Christine Flynn - Forbidden Love

She kept going, only to hear him tap on one of the small panes. Glancing past the long mahogany table with its white lace runner and huge ruby glass compote, she saw him hold up a quart-sized can.

“I might as well give this to you now,” he said the moment she swung in one of the doors. He held the can of solvent toward her. “Be sure to let it sit at least an hour and use it with gloves. Then scrape it off with a putty knife. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get you something else to try.”

He was doing what her grandmother had asked, telling her how to remove the paint. He also clearly intended to limit his assistance to supplying her with products and advice, not elbow grease, which was fine with her. Working with him would only add to the strain of his presence.

As long as she had advice available, however, she would take it.

“How do I make it sit on a vertical surface? It’s on the front of the cabinets.”

“She told me you were trying to get paint off linoleum.”

“That’s the only part I told her about,” she admitted, looking down at the directions. All she actually saw were the buckle of his belt, the worn white threads on the zipper of his faded blue jeans and the creases in the fabric above his powerful thighs.

“I’ll take a look at the cabinets,” he muttered, resigned.

“I need power, too.”

Her glance jerked from his groin, incomprehension covering her flush.

“Electricity,” he explained. “Is there an outlet I can use for a few minutes? I have to cut out a section of railing, and there are no outlets out here.” He nodded to the power saw and a huge coil of what looked like orange rope. “I have an extension cord that’ll reach just about anywhere.”

There was an outlet behind the buffet, but it would be easier to access one straight through in the kitchen. She told him that as she turned away, aware of his glance moving down her back as she padded across the hardwood floor and into the big, old-fashioned kitchen.

For as long as she could remember, the cabinets lining the room had been pale yellow and the floor black-and-white tile. The walls had been the variable. Over the years, orange paper scattered with swirls of avocado green had given way to paper of mauve and blue. Five years ago, her grandmother had stripped the walls bare, painted them shiny, enamel white and hung brilliantly colored stained glass birds in the windows to throw swaths of azure, magenta and chartreuse into the room.

On days when the sun was brightest, being inside the room was like being inside a kaleidoscope. Bea’s most recent alteration would have slashed color into the room even on the dreariest of days.

“What the…?”

Amy knew exactly what had brought Nick to a dead halt behind her. She’d had the same reaction when she’d first let herself in and seen the mess her grandmother’s accident had created. Her heart actually felt as if it had stopped—just before she broke into a grin at her grandmother’s daring.

The paint her grandmother had chosen for her cabinets was called Crimson Cherry—and when she had fallen from the ladder while painting the upper trim, nearly a gallon of the bright bold red had splattered over the counter, the floor, the front of two upper cabinets and all but three of the lower ones.

Amy had managed to clean the streaks and splatters off the white enamel of the old stove, a project that had taken her most of yesterday, but the shock of scarlet stood out in macabre relief against the yellow and black and white of everything else.

“It looks like a crime scene in here.”

“I know,” she replied. “That’s what I thought when I first saw it.”

“This is what she was doing when she fell?”

Amy nodded, watching his frown move from the worst of the spill on the floor to a rather artful spray of bright droplets on one of the cabinets under the sink. A thick splotch of solid red the size of a dinner plate graced the cabinet next to it.

“Why?” he asked.

“She said she wanted to add a little life to the place.”

“I mean, why didn’t she pay to have it done?”

“Because she wanted to do it herself.”

The frown intensified. “A woman her age has no business doing something like this by herself. She’s—”

“Capable of making her own decisions,” Amy interrupted defensively. “She knows her own mind and once it’s made up, no one can change it.”

“You make her stubbornness sound like a virtue,” he muttered. “The woman broke her hip doing this.”

Amy turned, can in hand. “You sound just like my mother,” she muttered back, and set the can on the yellow Formica counter. The sound, like the admission, was far sharper than she intended. Drawing a breath of air that smelled faintly of paint thinner and the gardenia-scented breeze coming through the open windows, she did her best to tamp down the annoyance eating at her.

“It doesn’t matter now what she did,” she quietly amended. It wasn’t his fault this particular subject so sorely tested the only real virtue she had. “All that matters is getting this cleaned up and getting her back home. There’s an outlet over there,” she said, motioning to her right. “That’s probably the most convenient.”

She wanted him to get on with his task so she could get back to hers. Nick had no problem with that. Getting his job done and getting out of there was infinitely wiser than standing there wondering at how quickly she’d buried the frustration that had been so evident seconds ago. She’d done it too quickly not to have had considerable practice.

Spotting the outlet, he turned to leave.

With some reluctance, he turned right back and motioned to the splatters. “Mind if I ask how long ago this happened?”

“About three months. Why?”

“I just wondered why no one cleaned it up before now.”

The late-afternoon sun slanted through the window over the sink, catching the brilliant colors of the stained glass birds hanging across the upper pane. A slash of ruby touched fire to the dark sweep of her bangs.

A memory stirred at the sight of that light in her hair, but all that surfaced was the thought that her hair had felt incredibly soft and that it had once smelled like…lemons.

“Mom wanted to bring someone in to clean it up,” she said, jerking him from the flash of buried memory. “But her idea of cleaning up was to repaint the cabinets yellow like they were. Grandma said she didn’t want yellow anymore. She wanted red, and that it made no sense to pay for them to be painted a color she didn’t want. So no one did anything.”

“I see,” he muttered, getting a better understanding of the frustration he’d just witnessed. Her mom hadn’t gotten her way, so she’d simply refused to help. “And your sister?”

“She agreed with Mom. She thinks yellow is a kitchen color and red isn’t.”

“I mean, why didn’t she step in and help?”

“Because she’s—”

“Busy,” he concluded, sounding as if he should have already known what she would say.

So that left you, he thought, forcing his attention from the faintly exasperated look she gave him. Standing there in her little tank top and shorts, the long lines of her body firm and lithe, her feet bare, she didn’t look much older than the seventeen she’d been when he’d last seen her. Only, when he’d met her when she was seventeen, her hair had been long and streaked from the sun, her skin had looked like golden satin—and it had felt as soft as silk.

He’d known how soft her skin was even before he’d felt it under his hand in the nursing-home parking lot.

The memories drew a scowl. They were unwanted. Pointless. Dangerous.

Ruthlessly shoving them aside, he crouched down, knees cracking, to inspect a lower cabinet. “This would have been easier if it hadn’t been left to dry,” he muttered, pushing his thumbnail into the plate-sized blotch. “To do these right, the doors need to be taken off, stripped and sanded.”