on the city college walls, one that would depict the city’s history and live up to the beauty of her great-great-grandfather’s beloved town monument.
Making the trek to his car, he decided Marta wasn’t exactly standoffish. He’d only just met her and shouldn’t make a snap judgment. She was definitely distant and quiet, but something in the way she carried herself portrayed pride. Maybe taking a mural-painting job for a small town was a step down for her?
He’d studied her website when the college had made their final decision. She had a solid reputation and did art shows across the country but mostly in her home state of Arizona. Some of her work hung in modern-art museums and at US universities. The kind of painting she did, as best as he could describe it, and he definitely wasn’t an expert, was Postimpressionism. She liked large canvases and big subjects. The style seemed well suited for their historical mural needs.
In a world of pop and abstract art, he appreciated her use of vivid colors and real-life subject matter. Hers were paintings where he knew what he was looking at without having to turn his head this way and that, squint to figure it out and then make a guess. What he liked most was her use of intense colors to make her point. In that way she was bold and unrestrained, unlike the quiet woman beneath the bold and unrestrained clothing he’d just met. Bottom line, this style would stand out on a wall at their local college, and that was all that was important.
As he drove toward the curb to pick her up, it occurred to him that beneath her cool exterior, deep under the surface, maybe all was not right in Marta Hoyas’s world. This was one of the traits he’d developed since he’d lost everything he loved—an uncanny ability to read people, especially in the pain and suffering department. He could spot sad people anywhere. Saw the same look on his own face every day when he shaved. Yep, he’d go easy on the woman, and maybe they’d work out a compromise for living under the same roof for God only knew how long it would take her to paint that mural. This, too, he would survive.
He stopped at the passenger pickup curb. She got in while he put all three bags in the bed of his covered pickup truck. Being in construction since he was eighteen—he still couldn’t believe it had been twenty-four years since he’d joined his father’s business—there was just no point in driving a nice car.
“You ever been to Oregon?” he asked once he got back into the cab.
“Not in many years.”
“Ever see your great-great-grandfather’s monument?”
At last, a little sparkle of life in her dark eyes. “Yes. When I was fifteen. Beautiful.”
She removed her hat, and he was struck again by her beauty. An uneasy feeling, one he hadn’t experienced in years, demanded his attention, and it rattled him.
You’re a man, damn it. You’ve always loved women. Quit thinking like a priest.
Too bad he was hell-bent on living with a dead heart. Didn’t matter what this woman did to his pulse. Losing Ellen to cancer had left him devastated. The thought of ever again going through anything close to that—loving someone with all of his heart and soul and losing them—had shut him down. Never again.
So how the hell could he explain the humming feeling under his ribs and down to his fingertips when he looked into her dark and mysterious gaze? She crossed one booted leg over the other and stretched forward to adjust the seat belt, jutting out her chest in the process.
“Can I help you with that?” he asked, trying his damnedest not to notice her breasts.
“I’ve got it. Thanks.”
He focused back on driving, vowing to only look straight ahead from that moment on.
Typical of Oregon weather in late September, it drizzled as he exited the Portland airport and headed toward the freeway. Being three o’clock, it would be after five before they got back to Heartlandia this Saturday afternoon. And because she had yet to utter more than ten words, and he didn’t exactly feel like playing twenty questions, Leif gripped the steering wheel a little tighter and hunkered down for what he’d expected since first laying eyes on her—an extralong drive home, punctuated by awkward and strained silence. Like right now.
He swallowed. Fine with him.
* * *
Marta stared out the window, struck by how green everything was. What should she expect from a place that got more than forty inches of rain a year? Compared to her red-rock desert home, anyplace would look green. She glanced at Leif’s profile. If he ground his molars any tighter, he’d break through his jaw. His weathered fair complexion, darkened by his outdoor work—she’d been told his was the construction company that had built Heartlandia City College—made him look in his midforties...like Lawrence. She shook her head, trying to ward off any more thoughts about her benefactor, and wasn’t that all he’d wound up being? Her ex-benefactor...and ex-lover.
For five years she’d given up everything for him. Five years she’d traveled with him, met the people he thought she should meet for her career. Respected his boundaries and accepted his terms. Evidently Marta was only worthy of being his significant other. It had suited their relationship well for the first year. Hell, she’d even set up the rules. She’d rebelled against her parents’ traditional marriage. Pooh-poohed her father’s favorite saying: “A love like ours only comes once in a lifetime.” Heck, she’d been through half a dozen boyfriends by the time she was twenty-two, and not a single one had been interested in anything beyond the here and now. That kind of love was passé. She hid behind her rebellious facade, the edgy artist, and tried to believe it didn’t matter that no man had come close to loving her the way her father loved her mother. But they were so old-fashioned. Old school. She was a modern woman.
It had worked well with Lawrence at first, what with her traveling and long hours in her art studio—the studio he’d financed and built for her. But surprise, surprise, she’d fallen for him anyway, and celebrating her thirtieth birthday had made her long for something permanent. Something that said he held her above all others, that she wasn’t replaceable. For three more years she’d settled for focusing on her art and waiting, but then her mother died and put a whole new perspective on love, one Lawrence could never measure up to. By then their relationship seemed more like a habit than a love affair. Even now with her leaving him, he hadn’t protested...much.
Think it over, my dear, he’d said. Nothing needs to change.
Wrong! Everything had changed eight weeks ago, and if he thought she’d hang around forever waiting for him to propose marriage, he’d been terribly mistaken.
She attributed her change of heart to losing her mother so suddenly last year. They’d been estranged over Marta’s chosen lifestyle when an aortic aneurysm had suddenly taken her life. She’d never even gotten to say goodbye. Losing her mother had cut to the core, and she’d been determined ever since to honor her mother’s memory with Lawrence. He, however, wasn’t on the same page—that was the phrase he’d used when she’d first brought up the subject.
Even now, with the new situation and her world turned upside down, he hadn’t budged in offering marriage.
She glanced at Leif again. Dark blond hair cut short, the kind that stuck up any which way it wanted, not the carefully styled spikes of younger men. His crystal-blue eyes had nearly drilled a hole through her head when he’d introduced himself. The guy was intense and focused on one thing—getting her where she needed to be for the next couple of months. That was fine with her. She needed this break, and the job had popped up at an opportune time. She needed the money. Granted, she’d been quite sure she had an edge in the final decision, being the great-great-granddaughter of Edgardo Hoyas, the Heartlandia town monument artist. This job would allow her to get away from home and her problems and regroup, to put a little money in her bank account so she could focus on the only thing important to her right now, the...
“You okay with staying at my house?” Leif broke into her thoughts.
She’d been told she would have her own wing in a large and beautiful home.