Clancy readjusted in his lap and he stroked along his soft fur. “You don’t use logic,” he said. “You use your heart. You just want love.” So did Mia. And to his astonishment, so did he. He wanted love. Mia’s love specifically.
What would it take to get her back? What would reach her heart? He had to find a way to prove she was more important to him than his job or any other facet of his life—including his public persona.
And it hit him. Hard. His heart had provided the answer, but now he’d take his brothers’ advice and make a plan—a hell of a plan. Something that would not require his control to succeed. Something that defied explanation.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, Clancy. I hope to hell this works. If not, I am completely and totally fucked.”
And with that, he went to bed with Clancy curled up at his feet and got the first good night’s sleep he’d had in two weeks.
Chapter Twenty
Mia heard the Queen B’s before they even entered the rec room, laughing about another article they’d found. She sighed and shook her head, then pulled out the paints. After almost a month, she’d assumed things would die down, but that saying “sex sells” must have had a great deal of truth to it. She deserved this, though. Michael had tried to warn her, but she didn’t really listen. She didn’t hear past the orders and her own wrong assumptions.
She’d been dodging cameras ever since.
Fortunately, everyone who knew her, including the B’s and the owners of Heart’s Home, found it entertaining and didn’t buy into the title of “Duped Trollop” that one particularly seedy overseas tabloid assigned her. She chuckled at the silly name. Trollop indeed. And at this point, she wasn’t even sure about the “duped” part.
“Hoooee! Look at this one, Mia.” Betty said, waving a scrap of newsprint from the paper. “Another Notch in the Anderson Bedpost.”
“Lemme see,” Blanche said, snatching the paper from her fingers. “Aw, durn. It’s the same photo.”
Mia placed watercolor pallets in front of five chairs and went back to the counter for brushes and water.
“I still like the cartoon one that had him wearing a jacket made of fly paper with all the girls stuck to it. ‘Catching Them Like Flies.’” Gladys laughed and slapped her knee.
After distributing the brushes and water, she returned with paper. “We’re working in watercolor today.”
“Have you heard from him?” Bernice asked, folding her walker and leaning it against the wall.
“No. And I don’t expect to.” She slid the paper in front of each woman and kept one for herself. “Today I want to talk about mood in painting.”
“She’s brushing us off because she doesn’t want to talk about it,” Gladys said.
Mia took a deep breath, “We’ve talked about color reflecting and evoking mood…”
“Yeller is happy!” Gladys said. “It’s why I knit with it.”
“Exactly. But shading and density also set the mood. Pale yellow versus your favorite sunflower yellow, for example, evoke different emotions. So, today, let’s show our mood through shading and density. Watercolor is a great medium for this because you can alter color density by simply adding water.”
“I’d rather knit.”
“I think we should use pottery wheels like in that movie with the hot ghost.”
Mia smiled and dipped her brush, wishing for the escape that painting sometimes brought with it. There were times she would be so lost in her art, everything would blur and all worry would disappear, almost like meditation. Only recently, the escape had evaded her. She could only focus on the pain. She wanted to stop hurting for just a day—a minute—a second.
She closed her eyes and imagined colors without shape. Red and pink and black. Lots of black. And while she knew the B’s were still chatting, she focused only on the colors as her feelings seeped into the paper through the brush. “Art comes from your soul,” her teacher had told her once. Right now, her soul ached.
I miss him.
Part of her wanted to call. To just say hi. The other part knew she’d crossed a line with the things she’d said in anger. She’d been right—he’d let his control freak nature get in the way. But she’d also been terribly wrong. He hadn’t been protecting his image; he’d been protecting hers. The papers had called her the flavor de jour, but she knew Michael, and though he may have had lots of women, she was not like that to him. Even if he didn’t care for her now—and that would be understandable—he had cared for her then.
Only seeing color, and no shape, she focused on her page.
Sometimes you do things because you love someone. He’d been protecting her, not pushing her away. And she’d hurt him. She felt a tear slide down her cheek but ignored it.
She was better now. Stronger than before she’d met him. He’d given her a gift. She knew who she was and she liked that person. No more self-deprecation. No more doubt.
No more Michael.
Her hand stilled and the fuzzy edges came back into focus, including four very concerned sets of eyes all trained directly on her.