Page 30 of Homeport

Miranda pursed her lips as she slid into the back of the limo. “Do you always travel this way?”

“No.” Ryan slipped in beside her, took a single white rose out of a bud vase and offered it. “But I had a yen for champagne I couldn’t indulge if I was driving.” To prove it, he lifted an already opened bottle of Cristal from an ice bucket and poured her a flute.

“Business dinners rarely start with roses and champagne.”

“They should.” He poured his own glass, tapped it to hers. “When they include women with arresting looks. To the beginning of an entertaining relationship.”

“Association,” she corrected, and sipped. “I’ve been in your New York gallery.”

“Really? And what did you think of it?”

“Intimate. Glamorous. A small polished jewel with art as the facets.”

“I’m flattered. Our gallery in San Francisco is airier, more light and space. We focus on contemporary and modern art there. My brother Michael has an eye and an affection for it. I prefer the classic . . . and the intimate.”

His voice rippled softly over her skin. A telling sign and, Miranda thought, a dangerous one. “So Boldari is a family enterprise.”

“Yes, like yours.”

“I doubt it,” she muttered, then moved her shoulders. Make conversation, she reminded herself. She was a confident woman. She could make conversation. “How did you become involved with art?”

“My parents are artists. For the most part they teach, but my mother’s watercolors are glorious. My father sculpts, complicated metal structures no one but Michael seems to understand. But it feeds his soul.”

He kept his eyes on hers as he spoke, directly on hers with a quiet intensity that had insistent sexual jolts dancing over her skin. “And do you paint or sculpt?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t the hands for it, or the soul. It was a huge disappointment to my parents that none of their six children had a talent for creating art.”

“Six.” Miranda blinked as he topped off her glass. “Six children.”

“My mother’s Irish, my father Italian.” He grinned, quick and charming. “What else could they do? I have two brothers, three sisters, and I’m the oldest of the lot. You have the most fascinating hair,” he murmured, twirling a loose lock around his finger. He was right. She jumped. “How do you keep your hands off it?”

“It’s red and unmanageable and if I wouldn’t look like a six-foot azalea, I’d chop it off short.”

“It was the first thing I noticed about you.” His gaze slid down, locked on hers again. “Then it was your eyes. You’re made up of bold colors and shapes.”

She struggled to repress the fascinating image of grabbing his lapels and simply yanking their bodies together until they were a tangle of limbs on the backseat. And despite her fight for control, she fidgeted. “Like modern art?”

He chuckled. “No, too much classic practicality for that. I like your looks,” he said when the limo pulled to the curb and stopped. When the door opened, he took her hand to help her out. His mouth nearly grazed her ear. “Let’s see if we like each other’s company.”

She couldn’t say when she started to relax. Perhaps it was sometime during her third glass of champagne. She had to admit he was smooth—maybe just a tad too smooth—but it worked. It was a long time since she’d sat across a candlelit table from a man, and when the man had a face that belonged on a Renaissance portrait, it was impossible not to appreciate the moment.

And he listened. He might claim to have been a poor student of science, but he certainly asked questions and appeared interested in the answers. Perhaps he was simply putting her at ease by steering the conversation onto professional ground, but she was grateful for the results.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent an evening talking about her work, and talking of it, she remembered why she loved it.

“It’s the discovery,” she told him. “The study of a piece of art, and finding its history, its individuality, its personality, I suppose.”

“Dissecting it?”

“In a way, yes.” It was so pleasant to sit like this, in the cozy warmth of the restaurant with a fire blazing nearby and the cold dark sea just outside the window. “The paint itself, then the brushstrokes, the subject, the purpose. All the parts of it that can be studied and analyzed to give the answers.”

“And you don’t feel, in the end, the answer is simply the art itself?”

“Without the history, and the analysis, it’s just a painting.”

“When something’s beautiful, it’s enough. If I was to analyze your face, I’d take your eyes, the bold summer blue of them, the intelligence in them, the hint of sadness. And the suspicion,” he added with a smile. “Your mouth, soft, wide, reluctant to smile. Your cheekbones, sharp, aristocratic. Your nose, slim, elegant. Separate the features, study, analyze, I’d still come to the conclusion that you’re a stunning woman. And I can do that by just sitting back and appreciating the whole.”

She toyed with her scrod, struggling not to be overly flattered or charmed. “That was clever.”

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