Next time?
Tula remembered sitting in her own kitchen thinking that this was not a good idea. Now she was convinced.
Yet here she was, living in a Victorian mansion in the city with a man she wasn’t sure she liked—but she really did want.
Last night at dinner, Simon had looked so darn cute with green beans on his face that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from giving in to the impulse to kiss him. Sure, it was just a quick peck on his cheek. But when he’d turned those dark brown eyes on her and she’d read the barely banked passion there, it had shaken her.
Not like she was some shy, retiring virgin or anything. She wasn’t. She’d had a boyfriend in college and another one just a year or so ago. But Simon was nothing like them. In retrospect, they had been boys and Simon was all man.
“Oh God, stop it,” she told herself. It wouldn’t do any good of course. She’d been indulging in not so idle daydreams centered on Simon Bradley for days now. When she was sleeping, her brain picked up on the subconscious thread and really went to town.
But a woman couldn’t be blamed for what she dreamed of when she slept, right?
“It’s ridiculous,” she said, tugging at her desk to move it into position beneath one of the many mullioned windows. A stray beam of rare January sunlight speared through the clouds and lay across her desktop. She didn’t take the time to admire it though, instead, she went back to getting the rest of her temporary office the way she wanted it.
She didn’t need much, really. Just her laptop, a drawing table where she could work on the illustrations for her books and a comfy chair where she could sit and think.
“Hmm. If you don’t need much stuff, Tula, why is there so much junk in here?” A question for the ages, she thought. She didn’t try to collect things. It just sort of…happened. And being here in the Victorian where everything had a tidy spot to belong to made her feel like a pack rat.
There were boxes and books and empty shelves waiting to be filled. There were loose manuscript pages and pens and paints and, oh, way too many things to try to organize.
“Settling in?”
She jumped about a foot and spun around, holding one hand to her chest as if trying to keep her heart where it belonged. He stood in the open doorway, a half smile on his handsome face as if he knew darn well that he’d scared about ten years off her life.
Giving Simon a pained glare, she snapped, “Wear a bell or something, okay? I about had a heart attack.”
“I do live here,” Simon reminded her.
“Yeah, I know.” As if she could forget. She’d lain awake in her bed half the night, imagining Simon in his bed just down the hall from her. She never should have kissed him. Never should have breached the tense, polite wall they’d erected between them at their first meeting.
Only that morning, they’d had breakfast together. The three of them sitting cozily in a kitchen three times the size of her own. She had watched Simon feeding a squirming baby oatmeal while dodging the occasional splat of rejected offerings and darned if he hadn’t looked…cute doing it.
She groaned inwardly and warned herself again to get a grip. This wasn’t about playing house with Simon.
He strolled into her office with a look of stunned amazement on his face. “How do you work in this confusion?”
She’d just been thinking basically the same thing, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. “An organized mind is a boring mind.”
One dark eyebrow lifted and she noticed he did that a lot when they were talking. Sardonic? Or just irritated?
“You paint, too?” he asked, nodding at the drawing table set up beneath one of the tall windows.
“Draw, really. Just sketches,” she said. “I do the illustrations for my books.”
“Impressive,” he said, moving closer for a better look.
Tula steeled herself against what he might say once he’d had a chance to really study her drawings. Her father had never given her a compliment, she thought. But in the end that hadn’t mattered, since she drew her pictures for the children who loved her books. Tula knew she had talent, but she had never fooled herself into believing that she was a great artist.
He thumbed through the sketch papers on the table and she knew what he was seeing. The sketches of Lonely Bunny and the animals who shared his world.
His gaze moving to hers, he said softly, “You’re very good. You get a lot of emotion into these drawings.”
“Thank you.” Surprised but pleased, she smiled at him and felt warmth spill through her when he returned that smile.
“Nathan has a stuffed rabbit. But he needs a new one. The one he has looks a little worse for wear.”
She shook her head sadly, because clearly he didn’t know how much a worn, beloved toy could mean to a child. “You never read The Velveteen Rabbit?” she asked. “Being loved is what makes a toy real. And when you’re real, you’re a little haggard looking.”
“I guess you’re right.” He laughed quietly and nodded as he looked back at her sketches. “How did you come up with this? The Lonely Bunny, I mean.”
Veering away from the personal and back into safe conversation, she thought, oddly disappointed that the brief moment of closeness was already over.
Still, she grinned as she said, “People always ask writers where they get their ideas. I usually say I find my ideas on the bottom shelf of the housewares department in the local market.”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Clever. But not really an answer, either.”
“No,” she admitted, wrapping her arms around her middle. “It’s not.”
He turned around to face her and his warm brown eyes went soft and curious. “Will you tell me?”
She met his gaze and felt the conversation drifting back into the intimate again. But she saw something in his eyes that told her he was actually interested. And until that moment, no one but Anna had ever really cared.
Walking toward him, she picked up one of the sketches off the drawing table and studied her own handiwork. The Lonely Bunny looked back at her with his wide, limpid eyes and sadly hopeful expression. Tula smiled down at the bunny who had come along at just the right time in her life.
“I used to draw him when I was a little girl,” she said more to herself than to him. She ran one finger across the pale gray color of his fur and the crooked bend of his ear. “When Mom and I moved to Crystal Bay, there were some wild rabbits living in the park behind our house.”
Beside her, she felt him step closer. Felt him watching her. But she was lost in her own memories now and staring back into her past.
“One of the rabbits was different. He had one droopy ear, and he was always by himself,” she said, smiling to herself at the image of a young Tula trying to tempt a wild rabbit closer by holding out a carrot. “It looked to me like he didn’t have any friends. The other rabbits stayed away from him and I sort of felt that we were two of a kind. I was new in town and didn’t have any friends, so I made it my mission to make that bunny like me. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get him to play with me.
“And believe me, I tried. Every day for a month. Then one day I went to the park and the other rabbits were there, but Lonely Bunny wasn’t.” She stroked her fingertip across her sketch of that long-ago bunny. “I looked all over for him, but couldn’t find him.”
She