Lost & Found Love Read Online Free PDF

her. “Crying.”
    She turned away with a shrug of her shoulders. “It’s just a painting.”
    “It’s like being inside Dante’s Inferno .”
    She turned back and smiled at him challengingly. “Then let me paint an angel instead, and I have one more request.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I want to sketch you while you sing.”
    He blew his breath out with an embarrassed laugh. “Seriously? You slammed your window the last time.”
    “I want to hear you. We can do it here or at your house. You pick.”
    He looked around the cluttered room with its high ceiling and the gentle whirr of a ceiling fan. “Here’s fine. Where do you want me?”
    For an instant the words naked and in my bed came to mind. Heat flashed through her in what felt like an entire body blush. She needed some control.
    “Near the window. I want to see the light on your face. That way I can capture the cascade of sparkles from your halo.”
    Joe laughed and relaxed. He half sat on a stool near the window, while she perched at the far side of it on the window seat, her sketchbook open. She had drawn plenty of models in her life drawing classes, but this was different. What she was trying to do was different, and Tabby had no idea at all how, or if, it would work.
    As she watched, he closed his eyes for a moment and began in the clear tenor she remembered so well, and she found it was as enthralling as it had been the first time she heard it. Only now, watching him as well as hearing him, she felt warmed inside. He glowed, almost as if he did indeed have a halo. Somehow, Tabby knew that would make him laugh if she told him, but it was true. He was light and warmth, and he fascinated her.
    She sketched quickly, catching his face from different angles, and when she finished, she simply listened to the breathtaking pull of his voice. She knew the song he sang now, a song that never failed to touch her heart—”Thankful.”
    * * * *
    Joe finished the last note and focused on Tabby. She sat with her sketchbook closed and her face angled toward the window. “Tabby?” he questioned softly. “What is it?”
    “That was beautiful, Joseph,” she whispered. “You have no idea. And… And I can’t tell you.” She blinked as if trying to clear her head.
    With a sudden burst of energy, she stood up, took the dark painting from the easel, set it facing the wall with other canvases that had been similarly stacked so all that was visible were the backs of them, and replaced it with a fresh canvas. Joe watched, knowing that for the moment at least she had forgotten him. He kept quiet, curious as to what he would see, feeling somewhat like an eavesdropper. She began what looked like another sketch, only this time using a brush and thinned paint to lay out the basic composition.
    He looked at his watch, vaguely remembering Tabby mentioning dinner with Evan and Jenny Richardson, but she was so intent on what she did he hated to interrupt her. As she finished outlining her composition and sat back for a moment, he finally spoke, “Tabby, it’s a little after five. Aren’t you going to the Richardson’s house?”
    She started. He smiled at a concentration so intense she could forget he was there. If he were a more egotistical man, he might be offended, but strangely enough he understood her absorption. He experienced it in his singing and often in writing a sermon, and he was flattered she allowed him to share hers. She stared at him, and the intensity of those golden eyes changed to panic as she glanced down at the paint smearing her hands.
    “I—I have to get ready. I don’t even know where I’m going or how long it will take to get there.”
    “It’s okay. It’s a couple of streets over. No more than a five or ten minute walk. I can show you the way.”
    “Would you really?”
    “It would be my pleasure.”
    He waited for her on the veranda, rising slowly to his feet as she came back through the door a quarter hour later. She wore a long, flowing