Now she was talking about mistletoe as if the kisses never happened at all.
“At least we’ll have plenty to tie up with a bow and put over the doorway,” he said.
If she wanted to ignore the kiss, then he could do the same thing.
* * *
When Sage painted, she concentrated on the underlying message of her picture while she carefully built dimension upon dimension to bring out depth and character.
Anyone can color a page in a coloring book.
That’s what her art teacher told them the first day she had walked into his class as a sophomore in high school. He’d seen something in her raw ability and had fussed at her for three years, critiquing and pressuring her to do better and better until she’d gotten the fantastic opportunity to study art in college.
Two years later she’d had all she wanted. She wanted to paint, not write creative English papers for the basic classes she had to take. So she quit and came home to the canyon. Grand supported her decision without a single negative remark. Four years later her bank account was substantial and she was doing exactly what she loved to do.
That morning she stood in front of the painting of the kitchen window and studied it. The angel was there, hiding in the snow. The little cardinal was on the window ledge, details in the way his feathers fluffed out against the cold. The next step was his eyes. She looked back at the window and either the original cardinal or one just like him flew out of the white flakes to land there again. Only this time he brought his mate, a female cardinal, with him to take a peek inside the house.
They stared into each other’s eyes for several seconds before they took flight. Sage looked back at the picture on the easel. It wouldn’t be difficult at all to put the female in the picture. The part of the picture where she would be was as yet unfinished. Sage picked up a tiny outline brush and painted the male cardinal’s eyes. The critics might not see the love at first glance. They might only see four panes in each of the upper and lower windows with a snowstorm in the background. Maybe after close scrutiny, they’d see the whole story and it would touch their hearts.
She was tempted to rush, but she forced herself to slow down, to shut her eyes several times and get the female bird’s part in the picture just right. Even though her colors weren’t as brilliant as her counterpart’s, and even though the wood between the panes separated them, she was his choice. And the angel was smiling down on them.
When both birds were to her satisfaction, she picked up the brush to paint in the mistletoe. She glanced back at the window and suddenly in her mind’s eye the mistletoe wasn’t lying on the sill but was tied up together with a bright red satin ribbon and hanging from the bottom of the poinsettia valance.
She blinked and it was back on the windowsill, but Sage Presley did not argue with her visions. If the gods said that she should hang the mistletoe then she would do just that. The times when she’d done what she wanted rather than what her visions gave her, those paintings had been a big flop. When she listened, the critics went wild with what she produced.
* * *
Creed and Noel played tug-of-war with an old wash rag he’d found in the scrub bucket. Creed held onto the rag with his hand and Noel pulled against it with all her might using her teeth. Even while he played, he kept a steady watch on the picture’s progress. He didn’t know jack shit about good art versus bad art. But the canvas on the easel was alive with color and motion. Two birds on the windowsill, feathers fluffed out against the cold wind, the promise of warmth behind the thin glass, mistletoe and poinsettias and an angel floating in the background.
When Sage painted the mistletoe above the cardinal’s head, Creed could actually feel the painting. He couldn’t have put a single thought into words, but it touched all the senses. He imagined one hand on the outside of the window and the other on the inside. One cold. One hot. He could taste the snowflakes on his lips, and the mistletoe reminded him of the kiss he and Sage had shared.
Lots of kisses were shared under the mistletoe during the Christmas season. He’d seen posters about Jesus being the reason for the season. If he turned it around maybe the season was the reason he felt such an attraction to Sage when she was definitely not the type that usually caught his eye.
* * *
Sage signed her name to the bottom of the picture, removed it from the easel, and carried it across the room where she hung it on two screws in a bare spot.
“Why’d you put it right there?” Creed asked.
“That’s where my work dries.”
“Now what?” Creed asked.
She pulled the rocking chair away from the fireplace and parked it in front of the picture. “I study it to determine what I could have done better. I look at it through the critic’s eye and the buyer’s. Then I decide if I’m going to burn it or put it with my stash to take to the gallery.”
“Good God, Sage! You’ve worked on that thing for hours and hours. Surely you wouldn’t burn it,” Creed said.
“What would you do if you were riding a horse, one that you’d raised yourself from birth, one you’d broken to the saddle and who’d carried you through a blizzard to a warm house, and he stepped in a hole and snapped his leg bone so badly that it stuck out of the skin and it could never be fixed? Would
