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“I knew it was you,” she greeted him breathlessly.
“Am I that predictable?”
“No, not at all, and after seeing you dance, no one would accuse you of it.”
He chuckled along with her but then added a caution. “Whatever talent I might have as a dancer really does have to be our secret.”
“Well, when no one knows we’re seeing each other, why would they care what we do?” She held her breath. She’d thought he’d missed her and wanted to hear her voice, but perhaps he was simply concerned with maintaining his extremely proper image.
He was quiet a moment too long. “I don’t even want to go there. I just called to say I was thinking of you.”
“Thank you.” She’d been thinking of him too. “You needn’t worry, Luke. All your secrets are safe with me.” As were her own, she didn’t dare add.
Monday morning, Catherine reached over to shut off her alarm, and then sat up slowly. She took a deep breath and released it gradually; then, having suffered no ill effects, she risked swinging her legs off the bed to stand. She waited a moment, but still felt fine and went on into the bathroom.
Despite having gone to bed early, she still looked a little tired, but her skin no longer held a peculiar olive tinge. She leaned closer to the mirror and blinked. “It was a bad strawberry after all,” she concluded, but the words were easier said than believed.
Expecting to spend the day buying paint and working at Toby’s house, she dressed in jeans, an aqua T-shirt with a purple cat across the front, and tennis shoes. She remembered to take a hat, but when she arrived at Lost Angel, the mural project had already progressed further than she could have imagined.
Over the weekend, Toby and Dave had erected a scaffold and begun to trace the outer borders of a grid on the Victorian. She walked across the street to join them. Rafael and a dozen other kids were seated along the porch, eager to begin painting, while Nick did skateboard tricks on the sidewalk.
“You’ll all need clothes to paint in,” Catherine suggested. “Let’s have Pam unlock the clothes lockers so that you can find something to work in while I go and buy the paint.”
Rafael rose and took a step toward her. “It’ll be a real pleasure to get paint on some of the awful rags people donate. In fact, it would only be an improvement.”
“Hey, when we’re finished, maybe we can sell the stuff as Jackson Pollock’s old clothes,” Tina Stassy urged.
“That would be fraud, Tina,” Catherine warned. “Let’s just concentrate on painting the mural.”
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“You’re all business, aren’t you?” Toby observed.
Catherine shot him a dark glance rather than reply.
He had his hair pulled back in a ponytail, but he was clad in jeans and a T-shirt which left his colorfully tattooed arms on full display. “Let’s take my truck,” he said. “We’ll need tarps, scrapers, sandpaper, brushes, rollers, masking tape, gloves, buckets to mix the paint in. It won’t all fit in your Volvo.”
“What makes you think I drive a Volvo?” Catherine asked.
“You just drove into the center parking lot,” Toby pointed out. “I’m an artist and observant. Now you take that convertible cruising by now. Someone’s spent a lot of time and money to restore that ’50’s Ford. I noticed them driving by several times over the weekend, and they’re up to no good.”
Catherine turned to watch the dark green car roll by. It had been lowered to suit the owner’s definition of cool. The cream-colored top was up and obscured her view of the occupants, but she thought Toby was probably right about their motives.
“Dave, what kind of car does Ford Dolan drive?” she asked.
Dave had been trimming the scraggly bushes at the front of the house to clear the way to paint. “He has a battered old truck. What made you think of him?”
“Just the mention of a Ford, I guess.”
While she was relieved Ford Dolan didn’t own the convertible, Toby’s slow, sexy smile convinced her she didn’t want to ride anywhere with him, either. Her own shopping list was tucked in her pocket, but his sounded more complete than hers.
She cleared her throat nervously. “We’ll be buying a lot. Maybe we should take two cars.”
Toby looked surprised but finally nodded. “Okay, if that’s what you want. Let me get you the address of the place where I’ve been buying my paint. I talked to the manager on Saturday, and he’s giving us a good price in exchange for allowing him to post a sign advertising his store.”
“Really? And just how large is this sign?” Catherine inquired.
Toby gestured. “Not big. It’s about the size of a realtor’s for sale sign. Let’s just call the paint store our first corporate sponsor and hope to attract others.”
