Her Man To Remember
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The tour didn’t take long. The bar itself was wide-open, airy, bright with the morning light pouring in. There was the requisite back room with a pool table, and the small kitchen where the cook whipped up conch chowder and fried catch-of-the-day, along with a few other simple short-order items.
“Can I see upstairs?” he asked.
He knew it was an intimate request since she lived in the upstairs apartment, but it would be his, of course, if he purchased the bar. He had every right to see it.
He wanted to see where she lived.
She appeared to hesitate, then she said, “Sure.”
He thought he saw a hint of blush tinge her cheeks again. She led the way up the narrow, cramped back stairs.
“This is it,” she said, opening the door and standing out of the way.
He walked past her into the room. Against one wall, a counter, sink and stove made up the kitchen. A Murphy bed took up another wall, but she hadn’t put it up, and the twisted sheets and piled pillows made his chest tighten. The entire apartment was characteristically Leah-messy. He noticed she had walked to the large window. She stood there, framed by light sheers that left the ocean view uncluttered, except for a strange concoction of branches, suede lacing, beads and feathers that hung down in the center.
The rest of the room was taken up by a small dinette with two chairs and a plump tan love seat with a round coffee table. She grew a pot of overflowing ivy and miniature sunflowers in the center of it. Spare sketch pads and pencils, a couple of books and magazines and a box of shells and thread for her jewelry loaded up every spare inch of space around the plants.
“You’re an artist?” he inquired casually.
She turned to face him. “I design a few things—clothes, jewelry,” she said.
Her designs had been sold in expensive boutiques in Manhattan. She had been just as self-effacing about her work then.
Leah had never taken herself seriously. She could have made a fortune, but she’d never operated that way. The demand for her work had always been much higher than her production. She wasn’t lazy—on the contrary, she worked very hard. But she hadn’t been willing to let it consume her.
It had been just one of the ways they’d approached life differently.
“You’re a very creative person,” he commented. He was all-business, conservative. Maybe we were never meant to be, she’d told him once when they were fighting. We’re too different.
“You haven’t even seen my work.”
“I’d like to see your work,” he said, covering quickly. “Is it showcased here on the island somewhere?”
Of course, he’d already seen her recent work displayed on the boardwalk. The day he’d been there, a reggae band was performing for free in the courtyard. Beyond, the public beach offered dive shops and snorkeling gear rentals. A sign in front of the marina advertised a bucket of fish for a dollar to tourists who wanted to feed the pelicans and huge tarpons swarming below the dock.
He’d fed the fish and watched Leah from the distance as she entered a boutique.
“There’s a small shopping center on Rum Beach,” she said. “It’s called Smugglers Village. You can see my work there in the Artisans Cove boutique.”
“Maybe you could show it to me,” he suggested, managing to sound blithe. “I haven’t had a chance to see much of Thunder Key, and if I’m going to be making a property investment here, I’d like to find out more about the island first. It wouldn’t be a date,” he added to defuse any argument before she made it.
Again he caught her faint blush.
“I’m sorry I made such a big deal about that,” she said. “I know that sounded stupid. I’m not ready to date, that’s all.”
“Why is that?” he asked, carefully.
She was very still, then she answered in a quiet voice, “I’m not sure. Really, I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”
The confusion in her soft eyes hurt him.
“I know how you feel,” he said gently. “I was married, but—” he began, then waited. For a reaction, anything—
“But what?” she prompted, her eyes wide.
One heartbeat, two. “I lost her, in an accident.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said, sympathy gleaming in her eyes. He even saw moisture there. She was ready to cry—for him.
Leah had always been one to respond to others’ pain. Not long after they’d married, one of her friends from the studio had suffered an inoperable back injury in a car accident. Like Leah, Nikki Bates had no family, and it had been Leah who had sat by her hospital bed, visited her with food and helped her when she was finally sent home. And no one had been more crushed than Leah when Nikki overdosed on pain medication only weeks before Leah disappeared.
The suicide of someone so close to her had torn Leah apart—and it was for exactly that reason that when one of the crash investigators had tried broaching the possibility that Leah might have driven her car over that bridge on purpose, Roman had flatly dismissed it. There was just no way. Leah had been too hurt by Nikki’s death to ever leave anyone else with the cruel guilt of losing someone that way.
Roman changed the subject, not ready to talk more about the past yet. Not ready to risk that she would remember him before he’d had a chance to convince her that he was a different man.
“What is this?” he said, reaching out to touch the artistic creation of beads, feathers, branches and suede in the window. There wasn’t much in the apartment, so he was curious about what she would choose to display. He had to focus on getting to know this new Leah.
“It’s a dreamcatcher.”
“What’s that?” he asked. He’d never seen anything like it.
“It’s from an old Native American legend,” she explained. She touched the beaded suede laces that made up a web. “The web catches the good dreams, and the hole in the center—” She put her fingers in the opening. “The bad dreams go out through here.”