Chapter Four
Jillian awoke the next morning and looked over at the beginnings of the bunkbed picture.
She had been truthful when she told Wyatt that she didn’t like to read scary stories.
Happily-ever-afters and stories where women empowered other women had always been her pleasure reading genres.
Had she been charmed by Wyatt’s good looks and easy banter to actually agree to read one of his books?
Molly hopped up on the bed and yawned so big that Jillian could almost see her tonsils.
She checked the time on her phone, pushed the covers back, and sat up.
“You are a good girl to let me sleep this long. Let’s get your potty box cleaned up and fix your breakfast. I’ve got a date with a cup of coffee, and I’m paying a higher price for it than I would at Starbucks. ”
She finished taking care of the cat and dragged her easel out onto the porch.
The canvas wasn’t all that heavy, but it seemed like it weighed as much as a full-grown elephant when she set it up.
She had had that same feeling every time she packed everything she owned into a single bag and moved to the next place.
The Bridal Veil Resort, the name given to the cabins, was the misnomer of the century. She didn’t know about Wyatt’s place, but hers could have a sign out on the porch warning the renters to enter at their own risk because it was haunted with the ghosts of the past.
She had unloaded everything in one of her totes onto the sofa and now arranged her drawing equipment on top of it.
The little light that came through the overlapping tree branches was so much better than the one window in the cabin afforded that she decided on the spot to work on the porch a few hours each day.
She sat down on the edge of the rocking chair.
Not as comfortable as her office chair in her studio, but it was better than sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Good morning!” Wyatt carried a thermos in one hand and two mugs in the other.
“Whoa!” Jillian held up a palm. “You don’t get to see or watch me work without payment.”
He set the thermos and mugs on the floor of the porch and handed her a book that he had hiding under his arm. “I didn’t sweat on it, I promise. I took a shower after my morning run.”
“Thank you.” She took it from his hand, carried it inside the cabin, and set it on the fireplace mantel.
The imagery on the cover sent a shiver up her spine—a hand with the tattoo of a skull on the back, holding a knife with blood dripping from the point onto a woman’s closed eyes—but she was determined to read it cover to cover.
Her own feelings and emotions were tied to her art, so by reading Wyatt’s works she might get to know him better.
That was the craziest thought she had ever had. Probably brought on by the ambiance of the cabin. She would leave in less than two weeks, and Wyatt Creswell would be nothing but a faint memory within a year.
Molly hopped off the windowsill and was almost outside when Jillian slipped a foot under her belly, slid her across the wood floor, and yanked the door shut.
“Sorry about slamming the door. My cat is nosy. I would never find her if she ran into the woods. I live in a third-floor apartment with a balcony, and Molly is missing her morning sunbath,” she explained.
Wyatt filled a mug with steaming-hot coffee and handed it to her and then eased down into the other rocking chair.
“I understand. I’m in a fifth-floor apartment in Dallas, and Rascal gets downright pissy if he doesn’t get his evening walks.
He really likes it out here where he can fuss at the squirrels and go outside any time he wants.
I only got a glimpse of yellow-and-white fur. Was her mama part lion?”
She sat down, took a sip of the coffee, and set it on her makeshift table.
“Maybe so. She didn’t have a pedigree in her paws when I found her hiding under a bush at a park.
She was so tiny and skinny that I couldn’t leave her there.
Now, she weighs twenty pounds, but the vet says that she’s healthy.
I guess cats are not one size fits all.” She picked up a piece of gray charcoal and began to work.
“I don’t know why you’d be afraid to read mystery books,” Wyatt whispered.
“Why’s that?”
“What you are working on right there sends chills down my spine. It’s far scarier than anything I could conjure up to write about,” he answered and visibly shivered.
“What do you see?” she asked as she shaded in a small portion of the little girl’s pajamas.
“Pure fear,” Wyatt said. “I don’t know a damn thing about art, but that right there is terror.”
“What did you think you were coming over here to see?”
By his own admission he knew as much about art as she did about writing a book, but he had put the emotion she had that day into words. She would title it Fear, and the one she had yet to name—the one of Rascal and Wyatt—would be Hope.
The crow’s feet around his eyes deepened as he stared long and hard at the canvas before he spoke. “I’m not sure. Maybe something like a Thomas Kinkade. My mother had one of his prints hanging above the dining room table when I was a kid.”
Jillian turned and smiled at him. “This is one of my first actual charcoals I’m doing for a gallery showing. I usually paint in colors, not abstract, but slightly out of focus.”
“Why?”
“Because the world is not always clear,” she answered.
“Do they instill fear like this does?” he asked.
“I hope not.” She laid the charcoal stick down, took a sip of coffee, and stood up. “I’ll bring one out that I have yet to put the finishing touches on, and you can decide if it’s got a dark side.”
Molly was on the bed washing her belly and barely even looked up at Jillian when she picked up the three-foot square canvas. “Watch that attitude, girl. I can always go back to buying that cheap cat food instead of giving you tilapia and chicken breast every night for supper.”
She set the picture on the far end of the porch. “What do you see in this one with color?”
Wyatt propped his elbow on his knee, his chin on his fist, and studied the huge sunflower in the foreground with a rising blood moon in bright reds and oranges in the background. “Like I told you, I know very little about art, so this would just be my opinion.”
“Interpretation is individual,” she said.
“I see indecision,” he finally answered.
“You are an author, so you have more than one word,” Jillian said.
“The blood moon is a symbol of something that caused pain. The sunflower is a bright spot that overpowers something as big as the rising moon. It’s out of focus because neither the pain nor the bright spot is clear, and that creates indecision.
” He looked up at her with a self-satisfied yet boyish grin on his face. “Did I do good?”
“You nailed it,” she answered, and went back to the charcoal.
Wyatt watched the little girl become increasingly more ghostly as Jillian deftly filled in details.
The child held a ragged coloring book in one hand and a bent-all-to-hell box of crayons in the other.
His breath caught in his chest when he remembered Jillian saying that her journey began with a coloring book.
He realized that wasn’t just any little girl in the picture.
She was doing a self-portrait. He had a thousand questions to ask her, both out of pure nosiness and to give his new character Jolene more depth, but he kept quiet.
If Jillian had suffered as much as portrayed in that picture she was working on, then he didn’t want to dredge anything up.
Even with the little bit he had discovered, Jolene had a past she didn’t like to talk about.
“I really should get back to my own story,” he said as he refilled her coffee cup. “I’m going back into town this evening. Would you like to go along?”
“To a Walmart, maybe?” she asked without looking at him.
“That’s where I get most everything, but we can go anywhere you want.”
“That’s good enough for what I need,” she answered. “What time?”
“Six o’clock? There’s a good little Mexican café on the way. We could stop and have supper before we shop.”
She stopped what she was doing and locked eyes with him. He dove right into the deep waters of her brown eyes and was afraid to blink for fear he would lose the chemistry that sprang up between them. “Wyatt Creswell, are you asking me on a date?”
“I’m asking my new friend to have supper with me,” he answered, and finally looked away.
She blinked and turned back to the canvas. “Then I will be ready at six.”
“See you then,” he said.
He went straight to his computer and got lost in giving his readers a little more about Jolene. She wasn’t an artist and didn’t write family sagas at night when she went home, but she did have a tough childhood growing up on the wrong side of the tracks.
The cracked mirror above the wall-hung sink in the bathroom solidified Jillian’s idea that the cabin was most likely haunted.
She turned her face to the side and then back again.
In one angle, even her smile was crooked.
“I won’t get worried until one side starts to whisper in an eerie voice to me. ”
If Wyatt was on time, she had five minutes before he arrived, so she slipped a pair of sandals on and scratched Molly’s ears.
“It’s not a date. It’s only hitching a ride into town for supplies,” she assured the cat but wished it was a real date.
The attraction she had for Wyatt now had a firm foundation, and she would love to see where it might go.
“There’s something trustworthy in him. Don’t ask me how I know.
It’s just a feeling. Something I’ve never felt before. ”
The hard knock on her door startled her so badly that she jumped, and Molly took off to hide under the bed. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Hold down the fort for us.”