McGillivray's Mistress Page 17

  And not just food and places, but faces.

  People.

  Mike and Claire and Tom and Peter. Paul and Julie and their new twins, Alison and Jack who had been barely three weeks old when Fiona had left. Maurice and Estelle and their family. Carin, Nathan, Lacey and Josh. Miss Saffron. Tony. Nikki. Molly. Hugh.

  Lachlan.

  She couldn’t sleep for remembering Lachlan. Wanting Lachlan.

  Loving Lachlan.

  It was stupid and she knew it. But there it was: she’d come halfway around the world and hadn’t left him behind at all.

  It was early days yet, she told herself. She’d barely been gone a month. Surely by Christmas she wouldn’t be dreaming of him every night. She wouldn’t be thinking of him a thousand times a day.

  If she was, she couldn’t possibly go home for the holiday. She would have to go with Resi and Hans to Innsbruck to go skiing. A little island girl like her going skiing in Austria? The mind boggled. But then hadn’t there been a Jamaican bobsled team?

  She was out in the world doing things, learning things, growing and getting a life. And someday, God willing, Lachlan would be only a small insignificant memory.

  She was sure she already was that to him.

  She didn’t believe that once she had left, he had wasted a moment’s thought on her. He’d wanted her. He’d had her.

  End of story.

  To make sure it really was the end of the story, she made it a point to go out on the occasional date with Vittorio, one of Giulia’s cousins.

  Vittorio was lively, intense and the stereotypical “Italian lover.” He was perennially ready to sweep her off her feet. Fiona found him fun and charming and had no intention of getting serious about him. But if she went out with him, at least she could write home about it.

  She spent a lot of time writing home. She sent e-mails several times a week, telling her brothers and sisters-in-law and Carin and Molly all about the places she went and the people she met.

  She wrote about her classes and her teachers, about her classmates and her friends, about going shopping in the markets and getting her hair cut by the old lady who lived around the corner, and the sculptures she saw in the museums she went to, and what fun riding a motorbike was.

  And because she wanted them to know she wasn’t pining, because she wanted them to believe that she really was happy and glad that she’d gone—even though some nights she ached with longing for home and for Lachlan—she made her life sound even fuller—especially of Vittorio—than it was.

  LACHLAN TRIED TO BE HAPPY for her. And most of the time he honest-to-God was. He knew she needed to have a chance to spread her wings, to see the big wide world.

  He could wait, he told himself. It wouldn’t be that long until she came back to Pelican Cay. Two years wasn’t forever. She was doing what she wanted to do. Having the life she wanted to have. At last.

  And him?

  He got by. He threw himself into renovations. He spent a lot of time at the Sandpiper because it was easier than being lonely on Pelican Cay. He bought another inn in the Caicos and began work down there. When he was home he helped Hugh finish the shop and put a new roof on the Mirabelle, his other local inn.

  When he wasn’t working, he spent his time with the kids on the soccer team. They were still practicing three times a week and playing in tournaments on other islands. He loved working with them. They kept him sharp, they kept him honest. Most of the time they kept him smiling.

  He was okay as long as he had occasional fixes—news of what Fiona was doing.

  Of course she wasn’t writing to him. But he got his fixes anyway. He stopped by now and then to admire Julie and Paul’s twins, and Julie always eagerly volunteered information on how Fiona was doing.

  “She’s learning so much,” Julie told him. “And she sent me a scan of a sketch she did of her media professor. Want to see?”

  “Sure.” He tried not to look as avid as he felt.

  The sketch had obviously been dashed off in a few minutes. But it captured the man—his beaky nose and slouchy beret, his sweater with the holes in the elbows, his slightly stooped posture, but the intent look in his eyes said he knew what he was talking about. Fiona got at the heart of people.

  “It’s very good.” It was wonderful.

  “Want it?” Julie asked. “I can print another for us.”

  “Well.” God, he wanted it so badly his hand was shaking. “I guess.” He went away, carrying it, aching with loneliness, missing her more than he thought possible.

  She wrote to Claire and Mike and the boys, too. He had less reason to stop by their place. But Tom sometimes told him what she was doing.

  “She went to a soccer game with Vittorio,” he reported eagerly. “She said she saw where you used to play.”

  “Did she?” He felt a twisting in his midsection as he wished he could have shown the city to her. When he thought back on the time he was there, he came up with a lot of places he would have liked to have taken her there. He wondered if this Vittorio guy knew the places he did. He hoped not.

  Carin told him Fiona was learning a lot about art history. “Going to museums every weekend,” she said.

  He hadn’t spent a lot of time in museums when he’d lived there. “I wouldn’t mind doing that,” he said to Carin. “I never had anyone to go with either.”

  “Oh, she’s not alone,” Carin said blithely. “She always goes with Vittorio.”

  “Does she?” Lachlan’s jaw got tight.

  He dropped by Hugh’s every day when he was on the island. He saw Molly every afternoon.

  Molly told him when Fiona had moved into her flat above the wine shop. “Her friend Giulia found it for her,” Molly said. “And they all helped her move in—Alberto, Franco, Giancarlo, Vittorio.”

  Vittorio again.

  Molly told him about Fiona’s interest in church architecture. “She’s learning a lot. Checking out the churches in all the villages.”

  “Taking buses?” Lachlan grinned, remembering the old buses.

  But Molly shook her head. “She bought a motorbike. Since she got it, they go all over, she and Vittorio.”

  And now Molly said Fiona was going to Milan for the weekend.

  “Milan? On the motorbike? By herself?” Lachlan was appalled. Fiona was a small town girl. Thinking of her coping with a city the size of Milan was unnerving.

  “Oh, no,” Molly said. “Vittorio drives a Ferrari.”

  Lachlan had only one question: Who the hell was Vittorio?

  THE FIRST WEEK in October Fiona’s master teacher, Adela Dirienzo, returned from Amsterdam.

  It was just as well, Fiona thought, that Signora Dirienzo hadn’t been there when she first arrived. The learning curve was high enough with only her regular classes. If she had been plunged straight into one-on-one work with a master she might have panicked.

  Even now, with four weeks’ work under her belt Fiona was nervous. Since she’d arrived she’d seen plenty of examples of Signora Dirienzo’s work. It was strong, powerful, dynamic. She worked in both marble and clay, creating works that were substantial and yet that pulsated with life.

  She was, the direttore, Luigi Bellini, told Fiona when she arrived, the reason they had admitted her.

  “She say you have talent,” Signore Bellini told her. “She zees potential in the pictures you zent. She wants to nurture your talent. Develop it.”

  Potential? In the pelicans? In the sand castles? Maybe in the cutout surfers and fishermen. They were dynamic at least.

  “Signora Dirienzo knows what she’s talking about,” Hans, her friend from the history class, told her.

  Fiona dearly hoped so. And at the same time she was apprehensive about her first meeting. What if it had been a mistake? What if Signora Dirienzo had mistaken someone else’s portfolio for Fiona’s? What if they’d sent her the wrong pictures when she was in Amsterdam?

  So it was with considerable trepidation that she mounted the stairs to the signora’s
studio on Wednesday afternoon and knocked on the door.

  “Come in!” The words were Italian, but Fiona understood them now.

  She pushed open the door to find a sixtyish woman dressed like a workman, her long salt-and-pepper hair dragged back into a knot at the base of her neck, as she wrestled with a block of marble. She looked up at Fiona’s entrance and beamed.

  “Ah, you are the island girl? Fiona, yes? Come help me, per favore. This is ours.” She patted the marble as if it were an old friend.

  Fiona dropped her backpack on the floor and hurried to do as she was told. There wasn’t time to worry. There was only time to respond.

  Signora Dirienzo—“Adela! You call me Adela,” her teacher said as she and Fiona moved the chunk of marble into place—believed in jumping right in. “Is what I like about you. Energy,” she said. “Always energy. You see potential, yes?”

  “Um, I try,” Fiona said.

  “You look here. You see?” Signora Dirienzo—Adela—moved her hands over the marble, stroked it, seemed to shape it as her palms caressed the grain. Fiona tried to see. She nodded her head, feeling as if she was completely out of her depth.

  “You touch,” Adela said. “You feel. Then you see? Yes?”

  Fiona touched. The stone was cool against her fingers. Not as smooth as she would have thought. There was a grain. A texture.

  “Yes, yes. Like that.” Adela nodded, smiling. “Come.” She plucked at Fiona’s sleeve. “Here. You feel.” And she practically dragged Fiona over to the finished pieces that sat on shelves and in deep window ledges. “Close your eyes.”

  Fiona closed them.

  “Now,” Adela said, taking her hands and putting them on a piece of sculpture. “Feel.”

  Fiona felt. She ran her hands over it, felt the smoothness one way, the grain the other, ran her fingers lightly over angles and bends and curves. She did it on a dozen pieces, possibly more.

  “Which one you are feeling?” Adela demanded. “What is it?”

  And, eyes closed, Fiona tried to describe what she was feeling.

  “Yes, yes! Exactly. Yes! You see! But you do not need eyes to see!” Adela beamed, then tugged her onward. “Come. You feel this next.”

  They moved around the room from piece to piece. Under Adela’s direction, she felt them all, marble and terra-cotta, large and small, clothed and naked. And Fiona was reminded of her sculpture of Lachlan. A flush heated her cheeks.

  “Ah, yes. You feel passion.” Adela laughed delightedly when she spotted Fiona’s blush. “That is what we want, what we nurture! That I cannot teach. That you must bring, yes?” She smiled, her intent blue gaze settling on Fiona. Then she let out a long, satisfied sigh. “That I know you bring.”

  “You do?”

  Adela nodded. “Oh, yes. Come now. We get to work.”

  The rest of the two-hour session was as intense as the beginning. The chunk of marble was theirs, she told Fiona. They would learn it together. They would feel it and talk about it and try to understand what it said.

  “The stones speak,” Adela told her. “But they need us to give them voice. We must listen and feel and then show what they say.”

  Avidly Fiona listened while Adela lectured on. Listening to Adela was like being given a translator. Ever since she’d been sculpting, Fiona had been trying to find the words in this new idiom. Now, at last, with Adela she had someone to teach her what the words meant and how to say them. She had the mentor she’d told Lachlan she needed.

  “I only help,” Adela insisted when they were finishing.

  Fiona’s mind was spinning, full of new ideas, new concepts, new ways of looking at her medium and the world. She didn’t know whether she was more exhilarated or exhausted. “I just hope I’m up to it,” she said.

  “You already have the tools. I refine them. You have the passion, as I say.”

  “How do you know?” Fiona asked. She thought she did, but she wasn’t sure.

  “I see it in your work, this passion.”

  “In the shells? In the cutouts? In The King of the Beach?”

  Adela smiled. “Is that what you call him?”

  Fiona nodded.

  “He is the king, yes,” Adela agreed, nodding as she opened a wide flat drawer in the map cabinet behind her, then took out Fiona’s flat black portfolio and spread out some photos.

  “Passion, yes?” she said happily.

  Fiona stared. They weren’t photos of The King of the Beach. They were photos of her sculpture of Lachlan!

  Closeups showing every side, every curve, every line of the sculpture of Lachlan as beautiful and naked as Fiona remembered him.

  She went white. “Who? How—? How did you—?”

  “King of the beach indeed.” Adela’s gaze flicked up and her eyes laughed. Then she mused, “He looks familiar. But then all beautiful men, we wish they look familiar, yes?”

  It was all Fiona could do not to snatch the photos and bury them. How on earth—?

  Her mind was reeling.

  Had Molly? But Molly didn’t know. No one knew—

  Except the man himself.

  IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN LACHLAN.

  He would never!

  So it had to have been Molly, Fiona had decided by the time she got home that afternoon.

  Molly must have found the sculpture wherever Lachlan had put it. Surely it hadn’t been out for display. But if she’d stumbled across it, Molly—knowing how upset Fiona was—would have known how much she’d been depending on being able to leave Pelican Cay. She must have taken matters into her own hands, making the photos and sending them in.

  Dear God.

  What on earth would Lachlan do when he found out?

  The sound of the door buzzer from downstairs momentarily interrupted her panic attack. She’d been pacing the floor since she’d got home.

  “Come out for a coffee?” Vittorio had urged her. “Tell me about your meeting with Signora Dirienzo.”

  But Fiona had shaken her head. “I can’t,” she’d babbled. “I need—I need to think!”

  Maybe Lachlan would never find out. Maybe it would never come up. But Signora Dirienzo had talked about doing a show at some point. “Where you’ve been and where you’re going.” And she’d patted Lachlan’s clay self on the butt. “Starting here.” She’d beamed.

  The buzzer went again. Longer. More insistently.

  Fiona knew who it was. Marcelo, another of Giulia’s cousins, the eldest of Tommaso’s sons, had said he’d stop by after work to replace a cracked windowpane.

  If she wasn’t involved in something, Marcelo would talk her ear off. And she didn’t need to talk to Marcelo right now.

  She needed to think what she was going to do, how she was going to handle this. Molly, of course, wouldn’t have known about Fiona’s promise to Lachlan.

  The buzzer again.

  “Come up!” Fiona yelled. Then she deliberately ducked her head under the tap to wash her hair so she could ignore Marcelo when the door opened.

  “It’s over there,” she said, waving her hand toward the broken window sash without looking up when she heard footsteps at the top of the stairs. “Can you fix it?”

  “Maybe,” a voice said. “I’ll try.”

  Fiona whipped her head around, flinging water everywhere.

  Lachlan was standing in the door.

  “You’ve cut your hair.” He was staring at her, looking a bit dazed himself.

  Fiona stared right back, stunned. She must be dreaming. Water dripped into her eyes. She shook her head.

  Lachlan? Here?

  Then all of a sudden she realized why he must be here, and her stomach dropped. Oh God.

  “Did Molly tell you what she did?” she said frantically, grabbing for a towel, scrubbing at her wet hair. “I didn’t ask her to, I swear it! I—”

  “Molly? What did Molly do?” Lachlan looked perplexed.

  “Took the photos! The photos of the sculpture! Of you! I just found out about them today. Hon
est to God, Lachlan, I didn’t break my word. I didn’t take them. I didn’t send them in!”

  “I did.”

  Her jaw dropped. She stared at him. “You sent them?” Her knees threatened to buckle. She clutched the back of one of the kitchen chairs for support. “But…but why?”

  He shrugged. “You wanted to go to school. You never got to.”

  Her mind reeled. “Yes, but—”

  “I owed you,” Lachlan said quietly. He swallowed, shut his eyes for just a moment, then opened them and met her astonished gaze. “For the net,” he told her. “For doing it for the wrong reasons.”

  “It’s not—”

  “I love you.”

  Fiona couldn’t say anything to that. She could only stare.

  Every instinct she had told her not to believe it, that this was Lachlan who couldn’t be trusted.

  But a Lachlan who couldn’t be trusted would never have taken those photos. He would certainly never have sent them to the school. That Lachlan would never have offered himself up for her benefit. That Lachlan had been out for himself—not her.

  And this Lachlan?

  She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  “I love you,” he said again. His voice was still quiet, but she heard pain in it. “I don’t know if you believe it or not,” he told her. “I hope you do. I hope you will. I’ll do what I can to prove it to you.”

  “I—” she managed that much.

  But he went on hurriedly, “I don’t expect you to come back to Pelican Cay. I speak a little Italian. I thought I might hang around a little. Maybe teach some soccer here. Get a job at a school? While you’re in school…if you’re interested…I know it’s the first chance you’ve had to spread your wings, to try something new, to…”

  “I love you, too.”

  She needed to say that now, right off the bat, because if she didn’t she might not be able to before she started crying. Her throat ached and tightened. Her eyes swam.

  She believed. She trusted.

  “Fiona—” He started to interrupt her, but this time she wouldn’t let him. She closed the space between them and put her fingers against his lips.