking down all day. So much country cutesy. Nothing that said a man like Showdown Ryan had ever lived here. “I’ll only live here if you participate, make it ours.”

He grinned. “But you’ll live here?”

“What’s your favorite color, Show?”

“What?”

“Your favorite color.” She hoped he wouldn’t say black. In Shannon’s opinion, no one should ever say that black was their favorite color. Black wasn’t a color. Black was absence. Color should be presence.

Attitude.

“I don’t know. Never thought much about it.”

“Everybody has a favorite color. What color makes you feel good when you see it? What color makes things better?”

He put his hands around her face and regarded her steadily, deeply. His thumbs traced the tops of her cheekbones. “Blue. Blue is my favorite color.”

“Like sky blue, or navy blue, or—”

“Like your eyes.”

Show wasn’t a sweet talker or a romantic. He was just…true. Real. Direct. And it made the times he said amazingly sweet, romantic things like that a billion times more amazing, because he simply meant what he said.

Her heart was thumping, but she covered with a smile and said, “Okay, so—blue.”

“What’s your favorite color? He leaned in and kissed her before she could answer. He kissed her long and sweetly, nibbling lightly at her lips and tongue. She felt every graze of his teeth like a strum between her legs. When he left her lips and trailed his tongue over her jaw and down her throat, she gasped, “Green. I like green.”