Hummingbird Lane Brown, Carolyn (libby ebook reader TXT) 📖

“You’ve never dated?” she asked.

“Nope.” He stopped the vehicle and turned off the engine. “Don’t get off. I just wanted you to see the cottontail rabbit over there against that big cow’s tongue cactus. He’d be a real cutie for one of your paintings.”

The bunny was sitting up on his hind feet and staring right at them. She took her new phone from her hip pocket and took a picture of him. “I can see him sitting at the end of a rainbow,” she whispered.

“Or maybe with a stylized cactus behind him. He’d be the only real-looking thing in the picture,” Josh suggested.

“Purple cactus with pink spines.” She thought again of what Sophie had said about the liberties an artist could take with her work.

“Might be interesting.” Josh fired up the engine.

She tucked the phone back into the hip pocket of her jeans and wrapped her arms back around him. Then they were off again. The mountain range didn’t look nearly as tall when Emma viewed it from the trailer, but the closer they got to the shade that it threw, the bigger it was.

Josh parked the four-wheeler under a big scrub oak tree. She moved her arms so he could hop off, and then she slung a leg over the seat and did the same. He got out their supplies and a quilt from the saddlebags.

“You thought of everything,” she said.

“This ain’t my first time to come out here. I even discovered a cave about a quarter of the way up the mountain.” He grinned. “We’ll spread this out and have a little snack. Then we’ll just let the ideas for future projects come to us.”

“How do we do that?” Emma asked.

“The ideas?” Josh whipped the quilt up into the air, let it fall, and then smoothed it out. “You just lay down on your back and stare at the tree limbs and leaves and even the clouds. You clear your mind of everything and wait. When you get an idea, you write it down. I brought two small notebooks—one for you and one for me.”

“Couldn’t we just make a note in our phone?” she asked.

“Of course, but I always back up everything with notes in case I lose my phone. You can use the notes app on your phone, but there’s no service when we’re this far out. That picture you took of the bunny was about the last place that got reception,” he explained. “We can spend the whole day until dark, or if nothing comes to mind, we can go home anytime we want.”

She opened her backpack and brought out two bottles of water and some snacks that she’d packed, thinking the whole time that she should have tucked in more. But then, she hadn’t figured on spending the whole day. And ideas about painting? Forget that when she was stretched out beside Josh on a quilt all day. Her mind would be going in circles about him and what Filly had said about hunting for truth, love, and inspiration, not thinking about pictures to produce for Leo and Sophie.

Josh handed her a protein bar and a bottle of apple juice. “There’s”—he blushed—“I don’t know how to say this”—he rolled his eyes up toward the sky—“but if you need it, there’s toilet paper and a small trenching tool in my backpack.”

“I brought some, too, but I didn’t think of a little shovel.” She’d lay dollars to doughnuts that Sophie never had to discuss such things on her first date with Teddy. She opened the protein bar and took a bite. Forget love, inspiration, and truth. I’m hunting for the new me.

Josh handed her a small notebook and a sharpened pencil, finished the last of his snack, and stretched out on his back. “Those clouds look like an angel. I wonder if I could do justice to them in a drawing, maybe with just a hint of color in them from the sun rays.”

Emma never wanted to paint angel clouds again. Just looking up at them made her skin crawl and her stomach almost rebel at the small protein bar she’d been eating.

“I don’t paint clouds that look like angels’ wings,” she said.

“Why?” He turned his head to look at her. “You know you can talk to me, Em. I’m a dang good listener.”

She thought of all the times that Nancy had tried to get her to open up about her memories and she couldn’t. Maybe she should call Nancy and talk to her on the phone about some of this. Sophie and Josh, along with Filly and Arty, were her friends. She could talk to them, and they would help her, but maybe Nancy could help even more.

“I’d just finished the painting a day or so before and gotten my final grade on it,” she sighed. “Rebel used to tell me and Sophie that we had guardian angels that would wrap their wings around us and protect us. That’s what I thought about when I was working on it. Then no one, not a guardian angel or a real person, was there to protect me when I was raped.” She told him about how she felt at the hospital and how she had sneaked out. “I took a knife from the kitchen and destroyed the painting because my guardian angels had forsaken me.”

Josh reached across the distance separating them and laced his fingers with hers. “I understand, but someday you might be ready to paint angel clouds again.”

“Thank you, but what I really need to do is figure out who I am right now,” she said.

He pulled his hand free. “How long do you think that will take?”

Suddenly she felt pressured to figure things out in a hurry, and yet she needed the time to work through it all. Would Josh be willing to wait, or did he want a relationship now?

“I have no idea. It took my whole life in some ways to get me in the shape I was in before I came to