Return to Summerhouse (The Summerhouse 2)

“I have finished with your mouth, so why do you not tell me more about yourself?”

She laughed because he made it sound as though they’d just met this morning. “I’m boring,” she said, but in the next second she found herself telling him more of her life story. She had to adjust it to sound as though it happened in the eighteenth century, but it was the same tale. Wherever she lived, she still didn’t remember what happened.

“Love,” Russell said when she’d finished. “Whatever happened, it had to do with love. Only love can produce such hatred.”

“You sound as though you know all about true love,” Zoë said.

“More than I want to, but, no, before you ask, I have never been in love. Not in what I consider love, something that takes over my entire being. I’ve seen it in others and I want no part of it.”

“Me either,” Zoë whispered, then her eyes met Russell’s and for a moment the earth seemed to stand still. In the next second, the painting was abandoned and they were making love among the fragrant plants, on the sun-warmed stones.

Afterward, she lay in his arms. Their nude bodies were coated with sweat and they had quite a few leaves stuck to them.

“How long do we have before you leave?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“I don’t…” she began, but then drew in her breath. “I have three weeks, from beginning to end.”

“Half the time is gone,” he said. “Can you not stay?”

“I don’t think I’ll be given a choice. I think I’ll just leave.”

“Then it is sorcery.”

“Perhaps,” Zoë said. She put her head on her hand and looked at him. He had become so familiar to her in the last few days that she couldn’t imagine being without him. “You will find someone else as soon as—”

He put his fingertips over her lips. “Do not say that I will find someone else quickly. I will never find someone to share my heart and my work with. It would take three people to fulfill all that you and I have together.”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered, and tried to move away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. His arm held her, close to his big body.

“Are you saying I am not to tell you the truth about how I feel about you?” he said. “I have bedded many women, but I have never told any woman that I love her.”

“Russell,” she said as she tried to keep the tears from coming, “I can’t love you or anyone. I’m not—”

“Not what? Worthy of love?”

“I don’t know,” Zoë said. “I don’t know what I did that made people hate me and you’ve said it had something to do with love. I have dreams of seeing a man shoot himself in the head. Did I do that? Did I make a man take his own life?”

He moved her head to rest on his shoulder. “You say that you do not know what you did. The truth is that you do not know what happened. It is a very different concept. I think you should find out the truth.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I should find out the truth about what I did—Sorry, I should find out what happened.”

He stroked her hair. “And when will you do this?”

“I guess I’ll do it when I return,” she said.

“You cannot stay here? With me?”

“And spend our lives together? Painting and learning and making love? I’m not sure I deserve such happiness.”

“Nor do I,” Russell said. “I think that all I can hope for in this life is what I was given when my mother got me a good teacher.”

She looked at him. “Russell, your talent is monumental. You aren’t just some hack itinerant portrait painter like I am. You have talent and training, and I want you to promise me to use it. I think you should continue your work of drawing the common people. There will be lots of portraits of the upper classes, but without you to record them, the ordinary people will be lost.”

“And you know this, do you?”

He was trying to lighten the mood, but Zoë didn’t want to. “Promise me,” she said. “Swear to me that you’ll continue with your drawings of the people in the fields and in the kitchens.”

“All right,” he said, but she could tell that he thought her words were silly.