Read The Art of My Life Online
Authors: Ann Lee Miller
Tags: #romance, #art, #sailing, #jail, #marijuana abuse
The Art of My Life (8 page)
Van Gogh barked from the deck and
raced from one end of the boat to the other at the sight of
Aly.
Cal swung them alongside the
Escape
, and Van Gogh went into a seizure of delight when Aly
scooted aboard, hugged him and scratched his ears. At least he and
his dog were in agreement. But, to be fair, Cal couldn’t remember
anyone who didn’t enrapture the dog.
“
I hope you’re hungry
because I’m grilling grouper I caught this afternoon.”
Aly smiled, and his world righted.
“Sounds amazing.”
He handed her the grocery bag. “Warm
up the beans, put the Chunky Monkey on ice, and I’ll get the
hibachi going.”
Thirty minutes later he passed Aly a
plate of food—a quartered pumpernickel fish sandwich, perfect
half-moon of black beans with a dollop of salsa on top.
Aly grinned and shook her head. “You
could always get a job at Riverview Charlie’s as a
plater.”
Cal slid into the dining nook at a
right angle from her. “I’m an artist. It’s what I do. It’s all
about color—chalk-white fish, obsidian bread and beans, garnet
salsa.”
Cal took a bite of the canned beans
Henna had given him. “What did you do to these? They’re
incredible.”
Aly arched her brows. “Maybe it’s all
about taste. I used the tail end of the onion that was about to go,
found some garlic salt that hadn’t turned to rock, a pinch of red
pepper.”
The wind whistled outside the cabin
and swung the boat west. Sun coming through the portholes dimmed,
and Cal turned on the marine battery-powered light. “We make a good
team.”
Her eyes lowered.
“
I wish I would have asked
for your help at the beginning,” he said. “You always wanted to run
your own business. You’ve got the aptitude for it. I have the boat,
the seven hundred and twenty sailing hours for my Coast Guard
captain’s license.”
He gave her the rundown on the
repairs, catalogued the fourteen customers he’d had in three months
of operation. “Help me, Al. Talk to your boss. Buy me some time.
Think about taking over the business end of things. You could make
the business fly. I know you could.”
Rain pelted the cabin and decks. Van
Gogh whined under the table.
Aly’s brow wrinkled. She peered
through the porthole.
He picked up on her unease. “It’s just
rain—no lightening. I can take you back. I’ve got a rain
poncho.”
“
No. What if it started
storming when we were half way between the
Escape
and the
marina?”
He could point out that land was less
than five hundred yards away, but he didn’t want her to
leave.
She pushed away the empty carton of
ice cream, shivered, and rubbed her arms.
Cal headed for the bow. “I’ll get you
a blanket.”
Thunder clapped.
Aly launched from her seat and gripped
the bulkhead, wild-eyed. Before the sound dissipated from the
cabin, the color drained from her face.
He crossed the two steps between them
and pried her fingers from the bulkhead, slipping the blanket
around her, pulling her close. “It’s just a squall. It’ll blow
over.”
A wave smacked against the hull,
lurching the boat to one side and pitching them off balance. They
fell onto the bunk in a tangle of limbs.
Cal laughed and tried to sit
up.
Aly’s arms snaked around him in a
death grip, pinning him to the bunk. “It’s not funny.”
Cal pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“The thing that looks like a wire brush on top of the mast is a
lightening arrestor. You’re as safe here as you would be in your
condo.”
“
That’s not
helping.”
Cal stuffed pillows under their heads
and repositioned the blanket over her. He rubbed circles on her
back. “It’ll be okay.”
The boat rocked in the wind. A shudder
passed through Aly’s body with every clap of thunder.
Van Gogh put his front paws on the
bunk and tried to scramble up.
Cal shoved him down. “No, you big
sissy. If I let you up here once, you’ll think you get to sleep
here every night. Besides, if it’s between you and Aly in my bed,
she’s going to win every time.”
Aly giggled.
Good. She was calming down.
The storm sounded like an all-night
rain and not a squall that would rumble through in half an hour.
Maybe that was wishful thinking.
Now that Aly was in his arms, he
didn’t want to let her go. With the exception of his short-lived
infatuation with Raine, he’d probably always wanted permanence with
Aly. Only now, time was running out. Aly probably dated some guy
now. She was always seeing someone. But at twenty-three, people
didn’t just go out. They got engaged. She could marry the guy in
months.
He closed the space between them and
filled his lungs with the scent of mint growing in the forest. He
needed Aly to rescue his business, his self-worth, so he’d have
something to offer her. It was humiliating to ask. But he was out
of options.
The thunder subsided, but rain
continued to assault the boat and his optimism. Aly had said the
bank was past the point of giving him more time. She was too smart
to sign on to a sinking business. He needed to prepare himself for
her
no
.
Aly’s breathing eased into a normal
cadence, and his body warmed against hers. He’d made some pretty
stupid decisions in the past, but having sex with Aly tonight would
go into the hall of fame. He put air between them.
Light from the main cabin spilled
across her sleeping eyes. Every fiber in him wanted her.
Mascara coated her almost colorless
lashes. He picked up a white-blonde tendril from the hair pooling
on the bunk around her face and rubbed it between his fingers. He
hadn’t gotten the color right the first time he painted her when
she was fifteen. In
Sleepy Aly
, he’d painted to stay sober
after Raine dumped him; the color had been better, but still not
exact. When he painted Aly again, he’d take his time and get it
perfect.
He propped his head on his hand and
studied her thin brows, exactly proportioned nose. The asymmetrical
quality of her eyes, the left larger than the right, wasn’t
detectable to most people. She’d always hated her “lopsided” eyes
and used makeup to minimize the difference. But Cal loved the
contrast. He’d drawn and painted her enough to know it wasn’t so
much a matter of size, but of one eye appearing wide open and the
other heavy-lidded. He ran the back of his finger against the blush
of her cheek. It would be a challenge, but he knew he could capture
the silkiness of her skin on canvas.
The shadowed gap between her blouse
and chest teased him. Aly had offered to comfort him with her body
when he’d been reeling from Raine. He’d turned her down, one of the
few good decisions he’d made during that dark time. He’d get that
chance to make it with Aly if he had anything to say about
it.
That depended on Aly’s answer to his
plea for help. And it didn’t look like he would get a reply in the
next five minutes. He could think of worse ways to wait.
Panic jetted through Aly as she gained
consciousness. A heart thumped under her right ear. Male scent
filled her nostrils. She’d woken up in some guy’s arms—something
she promised two years ago she’d never do again. Her tongue ran
across the roof of her mouth and tasted morning breath and
remorse.
A dog whimpered in his sleep. Van
Gogh. Cal. Her head rested on Cal’s chest. An underwire dug into
her ribs. Fully dressed. Relief filtered through her. Thank God, it
was Cal. Then, she remembered the storm, the feeling of safety in
Cal’s arms. How she always felt with Cal. But the feeling was a
lie. Cal had snapped her heart in two.
The rain had stopped. The
Escape
rocked softly, water slapping contentment against the
hull. She closed her eyes to savor the quiet whistle at the end of
Cal’s breaths as he slept—intimate and foreign.
If they’d been together since she was
fifteen, Cal would have put a ring on her finger a long time ago.
Their firstborn would sleep in the bow berth. And when Aly woke up
at dawn, her hands would explore the map of Cal’s body—one she’d
know as well as her own. It was just this kind of useless
daydreaming that would set her up for a second
heartbreak.
Cal shifted in his sleep and tightened
his arms around her. A sense of being loved washed over her—did he
know it was her in his sleep?—and subsided.
Regardless of her vow, if Cal woke up
and wanted her, she didn’t know if she had the strength to say no.
She hadn’t had sex in two years—which probably accounted for the
near-starvation she felt for Cal’s touch. If she gave in, she
couldn’t feel more guilt than she already felt.
She could see her sister plopping her
hands on her hips and saying, “Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry. You
know you will.” Easy for Kallie to say. She’d held onto her
virginity with a vise grip until her honeymoon.
Cal and Kallie thought she slept with
guys because she was looking for Daddy’s love. They were probably
right. Kallie had convinced her that just because she responded to
Daddy’s defection differently didn’t mean she was any better than
Aly. But knowing why she slept with her boyfriends didn’t make the
guilt go away. The nuns had always made it perfectly clear that sex
was only permitted in marriage. Her drive to be loved had always
trumped doing the right thing.
And she was sick of trying to get
Daddy to care about her. The back child support Mom had sued him
for could rot before she’d spend it. Blood money—money that came
from Daddy’s bloodline running through her body, not from his
love.
She’d already learned the hard way
that Cal was a bad risk, no matter how safe he felt. He’d chosen
Evie over her before. And Evie’s one-act last night proved she was
still in the picture.
She eased herself out of Cal’s grasp
and sat up, tugging the blanket with her.
Cal’s jean-clad knee poked out when
she disturbed the covers.
Dawn warmed the cabin, the stubble on
Cal’s face. His lips slightly parted. Sea-softened, kinky hair
sprawled across his pillow. Warm brown eyes blinked open. He looked
disoriented, then his expression cleared and he lumbered up. “I
must have fallen asleep.” Gravel roughened his voice.
“
Yeah. It’s
morning.”
He leaned forward,
hesitated.
Her pulse sped and her breath
hitched.
Cal smiled and planted a kiss on her
cheek and the corner of her mouth. A second stretched into
eternity, and the kiss ended. “Thanks for coming. For hearing me
out.”
Her brain scrambled for something
intelligible to say. “For going psycho.”
Cal grinned. “Do I look like I’m
complaining?”
She mumbled something about needing to
wash her face and shut herself into the head.
Everything changed with that kiss, and
nothing changed. It was a perfect kiss—not steamy or platonic. The
impact felt small, like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence
or a capital letter at the beginning of the next. But it
wasn’t.
She rubbed toothpaste on her teeth,
swished water around her mouth, and spit.
She could resign from the world’s most
boring job at the bank. Other than socking money away, she wasn’t
getting any closer to her goal of owning her own business before
she turned twenty-five. She’d always thought she’d open a gallery,
but the type of business was less important than running
it.
Aly splashed cold water on her face
and toweled it dry. Goose bumps rose on her bare arms. She grabbed
the sweatshirt that hung on the back of the door and pulled it over
her head, inhaling Cal. She could run his business. She knew she
could.
Cal sliced pumpernickel toast into
eight triangles dotted with butter. They chased the toast with a
Dr. Pepper they split. No weirdness crept in.
She huddled in the back of Cal’s
dinghy trying to capture all the ideas for his business pop-corning
into her brain as they neared the dock.
In the distance Evie climbed out of
her hatch.
Aly snapped back into sanity and the
sting of reality. Cal and Evie had to be still going out. Things
seemed strained between them yesterday. But she’d swear to it that
Evie was the only one Cal had ever slept with.
Aly touched her lips. This morning
he’d kissed
her
. Maybe it was just a thank-you kiss from his
perspective. But it didn’t matter. She’d have to be a masochist to
face Evie or the possibility of seeing Cal and Evie together every
day. No contact with Cal was the least painful option. And the
smartest.
Like a slo-mo DVD, Aly watched Evie’s
chin navigate toward the parking lot, then angle to where she and
Cal sat in the dinghy. Evie slammed her hatch and marched in their
direction.
Aly sucked in a shaky breath of
salt-laden air as Cal grabbed hold of the dock. She squinted at him
in the morning sun—needing to spit the words out before Evie
descended on them. “My boss is going to call in your loan no matter
what I say. I-I want to help you, Cal. You have to believe that.
But I can’t. I just can’t.” Her voice broke.
She couldn’t read his expression with
the sun in her eyes, but she heard him fill and empty his lungs.
“It’s your call, Al.” His voice was heavy, resigned. He held out
his hand to help her up the ladder to the pier and her grip closed
around his thick fingers, the calluses on his palm. She could
almost feel herself rip in two.
Evie glared down at them. “Isn’t this
cozy. Seven-thirty a.m. Yesterday’s clothes.”