Moonlight in the Morning (Edilean 6)

“So you did talk to this Lucy!” Kim said.

Jecca picked up her bag. “Is there someplace I can get some shampoo? I’m about out.”

“Sure. It’s homemade around here and we put lye in it, but it won’t hurt your hair too much.”

“Funny,” Jecca said. “I just need—”

“Ma’am?”

They turned to see their waitress holding out a large, colorful book to Jecca. “You left this behind.”

Taking the book, Jecca stared at it. Cupid and Psyche was the title, and it was profusely illustrated with gorgeous watercolors.

“Jecca!” Kim said. “You’ve really been thinking a lot about my ad campaign. You are such a good friend! Could I borrow this?” She reached for the book.

“No!” Jecca said and clasped it to her chest. “I mean, I need to look at it more before I come up with some ideas.”

“Okay,” Kim said, smiling, “but I get it next.”

They stayed in Edilean for only an hour more. Kim had meetings and Jecca was dying to get to work. She wanted to set up her table and put out all her supplies in exactly the order she wanted them in. And she wanted to start photographing the orchids in the light of the setting sun.

But m Kh=" start ostly, she wanted to go through the book Tristan had left for her. She couldn’t help smiling as she thought about how he’d gone to the trouble of finding and purchasing the book, then hiding it . . . Where? In his sling? Somehow, he’d distracted Kim long enough to get it out and put it beside Jecca’s bag. She hadn’t noticed it but was very glad the waitress had.

Once she was back at the Wingate house, Jecca ran upstairs, flopped across the bed, and read the story of Cupid and Psyche. It wasn’t until the last page that there was a note from Tristan stuck inside.

I was wrong. They didn’t wed until after they fell in love. Tristan

She laughed. It was funny that he was pretending that she was the woman he wanted. “A woman he’s never even seen,” she said aloud.

She slipped the book under her pillows and went about setting up her makeshift studio. She got out her precious paper and laid out her brushes. Since school she’d invested in the best quality sable brushes, and treated them with all the care and respect they deserved.

She put individual enameled dishes that she used for her paints in stacked office trays. Jecca liked to layer her paints. If she wanted green, she’d put down a very thin glaze of blue, let it dry, then put another glaze of yellow on top. The resulting green was, to her eye, more luminous than if she’d just mixed blue and yellow on a palette and spread it on the paper.

Her practice of letting colors dry between applications, plus her frequent use of masking fluid, made her paintings take weeks. But to her, the result was what mattered.

She got out her travel box, the one she used when she went outside to sketch. Her father had made it of fine-grained mahogany.

“That should hold what you use,” he said when he presented it to her the second Christmas she was home from art school. Unknown to her, he’d gone through her big, worn-out canvas bag and measured everything inside it. It held what she needed when she did her quick sketches, where she didn’t take the time to layer but used a kit that held a dozen different colors. A few weeks before, Jecca had been in tears because her wet colors had bled onto what she’d painted.

“You turn them up sideways and they run,” her brother had said, as though she were a moron.

Her dad put his arm around her and patted her shoulder. At Christmas he’d given her the box that had space for her paper, paints, brushes, and a separate place inside for her completed work.

Jecca had loved the kit so much that she’d danced around the room with it, making her father and brother laugh. Later, she’d painted a picture of her dad and Joey bent over a new hand plane. Their faces showed an identical look of love for the tool—and for each other.

Jecca ran her fingers over the grooves for her pencils and her brushes and thought of her dad. The last few years hadn’t been happy for him. He was always butting heads with Joey’s wife, Sheila. She had turned out to be extremely ambitious, and she didn’t see any reason why her father-in-law shouldn’t retire and give the hardware store to Joey.

“Tell her that when the queen r Kn tm">?etires I will!” Joe had shouted at his son.

“What queen?” Sheila asked. “Is he talking about that club down on the corner? I don’t go into places like that.”

During one of the fights—which Jecca worked to stay out of—she’d said that Sheila’s ambition was inversely proportional to her intelligence. Her dad laughed, Joey glowered, and Sheila had asked what that meant.

The “Sheila War,” as Jecca called it, was one of the major reasons she’d so readily accepted Kim’s invitation to spend a peaceful summer in Edilean.

Jecca was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice Lucy standing at the open door to her bedroom.

“I don’t mean to interrupt you,” Lucy said. She was wearing a flowery bathrobe and looked like she was headed for the shower. “It’s just that it’s nearly three o’clock and you said you might like to join us.”