Dawn in Eclipse Bay

quiet way, tried to even things up a bit with money.”
    “I think so, yes.”
    “What was the hard part?”
    “The hard part?”
    “You said that getting the backing from her for Madison Commercial wasn’t the hard part. What was?”
    His mouth curved reminiscently. “Structuring the contract so that Isabel got her money back plus interest and profit. She didn’t want to do things that way. She wanted me to take the cash as a straight gift.”
    “But you wouldn’t do that.”
    “No.”
    Madison pride, she thought, but she did not say it out loud. She went back to work on her drawing. Gabe moved on to another picture.
    “I was wrong about you, wasn’t l?” She used the tip of her thumb to smudge in a shadow.
    “Wrong?”
    “Watching you at the banquet tonight, it finally hit me that I had leaped to a totally false conclusion about you. And you let me do it. You never bothered to correct my assumption.”
    He gave her his enigmatic smile. “Hard to imagine a Harte being wrong about a Madison. You know us so well.”
    “Yes, we do. Which is why I shouldn’t have been fooled for even a minute. But I was.”
    “What was the wrong conclusion you leaped to about me?”
    She looked up from the sketch and met his eyes. “You aren’t suffering from burnout.”
    He said nothing, just watched her steadily.
    “Why didn’t you set me straight?” She returned to her sketch, adding more depths and darkness. “Because it suited your purpose to let me think you were a victim of stress and burnout? Did you want me to feel sorry for you?”
    “No.” He started toward her down a dim aisle formed by unframed canvases. “No, I sure as hell did not want you to feel sorry for me.”
    “What did you want?” Her pencil flashed across the paper, moving as though by its own volition as she worked frantically to capture the impressions and get them down in all the shades of light and dark.
    He came to a halt in front of her. “I wanted you to see me as something other than a cold-blooded machine. I figured that if you thought I was a walking case of burnout, you might realize that I was human.”
    She studied the sketch for a moment and then slowly put down the pencil.
    “I’ve always known that you were human,” she said.
    “You sure about that? I had a somewhat different impression. Must have been all those comments you made about how I wanted to date robots.”
    He reached for the sketchpad. She let him take it from her fingers, watching his expression as he looked at the drawing she had made of him.
    It showed him as he had appeared a few minutes ago, standing in front of one of her canvases, his hands thrust easily into the pockets of his trousers, collar and cuffs undone, tie loose around his neck. He stood in the shadows, his face slightly averted from the viewer. He was intent on the painting in front of him, a picture that showed an image that only he could see. Whatever he saw there deepened the shadows around him.
    She watched his face as he studied the drawing. She knew from the way his jaw tightened and the fine lines that appeared at the corners of his mouth that he understood the shadows in the picture.
    After what seemed like an eternity, he handed the sketch back to her.
    “Okay,” he said. “So you do see me as human.”
    “And you saw what I put into this drawing, didn’t you?”
    He shrugged. “Hard to miss.”
    “A lot of people could look at this sketch and not see anything other than a figure standing in front of a canvas. But you see everything.” She waved a hand at the canvases that filled the studio. “You can see what I put into all of my pictures. You pretend to disdain art but the truth is you respond to it.”
    “I spent a lot of the first decade of my life in an artist’s studio. Guess you pick up a few things when you’re surrounded by the stuff during your impressionable years.”
    “Yes, of course. Your father was a sculptor. Your mother was his model.” She put the sketch down on the worktable. Guilt and dismay shot through her. “I’m sorry, Gabe. I know you lost your parents when you were very young. I didn’t mean to bring up such a painful subject.”
    “Forget it. It’s a fact, after all, not something you conjured up out of your imagination. Besides, I thought I made it clear that I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. Sort of spoils the Harte-Madison feud dynamic, you know?”
    “Right. Wouldn’t want to do that.” She