Rosa put down the mustard bottle and went to take a look. There were lots of family pictures on his walls, and she made a mental note to go back and look at the rest of them later, but for now she homed in on the first one with Drake’s immediate family in it. “Wow, you’re not the only one with killer genes, are you?”
First off, his sister was miles beyond pretty. Tall and elegant, yet curvy at the same time, she could have walked any runway in the world if she’d wanted to. Rosa loved that she’d chosen what was in her head instead of her looks to guide her career.
As for Drake’s brothers? There was no way any woman alive stood a chance against tumbling half into love with a Sullivan, simply from setting eyes on any one of them.
“Alec is the one with the cocky grin.” He said it with affection, and she easily guessed exactly which brother he was talking about. “He builds jets, mostly private, just outside of the city. Harrison is a history professor at Columbia. Everyone thinks he’s the quiet one, at least until they get to know him.”
The brains, looks, and talent in Drake’s family made her head spin. “Is this your father with you?”
“That’s him.” The four siblings stood as one tight unit, but their father was slightly off to one side, almost as though he felt he didn’t quite belong in the family photo. “We all happened to be up at his cabin in the Adirondacks at the same time, which doesn’t happen that often, so Suz made us set up a camera to get a shot.”
“Is that where your father lives?”
“He started building a house in the Adirondacks thirty years ago.” After his mother had gone, she thought with a sharp pang in the center of her chest. “We’d all head there during school breaks, but once we were old enough to be left alone, he sold his place in the city and moved there full time.”
It wasn’t hard for Rosa to put two and two together—not only had his father stopped painting when Drake’s mother passed away, but he’d also retreated from the city.
“I’ve never been to the Adirondacks. Is it nice?”
“With big blue lakes and green mountains that seem to go on forever, most people tend to think so. It’s pretty darn remote, though.”
“More remote than this?”
“We’re in the Hamptons,” he reminded her, his brush never once slowing as they talked.
“Do you see your father much?”
Finally, the brush stopped, hovering just over the canvas. “Not recently. He doesn’t get out to the city much.”
“And you don’t go to the Adirondacks to see him?”
“Not as often as I should.” Drake suddenly looked tired, as if his all-nighter had just caught up with him. “That’s why Suz came—to see if I wanted to drive out there with her.” He paused as if he was trying to decide whether to say more. Finally, he said, “He says he’s got some paintings of our mother to give to each of us if we want them.”
The last thing Rosa wanted was to hurt Drake. But something told her he needed to talk to someone about what was going on with his family without risking judgment. And if anyone knew about weird family dynamics, she did. Lord knew she was certainly in no position to judge.
Which was why, instead of backing off, she decided to step closer to the fire she could see burning inside of him. “Do you want the paintings?”
“My father is a true master painter, and collectors consider the paintings to be priceless, but—” He put down his brush and ran a paint-smeared hand over his hair, leaving it standing on end. “When she left us, she left him so broken that he left us too. The paintings have always felt like a brutal reminder of how having me must have pushed them both over the edge.”
Rosa didn’t think, just crossed the room and put her arms around him. “They were wrong. Both of them were so damned wrong to hurt you.” He’d been angry with her mother, and now she was just as furious with his parents. She held him tighter as she said, “It doesn’t matter how much the paintings are worth. If you decide not to take them, it’s entirely on your mother and father, not their innocent kid who got caught in the crossfire.”
“How can you see my innocence so clearly,” he said as he drew back to cup her face in his hands, “but not your own?”
“If you have an Internet connection here, I’ll show you why. It will take me less than five seconds to find dozens of pictures I’ve posed for where I’m wearing next to nothing. Where I’m deliberately flaunting my body.”
“You have every right to flaunt whatever you want to. And you have every goddamned right to strip off your clothes in front of the entire world if it makes you happy. But just like I didn’t ask my mother to walk out on me and my family, you sure as hell didn’t ask some creep to take those pictures of you.”
He’d been passionate and intense before, but this was a whole other level. One where it felt like he’d go to the ends of the earth if that’s what he needed to do to make her believe that what he was saying was true.