I want to stay here forever.
She reminded herself that Jefferson had broken that spell. That Jefferson broke all the spells. She wanted things to deepen between them. He did not.
And that was good. It was a good thing that one of them could be pragmatic when the storm was building all around them, threatening to pull them right into its vortex of power.
She looked at the dress again. If ever a dress could challenge a man’s best intentions, it would be this one. Is that what she wanted to do?
It was what she wanted to do. She did not want to be safe anymore. She wanted to fling herself into the storm, to put herself at the mercy of love.
Love.
She looked at her drawing again and let that word wash over her, felt the power of the feeling that accompanied it. Could she really pull this off?
She thought with longing of the woman she had been, ever so briefly, when that storm was over.
Fearless.
She wanted that again. She wanted to be fearless.
What about getting his house ready for the photographers? She was going to have to do both. She was going to have to be fearless and pragmatic.
Well, anyone who could coax cookies and a sewing project out of thirty reluctant teenagers could most certainly handle the pragmatic aspects of the assignment she had given herself.
She got up from her desk. She went over to those cubbies filled with fabric and sorted through them. They were swatches. It was almost as if they had been put here for show—to add splashes of bright color to the room—rather than to be of use. Angie had managed to scavenge her bathing suit cover from these, but the dress in the sketch was another matter.
She went to the window and stared out at the darkened lake. The breeze lifted a curtain and it caught her eye.
Angie laughed out loud. It was pure white silk. She caressed it with her fingers. She couldn’t use his curtains for a dress, could she?
The old Angie might not have been able to. The new Angie got on a chair and tugged the draperies down off their hooks.
* * *
Jefferson would not admit how much he missed Angie. Since that night they had danced in the living room, and in a moment of weakness when he had wanted to give her everything she wanted, and had invited her to a real dance, he had barely seen her.
She was a flurry of motion—racing through the house, cleaning crazily, organizing for the photo shoot and then disappearing up the stairs to her room.
She was making meals—in the middle of the night?—and leaving him notes on how to cook them, but he missed her. He was glad they were going to have a whole evening together to just enjoy each other.
On Saturday evening, he came out of his room. He and Hailey had often gone to events that required this kind of garb—the opera, plays, fund-raising balls. He had not dressed like this for a long time. He had never felt like this about it, either. Strangely awkward, almost shy. Standing in the hall, he put a finger between his collar and his neck, trying for a bit of breathing space.
He heard a sound on the stairs that led to Angie’s room.
He turned slowly. He dropped his finger from his collar. It was hopeless. He was never going to be able to breathe. Every thought of the impression he was going to make on her fled him as the sight of her—the impression she was making on him—filled his every sense and stole his breath away.
Could this woman be Angie?
Even in that ultra-sexy bathing suit, he had never seen her look like this.
She floated down the staircase toward him on a cloud of white. The dress hugged her upper body, showed the sensuous curve of her recently sun kissed shoulders, then flared out, sweeping around her. She looked like a princess in a fairy tale.
“What?” she asked, pausing on the stairs.
Could she not know what a vision she was?
“Where on earth did that dress come from?” he managed to choke out when that was not what he wanted to say at all. “I’m pretty sure the Emporium does not stock anything like that.”
“Have you ever seen The Sound of Music?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Curtains,” she said. “I’m afraid I owe you a set of curtains.”
He vaguely recalled a scene in that movie where curtains had been transformed into play clothes. It was a movie. They would have had a team of tailors and seamstresses working on that.
“How did you do this?” he asked. Another movie came to mind. Cinderella, where the cleaning girl was transformed.
As if drawn to her by an invisible cord, he went and stood before her, looking up the stairs at her, at the sweep of the dress, the delicacy of her naked shoulder, the formfitting bodice.
“This is what I always wanted to do,” she said. “I wanted to design clothes.”
“And you didn’t, why?” He could hear the astonishment in his own voice.
“Because I was told to pick a practical career, and that’s what I did. Instead of following my own heart.”
She was looking at him with an unnerving intensity, as if that was all changed now. As if she fully intended to follow her own heart from now on.
He realized it was not the dress, alone, that made her beautiful. He realized it was her radiance. He had invited her to go to the dance as a gift to her, to give her something she had always wanted.
Jefferson contemplated the nature of gifts.
For this one had come back to him. It felt as if what he had given her since she arrived, the gift of sanctuary, had unveiled her bit by bit.
Now she stood before him, confident and radiant, the woman she really was, the woman she had always been meant to be.
And so the gift was returned to him. In leading her back to herself, it was he who had come fully alive. This gift of awareness did not fall gently against him. No, it smashed into him with all the force that was needed to take what was left of the severely compromised armor he had put around his heart and leave it in shards.
It felt as though he was stepping over that shattered armor as he reached for her, as her hand came into his, as he placed his kiss of recognition and welcome first on the top of her hand and then on her cheek.
He could fight no more.
They went by boat to Anslow. That journey, through inky waters, the spray from the boat white against blackness of the sky and the lake was the beginning of the magic. When they arrived he had to squeeze in to find a place to tie up, there were so many boats at the dock. A horse and carriage were at the end of it, waiting to take guests who had arrived by water to the community hall.
The
