tilted his head slightly to one side and gave her a lopsided grin which made him look about twelve years old.
And her poor lonely heart melted all over again.
She smiled back, her defences weakened by the wonderful charm and warmth of this man she cared about so very much, who was standing so very close and yet seemed beyond reach.
‘What have you been doing with yourself these past weeks?’ Scott whispered. ‘Travelling the world with that camera of yours?’
‘Actually, I’ve been working on my own projects, right here.’ She waved her right hand in the air and looked up at the white-painted ceiling. ‘I thought that I might stay in one place for a while.’ Her voice quivered a little. ‘In fact, I decided to take a year’s leave from the media company and focus on painting for a while. See where it takes me.’
Scott glanced quickly over her shoulder before turning his gaze back to her face. ‘You’ve worked wonders. It looks amazing.’
His fingers traced a line along her chin from ear to throat. ‘My portrait is stunning. You should be very proud of your talents, Toni. I believe you have it in you to achieve amazing things with your work. Photographs, painting. It’s all part of your creative genius. You’re destined for wonderful things, my girl.’
His girl?
‘Oh, Scott, I’ve been such an idiot,’ she whispered.
His reply was to cup Toni’s head between his hands, his long fingers so gentle and tender and loving that her heart melted even more.
‘You were right, Scott. I did need to paint your portrait. And it wasn’t just for the cash, although it has been very useful. It was more than that. A lot more.’
Her head dropped forward on to his chest so that when she spoke her words were swallowed up in the warmth of his fleece shirt.
His reply was a low sigh of contentment as he wrapped his arms tighter around her back and drew her even closer so that she was totally encased in his loving embrace.
‘Ah. She finally admits that I am a genius in all things. Happy days.’
‘You don’t get everything right. You thought that I couldn’t understand what it was like to see the Elstrom heritage slip away from you. But you are so wrong about that.’
Words and feelings whirled around inside her head and her heart so fast that she thought she might pass out if it wasn’t for Scott’s strong arms holding her upright.
But how could she explain without giving away a secret that she had sworn to her parents that she would never tell anyone unless she had to?
Toni closed her eyes and listened to the sound of Scott’s heartbeat. It was strong and clear and it beat for her and only her. She was certain of that now.
It was so hard to step back from Scott but she could still feel his arms around her as she whispered, ‘I need to show you something. Okay?’
Sliding away, she took hold of Scott’s hand and with one quick smile she led him into the bedroom and gestured for him to sit on the bed.
‘If this is a lingerie display I may have to call Freya and tell her that I’m missing dinner.’
With a quick chuckle, Toni shook her head. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but this is more of an art display.’
Toni knelt down next to her bed and tugged an old battered leather suitcase out from underneath. Taking a long juddery breath, Toni slowly pressed the metal sliders away and felt the lid of the suitcase spring up as the pressure was released.
Suddenly exhausted, Toni sat on the floor next to the suitcase with her back pressed against the bed and her legs outstretched in front of her.
Slowly and with shaking hands, she lifted the suitcase lid and sat for a few moments in silence. Staring back at her was the sweet smiling face of the nine-year-old Amy. It was the last portrait that she had ever painted and signed under her own name. Lifting up the thin wooden light canvas, Toni smiled and stroked the edges as a freckle-faced happy girl with long hair and a turned-up nose and missing teeth grinned back at her.
When she finally found the words Toni was speaking more towards the picture than to Scott but she knew that he was listening.
‘Every brush stroke of this painting was a delight. Our annual holiday had been in Cornwall for a couple of weeks the summer after I turned seventeen and we had all gone down to the beach for the afternoon. That was a rare event in itself. My father hated the sun and would much rather have stayed inside working on a commission he had to deliver the following week. It had been going too slowly and he couldn’t seem to concentrate on the work so Mother had suggested that he take the afternoon off.’
Toni smiled to herself. ‘It turned out to be a wonderful day of happy relaxed laughter and fun and sheer pleasure. Not too hot. Not too windy. Perfect blue skies and golden sandy beach. It was only natural that I should take some photographs of Amy and my parents. I had never intended them to become sketches or paintings. But somehow the moment I lifted the camera and pointed it towards Amy everything changed. I called out her name...Amy turned towards me.’
Toni flicked both hands in the air. ‘And bam. Just like that, I knew that the photograph would be wonderful. Not just good. But special and amazing. And that feeling was so astonishing and overwhelming that I started to cry.’
‘Cry? Why were you crying? Didn’t that make you happy?’
‘Yes. Amazingly, wonderfully happy. But it was sad at the same time. All my life I had been focusing and training on one thing—to be a painter and true artist like my parents. And in that moment, looking down that camera lens, I realized that it was all for nothing. Because I had never once felt that way with anything that I had painted. Not once. I could paint professionally any day of the week. And that’s not being immodest. It was the truth. But taking that photograph changed everything.’
She glanced over her shoulder at Scott and smiled through the tears that were streaming down her face. ‘Until then I was Antonia Baldoni, little daughter of Aldo and Emily Baldoni. Painters. Artists. But that moment made me realize that I could take everything I had learnt and apply it to creating portraits and paintings with more than canvas and paint. I had found my passion. Just like you found yours.
‘I was so excited that I was jumping up and down and laughing and crying at the same time and generally making my parents fearful that something terrible had happened. I couldn’t wait to tell them. I thought that they would be so excited that I had found the artist in me.’
‘Oh, Toni. I know where this is going. My poor girl.’
Her head dropped. ‘It came as a bit of a shock to realize that everything I believed about being part of a family of artists until that second was completely wrong. They were not excited for me at all. In fact they were horrified. Speechless with shock and horror. They felt it was a betrayal of my legacy. And then there was my dad’s work...’
Her hands got busy lining up the edges of sheets of her sketches and notebooks inside the suitcase. She focused on the gold-edged papers so that when Scott shuffled closer she could pretend that a collection of ragged teenage work was far more interesting than the man whose trouser leg was only inches away from her shoulder.
