“Not everyone is cut out to work in a corporation.”

Her pencil stilled for an instant. “Me, for instance.”

He nodded. “You, for instance. And apparently your sister and brother, too. You’ve all got strong, independent, entrepreneurial streaks. You’re all ambitious and you’re all talented but you don’t play well with others. At least not in a business setting.”

“And you think you’re so very different? Give me a break. Tell me something, Gabe, if you were only a vice-president instead of the owner, president, and CEO of Madison Commercial, would you still be on the company payroll?”

There was a short pause.

“No,” he said. Flat and final.

“You said that not everyone is cut out to work in a large corporation.” She moved the pencil swiftly, adding shadows. “But not everyone is cut out to run one, either. You were born for it, weren’t you?”

He pulled his attention away from a canvas and looked at her down the length of the studio. “Born for it? That’s a new one. Most people would say I was born to self-destruct before the age of thirty.”

“You’ve got the natural talent for leadership and command that it takes to organize people and resources to achieve an objective.” She hunched one shoulder a little, concentrating on the angle of his jaw. Going for the darkness behind his eyes. “In your own way, you’re an artist. You can make folkssee your objective, make them want to get there with you. No wonder you were able to get that initial funding you needed for Madison Commercial. You probably walked into some venture capitalist’s office and painted him a glowing picture of how much money he would make if he backed you.”

Gabe did not move. “Talking her out of the venture capital funds I needed wasn’t the hard part.”

She glanced up sharply, her curiosity pricked by his words.

“Her?” she repeated carefully.

“Your great-aunt Isabel is the one who advanced me the cash I needed to get Madison Commercial up and running.”

She almost fell from her perch on the worktable.

“You’re kidding.” She held the point of the pencil in the air, poised above the paper. “Isabelbacked you?”

“Yes.”

“She never said a word about it to any of us.”

He shrugged. “That was the way she wanted it.”

She contemplated that news.

“Amazing,” she said at last. “Everyone knew that it was her dream to end the Harte-Madison feud. Hannah figures that’s the reason she left Dreamscape equally to her and your brother in the will. But why would she back you financially? What would that have to do with ending the old quarrel?”

“I think she felt that the Madisons got the short end of the stick when Harte-Madison went into bankruptcy. She wanted to level the playing field a little for Rafe and me.”

“But when Harte-Madison was destroyed all those years ago, everyone lost everything. Both the Hartes and the Madisons went bankrupt. That’s about as level as it gets.”

“Your family recovered a lot faster than mine did.” He concentrated on the painting in front of him. “I think we both know why. So did Isabel.”

She flushed. There was no denying that the tough, stable Harte family bonds, not to mention the Harte work ethic and emphasis on education, had provided a much stronger foundation from which to recover than the shaky, shifting grounds that had sustained the Madisons.

“Point taken,” she agreed. “So Isabel, in her own 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 hesitated. “Gabe?”

“Yeah?”