“Other canvases?” I repeated, curious when Sully had become a surveyor of the arts.
“Yeah,” he said simply, and I frowned, confused, until he lifted the sample with the soft brown to my face, lining it up with my eyes. He cocked his head to the side, a smile sliding into place on his handsome face. “Yeah,” he echoed, this time more definitive.
Something flipped inside me.
“Sawyer.” My voice was low, a quiver in it. “You cannot paint your mother’s house brown just because it is the color of my eyes.”
“Why not?” he argued, and then he pursed his lips. “It’s much more than justbrown, Eleanor. It’s warm and homey and?—”
“Which room are you thinking?”
He was still staring, looking between the sample and my eyes. “The kitchen, maybe?”
“What about these other ones?”
“Well, this one—” He pulled out the dark cherry red. “—is the color of my favorite dress.”
A sound bubbled out of me, incredulous and oddly giggly. That had been the last thing I’d expected him to say, but now my insides were turning to goo. “Oh, is it?”
“Andmy favorite flower,” he added.
“The rosebushes are one of the best parts of the house,” I agreed, somehow pulling myself together. “And it would be fun to bring a bit of the outside…inside. But it’s a very bold color, Sul.”
“That’s why we’re just getting a sample,” he said, all pragmatic. As thoughanyof this was logical. “We can experiment with it.” His head turned on a swivel, looking down the aisle of the store. “We could also see about replacing some of the wallpaper. If a solid color is too bold, maybe there’s a design with this in it.” He tapped the red paint sample.
“That sounds nice.” I smiled—but mostly because Sully’s expression looked alive in a way I hadn’t seen for a long time, transporting me back to a time when we’d wander these aisles and tackle other projects together. “What about this color?”
I pointed at the sunny yellow swatch, trying to puzzle out his reasoning for that one.
Sully lifted one shoulder, looking slightly sheepish for the first time.
“What about it?”
“Why the yellow?”
“Yellow is a happy color, isn’t it?”
He lifted a hand to my hair, twirling his finger around a strand, and I nodded, mesmerized by the way he was touching me and the heat that emanated from him. Likehewas the sun.
Maybe that was why he’d picked yellow. Maybe the yellow was…him.
Sully bent closer to me, so close that my body responded, arching back and tilting my head to follow his movements. His head dipped lower, and a part of me wondered if our first kiss in five years was going to be in the middle of this aisle in a small-town hardware store while deliberating paint samples.
But at the last second, his head turned to the side. Our cheeks brushed instead. His lips grazed my ear as he murmured, “I can’t think of a single fucking thing that makes me happier than you.”
The world was spinning when he pulled away, and I found myself clutching him, needing something solid to hold on to. And God, was Sully solid.
Solid and real and unwavering.
“Yellow is…” I began, feeling slightly speechless.
“You,” he answered simply.
Warmth found me again. I certainly hadn’t felt like yellow lately, but maybe it was still inside me somewhere. Maybe if Sully believed it, I could believe it, too.
“And the black?”
Sully tugged on the ends of my hair, reminding me that he still had his finger wrapped in it, and I shook my head with a laugh.
