Page 10 of The Christmas Book Flood

SIX

It was more than a little pathetic that he’d gotten so little sleep last night because he was agonizing over a children’s Christmas party still more than twenty-four hours away.

But knowing that hadn’t kept the thoughts from endlessly parading through Anders’s mind as he’d lain in bed.

Had it just been Elea joining him and Heidi, it would have been fine. But Tatiana was coming too.

It would be the first time they’d done anything together outside of work. For that matter, it would be the first time in years he’d done anything with a woman who wasn’t a relative outside of work. Just a children’s party, true. Not a date, per se.

He’d tried telling that to his overactive imagination time and again, but still it kept presenting him with innumerable scenarios for ways he could mess it all up and make Tatiana storm off in disgust.

From her little desk, Elea gusted out a sigh that was frustrated enough to capture his attention—attention that should have been on the manuscript before him, not on what stupid thing he’d likely say tomorrow to make Tatiana wish she’d stayed at home.

He stood and moved to his door. Helga had been rising too but paused when she spotted him and gave him an encouraging nod. “Everything all right, Elea?”

She smacked her pencil on the desk. “It’s all wrong.

What am I doing wrong?” She held up the paper she’d been drawing on—she’d already finished all the schoolwork her teacher had sent with her, but they’d still decided she’d spend the morning with him and Helga rather than in the warehouse, so she didn’t exhaust herself.

Anders moved closer and studied the drawing.

He could tell at a glance that the figures represented Elea and.

.. a woman. The little girl on the page had two braids just like Elea and was wearing a dress like the one she currently had on.

But he couldn’t be sure if the woman was meant to be her mother or her aunt.

At least not at first. But further study showed him the skirt suit he highly doubted her mother wore on the farm.

“You and your aunt?”

She nodded but huffed again. “The hands are all wrong. And I can’t get the typewriter right either.”

Ah... was that what the awkwardly shaped box in the background was? He smiled. “Hands are notoriously tricky. I always put people in mittens in my drawings when I was your age to avoid the problem.”

She giggled at that. “That makes sense for winter. But what about summer pictures?”

“They always had their hands behind their back.” He hid his in demonstration. “Problem solved.”

This time her laugh was full and bright. “You draw hands now though. And they always look perfect.”

“Because eventually I decided I had better master them, so I drew them every day. Just hands—hands in every position I could think of. I’d sit like this.

” He put his left hand into a pose and picked up a pencil with his right, mimicking drawing the left.

“Of course, that meant I got good at left hands and still had trouble for a while with rights. My mother was forever frustrated by the bodiless hands strewn all over our house—though she said it was better than my eye phase.” He grinned at the memory.

“Everywhere she turned around, there was a paper with an eye staring at her. Angry eyes, dreamy eyes, surprised eyes...”

Helga laughed. “Your poor mother! All those dismembered body parts.”

Elea grinned. “You must have practiced a lot.”

“Much to my parents’ dismay.” He motioned for her to lower the drawing to the desk again and knelt beside her.

“As for the typewriter—you’re drawing what your mind says it should look like rather than what your eyes actually see.

If viewing a typewriter from this angle, you don’t actually see the roundness of the keys, do you?

Take a look.” He motioned toward the machine on his own desk.

She got up and moved into his office, going behind his desk, brows furrowing as she studied it. “The keys just look... flat. Maybe a little bit of an oval on some of them.”

“Mm-hmm. This is what we call ‘perspective’ in art. And you needn’t feel bad for not realizing it—it wasn’t until the Renaissance that artists began incorporating perspective into their work.

Realism didn’t always matter, you see. And there are plenty of artistic movements that don’t care about realism even today. ”

“I want it to look real though.” She pursed her lips, eyes still on the typewriter. “Can I look at this while I’m drawing it?”

“Certainly. I’ll set it on Helga’s desk for you so you can see it.” He rose from his kneel and did just that. It wasn’t as though he needed the typewriter this morning anyway, and while Helga had one of her own, she was using it.

Though as he got it into its new position, he paused, his own brows drawing together.

Tatiana had a typewriter in her office, it was true, which she used for the correspondence she did for Valdi, much as Helga did for Anders.

But from the details Elea had already lightly sketched into place, the room she and Tatiana were standing in was not her aunt’s office at the Story Society.

The desk was completely different, and there was a sofa visible too, and a window. “Is this your aunt’s flat?”

“Mm hmm.” Elea scurried back to her seat.

“She has a typewriter at home?” Not entirely odd, he supposed... but not entirely common, either. No one in his family had one, certainly not that they kept out on display.

Elea nodded and picked up her pencil again. “She’s on it all the time—always typing when I get up, and once I’ve gone to bed too. Even now, when we have to leave so early and get home so late.”

Anders’s brows lifted. That didn’t sound like correspondence, though he supposed it could have been. Perhaps she had a lot of friends from their village to write letters to. “What is she writing?”

Elea shrugged. “A story, but she wouldn’t tell me more than that.”

He glanced to Helga, but she looked just as surprised by the information as he felt.

His pulse kicked up—he couldn’t help it.

The mention of story writing always did that to him, whether it was one he was working on, one he was editing, or one he was simply hearing about.

And the thought of Tatiana writing a story.

.. excitement bubbled. It could give them something to talk about.

Something else they had in common. Perhaps he could even help her somehow—if ever she admitted her writing to him, he could offer.

Perhaps they could have a little critique partnership.

Get together for coffee and reading and talk about plots and characters and.

.. and he’d probably make some suggestion that she would hate and then she’d resent him and think him idiotic and heavy-handed, and then instead of seeing her more , she’d avoid him even at the office and. ..

There he went again. Why was his imagination always so quick to think up worst-case scenarios?

Elea paused suddenly, turning her face his way. “Have you ever drawn Aunt Tatta?”

And now heat climbed his neck and stained his cheeks.

He turned back to his door in the hopes that the little girl wouldn’t notice.

“No, I haven’t.” It was true. He hadn’t dared, not with how often his family dropped by without warning.

If they saw a drawing of a beautiful modern woman, they’d tease him endlessly.

And he certainly couldn’t work on such a thing here .

But he’d mentally composed any number of drawings.

Some portraits, others candid. Occasionally he’d imagined her as the beautiful Brynhild, sporting gleaming chain mail and her warrior’s sword, or the determined Signy, or the young Sigrun.

Though inevitably he decided not to cast her in any of those tragic roles—it seemed all the heroes and heroines of the old sagas met violent ends, something he usually neglected to include in his children’s versions.

But still, he knew how the real tales went, and he had no desire to imagine anyone he admired taking on those roles.

Elea turned on her chair to face him, eyes alight. “Would you draw one of me and Aunt Tatta too? I was going to give her mine for Christmas—you could too. It would be fun! A way to remember my visit.”

He ought to decline—after all, he hadn’t time for random drawing. He had editing to do in the morning, books to help pack up in the afternoon and evening, and his own next manuscript to write and illustrate over the weekends.

Yet the mere suggestion was enough to make a scene jump into his mind, and his lips twitched into a smile as he returned to his desk chair.

He imagined Tatiana in that red suit she wore so often this time of year, in profile, holding a stack of books that towered far too high.

Beside her would be Elea, standing on a stack of books rather than carrying them, giving her enough height to peek over her aunt’s shoulder at the title on the top of the stack.

The snowy city behind them, with the aurora dancing in the background, a few snowflakes drifting down.

Bother. Now he had no choice but to pull out a piece of watercolor paper from the stack he always kept in a drawer—one never knew when inspiration would strike over a lunch or coffee break—and grab his favorite sketching pencil.

He imagined this one almost in the style of the American Norman Rockwell, though not with the earthy color scheme Rockwell often chose.

No, he imagined deep blues and bold reds and then that dance of pastels in the sky.