“What’s so funny?”
“You are. You’re so busy trying to rebuild your fences to keep me out you haven’t realized I’m already in the pasture with you.”
“We agreed not to get involved—”
“That’s not exactly how I recall it,” he drawled. “We’re already ‘involved.’ We agreed not to have sex. We haven’t, though I have to tell you, sweetie, it was mighty tempting.”
He was doing something funny to her name, she thought, fluttering the n or something like that. Maybe it was caused by that remnant of a Virginia drawl that she had never before noticed, though she didn’t know how she could have missed it. And he really should put on his shirt, instead of leaning over her half-naked like that. The guy in the Diet Coke commercial didn’t have anything on Richard in the chest department. His chest was broad, and muscled, and wonderfully hairy, and she wanted to lay her hands on his pecs, feel his heart beating against her palm, somehow bank his heat against the cold hours when he wasn’t there.
“Tell me more about the ghosts,” he coaxed.
Well, she had already let the cat out of the bag, so she might as well tell him everything. He looked as if he had settled in for the duration, determined not to move until he heard the whole story. “The first time was in Clayton, a year ago. A little boy named Sam Beresford died of leukemia, and a month after that I saw him in the supermarket parking lot, trying to get his mom to see him, talk to him, anything.”
“Sad,” he commented, and she nodded.
“Then I began seeing more and more, and Clayton is such a small town I knew most of them by sight, even if I wasn’t actually acquainted with them. They’d wave, and I’d catch myself waving back, or saying hello, and people were beginning to give me really strange looks, so I knew I had to leave. There are a lot of ghosts here, but they’re New Yorkers; they rarely speak.”
He almost grinned again, but caught that one, too. “I guess seeing ghosts would be a problem in a small town,” he murmured.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” She sighed, her eyes somber. “I wouldn’t believe me either, if it wasn’t happening to me.”
“I didn’t say that.” He stopped playing with her hair and cupped her cheek. “I’m open on the subject of ghosts. Tell me more.”
She shrugged. “They’re sort of translucent, and two-dimensional. When they speak, the sound is tinny. And they always know I can see them. I don’t know how, but they do.”
“You saw the vendor, the one you painted? That’s how you know he’s dead?”
“He came up behind me on the street. He asked me to send a sketch I’d made of him to his sons. But how did he know I had made a sketch? I did it the night he died. I never had a chance to show him.”
“Did you send the sketch to them?”
She nodded. “Yesterday.”
“Do you still have the painting?”
She looked startled. “Sure. Why?”
“I’d like to see it. Just curiosity.”
She started to sit up and remembered her state of undress. Considering he had already seen her breasts, and touched them, and considering everything else they had done together, if she had been sophisticated, she would have nonchalantly gotten up and gotten dressed. “I guess this is proof I’m not sophisticated,” she said, looking up with a rueful smile to find his dark gaze already locked on her.
Her heart fluttered, or maybe it was her stomach. Something fluttered. He really shouldn’t look at her that way, there was no telling what sort of damage he was doing to her internal organs.
“What is?”
She gestured to her clothes. “Turn your back.”
“Ah.” He nodded in understanding, but he didn’t get up. That dark gaze was so intense she was afraid to try to read what was in it, though she didn’t know if she was afraid he wanted too much from her, or too little.
He rubbed his thumb over her lips, then lightly over one cheekbone. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then he said, “I’m expediting the divorce.”
So he could be with her. She couldn’t play games and pretend she didn’t understand the meaning behind that statement. He wanted her, and he was moving legal mountains to get her. It was exhilarating to be the object of such determination, but it was a little—a lot—frightening, too.
She was comfortable alone, comfortable with her life, but in that moment she accepted that things were going to change. He was going to change them. More important, she wanted them to change. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be part of a couple. She wanted to give this relationship thing a shot. Life was a lot more predictable when she had only herself to consider, but she wasn’t the island she had always thought herself to be. She couldn’t always be totally self-sufficient. Twice now she had needed him, and twice he had been there to help.
Having someone else on whom she could depend was novel, but intensely comforting. She had never known that kind of security before, not even as a child. Especially not as a child.
“Get dressed,” he said softly, standing up and turning his back.
Dressing was only a matter of pulling on her sweatshirt and stepping into her jeans, accomplished in seconds. She pushed her hair back from her face, relaxed and still a little drowsy, wonderfully warm. She didn’t feel any chill at all. All she felt was a sense of well-being, of physical contentment.
“This way.” She led the way to the studio, though in a four-room apartment it wouldn’t have been difficult to find. The studio was actually supposed to be the main bedroom, but her bed fit into the smaller room, so there was never any doubt about where she would sleep and where she would work.