Improper Arrangements Read Online Free Page B

the door, opened it wide and paused at the threshold.
    He turned his head to look at me one last time. A flicker of some emotion, too elusive to identify, moved across his face, then was gone.
    “Goodbye, Alice.”

Chapter Three
    As soon as the door had clicked shut behind him, I went to the window and forced myself to admire the entrancing view. Oceans of sky so blue it nearly hurt my eyes, a few stray clouds scudding by, and above all the inescapable mass of the mountains, so near and yet so remote, their upper slopes heavy with snow even in high summer.
    It seemed impossible that men had stood atop those peaks to stare down at the world below. Had Eli climbed them? I wished, suddenly, that I had asked.
    It was done. Over. I need never think of him again, nor dwell on how foolish I had been. And I had been foolish. I knew nothing of him, not even his surname. He could have been anything, anyone—a vagabond, a brute, a madman—and I was vulnerable, a woman traveling alone in a foreign country.
    I was twenty-six years old and had endeavored, ever since the sobering mistakes I had made eight years ago, to be the very model of rectitude and sensible, level-headed behavior. All gone in a matter of minutes.
    “Enough,” I said to the empty room and the echoing mountains beyond. What was done was done. I had made a mistake, but it need not lead to catastrophe. No one knew, apart from Eli, and he didn’t seem the sort of man to gossip. Assuming he hadn’t left any of his seed in me, I should be safe from pregnancy.
    Now I simply had to forget. That was the solution. I had to busy myself, do something, else find myself wallowing in doubt and recrimination.
    I would paint.
    I’d been traveling almost nonstop for the past week, and while I’d been able to make rough sketches of the sights I’d seen, I hadn’t yet had the chance to capture the colors and details of the views that had affected me most deeply.
    It was the work of seconds to set up my little traveler’s easel on the table in front of the window, affix to it a half sheet of pristine Arches paper, open my tin of watercolors and unroll my bundle of brushes. I borrowed a cup of water from the nearby flower arrangement, there being no other ready source in my rooms, and opened my sketchbook.
    I leafed through the drawings I’d done—Lake Geneva at dawn, placid cows grazing in their summer pastures, the mottled amethyst petals of a Dactylorhiza alpestris —but none inspired me.
    I wanted to paint Eli. Never mind that a heartbeat ago I’d resolved to forget him. Never mind that fixing his face in my memory was pure, unalloyed folly.
    I took up a pencil, sharpened it on a scrap of sandpaper and set the first line on the paper. It was the arch of his brow, always my favorite place to begin when drawing a person’s face. Another sweep of the pencil and I had his nose, including the crooked bit just below the bridge. A flurry of short, soft strokes, and I had his eyes. The rest of his face followed, little more than brief lines that suggested the curve of his lips, the shadow of his beard and the fall of his dark, waving hair.
    A sketch alone wasn’t enough—I needed to capture the almost otherworldly color of his eyes before my memory of them faded and blurred. While I might never look at this drawing again, I had to see those eyes one last time.
    I dipped my sponge into the cup of water I’d purloined from the flower arrangement and dampened the paper just enough to let the pigments settle in. I dabbed a dot of cobalt blue on my palette, a smaller dot of vermilion, a drop of water to lighten the resulting gray, and let the shades flow together. Allowing only the tip of my favorite squirrel-hair brush to touch the color, I let it wash over the irises, scarcely darkening them, letting the pigment work with the stark white of the paper to produce the shade I sought. I dried the brush, touched it to the gray on the palette, let it linger on the paper a further half