Sparks Fly

I’m not usually this clumsy.”
    Will had to fight the urge to pull her close to him again. Frankly, he was still more than a little perplexed by his attraction to a woman who was the polar opposite of his usual Barbie dolls.
    Angelina asked, “Are you ready to get started?” and snapped Will out of his fog.
    “Sure.”
    They went inside and she said, “Why don’t you take me through your house and tell me what you like and don’t like about each room. Let’s start with your foyer. How do you feel about it?”
    The first totally inappropriate thought that popped into his head was, I love it when you’re in it, but he settled for, “It’s okay, I guess.”
    Scanning the room, Angelina moved to stand in front of a painting. “Does this make you happy?”
    The truth was, Will couldn’t have cared less if the painting made him happy. But when he really looked at it for the first time, he saw that the artist had used acrylic on canvas to depict a sad man who stood in the middle of a wet, deserted street.
    The painting sucked. “I don’t like it.”
    “Why don’t you like it?”
    “It’s depressing and besides, even I could do a better job than—” Realizing he was saying too much, Will cut himself off.
    Angelina pinned him with a questioning look.
    Inwardly cursing himself for divulging any information at all about his personal life, Will said,
    “Seems like anyone could do a better job than this artist did.”
    “Feng Shui is all about living with what you love. When we get rid of the things that bring us down and replace them with things that make us happy, we open ourselves up for good things to happen in our lives.” Grinning, she added, “Don’t be surprised if taking this painting down gets you the woman of your dreams.”
    “If that’s the case,” Will said as he reached for the painting, “let’s get this pathetic loser off my walls ASAP.”
    Angelina could barely keep from laughing as she helped Will lift the heavy frame. Men were so predictable.
    Will surveyed the new look of his foyer. “It looks better already.”
    Angelina was pleased that she could finally grace him with a genuine smile, and right then and there she decided she was going to maintain a nice, agreeable banter with him throughout the rest of the consultation. No matter what.
    Getting back to business, Angelina did a quick scan of the kitchen/family room. “You’ve got an awful lot of the fire element in here.”
    “The fire element?”
    “There are five elements: fire, water, metal, earth, and wood. The fire element is in your red rug, your fireplace, and your electronics.”
    “And that’s bad?”
    “Well, not bad, exactly. Just not balanced.”
    “Maybe I should just take all of this to the dump and start over.”
    Angelina was surprised by her own chuckle. She’d barely replied with, “Not unless you hate everything in here,” when she made the mistake of looking into his incredible blue eyes.
    Her mouth went completely dry. Again.
    Oh God, what was she doing? She knew better than to look at a wealthy, good-looking man like Will Scott with stars in her eyes. She was a twenty-six-year-old woman who had never gotten over her broken heart or her deep sense of shame from being so easily used.
    And Will definitely had heartbreak written all over him.

    * * *
    Will was enjoying watching the play of emotions run across Angelina’s expressive face, when she abruptly turned away from him and began to study his living room with renewed zeal.
    She pointed to a watercolor hanging in a dimly lit corner. “Will, this is an incredible oceanscape. It would be the perfect water element to hang over your fireplace.”
    Will was tempted to tell her he had painted it in college. What would it be like, he wondered, to have Angelina’s eyes light up with admiration? But he squashed the thought as quickly as it came. He was CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and if anyone found out he painted, he’d become a laughingstock.
    She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper. “This should help with explaining some of the hows and whys of what I do. It’s called a Feng Shui map.”
    Will scanned the page. “For some reason these charts remind me of computer programming.” It also reminded him of what it was like to balance out all of the colors on a canvas.
    Disturbed that he was thinking about painting again for the first time in years, he pushed his fruitless thoughts back into the recesses of his mind,