The Ties That Bind

Shannon was so busy deciding exactly how she would handle the introduction that she didn't even notice her quarry until he suddenly loomed up out of the fog. She nearly collided with him.
    "Oh, excuse me, I'm sorry," she said quickly, reeling awkward now that the moment was upon her. This wasn't quite how she had planned the initial encounter. Hastily she recovered her balance and stood looking up at him. It was definitely a case of looking up. Shannon was a hairbreadth under five foot five, and as she lifted her eyes to his, she decided the stranger must have been close to six feet in height.
    There was a certain sense of massiveness about him, although he was clearly built along lean, hard-edged lines. Her artistic eye automatically registered the overall impact of the dark, remote aloneness that seemed to radiate from him. The somber quality was reinforced physically by the near blackness of his hair, the ice-gray eyes and the roughly hewn angles of his face. Shannon did not find conventionally handsome men attractive. There was a shallow, uninteresting flatness about them that she had discovered was often accompanied by an equally shallow and uninteresting personality. The creative element in her instinctively responded to the more complex and the less easily defined, both in physical characteristics and in emotional makeup. At this moment everything in her was reacting with fierce awareness to the somber stranger.
    "My name is Shannon Raine ," she finally said when he made no reply to her awkward apology. "I'm your neighbor. Are you going to be staying long in the area?" She smiled, reaching up to push a curve of breeze-tossed hair out of her eyes.
    "I'll be here for a while."
    She nodded, accepting the ambiguity of his answer while she absorbed the deep, rough-textured sound of his voice. Its resonance made her want to reach for a sketch pad to see if she could find a visual representation of the dark textures. Already she could imagine an elaborately worked initial in the Carolingian style, classic and strong in overall proportion, but with intricate and complex details decorating the whole. The sort of image that compelled the viewer to keep studying it, every glance detecting a new element.
    "I live here," she offered. When there was no immediate response, she added, "I walk down here most days. I hope you don't mind if I join you."
    "Do I have any choice?"
    She blinked, a little taken aback by the rudeness in spite of herself. "Well, I suppose I could go back to my place and wait until you're finished. Or we could walk in opposite directions."
    He tilted his head slightly as if distantly amused by the touch of asperity in her voice. Then he shrugged and rammed his large hands back into the pockets of the windbreaker. "Suit yourself. I was just going to walk to the point and back."
    "That's what I usually do." Shannon felt more confident now as she fell into step beside him. She had to move quickly in order to match his pace. He had a long, powerful stride, one that was curiously fluid in a purely masculine sense. She tried another smile on him, watching for some sign of response in his hard face.
    There was no reaction to her smile as far as Shannon could tell, but after a long, thoughtful moment he said, "My name is Sheridan. Garth Sheridan."
    Feeling as though she'd just gained a tremendous victory, Shannon nodded and launched into an innocuous discussion of the weather along the Mendocino coast in summer.
    "We're famous for this fog, but the afternoons are usually quite pleasant. Most of us who live here like the fog, of course."
    "Why?"
    She was surprised by the flat question. She had always assumed the appeal of the fog was obvious. "Oh, I suppose because it's good for the artistic temperament," she said with a small laugh. "A lot of people who live around here are artists and writers."
    "Which are you?"
    "Sort of an artist," she admitted whimsically.
    "Sort of an artist?"
    "Some people might call me more of an illustrator. Or a designer. I design my own line of silk-screened greeting cards. I'm also experimenting with some silk-screen designs for tote bags and T-shirts. That sort of thing." She grinned suddenly and opened the front of her jacket to show him the coral-colored sweatshirt she was wearing underneath.
    He stopped for a moment to stare down at the intricately worked design on the front of the shirt. It was a modern interpretation of the first character of an illuminated medieval manuscript.