Regina sighed. She had once been considered one of his best.
Suddenly she wasn’t so sure that what she was about to do was a good idea. What if she’d changed so much that he didn’t even recognize her? What if he was disappointed in her when he discovered that she hadn’t even held a paintbrush in all these years? At one time Mikel’s approval had meant everything to her. In some tiny, almost forgotten part of her heart, it obviously still did.
She glanced at her reflection in a narrow window beside the door and saw the toll the years had taken, the lines on her face, the tiredness beneath her eyes. Perhaps, though, time had been no kinder to Mikel, she consoled herself. Few escaped its ravages forever.
But even acknowledging that, she couldn’t bring herself to take the last few steps that would carry her back into his life. Some things could never be recaptured. To try would only lead to disappointment.
Filled with uncertainty, she stood frozen to the spot until, suddenly, the decision was taken out of her hands. The door flew open and Mikel was there, his disbelieving gaze locked on hers.
“Gina?” he whispered, scanning her face intently. “My God, it is you, isn’t it? I saw from inside and couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Her heart thundered at the sound of his deep, almost raspy voice. Her senses spun as giddily as they had as a girl.
“Yes, Mikel. It is I.”
He reached out his hand as if he still couldn’t quite believe her presence was real. When his fingers brushed the curve of her cheek so, so gently, she trembled...just as she once had at caresses far more intimate. Memories came flooding back—sweet, sweet memories, long buried, where they could not torment her for the choices she had made.
His sensual lips curved into a wistful smile then, as if responding to his own memories. “You are here to take a lesson, perhaps?” he asked, as if she’d only been gone since yesterday or the day before.
“I...I don’t know,” she said honestly.
“You are here because you must be,” he said more briskly, planting his big hand squarely in the middle of her back and pushing her toward the door, taking charge as always.
Just inside he hesitated, looking down into her eyes. “I always knew one day you would return, my Gina. I knew.”
If only she had always been so certain, she thought as he swept her inside with such eagerness, such confidence, perhaps then her life would have been more bearable.
Upstairs in the huge loft with its perfect artist’s lighting cascading through the high northern windows, a dozen sensations assailed Regina all at once, carrying her back so many years—the smell of the paints, the vibrant splashes of color, the soft Hungarian music that always played in the background, the dust motes swirling in sunlight.
“It hasn’t changed,” she said in wonder, drawing one of Mikel’s once-familiar and very dear smiles.
“And I?” he asked. “Have I changed?”
His thick black hair shone with threads of silver now. His craggy, self-described peasant’s face was a bit more lined. His massive shoulders were slightly stooped. But his eyes, those wonderfully soulful black-as-midnight eyes, sparkled with the light and eagerness of a much younger man.
“You are the same,” she vowed. “Just as I remembered.”
He grabbed a palette and dabbed it with an array of colors, then pushed her toward an easel on which a blank white canvas waited. He pressed a brush into her hand and ordered, “Paint for me. Paint what you see when you look at me.”
From anyone else, it might have been an egotistical request, but Regina understood exactly what he wanted from her, what he needed.
But too much time had passed. She feared she could not give it to him, could not express on canvas the passion and the excitement she had once felt in his arms. The colors and images had flowed back then. Now her arthritic fingers ached just trying to clasp the brush that had once felt like a natural extension of her soul.
Tears filled her eyes as she looked at him. “I can’t. It’s been too long.”
Shock spread across his face. “You have not painted in all these years?”
She shook her head, filled with regret.
“But it was your life.”
Her art and him, she thought with silent dismay. She had given them both up to marry a man her family thought solid and dependable, Callie’s father. Jacob had dismissed her art as nonsense and thrown her paints away. She had come as close to leaving him then as she ever had, but in the end she had stayed. For her daughters.
Mikel tenderly brushed the dampness from her cheeks. “Then we will begin again, you and I. From the beginning.”
A sigh shuddered through her at his words. Could it possibly be so simple? “From the beginning,” she echoed, suddenly filled with hope for the first time in a very long time.
* * *
Jason was so distracted, they could have stolen the entire network out from under him and he would have barely noticed. He’d waited all day Sunday and most of Monday for some word from Dana. His private line and his cell phone had remained ominously silent.
It required every bit of restraint he possessed to keep from racing over to the studio where he could personally keep an eye on Callie, but he knew Terry would protect her with his life. Hopefully such a dramatic gesture would never be called for.
He didn’t know what to make of these threats and the break-in at Callie’s. Dana, who had far more experience with such things, hadn’t seemed overly alarmed, but she had agreed they couldn’t just wait to see what developed. She’d felt the need was urgent enough that she’d disrupted her precious time with her family to go charging off to Wisconsin.
He’d exaggerated only slightly when he’d told Callie that Dana was the best P.I. in the Midwest. She’d actually been out of the business for
