At that moment, he would happily take on Lila Cavendish. He didn’t care if she was going to be great-grandmother to his child.
He didn’t have to wait for this opportunity, though it would not come to fruition.
As he entered the stables, Lila was climbing down the ladder to the loft wearing jeans and a chambray shirt, both of them old, worn and covered in paint.
A quick glance around showed Belle was nowhere to be found.
“She’s in the loft,” Lila said quietly and Jack’s eyes went to her and then to the seemingly empty loft.
Lila’s announcement that Belle was in the loft surprised him. When he’d taken her up there, she’d acted frightened as a rabbit.
“She’s sleeping,” Lila went on and Jack’s gaze went back to her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she further surprised Jack by announcing. “I have to go to the house to call New York. I didn’t want to leave her up there because when she wakes she’ll go nuts and won’t be able to get down without me with her. It was an actual miracle I got her to go up there in the first place. But I have to make this call. Now, you can hang out and help her down if she wakes before I return.” She gave Jack a look that he couldn’t read and finished, “I’ll probably be a while.”
With that and without another word or inviting Jack to say one, she walked by Jack and his dogs and left the stables, quietly closing the door behind her.
Jack looked back to the loft.
Then he went to the ladder and climbed up.
Once there he saw Belle was sleeping on her side on a pile of old blankets. She had one hand under her cheek, the other arm curved around her face, palm up and resting by her forehead. Her legs were curled into her stomach and her face was soft in sleep. Some of her hair was spread on the blankets but mostly it was bunched against her neck and falling in her face.
He had, he realised, never seen her sleep.
She looked about twelve years old.
With some ease, he quelled the desire to bend and pull her hair away from her face and neck.
The desire to settle in behind her and draw her sleeping body into his took much more effort to subdue.
Nevertheless, he did it.
To take his mind off Belle, he looked to the sliding doors.
They’d been opened, an easel set in front of them, a large working canvas on the easel, a small wooden table next to it covered in a mess of tubes and brushes.
Lila was painting the view he’d shown Belle.
Likely Belle had shown Lila the view to paint.
This made Jack contradictorily pleased and annoyed.
He decided to go with annoyed.
He walked to the canvas and studied it, unable to suppress his fascination at seeing a Cavendish landscape in its early phases.
Lila had a tremendous following, many museum pieces, her work was coveted by galleries worldwide and she’d been written about in a variety of art books. She’d been deemed a living, contemporary master.
Many would pay for the opportunity he had at that very moment to see her art in process and it was not lost on Jack that this was one of those rare gifts life let fall in your lap.
“James?” He heard Belle’s honeyed, drowsy voice call his name and he had to stifle unwelcome desire at the sound of her drowsy voice just as he clenched his teeth in order not to correct her.
He despised it when she called him James. It was his name and there were people who called him that therefore he knew it was an irrational reaction.
He also could care less.
His eyes went to her and she was up on an arm, pulling her hair away from her face at the same time she was watching him, her face flushed with sleep.
She was wearing a red camisole top and a dark brown skirt that hit her knees and had cream and red patterns in it. The camisole and skirt showed a goodly amount of skin, now tanned from her many excursions with his dogs and her quiet, seaside reveries in the sun.