“Darling, it was after two in the morning when Ben came in last night.”
“He stayed with you?”
“Of course he did. Did you think he would drive all the way back out to the farm at that hour?”
“I honestly never gave it a thought,” Kathleen responded. If she had, she would have sent him packing a lot earlier just to avoid this exact misconception on his aunt’s part.
“Yes, I imagine there was very little thinking going on at that hour,” Destiny said happily.
Kathleen choked on her coffee. “Destiny!” she protested. “It’s not like that with Ben and me.”
Okay, so she was ignoring all the kissing that had gone on from time to time between them, but very little of that had occurred in the wee hours of the night before. A safe good-night peck on the cheek was the closest they’d come.
Destiny frowned. “It’s not?” she asked, her disappointment plain. “The two of you aren’t getting closer?”
“Of course we are. We’re friends,” Kathleen said, almost as unhappy with the label as Destiny obviously was.
Destiny sighed. “Friends,” she echoed. “Yes, well, I suppose that’s a good start. I can see, though, that I’ll have to do a little more work on my end.”
“No,” Kathleen said fiercely. “You’ve done enough. Let it be, Destiny, please.”
Ben’s aunt looked taken aback by her vehemence. “Why are you so opposed to anything coming of this relationship with my nephew?”
Kathleen was having a hard time remembering the answer to that herself. It had started because she’d been afraid to trust another man. It had been magnified by the fact that Ben had a reputation as a moody, reclusive artist.
But the truth was that he was nothing like what she’d been led to believe, in fact quite the opposite. He was so far removed from the kind of man her ex-husband had been that the only thing the two had in common was their gender.
She faced Destiny and tried not to let her bewilderment show. It would be just what the sneaky woman needed to inspire her to get on with her campaign.
“It’s not that I’m opposed to anything happening with Ben,” she said candidly. “But the two of us are adults. We don’t need someone running interference for us. You’ve done your part. Now leave it be. If anything’s meant to come of this, it will happen.”
“Even if I can see that you’re both too stubborn to admit what’s right under your noses?”
“Even then,” Kathleen told her.
Destiny nodded slowly. “Okay, then, I can do that.”
Her easy agreement made Kathleen instantly suspicious. “Really?”
“For now,” Destiny told her cheerfully. “I suppose I should go along to my meeting. Thanks for the coffee and the muffin. Our little visit has been very enlightening.”
Enlightening? Kathleen thought as she watched Destiny depart at the same brisk pace with which she’d entered. In what way had their exchange been enlightening? Destiny had said it in a way that suggested she’d read some undercurrent of which Kathleen was completely unaware.
She shivered in the morning chill and then made herself shut the door. If Ben left her feeling edgy and discombobulated, his aunt had the capacity to strike terror in her. Because it seemed that Destiny could see into the future...and saw a very different picture from the one Kathleen envisioned.
Kathleen was dreaming of a wildly successful showing of Ben Carlton paintings in her gallery, while Destiny was clearly picturing the two of them living happily ever after. Kathleen didn’t even want to contemplate that image, because it was quickly becoming far too tempting to resist.
11
With Destiny’s visit still fresh in her mind, Kathleen made a decision that she needed to seal this deal with Ben to show his paintings. The sooner that was done, the sooner she’d be able to get him—and his clever, matchmaking aunt—right back out of her life. Of course, solitude no longer held the appeal it once had, but she’d get used to it again.
She was sitting at her desk trying very hard not to look at her half-finished portrait of Ben, when the bell on the outer door rang. Heading into the gallery, she plastered a welcoming smile on her face, a smile that faltered when she found not the expected customer but her mother.
Shocked, it took her a moment to compose herself before she finally spoke, drawing her mother’s attention away from the most dramatic of Boris’s paintings.
“Mother, this is a surprise. What on earth are you doing here?” she asked, trying to inject a welcoming note into her voice when all she really felt was dismay. She’d expected that if her mother ever did show up in Alexandria, it certainly wouldn’t be without warning.
“I decided to take you up on your invitation to visit.” Prudence tilted her head toward the large painting. “I can’t say that I like it, but it’s quite impressive, isn’t it?”
“The critic from the Washington paper called it a masterpiece,” Kathleen said. She still had the uneasy sense that her mother was merely making small talk, that at any second the other shoe would drop and land squarely on Kathleen’s head.
“I know,” Prudence replied. “I read his review.”
That was the second shock of the morning. “You did?”
Her mother gave her an impatient look. “Well, of course, I did. Your grandfather finds every mention of your gallery on the Internet and prints the articles out for me.”
“He does?”
Her mother’s impatience turned to what seemed like genuine surprise. “What did you think, darling, that we didn’t care about you?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Kathleen said. “I thought you all thoroughly disapproved of what I was doing.”
Her mother gave her a sad look. “Yes, I can see why it must have seemed that way, since none of us have come down here. I’m sorry, Kathleen. It was selfish of us. We wanted you back home, and we all thought this would pass, that it was nothing more than a little hobby.”
Kathleen felt the familiar stirring
