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  “You could count on me,” she said quietly.

  A part of him desperately wanted to believe that, wanted to have faith that nothing would ever take her away, but experience had taught him otherwise. People he loved went away, no matter what promises they made.

  He stroked a finger down her cheek, felt the dampness of tears. “I wish I could,” he said with real regret. “If ever I was going to count on another person, I’d want it to be you.”

  “Then do it. Take a leap of faith. Forget about the paintings. I would love to show them, and I think the show would be wildly successful, but it doesn’t matter. Just believe in me. Believe in what we found last night. It was real, Ben. You can’t deny that.”

  He smiled sadly, regretting that the subject had shifted so quickly from his work to the two of them. While one topic only exasperated him, the other terrified him.

  “No, I can’t deny that it was real,” he agreed. “I just can’t count on it lasting.”

  And before she could utter another word, before she could try to persuade him to stay, he turned and left the gallery.

  Outside he hesitated, then dared to look back. Kathleen was standing where he’d left her, her expression shattered. He realized then that being left wasn’t the only thing that could break a person’s heart. Leaving was tearing his to pieces.

  When Ben left the gallery, he didn’t go to Destiny’s. Instead, filled with anger and regret and anguish, he drove back to the farm and went straight into his studio seeking that solace he’d tried to explain to Kathleen.

  Filled with an almost frenetic energy, he pulled out a canvas, daubed paints on his palette and went to work.

  He began, as he often did, with a wash of blue. As the color of sky filled the canvas, his tension began to ease. He was able to convince himself that nothing had changed, that his world was still orderly. He sat back, filled with relief, and sighed deeply.

  He took the time to brew himself a pot of coffee, then went back to the canvas, but this time the first stroke of the brush betrayed him. It wasn’t the familiar, sweeping line of a majestic oak at all, but the curve of a woman’s body. Kathleen’s body. There was no mistaking it. Why would this come to him now with no photo to work from, no live Kathleen there to guide him?

  He threw down his brush, tossed his palette across the room and began to pace, muttering to himself as if that alone would get her out of his head. When he was certain he was back in control, he went back to the easel.

  Impatiently he tried to change the form, to add a texture that spoke of something solid and unyielding. Instead, the image softened and blurred, the very picture of welcoming arms and tender flesh.

  Another tantrum, another attempt, another failure to regain control.

  Defeated, he gave himself up to the inspiration, then, letting the image flow from the brushes as if they had a mind of their own. His usual palette of greens and browns and grays gave way to the inky blackness of night and the shimmering pastels of a woman in moonlight.

  Her body took shape before him, as intimately familiar as the skies he usually painted. Without a picture, without her, it was her face that gave him the most trouble, especially the eyes. He cursed himself time and again for not getting them right, then sat back for a moment in dismay.

  He knew in his gut why they wouldn’t come to him. It was because he couldn’t bear to look into those eyes and see the pain he’d put there. And that’s what he would have to paint if he completed this now. It was the truth, the reality, and that’s what he always insisted on when he painted, absolute clarity.

  Exhausted, he finally put aside the brushes and paints and methodically cleaned up the studio, which seemed to be in more disarray than usual thanks to his impatient pacing and frequent rages of temper.

  He went into the house, grabbed a sandwich, then fell into bed and spent a restless night tortured by dreams of Kathleen and his determination to throw away what they were on the brink of having.

  He was back in his studio at the crack of dawn, armed with renewed determination, a strong pot of coffee and some toaster pastry that didn’t hold a candle to anything Kathleen had ever baked for him. Rather than satisfying him, that paltry pastry only exacerbated his irritation.

  He wasn’t all that surprised when Destiny came wandering in around eight. To his shock, though, she didn’t immediately pester him with questions. She merely came to stand beside him, her gaze locked on the canvas.

  “She’s very lovely,” she said at last.

  “No denying it,” he said tightly, knowing she was talking about the woman, not the painting.

  “Why not just admit that you love her?”

  “Because I don’t,” he lied.

  Destiny gave him a chiding, disbelieving look. “Oh, please,” she admonished. “You need a real woman in your life, Ben, not a portrait, however magnificent it might turn out to be.”

  “Stay out of this,” he told her flatly.

  “Too late. I’m in the thick of it. I brought her into your life and now you’re both hurting because of it.”

  “I forgive you,” he said. “Eventually Kathleen will, too. Now go away.”

  She smiled at that. “Forgiveness doesn’t come that easily to you,” she chided. “Besides, there’s nothing to forgive, is there? Kathleen is the perfect woman for you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s the only thing that matters,” she said fiercely.

  He gave Destiny a hard look. “I thought you dragged her out here because of my art. Wasn’t she merely supposed to convince me that I had talent?”

  “I think we both know better than that.”

  “Well, whatever your intentions, it was a mistake.”

  “You keep telling yourself that. Maybe you’ll wind up believing it. Of course, you’ll also be old and alone and bitter.”

  “Not so alone,” he muttered, not liking the picture she painted. “I’ll have you.”

  “Not forever, darling,” she reminded him matter-of-factly. “And your brothers have their own lives now, their own families. You’ll always be a part of those lives, of course, but you need to be—you deserve to be—the center of someone’s universe. Even more important, you need to make someone the center of yours.”

  “Why?” he asked, not even beginning to understand. Loneliness had become a way of life long ago. Even when his whole family had been around, he’d felt alone.

  “Because, in the end, love is the only thing any of us has that truly matters.”

  “You’ve been courted. You’ve been admired by many a man, but you’ve chosen to live without the love of a man all these years,” he reminded her.

  “And that was probably a costly mistake, not just for me, but for all of you,” she admitted. She gave him a surprisingly defiant look. “Moreover, it’s one I intend to correct before too long.”

  Ben seized on the implication. “What on earth does that mean?” he demanded, not entirely sure he liked the sound of it and not just because he hated having his own world turned upside down, which any change in Destiny’s life was bound to do.

  “Nothing for you to fret about,” she reassured him. “I won’t do anything until I know you’re settled and happy.”

  He scowled at her. “Isn’t that blackmail? If I decide to maintain the status quo, you’re stuck here, so therefore I have some obligation to what? Get married?”

  She beamed at him. “That would do nicely. Let me know when you and Kathleen have set a date.”

  “Hold it,” he protested when she started toward the door. “No date. No wedding. I am not letting you blackmail me into making a decision I’m not ready to make, will probably never be ready to make.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, Benjamin, now you’re just being stubborn,” she declared, facing him with an exasperated expression. “It’s the worst of the Carlton traits. Everyone has always said you were the most like me, but I see absolutely no evidence of that right now. Whatever the choices I made, at
heart I’m a romantic. I believe in happily ever after. I certainly thought I taught you more about grabbing on to life with both hands.”

  “You tried,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “Then why are you here when there’s a woman in Alexandria who’s brokenhearted because she thinks she pushed you too hard? She’s terrified you’ll think she only slept with you to get her hands on your paintings.”

  The thought had never crossed his mind, at least not until this moment. Now he had to wonder. As soon as he did, he dismissed the idea. There wasn’t a shred of duplicity in Kathleen. He wished he could say the same about his sneaky aunt.

  “Nice try,” he congratulated her. “For a minute there you had me going.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was with Kathleen yesterday after you’d gone. She’s beside herself. If you don’t believe me, call Melanie or Beth. We were all there.”

  The thought of that made his skin crawl. “What the hell was going on, some sort of Carlton hen party?” He shuddered. “Just thinking about all four of you gathered around discussing me and Kathleen is enough to twist my stomach into knots.”

  “It should,” Destiny said without a trace of sympathy. “You’re not very popular with the females of the family right now.”

  “What did I do?” he asked, bewildered. “I was honest with her. I’ve been honest with Kathleen from the beginning. She knew what she was getting into when we were together the other night.”

  “Did she really? You slept with her and then you walked out on her,” Destiny accused. “Do you think she was expecting that?”

  “In a very condensed version, that much is true,” he acknowledged. “But a lot went on in between.” He raked a hand through his hair as he realized that he wasn’t going to win, no matter how he tried to explain away that scene in the gallery. “What do you want from me? What does Kathleen want from me? Besides my paintings, of course.”

  “Oh, forget the stupid paintings,” Destiny said. “I want you to tell that woman you love her before it’s too late.”

  He stared at her bleakly, filled with dismay that this woman who understood him so well could ask the impossible of him.

  When he said nothing, she walked over to his painting. “Look at this,” she commanded. When she was apparently satisfied that his gaze was on the canvas, she asked, “What do you see?”

  “Kathleen,” he said. “And I’ve never painted a portrait before. Is that your point?”

  “No, darling,” she said more gently. “I want you to open your eyes and really look at what’s on this canvas. It’s not just a very nice likeness of Kathleen.”

  He tore his gaze from the painting and stared at her, not comprehending.

  “It’s a portrait of love in all its radiance,” she told him quietly. “Any man who could paint this is capable of great passion.”

  After she’d gone, Ben sat and stared at the painting. He could see the passion she was talking about. In fact, passion was something he certainly understood, but love? Only four little letters, but they added up to something that scared the living daylights out of him. He didn’t think there were enough weeks in a lifetime or enough reassurances to help him move past that terror.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kathleen still couldn’t get over the way the Carlton women had rallied around her two days ago. Within moments of Destiny’s arrival at the gallery and her discovery that Ben had walked out on Kathleen that morning, she sent out an alert to the others. Minutes later Melanie and Beth had burst into the gallery like the calvary arriving. Melanie had brought a huge bag of junk food, and Beth had brought nonalcoholic drinks for Melanie and champagne for the rest of them. These women clearly knew how to prepare for a crisis.

  Satisfied with the reinforcements, Destiny had locked the gallery door and they’d all proceeded to get thoroughly intoxicated on potato chips, cheesecake, ice cream and old-fashioned gossip.

  Ben had not fared well, despite Kathleen’s halfhearted attempts to defend him or at the very least to make them see his point of view. She’d been amazed to find them all on her side.

  “Take him out and shoot him,” Melanie had suggested with real enthusiasm. “Maybe that would get his attention.”

  “Aren’t you being just the teensiest bit bloodthirsty?” Kathleen had asked weakly. “That can’t possibly be good for the baby.”

  “Boy or girl, this baby needs to know that there’s right and wrong in the world when it comes to the way men treat women,” Melanie insisted. “Besides, this baby is now officially overdue and getting on my nerves. I want the man responsible for this pregnancy—no, I want all men, especially Carlton men—to pay.”

  “Don’t get too carried away and do anything you’ll regret. You’ll stop blaming Richard once you hold the baby,” Beth assured her. She turned to Kathleen and added, “As for Ben, shooting’s too good for him. Tie him up and torture him. You have no idea how often I was tempted to do that to Mack, when he was being pigheaded.”

  “But you didn’t,” Kathleen reminded her, then hesitated. “Did you?”

  “No,” Beth said with apparent regret.

  “That’s because the person you really wanted to torture was Destiny,” Melanie said, then gave their aunt-in-law an apologetic look. “No offense.”

  Destiny laughed. “None taken. But since we’re obviously not going to convince Kathleen to shoot or torture Ben, perhaps we should try to focus on some more practical solutions to this dilemma. How can we get through to him? Goodness knows, I’ve tried. If it hadn’t been for Graciela, I doubt he’d be making this so difficult, but her death destroyed whatever progress he’d made in terms of having faith that people he cared about would stick around. He seems to have forgotten all about what brought on their fight that awful night.”

  Kathleen took all of this in. She’d known that the woman Ben had loved had died, but she hadn’t realized there had been any sort of fight.

  “Why were they fighting?” she asked.

  The three women exchanged a look.

  “He never told you?” Destiny asked.

  “Not really. I just knew that he felt horribly guilty,” she said.

  “Oh, please,” Destiny said. “Of course it was tragic, but Ben has absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. Not only was she far too drunk to get behind the wheel that night, but they fought in the first place because he’d caught her cheating on him. It wasn’t the first time, either, just the first time he’d seen it with his own eyes.”

  “Oh, my,” Kathleen whispered. It was even worse than she’d thought. Ben had suffered not only a loss, but a betrayal. It was little wonder he didn’t trust anyone.

  They’d all fallen silent then, Beth munching thoughtfully on chips while Melanie ate the last of the chocolate fudge ice cream from the half-gallon container. Kathleen picked disconsolately at her third slice of cheesecake. She was pretty sure if she finished it, she’d throw up, but she couldn’t seem to stop eating.

  “I don’t think there’s anything any of us can do,” Kathleen ventured after a while. “Ben has to figure out for himself that I would never betray him. He has to want this relationship enough to get past his fear of loss. He has to see that either way he’s going to lose and at least if we’ve tried, he’ll have had something good for a while.”

  “Good?” Beth asked in a mildly scolding tone. “Extraordinary. He’ll have had something extraordinary. Don’t lose sight of that, Kathleen. This isn’t just some happy little diversion. It’s the real deal.”

  It was still hard for Kathleen to see herself in that kind of glowing light. She’d felt that way in Ben’s arms. She’d had a hint of it when he’d praised her painting, when he’d gone into raptures over her cooking. But those feelings of self-worth were new and fragile. It would be far too easy to retreat into the more familiar self-doubt.

  “Thank you for reminding me of that,” she told Beth. “You have no idea how hard it is for me to remember that, especially this mornin
g, but it’s coming back to me. I owe Ben and all of you for that.”

  Beth gave her a curious look. “Is there a story there?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But it’s not worth repeating ever again. I am finally going to put it where it belongs, in the past.”

  “Good for you!” Melanie cheered.

  “Does Ben know?” Destiny asked, a frown knitting her brow.

  “Yes.”

  “And he still walked out of here and left you feeling abandoned?” she said indignantly. “What is wrong with that man? Obviously I need to have another talk with him. In fact, right now I’d like to shake my nephew till something stirs in that thick head of his.”

  “Don’t,” Kathleen pleaded, but her request fell on deaf ears. She’d seen the determined glint in Destiny’s eyes and known Ben was in for a blistering lecture. She tried to work up a little sympathy for him, but in the end she’d concluded he was only getting what he deserved. She had a few choice words she’d like to say to him herself. Too bad they hadn’t come to her before he’d slunk out of the gallery.

  Now, though, with the hours crawling by and no word from Destiny or Ben, she had to wonder if Destiny had failed to get through to him, if it wasn’t over, after all, simply because Ben had decreed that it was. They said you couldn’t make a person fall in love with you, but she didn’t believe that was Ben’s problem. He had fallen in love with her. He was even willing to admit it. He just wasn’t willing to act on it, not in the happily-ever-after way she’d begun to long for. And in the end what difference did the admission make, if it wasn’t going to go anywhere?

  She sighed and tried to concentrate on tallying up the day’s sales, but the numbers kept blurring through her tears. She needed to get out of the gallery. She needed to walk or maybe run.

  She needed a drive in the country.

  She sighed again. That was the last thing she dared to do. Going to Ben’s—going anywhere near Ben’s—was beyond self-destructive. It was stupid, foolish, pitiful. The list of adjectives went on and on.

  None of them seemed to prevent her from getting into her car and driving out to Middleburg, but when she reached the entrance to the farm, her pride finally kicked in. She drove on past, then turned around, muttering another litany of derogatory adjectives about herself as she drove. She hadn’t done anything this adolescent and absurd since high school.