anyway, all I really like to paint are landscapes and still lifes. I’ve never done a portrait.”
“And you haven’t done anything at all for a while. What’s going on with you, son?”
That word…it got to Jordan every time. He looked over at the woman who had become a surrogate for the mother he had lost. Her face was tanned, her brow furrowed in worry, her skin parchment-thin and wrinkly. And yet he found her to be one of the most beautiful women he had ever known. He loved her…he hadn’t realized it until this moment. Meeting and getting to know Bennett Kincaid had really done a number on him. Because, he acknowledged to himself for the first time, he’d also fallen in love with him.
“I’m okay, Mrs. S, honestly. I’m just…finding out some things I didn’t realize before.”
The old lady smiled at him, making the wrinkles deepen and her eyes shine with love.
“What? Like the fact that there’s more to life than work? That you’re lonely and you need someone? That maybe that someone is the beautiful young thing you’ve been hanging out with?”
Jordan chuckled, both amused and appalled at how well she understood him. He supposed that was to be expected. It was how mothers were, he imagined. Bennett’s mother certainly seemed intuitive like that, too. And he was well on his way to falling for her, as well as for her son. His chuckle became a full-bodied laugh at that thought. Mrs. Salvietti didn’t speak, though. She just watched him, obviously waiting for his answer.
“All of the above, I guess, Mrs. S,” he replied at last.
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
She was all about the direct questions today, wasn’t she? Jordan squirmed under her unblinking gaze. He wanted to sass her, but he knew that would just be stalling. Her question was valid, and though he knew objectively what his answer should be, he hesitated to speak it. Because Bennett had gone to a place where so many dangers lurked, and Jordan was only now facing the fear that had kept him from letting anyone get close enough to him to matter.
Even his friends had not been let into the deepest chamber of his heart, because if they left, he’d still have that safe place to hide in until he could handle the hurt of their leaving. And then Bennett showed up and demolished that last wall, leaving him feeling vulnerable and desperate to shore up his defenses. He had never allowed himself to think about why he had shied away from commitment, from deep relationships…from love. Now the epiphany was breaking over his head like high rolling waves in a storm.
How the hell was he supposed to answer the question he had been avoiding? And since when had he reverted to the cowering seven-year-old, scared to move, horrified to hear and not know what was happening to his parents, terrified and panic-stricken by what he eventually saw? He swallowed, taking control of his spiraling thoughts, and answered honestly.
“I don’t know.” His answer left an uncomfortable silence in its wake.
Mrs. Salvietti watched him closely, studying his face as though she was trying to find some answer in it, and then she said,
“I never asked how you felt that day, Jordan.”
He knew the day she meant, and he had always been grateful that she had never made him rehash it. He knew she had to have been given the bare minimum regarding his life and what had brought him to her home at age seventeen, a silent, passive-aggressive boy on the cusp of manhood. Her restraint in not wanting to know all the ugly details, like some voyeur at an orgy, had been the first thing that made him thaw towards her.
“And I’m not asking you now,” she continued reassuringly, though he no longer needed that reassurance from her. “But I am going to say what I didn’t think you were ready to hear all those years ago when you showed up in my home ready for battle.”
His eyes snapped to hers and she laughed. “What? You thought I didn’t know you were loaded for bear, as they say?”
She laughed again, an amused sound that made Jordan cringe with embarrassment. He supposed if he hadn’t been as defensive as he was, he’d have realized she’d seen him coming long before he’d arrived. He wasn’t her first rodeo…Okay, enough with the cheesy clichés!
“I was a kid,” he defended himself. “I wasn’t too interested in figuring out anyone