True Colors (5 page)

Max’s gaze narrowed on Emma. Evidently, he
hadn’t expected her to be so blunt, to express her fear so
honestly. She hadn’t expected to express it so honestly, either.
But she’d hoped that if she gave voice to her panic, she’d win a
few points for candor.

“I don’t want to make you homeless,” Max
said. Maybe he had a conscience, after all. Maybe she could guilt
him into letting her stay at the house until she found a new
residence. And some space to run her classes and Dream Portraits,
because she’d need the income to pay for the new residence.

She started to thank him for his compassion,
but he cut her off before she could speak. “The thing is, you can’t
run a business from a private house without getting a zoning
variance.”

“This is Brogan’s Point,” Monica reminded him
gently. “Everyone knows everyone here in town. We aren’t sticklers
for those kinds of things.”

“What if one of Emma’s students tripped and
fell in my house? As the owner, I’d be liable.”

“There’s nothing in the lease that says I
can’t have guests in the house,” Monica pointed out. “Let’s say I
had a guest and she tripped and fell. You’d still be liable.”

“I’ve got insurance for that. I don’t have
insurance for a student paying to participate in a commercial
venture in my house.”

The waitress arrived with their drinks and a
heaping bowl of mixed nuts. “Gus said to tell you if you want
something more substantial, the wings are good tonight,” the
waitress informed them.

“Do you want wings?” Monica asked Max.

He shook his head.

Once the waitress departed,
Monica took over. “The lease runs through the end of June. If you
don’t sell the house July 1
^st
, you may as well let us stay
there month-to-month until you do sell—or at least until we can
make alternate living arrangements. No sense having the house stand
empty if you can be earning some money with it.”

Emma experienced a surge of gratitude. She
knew Monica was saying this on her behalf. Monica already had
alternate living arrangements.

“Money isn’t the issue,” Max argued.

Before he could clarify what the issue was, a
man approached their table. He had a blandly handsome face topped
by light brown hair, with sideburns that crawled just a little too
far down his cheeks. He wore a cheap suit, his tie loosened. Emma
suppressed a grimace. Monica did nothing to suppress her grin.
“Jimmy! I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“Hey, babe!” Jimmy leaned across Emma to kiss
Monica’s cheek. “Yeah, a few of the guys decided to do a little
TGIF action after work.” He gestured toward a clot of young men,
all dressed much like Jimmy. He was a car salesman. Emma assumed
his buddies were, too.

“It’s not Friday,” Monica pointed out.

“That never stopped us. Hi, Emma,” Jimmy said
belatedly, and rather coolly. She suspected that his opinion of her
matched her opinion of him. He shot Max a quizzical look, then
turned back to Monica. “Who’s this? Emma’s new squeeze?”

Monica sent him a warning glance. “This is
Max Tarloff, our landlord.”

“Oh.” Jimmy held up his hands in mock
surrender. “My bad. I keep telling you, Monica, move in with me and
you won’t have to deal with a landlord.”

“She’d have to deal with you,” Emma muttered.
Someone must have stuffed some money into the jukebox, because it
suddenly began blasting an old Rolling Stones song, drowning out
Emma’s words. Just as well. She didn’t need Jimmy joining Mad Max
in the Let’s-Give-Emma-Shit club.

“Jimmy.” Monica’s tone grew steely, even
though she was still smiling. “Can we talk for a minute?”

Emma slid out of the booth without being
asked. Monica followed her out of the booth, apologized to Max,
clamped her hand around Jimmy’s elbow and hustled him away from the
table.

Emma resumed her seat. Max gazed after Monica
for a moment, then shook his head. “I tried to talk to her in her
office this afternoon, but her phone kept ringing.”

“She’s a busy lady,” Emma said. “Always in
demand.”

Max regarded Emma in silence for a moment.
“That’s an old song,” he finally said. “Microsoft used it in an ad
for one of its operating systems a few years back.”

“That jukebox is full of old songs. And
nobody knows what they are, according to Monica.”

“What do you mean? Aren’t they listed on the
front of the jukebox?”

“Nope. You put a quarter in—the price is as
ancient as the music—and you never know what songs will come out.
It’s supposed to be haunted, or magical, or something.”

A faint smile whispered across Max’s lips. “I
don’t believe in magic.”

“I do,” Emma said, meeting his gaze.

His smile widened. “Really?”

“I don’t believe you can
say
abracadabra
and wave a magic wand and make things happen. But I do believe
you can take a bunch of paint and spread it across a canvas in such
a way that it changes the world. It’s just colors and shapes, but
those colors and shapes can reveal the artist’s soul—and the
subject’s soul, too—and it can move people to tears. How can that
not be magic?”

“Lots of things move people to tears. It
isn’t magic. It’s a matter of brain chemistry, reflexes,
psychological issues. If you fall and scrape your knee, you might
cry. That’s not magic. It’s the body’s neurological reaction to
pain.”

Emma hadn’t expected to venture into a
scientific discussion with him, let alone a philosophical one. She
considered pointing out that if he evicted her from his house,
she’d probably wind up weeping hysterically, and that wouldn’t be
because she’d scraped her knee. That would be much more akin to
magic. Black magic. Bad magic.

But she was too intrigued by the analytical
turn he’d taken. “Are you a scientist?” she asked. “I thought maybe
you were a lawyer, given how hung up you are on liability insurance
and clauses and all that.” She realized she knew nothing about Max,
other than that he lived in California and he was her landlord. And
that he was a hell of a lot younger than she’d expected. And that
if he’d been responsible for the décor of his house, he had no
taste.

And that he had beautiful eyes. A beautiful
mouth, too. His lips were thin but distinct, anchored by his sharp
nose above and his strong chin below.

“I work in the high-tech industry,” he
said.

“High-tech is science. It’s magic, too, if
you ask me.”

Another smile flickered across his face. His
mouth was even more beautiful when he was smiling.

“How did you wind up with a
house in Brogan’s Point?” she asked. “Especially
that
house. It’s so
atypical for this area. Most houses around here are very
New-England style. Colonials, Cape Cods, saltboxes…and you own this
amazing modern house with walls of glass.”

His smile vanished. “Why I bought the house
is irrelevant,” he said dryly. “All that matters is that I plan to
sell it, as soon as possible.”

“Right. But I think Monica made a good point
about letting us stay in the house until you sell it.”

He shook his head, then lifted his glass and
sipped his beer. “When I was a kid, my family rented an apartment.
Ugly little place. One bedroom. I slept on the couch in the living
room. There was a big water stain on the kitchen ceiling. But it
was in a gentrifying neighborhood, and the landlord decided to take
the building co-op. He said we could stay in the apartment until it
sold. Every time he brought in a potential buyer, one of my parents
or I would be sure to stare up at the kitchen ceiling. The buyer
would look up, notice the water stain, and leave. We wound up
living in that apartment an extra two years until the landlord
finally fixed the leak and repainted the ceiling.”

She tried to imagine a pint-size version of
Max, all tousled dark curls and attitude, his piercing blue eyes
aimed at a water stain. “Your house doesn’t have any leaks,” she
noted. “Your ceilings look fine.”

“I’m just saying, it wouldn’t be hard for you
to delay a potential sale. You’re smart. You’d find a way.”

She shouldn’t have been so
pleased that he considered her smart. But she
was
smart—smart enough to change the
subject. “So, you’re in high tech. What are you, a computer
scientist?”

He mulled over his reply. She didn’t think
she’d asked such a difficult question, but he seemed to feel he had
to weigh his answer carefully. Finally, he said, “My work isn’t
that interesting.”

His evasiveness made it interesting. “Let me
guess,” she said. “You developed some amazing new app and became a
billionaire.”

Another tenuous smile. “You found me out,” he
confessed.

At least he had a sense of humor. A
begrudging one, but it made him seem a bit more human to her. She
visualized the Dream Portrait she’d do of him—his angular features,
his dazzling eyes, the thick, dark waves of his hair, and a
background of computers, code, tablets, graphics, gadgets and
gizmos. If he were a billionaire, he could certainly afford one of
her paintings. He could afford millions of them.

She smiled back at him. Hell, she’d offer him
a discounted price on his portrait. She would have such a good time
painting it.

The Rolling Stones song ended and the jukebox
pumped out a new song. An old song, really, but Emma recognized it.
It was one of the many songs her mother used to sing when she was
gardening or puttering around the house. Emma’s mother had an awful
voice; if she occasionally hit the right note, it was purely by
luck. She also had a habit of mangling the words. Yet those classic
rock and pop songs her mother used to torture had embedded
themselves in Emma’s memory.

I see your true colors, shining through…

When someone with a good voice sang it, it
was a beautiful ballad. Emma felt a lush warmth fill her as the
singer’s voice curled around the words, sweet and searing. It
vanquished the chill of her damp hair and the fear of homelessness
hanging over her. She felt enveloped in the song.

Her gaze met Max’s across the table, and she
felt even warmer. He stared at her as if suddenly transfixed. By
the song? By Emma?

She heard nothing but the music. The din of
conversation, the clink of glasses, the rhythm of footsteps and
scrapes of chairs against the floor—all the noise faded. Nothing
entered her but the song, and the sight of Max Tarloff watching her
intently, intensely.

The bar disappeared. The other patrons. The
waitress. The tall, square-jawed, tawny-haired bartender. The beers
on the table, and the bowl of munchies. The entire universe
evaporated, leaving behind only a song.

A song, and the man facing Emma.

When the song ended, silence.

And then Monica’s voice, shattering the odd
spell the song had spun around Emma. “Hello? Slide over, Emma, so I
can sit.”

Emma gave her head a sharp shake. She noticed
Max doing the same. Embarrassed that she’d zoned out so completely,
she shifted on the banquette, moving herself and her beer toward
the wall so Monica could join her and Max at the table. “I’m so
sorry,” Monica said to Max, apparently unaware of whatever had
happened in the cozy booth while she’d been away.

What
had
happened? Emma had no idea. She
felt as she’d been in the grip of a fever, and now it had broken
and she was healthy again, but altered. The song was still inside
her, tattooed onto her soul.

“That was a friend of mine,” Monica explained
to Max, gesturing toward Jimmy, who had gathered with his buddies
at the bar. “He can be clueless sometimes.”

Ordinarily, Emma would have cracked that
Monica was correct on the “clueless” part of that claim, but
underestimating sorely on the “sometimes” part of it. But she
didn’t trust herself to speak. Her mouth felt the way it did after
dental work, before the Novocain wore off.

Max flexed his lips, and once again Emma
wondered if he was recovering from the same weird symptoms that had
overtaken her. He took a sip of beer, cleared his throat and said,
“That’s all right.”

“I feel bad about the insurance thing,”
Monica said. “If you want Emma and me to pay the additional premium
so your liability is covered, we can do that.”

Emma wanted to slam her foot into Monica’s
shin—not only because she owed Monica an under-the-table kick but
because Emma couldn’t afford to pay an additional premium. Monica
didn’t earn much, but she received a steady salary, paid weekly,
and if she had to, she could ask her parents for help. They were
big on urging their daughter to be self-reliant, but in a pinch,
they’d come through for her.

Emma’s parents were big on self-reliance,
too. In a pinch, she believed they would want to help her out, too.
But like her, they had no money to spare.

“It doesn’t seem worth it,
since the lease is up in a couple of months. And there’s the zoning
issue,” Max said. His brain-fog must have dissipated more quickly
than Emma’s, if he could discuss lease dates and zoning laws. He
turned to look at her, and she was once again stricken by the color
of his eyes. So very blue.
True
blue
, she thought, the song shimmering
inside her. She saw his true colors—or at least the true blue of
his irises.

“How about if I help you find a place outside
my house where you can teach your art class?” he said.

Emma gaped, as startled by his offer as by
the cool beauty of his eyes. “That would be great,” she
managed.

“All right.” He slugged down the rest of his
beer. “Let’s see what we can scare up.” Abruptly, he scooted out of
the booth and stood. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, then strode
across the tavern to the exit and out.