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  Already lost in her planning, she gave him a distracted kiss. “Good night, Ben.”

  Before he could recover from his apparent surprise, she stepped inside and shut the door in his face.

  The doorbell rang almost immediately. Fighting a smile, she opened it.

  “Forget anything?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Sure you did,” he said, stepping into the house and dragging her into his arms.

  He kissed her till her head spun, then walked back outside and closed the door behind him.

  Kathleen stared at the door and touched a finger to her still-burning lips. There was no escaping the fact that this latest round had gone to him. She wasn’t sure whether to start plotting a way to get even or to run for her life.

  Ben was getting far too much enjoyment out of rattling Kathleen. He was forgetting all about protecting himself. He needed to lock himself in his studio and get back to work. It was the most effective way he knew to block out the world.

  And up until a few days ago, it had been more than enough for him. He hadn’t craved anyone’s company, hadn’t yearned for any woman’s kisses. Maybe he could get that back again.

  Not likely, he concluded a few hours later when Kathleen breezed in with a bag of freshly baked banana nut muffins and a large latte. She was like a little whirlwind that touched down, left a bit of collateral damage and was gone an instant later. He stared out the door of his studio after she’d gone, fighting the oddest sensation that he’d imagined the entire visit.

  But the coffee and muffins were real enough. So was the edgy state of arousal in which he found himself.

  “Well, hell,” he muttered and tried to go back to work.

  Inspiration eluded him. All he could think about was the faint scent of Kathleen that lingered in the air.

  She did the same thing the next day, this time leaving him with an entire blueberry pie and a container of whipped cream. His vivid imagination came up with a lot of very provocative uses for that whipped cream that had nothing at all to do with the pie.

  By the weekend he was the one who was rattled, which was exactly what she’d obviously intended. He was also vaguely bemused by the fact that not once had she lingered in his studio or attempted to sneak a peek at his paintings. She’d come and gone in a heartbeat. In fact, one day she’d paid her mysterious visit even before he got to the studio. He found raspberry tarts and another latte on the doorstep, as if to prove that she hadn’t even attempted to take advantage of his absence to slip inside the unlocked studio for a look around.

  Ben sat in front of his easel, munching on a tart and considered not the painting he was working on, but Kathleen and these little sneak attacks designed to get under his skin without putting her own very delectable skin at risk. He couldn’t help wondering if the baked goods were meant as bribes or simply as taunting reminders of her. He suspected she intended the former, while the effect was most definitely the latter.

  Since he wasn’t accomplishing a blasted thing, he stalked back inside, picked up the phone and punched in a familiar number. Two could play at this game.

  “Studio Supplies,” Mitchell Gaylord said.

  “Mitch, it’s Ben Carlton.”

  “How are you? You can’t possibly be out of supplies. I just sent a shipment out there a few weeks ago.”

  “This isn’t for me,” Ben said. “Here’s what I need.”

  Ten minutes later he hung up and sat back, satisfied. “That ought to get her attention.”

  Kathleen was feeling very smug about her little forays to the country. Maybe it was ridiculous to drive all that way just to torment Ben with coffee and a few pastries, but she had a feeling it would pay off eventually. He’d feel so guilty—or get so annoyed—he’d have to let her poke around among his paintings just to get rid of her and restore his much-desired serenity.

  She was in the back of her shop planning the Christmas decorations, which needed to be up by the first of the week, when the bell over the front door rang. She went out expecting to find some browser who’d come inside primarily to get out of the cold. She rarely got serious customers this early in the day.

  Instead, she found a delivery man.

  “You Kathleen Dugan?” he asked, looking from her to his clipboard and back again.

  “Yes, but I’m not expecting anything.”

  “Hey, Christmas is coming. ’Tis the season of surprises.” He handed her the clipboard. “Sign here and I’ll be right back.”

  Kathleen signed the page and waited for his return, feeling an odd sense of anticipation, the kind she vaguely recalled feeling as a very small child at Christmas, before things with her mother and father had gone so terribly wrong.

  When the deliveryman walked back inside, her mouth gaped. He was pushing a cart laden with what looked like an entire art store. There was an easel there, a stack of canvases, a huge wooden box that could only contain paints, a ceramic holder filled with brushes. Everything was premium quality, meant for the professional artist.

  “This can’t possibly be for me,” she said, but she knew it was. She also knew who had sent it. This was Ben’s retaliation for her little hit-and-run visits to the farm.

  The delivery man stood patiently waiting.

  “What?” she asked, half-frozen by a mix of anticipation, annoyance and something she could only identify as fear.

  “Do you want this in the middle of the floor or somewhere else?” he asked patiently.

  In the basement, she thought, locked away where it couldn’t torment her. Aloud, she said, “In the back room, I suppose. Just pile it up anywhere.”

  When he emerged a moment later, he had a card in his hand. “This came with it. Happy holidays, Ms. Dugan.”

  She accepted the card, then dropped it, her nerves jittery. She managed to get a tip for the man from the cash register, then continued to stare at the card long after he’d gone.

  Just then the phone rang.

  “Yes,” she said, distracted.

  “Is it there yet?” Ben asked bluntly.

  “You!” she said, every one of her very raw emotions in her voice.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Have you read the card?”

  “No.”

  “Call me back when you have,” he said, then hung up in her ear.

  She stared at the phone, not sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Instead of doing either one, she dutifully opened the card.

  “For every canvas you complete and show me, I’ll show you one of mine,” he’d written.

  Hysterical laughter bubbled up in her throat. She hadn’t thought it possible, but Ben had managed to find the one thing on earth that could get her to back off.

  When Ben still hadn’t heard back from Kathleen by late afternoon, he heaved a resigned sigh, climbed into his car and faced the daunting rush-hour traffic to head to Alexandria. Apparently his gift hadn’t gone over the way he’d anticipated.

  Or maybe it had. He’d meant to shake her up, though, not infuriate her. Judging from her lack of response, he worried he’d done both.

  He wasn’t entirely sure what was driving him to head over there and find out. It could be intense curiosity, or maybe a death wish.

  He found the gallery already closed by the time he arrived. The window shade in the door was drawn, but he could still see lights in the back of the shop, which suggested that Kathleen was still on the premises.

  As he had once before, he banged on the door and kept right on banging until there was some sign of movement inside.

  He heard the tap of her footsteps coming toward the door, saw her approaching shadow on the other side of the shade, but the door didn’t immediately swing open.

  “Go away,” she said instead.

  “Not a chance,” he retorted, alarmed by the hint of tears he thought he heard in her voice. “Open up, Kathleen.”

  “No.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No,” she said, despite the unm
istakable sniff that gave away the blatant lie.

  “Why?”

  “I said I wasn’t crying.”

  “And I don’t believe you. Dammit, open this door, Kathleen.”

  “I don’t want to see you.”

  “Because I sent you a few art supplies?” he asked skeptically.

  “That’s one reason.”

  “And the others? I assume there’s a whole list.”

  “Yes,” she said, then added more spiritedly, “And it’s getting longer by the minute.”

  “I annoy you,” he guessed.

  “Yep.”

  “And I ripped the scab off an old wound.”

  She sighed at that. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Sweetheart, please let me in. I want to see your face when I’m talking to you.”

  “I should let you,” she muttered.

  Ben laughed. “All puffy and red, is it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You’ll still be beautiful.”

  “It’s too late for sweet-talk, Ben. I’m mad at you.”

  “I got that. I want you to tell me why.”

  “You said it yourself.”

  “But I want you to say it. I want you to scream and shout till you get all the insecurities that man filled your head with out of your system.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said impatiently. “Tim said a lot of cruel, hurtful things to me while we were together, that’s true. But what he said about my art wasn’t one of them.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “Yes, dammit. Do you think I would have quit painting just because of what he said?”

  “I don’t know. Did you?”

  “No. I quit because what I painted could never measure up to what I saw in my head,” she said.

  Ben could hear the misery in her voice and saw his mistake then. He’d assumed they were just alike, both being modest about their talents. He’d supposed that she was good but had been told otherwise, not that she had such a low opinion of her own work.

  “Maybe—” he began, but she cut him off.

  “There are no maybes,” she said flatly. “Not about this.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry I upset you. I thought I was helping.”

  “I know you did.”

  “Can I come in now?” he asked again, wanting to hold her, to offer some sort of comfort.

  “I suppose you’re not going to go away until you’ve patted me on the head,” she said, sounding resigned.

  “I was thinking of something a bit more demonstrative,” he said, fighting the urge to chuckle. “A hug, maybe.”

  “I don’t need a hug. I need you to drop this.”

  “Consider it dropped,” he said at once. “I’ll haul all that stuff right back out of here tonight and toss it in the nearest Dumpster, if it’ll make you feel better.”

  A key rattled in the lock at last and the door swung open. She met his gaze. “It was a nice gesture, Ben, even if it was misguided.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his heart twisting at the misery in her eyes. She’d been telling the truth. Her face showed evidence of a long crying jag, but he’d been right, too. She was still beautiful.

  She forced a smile. “Maybe we should get out of here,” she said before he could set foot inside. “Give me a second to turn off lights and I’ll lock up.”

  Something in her voice alerted him that there was a reason she didn’t want him coming in, which, of course, guaranteed that he followed her to the back.

  There on an easel sat an unfinished painting…of him. He must have made a whisper of sound because she whirled around and her gaze flew to clash with his.

  “I told you to wait,” she said accusingly.

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t want you to see it.”

  “Because it was meant to be a surprise?”

  “No, because it’s awful.”

  He stared at her in shock. “Awful? How can you say such a thing? Kathleen, it’s wonderful. You’ve got every detail just right.”

  “No, I don’t,” she insisted adamantly. “Maybe if I’d had a photo I could have gotten it right. This is awful. It looks nothing like you.”

  As if to prove her point, she picked up the brush with which she’d been working and started to take an angry swipe at the canvas. Ben caught her arm before she could do any damage.

  “Don’t you dare ruin it,” he said heatedly.

  “It’s no good,” she said again.

  He held her, looking down into her tormented eyes. “I can see that you don’t believe me,” he told her quietly. “But let’s get another opinion, one you will trust.”

  She searched his face as if desperately wanting to believe he wasn’t lying to her, but not quite daring to hope. “Whose?”

  “Destiny’s,” he suggested. “You trusted her to be unbiased about my work.”

  “Not at first,” she said.

  “But enough to believe her when she said those old wall panels were decent,” he reminded her.

  She sighed and he could feel her muscles relaxing.

  “Okay,” she said eventually. “But only when it’s finished. Will you let me take a picture or two?”

  He could understand why she wanted it to be the best it could possibly be, but he wasn’t sure that waiting was wise. She could suffer another one of these attacks of inadequacy and ruin it.

  “Will you promise me that you won’t damage it?”

  “Yes,” she said, meeting his gaze evenly. “I promise.”

  “No matter how discouraged you get?”

  “Yes,” she repeated, this time with a trace of impatience.

  “Okay, then. I’ll bring you some snapshots of me. You have till Christmas. In fact, if you want to make Destiny extraordinarily happy, you could give it to her as a gift. I never would sit still for her to paint me.”

  But Kathleen was already shaking her head. “No, if it turns out that it’s any good at all, I want to keep it.”

  “To prove that you are an artist, after all?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, her expression solemn. “Because it’s of the man who cared enough to give me back my love of painting.”

  Chapter Ten

  Standing in her office with paints scattered around, her own painting on an easel for the first time in years and Ben’s assurances still ringing in her ears, Kathleen felt her heart fill with joy and something else she refused to identify because it felt too much like love.

  She didn’t want to love this man, didn’t want to be swayed by tubes of oil paints and a few blank canvases, so she wouldn’t be, she decided. It didn’t have to matter that he’d gone to such extremes to give her back the joy of holding a brush in her hand. It didn’t have to mean that on some level he understood her better than she understood herself.

  In fact, in the morning when she saw her work again, she might very well decide once more to hate him for getting her hopes up.

  She faced Ben and caught the surreptitious glances he was casting toward the painting.

  “Admiring yourself?” she asked.

  He gave her a wry look. “Hardly. I’m admiring your brush strokes. You have an interesting technique, not quite Impressionistic, but close.”

  She laughed at that. “I’m definitely no Renoir.”

  “Few artists are,” he agreed. “But you’re good, Kathleen. Damn good.”

  She drank in the compliment, even as she tried to deny its validity. “Come on, Ben. Don’t go overboard. You’ve won. I’ll finish the painting, but if you’re expecting something on a par with the great masters when I’m done, you’re doomed to disappointment.”

  “You could never disappoint me,” he said with quiet certainty.

  She started to offer another protest but the words died on her lips. How could she argue with such sincerity? Why would she even want to? Instead, she merely said, “Please, can’t we change the subject?”

  He seemed about to argue, but then he said, “Okay,
I’ll drop it for now. Get your coat. I’m taking you to dinner.”

  “Why don’t I cook?” she said instead.

  He regarded her with a hopeful expression. “Is your cooking anything at all like your baking?”

  She laughed. “It’s not half-bad. A lot depends on what’s in the refrigerator. I just shopped this morning so I think I can do something decent tonight. How do you feel about grilled lamb chops, baby red bliss potatoes and steamed vegetables?”

  He sighed with undisguised pleasure. “And for dessert?”

  “I left you a half-dozen raspberry tarts this morning,” she protested. “Isn’t that enough sweets for one day?”

  “No such thing,” he insisted. “Besides, I only ate one. I’m saving the rest, along with the extra muffins and the remainder of the blueberry pie.”

  She chuckled. “Maybe you should go home for dessert.”

  He shook his head. “I’d rather watch you make something from scratch.”

  “So you can steal my secret for flaky dough?”

  “No, because there is something incredibly sexy about a woman who’s confident in the kitchen.”

  Kathleen laughed. “Good answer. I’m very confident when it comes to my chocolate mousse. How does that sound? Or would you prefer something more manly and substantial like a cake?”

  “The mousse will definitely do,” he said with enthusiasm. “Can I lick—” he gave her a look meant to curl her toes, then completed the thought “—the spoon?”

  Kathleen’s knees had turned rubbery somewhere in the middle of the sentence, but she kept herself steady with some effort. “You can lick any utensil you want to,” she agreed. “And then you can wash the dishes.” She gave him a warning look. “And I tend to be a very messy cook.”

  Ben laughed. “A small price to pay. Shall we walk to your place, or do you want to ride?”

  “It’s only a few blocks,” she said. “Let’s walk.”

  Though the night air was cold, the December sky was clear and signs of Christmas were everywhere. There was a tree lot on a corner and the fragrance of pine and spruce filled the air with an unmistakable holiday scent.