Mr. Elliott Finds a Family by Susan Floyd

Author:Susan Floyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THE NEXT WEEK crawled by for Beth Ann, whose progress in the painting department was depressingly slow. She had at least made the color chart and discovered that this new brand wasn’t inferior to her old ones. She’d had a lengthy conversation with Fred, which made her feel even more like a fraud. She could talk art, she could see art, she just couldn’t produce art.

Christian, on the other hand, had no such difficulty. He was like a chameleon that changed colors with its surroundings, and after a few days, it was hard to remember what life was like before him. The switch of caretakers went so smoothly neither Bernie nor Iris seemed to show any distress when Beth Ann excused herself from the breakfast table to climb the stairs to her studio.

Midweek, after twenty minutes of whir, beep, beep, beep, beep, whir, whir, she heard a loud crack and was halfway down the stairs to intercede, when Christian told Bernie in an oh-so-sad voice that the toy—an annoying toy Beth Ann had declared unfixable several months earlier—was broken. It was then, as she stood frozen in the hall, that she realized Christian had his own way of doing things and it created a bevy of emotions inside of her.

“Boken?” Bernie asked, her tiny voice rising with the inflection of her question, maybe her disbelief.

“Yes, broken. Can’t be used. Died,” Christian said rationally to her. Beth Ann felt a pleasant shiver run down her back at the deep resonances of his voice.

“Fix it!” Bernie suggested. Beth Ann imagined Bernie batting her dark eyelashes in Christian’s direction. Who could resist that?

She heard a couple of rattles.

Then Christian confirmed his original diagnosis with the somber tone of an emergency room doctor, “No, it can’t be fixed. It died and went to heaven.”

“Oh, no!” Bernie’s voice was filled with sorrow.

Then the sorrow turned into heartfelt tears, and Beth Ann could hear Christian say hurriedly, “Maybe I can fix it.”

“Fix?” The tears were miraculously gone.

Beth Ann smothered laughter and knew that after Bernie was asleep, they would discuss her incredible powers of persuasion. She looked forward to the evenings, when both Bernie and Iris retired, and she and Christian sat in the kitchen or in the living room or most often, on the steps overlooking the garden and talked. About everything. About the death of her mother, about the desertion of her stepfather. About his experience in boarding school, then military school. His friend, Max. And Carrie. They always talked about Carrie. Carrie wove in and out of their conversations as if they both needed to resolve her life and her death.

If Beth Ann’s days crept by like stale molasses, the evenings were gone in an instant. She enjoyed Christian’s company so much that it was almost enough to keep her from being disappointed when he made no effort to kiss her again. Almost. As the nights turned hot, Beth Ann found herself tossing and turning restlessly in the daybed, wondering if he felt the physical tension between them or if she simply imagined it.

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