The scent of perfume filled the space, so incongruent to the moment, he was momentarily worried someone had come in the room because it certainly wasn’t Lara. He looked around but saw no one. Just like the basement.
A cold chill spread through him, taking away all that warmth.
Lara dropped her chin, leaned her forehead against his chest, the moment over. Any sort of…disaster averted.
“Thanks, Josie,” she muttered.
But he didn’t know what the hell she was thanking one of her fake ghosts for.
Chapter Six
After dinner, Lara had set her paints up on the back porch. She’d been so busy with Ty lately she hadn’t done much in the way of her art. She supposed it didn’t matter. She had an attic full of paintings and drawers full of drawings. Sure, Grandma displayed some of them here and at the museum, but mostly it was just a silly hobby.
But silly hobby or not, after the run-in with Bruce, she needed something to settle her, and she knew Grandma wanted to talk to Ty one-on-one about the whole ordeal, so this would give them some privacy.
And, okay, she was also trying to settle herself from that momentafterBruce. She needed to work through it and compartmentalize away, because obsessing over it wasnotgoing to work.
Maybe she’d had the strange, fluttery yearning thought that Ty was going to kiss her in that moment, but Josie had stepped in with her waft of perfume and given her the good sense to realize that hehadn’tbeen.
Or, if hehad, it was a reaction to…his dad, his life. Not her.
Not her.
She didn’t want to think about it or dwell on it. So she turned to her paints. The autumn sky. The cold around her. Justher. It was how she’d learned to cope.
Sure, the grief counselor Grandma had made her go to for a long time had talked a lot about staying open to relationships, to life. Tofeelingthe pain and accepting it so it didn’t become a ghost in her head, haunting her at every good turn.
Lara had understood that to an extent, believed it to an extent, but there was a certain…line she had to draw. Too much good, too much happy, it brought on all the anxiety she’d learned to manage and live with.
Not that anything right now was particularly good or happy. Or bad or sad. It was just…life. The careful, quiet life she’d arranged to her perfect specifications. So nothing changed or altered on her without a careful decision to let it.
She could keep doing that even with Ty home for good. It just required deciding what lines to draw. Like ignoring Ty touching her face and looking like he was about to kiss her.
She bit down on her lip, a physical reminder to focus. On color. On brush strokes. On bringing to life the scene in front of her.
She saw a figure out on one of the rocks surrounded by ocean. Sure, maybe there was actually a bearded guy in a hat standing out there in the fading light. Maybe it was a trick of said light bouncing off the ocean that his clothes looked old fashioned.
But she didn’t believe that. She believed that what she saw was some kind of apparition of a man who’d lived two hundred years ago.
So she added him into the painting.
And tried not to think about how the hit of Josie’s ghost perfume had kept her from ruining a lifelong friendship, all because Ty’s mouth had been a little too close to hers.
And how much she wished Josiehadn’tmade her appearance.
Ty stood inside, looking out the sliding glass door at Lara. She was perched on a little stool, her back to the windows. The wind teased her hair, and in the falling light it looked redder than it usually did.
He hadn’t seen her paint in a while. Her face was mostly hidden, but he could see enough hint of her profile to know her eyes were focused, her mouth set in concentration. He could see most of the painting, and the scene beyond it that she was bringing to life on canvas.
He saw the man she was painting, though he wondered how the guy had gotten out to that rock. He had to be wet and freezing, but he just stood there, looking out at the horizon. And if he looked like the same guy from Lara’s picture in the museum, and that old dream he’d had once upon a time, well… That was just his brain playing tricks on him.
Like this afternoon.
So he focused on Lara. What had this afternoon been? Or that moment she’d fallen on top of him? What was all this swirling around inside of him? Because it was damn familiar, the kind of thing he’d always pushed away.
But staying put changed things. It changed the choices he’d be making all his life, because thenextwasn’t about baseball anymore. It was about life. Staying here in Wild Rose Point for good changed…a lot more than he’d anticipated.
Ty wasn’t afraid of change, but hewasafraid of fucking things up. Things that were too important to fail at.
