He didn’t know what to say to that. Bad coincidence? That was stretching the boundaries of logic, but unless she had a lot more to tell him, he couldn’t think of anything else it could be but coincidence. “And this morning?”
She gave a low, harsh laugh. “This morning, when I saw the canvas had been moved again and another was in its place, all I could think was that someone else I knew had died. I was too scared to look at it, because I was afraid—terrified—that I had painted you.”
The meaning behind that admission went through him like a bolt of lightning. He clenched his fists to keep himself from reaching for her. He didn’t dare touch her now, or they wouldn’t get out of bed until sometime tomorrow. The look she gave him was stripped bare of the layers of prickly defenses she usually kept between her and the world.
“Did you?” he asked, and managed to keep his voice calm. He had the feeling she was grateful he hadn’t pounced on that telling admission.
She laughed again, this time with real amusement. “No. I painted shoes. Two of them. One man’s, and one woman’s.”
He grinned at the incongruity. “Shoes, huh? This may start a new trend. Some people would be able to read all sorts of deep meaning into two lonely, mismatched shoes.”
She snorted. “Yeah, the same people who buy a VanDern and think they’ve bought anything a monkey couldn’t reproduce.”
The disdain in her voice made him laugh. Now he felt able to touch her again, so he lifted another curl and watched it wrap around his finger. He examined the curl, rubbed his thumb over it to separate the silky strands, and carefully considered his next question. Maybe it shouldn’t be a question at all. “Now tell me why you were convinced that if you had painted me, I would be dead.”
He glanced at her in time to see the panic in her eyes. “You’ll think I’m crazy,” she said.
“Try me. I’m not leaving you alone until I know what’s going on.”
She wiggled again, frowning impatiently at the blanket. “Let me out of this thing. I feel as if I’m in a straitjacket, and considering what I just said, it’s making me very uncomfortable.”
Smiling, he tugged hard on the blanket, loosening it. She started to push it aside, then remembered she was almost naked and settled for tucking it under her arms. She sighed. “About a year ago, weird things began happening.”
“Weird, how?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, traffic lights turning green whenever I approached, parking spaces at the front of the row emptying just as I got there, that sort of thing.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Convenient.” He remembered how fast the trip from the gallery to here had been. It had been almost miraculous, the way traffic had cleared out of their way. It had irritated the hell out of him, because he had been looking forward to spending more time with her.
“Yeah, I kind of like that part. And I like the way the plants look. Before, they tended to die on me, but now, no matter what I do, they just keep growing and blooming.” She pointed at a plant with delicate pink blossoms. “That’s a Christmas cactus. This is the sixth time already it has bloomed this year.”
He rubbed his jaw. “I assume it isn’t supposed to do that.”
“Well, it never has before.”
“What else?” There had to be something else. Traffic signals and parking spaces wouldn’t make her this uneasy.
She shivered suddenly, alarming him. But her skin remained smooth, and he realized it was her thoughts that had made her shiver. She stared at him, blue eyes stark and haunted. “I began seeing ghosts,” she whispered.
CHAPTER TEN
Sweeney couldn’t tell if he believed her or not, and for a moment it didn’t matter. The relief at having told someone else was enormous, and until now she hadn’t realized how much strain she had been under, facing this alone. His dark gaze never wavered from her face, and his hand remained gentle in her hair.
Then she realized that it did matter what he thought. It mattered very much. Three days before she wouldn’t have believed she could respond to any man the way she did to him. She was uncertain how he had become so important to her so fast, but she couldn’t argue with the truth. And it was because he was important to her that she cared about his opinion. What if he thought she was a crackpot and decided she was more trouble than she was worth?
Suddenly she couldn’t look at him, and she felt her face heating again. Oh, God, where had her sense of caution gone? How had she let a threat to take her to the doctor, of all things, convince her to spill her guts like that? She had even been thinking of going to a doctor herself, just to see if her constant chill was in any way caused by a physical ailment. As threats went, that one was a real wimp.
“I don’t know why I told you all that,” she mumbled.
He merely looked at her and continued to play with her hair. “Yes, you do,” he finally said in a mild tone. “How do you know they’re ghosts?”
“Because they’re dead,” she said irritably, and scowled at him. “When you go to someone’s funeral and then see him in the supermarket parking lot a month later, you pretty well know something strange is going on.” She didn’t know what to make of that cryptic “Yes, you do,” so she ignored it.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s a given.” His mouth quirked as if he was struggling to hide a grin, and she wondered just what it was about her that he thought was so funny. He frequently looked as if he was trying not to laugh.