Light Me Up

Melissa clasped her hand around her mug so she wouldn’t show her nervousness. “They are hilarious.”

“Uh-huh.” Jack didn’t bother hiding his amusement. “And they knew exactly what they were doing.”

“Trying to reassure me?”

“Did it work?”

Melissa shrugged. “Yes. I guess. Some.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Melissa.”

She moved uneasily. Something about Jack’s deep voice saying her name was way more intimate than it should be, and she felt her guard go up again.

“How long have you known them?” Stupid question, but she needed words to break the tension.

“Five of us bought the building together. All graduates of UW Seattle, a few years ago. We get along, which is good, because launching businesses is not a job for sissies.” He leaned back in the chair. “What do you do?”

Melissa jerked back to the conversation, having been calculating his age. Twenty-six? With his smooth confidence, she would have put him a few years older. “I’m a human-resources specialist at the corporate headquarters of Au Bon Repas, the kitchen-supply store. We do business all over the world.”

“Oh, yeah, Angela’s always drooling over your catalogs. You like what you do?”

“It’s a good place to work, supportive and with a proactive corporate culture. Happy employees make our department’s job easier. And I have a great boss.” For some reason, though the phrases tumbled out in the usual way, they sounded stilted and overblown.

“Nice.” He stretched his long legs to one side, hands folded across his tight abdomen. Her job recitation must have hit him as funny because he was smiling. Or maybe he was just thinking about how gorgeous he must look. She wished she could be totally immune. “What do you do for fun?”

Urgh. Melissa hated that question. It sounded vaguely suggestive, as if guys were hoping she’d say, I like to get drunk, rip off my clothes and give blow jobs to strangers. Wanna go?

“I’m pretty busy. I take a lot of classes. Dance and exercise and crafts classes, plus some courses at the university. I think if you’re not learning, improving and trying new things, you might as well be six feet under.” Melissa snapped her mouth shut. Again, she sounded robotic and puffed-up.

He leaned across the table toward her. Melissa held herself still, though her protective instinct told her to pull back. This close she could see the slight stubble around his jaw, the faint lines in his lips. She could tell herself he was an obvious player, bad news, not her type, anything she could think of, but the facts were simple: he was gorgeous and her body wanted to check his out. “I have something new you can try, Melissa.”

Oh, lord. It took two attempts before she found her voice, and even then she only managed a tinge of cynicism. “Oh, really.”

Jack folded his hands on the table, teasing charmer gone, an intensity in his gaze that sounded a loud you-could-be-in-trouble-here alarm. Usually it took Melissa time to overcome her reserve with men. Half an hour after meeting this guy she wanted to grab him and find out what his skin felt like. His hair. His mouth—

Melissa, honey, get yourself under control. Her boss, Barbara, would know what to say to calm her down. Melissa could practically hear her voice. You shouldn’t need a man to feel good about yourself. You shouldn’t need a man at all.

Exactly. Melissa hadn’t needed one since she’d started the process of finding herself, soon after graduation, and she didn’t need one now.

“I saw you for the first time in April, practicing your poses after class. Immediately I knew I had to photograph you.”

“Why?”

“One, because you’re beautiful.” He spoke with a low, slightly husky voice, a bedroom voice, except that his expression was distant, as if he were imagining her as part of his art, which effectively negated any feeling of seduction. Perversely, that made his words even more seductive, and Melissa finally lost the fight with her blush machine. “But also, because your body looks like it’s part of nature when you’re posing. You have an inner light, an incredible serenity, as if nothing could rattle you.”

Spell broken. Melissa barely managed to stifle a snort. Serenity? Oh, my God. If they heard him say that, her doctor and everyone she knew would never stop laughing. “Jack, I don’t think you quite have—”

“I was right.” He blinked and resumed his focus on her. “My camera loves you. I captured everything about you that had already captured me.”

“And you were planning to take more shots of me.”

“Then you disappeared, but yes.” He raised an eyebrow. “Here comes my sales pitch, you ready?”

Melissa glanced at her watch, buying time to think. Sales pitch. She’d been thrown by meeting Jack and seeing those pictures. She was still struggling with her attraction to him. Whatever he was going to ask from her now, she was not going to be able to give him a sane response. She’d do much better thinking first and talking to Barbara. Most likely he was going to ask to continue to photograph her. Could she trade him for a discount on her sister’s wedding? How involved did she want to get with this man?

And wasn’t that a loaded question.

“Can it wait? I need to get to work.” She stood before she went soft and changed her mind.

He caught her forearm. “Meet me for a drink later?”

Melissa wasn’t prepared for that one, or for his touch, or for him to get to his feet, too, which brought him even closer. She had to concentrate yet again on keeping her breath low and slow. Most men’s persistence annoyed her. Why couldn’t she summon irritation now when she needed it? “What’s the nutshell version of your pitch?”

“I want you to model for my new series. The Unko Gallery has already shown interest. You’re perfect for what I need.”

He was still holding her arm, fingers squeezing, as if the tension was tough on him, too. Melissa’s head whirled with reasons, pro and con. Dr. Glazer had warned her about adding more to her schedule, but it was ridiculously open these days after she’d dropped so many classes; she was too often at loose ends. And if modeling meant she could hire Jack for Gretchen’s wedding …

Of course, she would have to pretend to be calm and serene around him for extended periods. That might kill her faster than her blood pressure.

“Look.” She tugged her arm from his warm fingers, needing to put her scrambled thoughts in order. “For one thing, I’ve never modeled before. I didn’t know you took the other pictures. I might be terrible at it when you’re right there with the camera in my face.”

“I doubt it. But we can test tonight, if you’re free.”

“I’m not free.” She was not going to jump for a guy like this who probably had several women already leaping like kangaroos. Besides, she’d need at least twenty-four hours to regain her equilibrium.

“Tomorrow?”

Tomorrow was Friday. She used to have a pottery class at 5:30, but these days she’d be going home to read or meditate or something equally dull. Jack was anything but dull. “How long would this take?”

“An hour. Maybe two.”

She was amazed. “For the series?”

“Oh, no.” Jack shook his head, grinning. “I thought you meant the tests. The series would take longer.”

“How much longer?”

He narrowed his eyes speculatively. She guessed he was figuring out what she wanted to hear. “Depends on how the pictures turn out, how the creative process evolves, whether I get the shots the way I want them.”

Uh-huh. He wasn’t risking specifics. If this only took a few hours, fine. She certainly couldn’t spend any longer than that pretending she was serene.

“By the way, blatant bribery. If you’ll agree to model for me, I can do your sister’s wedding for nothing.”

And there it was. She didn’t even have to ask. A photographer of his talent would be an amazing gift to Ted and Gretchen. All Melissa had to do was …

Be around Jack. Alone with him for long stretches of time. He’d be posing her, touching her. She’d have to pretend none of it affected her.

Dangerous to her sanity and to her health. And so tempting. She needed to talk to Barbara. Her boss, mentor and stand-in mom had helped clear her head more times than Melissa could count, and had started her on a wonderful journey of self-awareness.

“Let me know what you decide.” Jack held out his hand. “You can come by the studio after work tomorrow. Wear or bring black if you have it—something on the tight side for a good silhouette. We’ll have a drink, talk it over, maybe take a few shots and see what we have.”

“I’ll give it some thought.” Melissa shook his hand, proud of her ability to meet those killer brown eyes calmly with her insides still a mass of yes-please and no-thank-you confusion.

Give it some thought?

She could already tell that for the next day and a half she’d be thinking of little else.

3

BONNIE TURNED THE KEY, locking the front door of Bonnie Blooms. Her back ached. Her feet hurt. She had a crashing headache. Her parents had been right. She shouldn’t have opened this store, she didn’t have the experience. A pie-in-the-sky venture, launched on a wing and a prayer, and what other clichés could she use? Who ate pie in the sky anyway?

She was exhausted. Grinding through each day, hoping business would get better, putting on a good face for everyone. Wedding season always gave her a boost, and she’d painstakingly learned how to design a new funky website and blog page for the store with as much color and as many touches of humor as she could get away with while still appearing professional. Talk about a learning curve. She wasn’t convinced the site was perfect, but it was better than the template-based one she’d started with.

Orders were dribbling in, both local and through the FTD network, but only dribbling. She was still in the hole more than she should be, still dipping into savings more than she wanted to. How could she get people and companies and organizations and agencies to buy more flowers? What did she have to offer that no other florist did?

Nothing. But Bonnie couldn’t see that when she started this business. She’d been swept away by the can-do camaraderie of the other Come to Your Senses members, and had figured if they could do it, why couldn’t she? She had as much passion as any of them. While other girls had been into ponies and princesses, Bonnie was designing gardens on paper, in the backyard space her parents put aside for her, and eventually took over the entire backyard when she proved to have more talent than her mother.

But that didn’t make her a good businesswoman. She should have kept her job at Blossoms Dearie, making a steady, if small, paycheck.

Except then she wouldn’t be part of this terrific fivesome. Well, foursome if you didn’t count Demi, which Bonnie generally didn’t. Not belonging to this crowd would be a terrible tragedy. She smiled, thinking of poor Jack’s face when he’d finally found his beautiful Melissa and thought Bonnie and Angela were going to move in and ruin everything. That kind of teasing between people who knew each other so well, trusted and supported each other, teasing with genuine love at its heart—Bonnie couldn’t get that from old Mrs. Blatter at Blossoms Dearie.

She shuddered at the thought of her tyrant former boss, and trudged past Jack’s and Demi’s studios to the elevator, pocketing her shop key. All hope was not lost. Something would work out, some marketing idea would kick in, some corporate account would materialize, her blog would catch on. Something. In the meantime, it was summer—Bonnie’s favorite and most profitable season, Seattle’s most beautiful—and denial was her friend.

On the second floor, she headed down the narrow hallway. She’d painted two twining lines of roses down either wall. When Seth and Jack felt their manhood threatened by the floral decor, she’d mischievously painted a line of tanks along the baseboard, guns aimed high, as if to blast the flowers into shreds of petal. They’d all had a good laugh. That was when they’d been a solid fivesome, when Caroline was still around.

Her key hit the apartment’s lock at the exact moment her cell rang, as if the key had set it off. Bonnie hauled the phone out of her pocket and pushed inside, snapping on the foyer light.

Seth. A tingle of anticipation she could never quite control went through her. “Hi, there.”

“Hey, someone sounds cranky. What’s going on?”

“Long day.” She wasn’t in the mood for Seth. Or rather, she wasn’t in the mood for their complicated relationship. Past lovers, now uneasy friends. Bonnie had come to terms with the fact that while she might never meet anyone who fitted her so well, Seth wasn’t and might never be able to commit to a relationship.

“I just finished a song. I’d like to play it for you. Wanna come up?”

“I’m up already, just closed the store.” Bonnie slumped against the wall. Yes, she wanted to see Seth if he’d take her in his arms, declare undying love and make all her problems go away. But being in Seth’s arms had the unfortunate effect of creating many more problems than it solved. At least she’d figured out that much. Since they’d both lived at Come to Your Senses—nearly two years now—they’d been able to maintain a relatively peaceful and platonic truce. Though lately he’d been acting … odd.

“I’ll feed you, too, and pour you a short or tall one of whatever you’d like. And …” Seth did a credible impression of a drum roll. The guy had talented lips. She should know. “For dessert I have mint chocolate chip ice cream.”

Oooh, playing dirty now. Bonnie took a moment to consider. Her choice lay between morose, quiet loneliness here, and free food and drink with fun if slightly crazy-making company.

Sigh.

“Give me twenty minutes to rejuvenate and I’ll be over.”

“Cool.” As always, he spoke as if he didn’t care whether she came or not. Seth had a talent for making it seem he cared about nothing. Not the kind of thing you craved in a partner, though he’d had a hell of a childhood with an alcoholic father who hadn’t exactly made loving support or emotional sharing the rule of the family.

Yes, Bonnie was learning.

“Seeya.” She ended the call, slipped her phone back into her pocket. Seth had another talent, one she truly respected. He’d written music for some commercials and TV shows, sold a few songs and was in talks with a producer to score a movie soundtrack. He worked hard. Given that he had inherited enough family money to buy his own Hollywood movie studio, Bonnie respected him for that. If she had all that money in the bank, she’d be tempted to go on a tour of the world’s most beautiful beaches and hone her lying-in-the-sun skills.

After showering and putting on a comfortable sundress of pale brown and sunshine-yellow, she felt more human. Only occasionally did she succumb to fear like this over her financial situation. Something would work out, she was convinced.

Down at the other end of the rose- and tank-strewn hallway, she knocked on Seth’s door, and it opened immediately to the tall, model-gorgeous man whose fierce gray eyes seemed to glow in his face. Even now, after all the years of pain and exasperation he’d caused her, Bonnie got a fresh thrill every time she saw him.

Masochist.

“Hey, Bonnie. Come in, come in. Bar’s open, buffet’s open. I made pot-sticker dumplings and bok choy with ginger and soy.”

She groaned with pleasure. “You are a god among men.”

“Well, yeah. What’ll you drink with it?”

“Beer. Whatever you have.”

“I have Tsingtao, imported from Shandong province, a brewery started by Germans in nineteen hundred and—”

“Psssht.” She stopped him. “If it’s got alcohol and bubbles, I’m in.”

His grin turned him from tough-guy gorgeous to goofy farm boy—still gorgeous—a transformation that never ceased to charm her and, sigh, women everywhere. “It does, my little plum blossom.”

Bonnie rolled her eyes and pushed past him into his combination apartment and studio. He was the only one of the Come to Your Senses occupants who didn’t have commercial space on the first floor with public access, so the group had ceded him the largest unit, which had probably at one time been two apartments.

Seth closed the door and followed her toward the kitchen. “How was your day?”

“Not bad.”

“Business blooming?”

She didn’t want to talk about it, though Seth was the only person in whom she’d confided the extent of her financial troubles. “Not bad.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll get you that beer.” He squeezed her shoulder as he strode to the refrigerator; in that touch she felt his sympathy and understanding. What a complicated and frustrating man. All that great empathy for some of her feelings, a huge block against others and an even bigger one when it came to understanding and processing his own.

“So what’s this song you wrote?”

Seth pulled two beers from his state-of-the-art stainless refrigerator, popped off their tops and handed her one, then hit a button on his microwave, which started whirring. “Love song.”

“Really.” His songs tended to be about failed relationships, thwarted dreams and other forms of misery. Ironic for a man who had everything. “Happy love? Like, ‘I love you and it’s great’?”

“Yeah, like that.”

Bonnie took a long swig from the bottle, maybe not the greatest way to soothe her suddenly agitated stomach. Had he met someone? She wasn’t really excited to hear about how much he loved someone else. “How’d that happen?”

“A friend of mine was talking about marrying this girl he met after dating one disaster after another. He got me thinking.”

Bonnie took another nervous swig, shorter this time since she’d skipped lunch. “Got you thinking about what?”

“About a song I could write.” The microwave dinged and he moved toward it.

Bonnie shook her head. Trying to get Seth to talk about feelings … well, why the hell was she trying?

“Here you go.” He handed her a heaping plate of dumplings and bok choy, steam releasing a fragrance that made Bonnie’s stomach lurch with hunger instead of stress.

“All for me?”

“I ate earlier. Bring it in with you. And I’m not letting you leave until you finish it. You’re skeletal.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He shot her a scowl over his shoulder and headed for his studio. Bonnie followed, grinning, touched that he was worried about her. She had dropped weight. At first she was thrilled. Who didn’t celebrate when pounds came off? But while her new body might be fine for a magazine shoot, she wasn’t out to join the scary-thin crowd, and shouldn’t lose any more.

“Now.” Seth seated himself at his Bösendorfer grand, having put his beer carefully down on a nearby table. The piano and his extensive array of recording and soundengineering equipment were the only things he was meticulous about. His bedroom and bathroom looked as if a fraternity had moved in and partied for two weeks.

He rubbed his hands on his long thighs, picked out a note or two, rubbed his legs again. He was nervous. Interesting. This drill was totally familiar for both of them. He loved playing his songs, she loved hearing them; they did this all the time. Bonnie had never seen him like this.

“Ready?”

“I’m ready.” She stuffed a warm pot sticker, dripping soy sauce, vinegar and chili oil, into her mouth and groaned ecstatically. Seth’s mom had been an incredible cook and passed along that passion to Seth, the youngest in a family of five boys and the only one who’d been interested. “No, wait, I can’t listen right now. I’m having an orgasm.”

“No, you’re not.”

She stabbed another dumpling with her fork and stuffed it into her mouth, moaned again. “Yesh, I am.”

“Nope.” He started playing a classical piece. “You’re much louder than that.”

Bonnie glared at him, sitting at the piano wearing an I-know-you look that made her lips twitch. Did he have to say stuff like that? “You’re terrible.”

“You need cheering up.” He switched from the classical to a ragtime number, which he seamlessly fed into smooth jazz. She waited in delight until he wove in, as he invariably did, snippets of the Flintstones theme, “Happy Birthday” and “God Bless America,” all improvised so skillfully into the melodic and rhythmic texture that if she hadn’t heard him do this over and over again, she’d say it wasn’t possible.

Talent was really, really sexy. As if Seth wasn’t sexy enough on his own. Worse, he was staring intently at her, half his mind on what his fingers were doing, half on the impact he knew he was making.

Deliberately she shoved another dumpling into her mouth and followed it with a fourth, going for the unappealing chipmunk-cheek approach to keeping herself sane.

“What ‘bout the shong?” She chewed noisily, and found it didn’t help, because he was giving her that half smile that said she was adorable. Damn him.

“You’re ready now?”

“I’m ready.”

He nodded. Took his hands off the keys and rested them on his lap. Bonnie swallowed her dumpling. He was really nervous. What was that about?

“Here we go.” Soft chords filled the room, then a clear high piano melody, slow and sweet, repeated lower, then dissolving into a gentle arpeggiated accompaniment with occasional rhythmic and harmonic twists that kept the song from settling into predictability. Bonnie put down her fork, heart swelling with pride at the beauty of the music. This tune felt different than anything he’d written, yet it was Seth all over.

He lifted his head, gazing out at a point beyond the piano, expression earnest, and the closest to vulnerable Seth ever got. His smooth, rich baritone filled the room.

You wash me with colors

Blues to take away the sadness

Green for drawing down the madness

Black for smoothing over rages

White for all the pages I’ve filled with you

Yellow takes the fear from me

Gold can keep you here with me

Red’s for cinnamon-candy love

Burning hot and sweet

You wash me with so many colors

You make me feel complete.

He held the last note, let the chord under it die into silence. Bonnie swallowed convulsively, tears she hadn’t been able to hold back spilling onto her cheeks.

If he turned and looked at her now, if he gave any indication he understood what the song was saying, not about them, but just about the love it was possible for two people to have, something he’d never acknowledged before, she was going to shatter all over his carpet. He’d be picking up bits of Bonnie for the rest of his life.

Maybe that’s what he deserved.

He didn’t look at her. He took his hands off the keys and put them in his lap.

“Beautiful, Seth.”

“I hoped you’d like it.” He cleared his throat, drew his finger across the keyboard without depressing notes enough for sound.

Bonnie wasn’t sure what to say next. She felt as if she were walking on eggshells with this man who was so terrified of all the same emotions he’d just put down on paper. “You haven’t written many romantic songs like that.”

“Nope.” His fingers turned restless, picked out a tune she didn’t recognize.

“Your friend talking must have … I don’t know, brought out something in you?” She laughed slightly hysterically. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”

“Yes, you do, Bonnie.”

Adrenaline bolted through her. He was right. She did. But she couldn’t admit it out loud, and neither could he. They’d never get over their fears, either of them. Bonnie of being hurt, Seth of losing himself. It was such a poignant, frustrating and colossal waste.

She’d been looking at online dating sites—just looking for now. But more and more often she’d find herself thinking what she might like to say in her profile. After college she’d dated a couple of guys, friends of friends, but with Seth still firmly lodged in her heart, nothing had a chance of working out. Checking out dating services was a good sign, now, that she was really getting ready to burst free of the Seth-chains and find a relationship she could truly indulge, not one defined and bound by what it wasn’t and couldn’t ever be.