Hold My Heart by Barbara Delinsky

Author:Barbara Delinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 6

Jed’s offer could not have been more propitious. During the next few weeks she used the Mercedes more than she had ever planned. It began with short trips to local spots to draw, then developed into longer jaunts into nearby towns to scout the local crafts shops and markets. Between each of her trips, she worked feverishly in her studio, designing stencils, painting each in its turn on the stretched silk, then forcing the paint through the screen for another color added. As she finished each completed set of prints, several were sent automatically back to Marika in Essex as proof that she was, indeed, working in this mountain hideaway.

“There’s been a noticeable improvement in your work,” her friend suggested during a phone call following receipt of the latest group of prints. “Not that I didn’t love your work before, but these new things are deeper … more thoughtful … more mature. They’re superb, Jill!”

The breath she’d been subconsciously holding slipped through her lips in relief. “Do you really think so?” Marika’s opinion meant much to her, representative as she was of the art community from which Gillian had come.

“No doubt about it! Something must be agreeing with you! Is it the air? The rest? Your grandmother? Or that gorgeous hunk of a man you’re living with?”

Gillian gasped. “Marika! You make it sound like something it isn’t! Jed and I have a perfectly innocent relationship…”

“Your choice or his?”

“For Pete’s sake, he’s simply doing a favor for my grandmother!”

The argument sounded good, yet it stirred up a maelstrom of emotion within Gillian. For, from that first visit to her grandmother, there had been a subtle change in the relationship between her and Jed. Where before he had treated her as a patient on the mend, now he saw her as a viable individual spirit. Particularly once she had her own source of support and free use of a car for mobility, she saw herself in that same way. And she saw Jeremy Dawson more and more in the romantic light in which she’d viewed no other man before. They spent hours together on the weekends, breakfast, dinner, and evenings together—barring those days he spent in the city. Gillian grew to look forward to this time with him—savoring his company, delighting in his good looks, reveling in the attention he paid her. However, that attention stopped short of a repeat of the passionate scene they’d played out in the swimming pool that night … and, much as she fought it, she was sorry!

It was so difficult to be near him, day after day, night after night, knowing of his sleeping form but a short distance down the hall, without being able to satisfy this increasingly nagging ache deep in her feminine core. They lived the life of a married couple in so very many ways—but one. Did she love him? He had picked up the pieces and put her together. He had comforted her, cared for her, and cleared the way for her to find herself.

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