“I don’t know about a masterpiece.” Her fingers trail over the tools laid out for us, and I swear I almost feel the exploratory touches on my skin.
“Masterpiece,” I reiterate. “If you don’t want to take it home and hang it up, I will.”
She laughs at that. “You have entirely too much faith in me.”
“Not possible.” I cup her cheek and enjoy the way her breath hitches. Her skin is warm beneath my lips when I press a kiss to her forehead. “Now, let’s get messy.”
“This should be interesting.” Indie reaches for a bottle of cerulean blue paint and studies the large, blank canvas in front of her. Her lips twitch a few times, her eyes bouncing from side to side as she does some kind of internal calculations I wish I were privy to.
She nods once to herself, grabs a large paintbrush, like the kind you’d use to paint a wall, and squeezes a big glop of blue onto it. Then she makes a slashing motion with the brush, sending paint flying. It splatters the canvas in a tight arch, and Indie’s face lights up with a beautiful smile.
“Oh, that was fun.” She adds more paint to the brush and does it again, this time changing the angle of the brush and the splatter. “Come on, Bash.”
I’d be happy simply watching her, but she’d never stand for that. So I follow her lead, choose a brush, and pour a generous amount of yellow paint onto the flat of it before letting it fly.
“Satisfying, right?” She has a little speck of blue on her cheek, and quite a few on her jeans and tennis shoes.
Reaching out, I wipe the paint off her cheek with my thumb. “Definitely.”
The perfect shade of pink paints her cheeks, and I can’t help it. I lean down and take her mouth in a quick, hard kiss. She rewards me with a quiet little gasp that I swallow down.
“All right, Rosebud. Let’s do this. Show me what you’ve got.”
twenty-six
SEBASTIAN
Indieand I are just as paint-covered as the large canvases we’re carrying out to my SUV. It’s quite the sight, if the looks we’re getting are anything to go on. People smile and whisper to each other, throwing us curious and amused glances that Indie is trying hard to avoid.
“Told you it would be a masterpiece,” I say as she hands her canvas to me to put in the back of my vehicle. It’s a riot of color that somehow looks purposeful, whereas mine looks like it was created by a colorblind toddler. Mine is definitely getting shoved into the back of a closet.
Or I’ll give it to Griffin and make him promise to hang it somewhere prominent. He’s too nice to say no, and it’ll give me a good laugh whenever I go to his place. Though I’d have to clear that with Mira and get her on board. She’s cool, though, so I bet she would be.
“It’s definitely not a masterpiece.” Indie’s nose scrunches up as she surveys her chaotic work. “I’ll never fit this in my car on the drive back to LA.”
My stomach drops at that. I don’t want her thinking about going back to her life. There’s nothing in LA she can’t have here, and there’s so much here she wouldn’t have in LA. Maybe our date isn’t going as well as I thought if she’s thinking about leaving. Plastering a smile on my face, I carefully get the canvas settled in the back of the SUV. “Guess you’ll have to stay, then.”
Hazel eyes lift to meet mine, and I can’t quite read the emotion behind them. “Bash…”
“Indie.” With the painting in the back of the SUV, I reach for her. Gripping her hips, I pull Indie toward me until our bodies are flush. The little inhalation she rewards me with goes straight to my dick. “Just be here with me now.”
It’s all I can ask. I know it’s too soon to ask her to stay. If I did, it would scare her right out of town and back to LA. But I’m going to do whatever it takes to give her reasons to extend her stay. By a month, a year…a lifetime.
Her eyes soften as she reaches up to press her palms to my chest. She smooths them across my pecs, over my shoulders, and down my arms before running them back. “I am.”
“I’m not ready to call it a day.” The weather is warm, the sun is still out, and this is the perfect kind of day to show Indigo what life could be like here in the Twin Cities. “There’s a bunch of cute shops and cafes around here. Walk with me?”
“Like this?” She motions to our paint-splattered clothes before reaching up and tugging on a strand of my hair that’s coated in a bright yellow.
I shrug. “Why not?”
It’s not surprising that she hesitates. She does a sweep of the area, her radar scanning for anyone with a camera or a phone pointed our way, and I feel a flash of guilt.
Maybe I should have flown out to LA once I had money from signing my first hockey contract. I should have done more to track her down and figure out what happened. She was trappedin a life that made her miserable, always the butt of cruel comments and articles, always wary of how she existed in a world that was too small for a woman like her.
I could have taken her away from all of that. She could have been here, spending the last six years with me, not needing to look over her shoulder every time she left the house.
But I didn’t, and I can’t change the past.
