Artfully Yours (7 page)

The door opened, a long stocking-clad leg appeared, and a raven-haired stunner uncurled with sinuous grace. She rested a hand on the roof, tipped her sunglasses down, and stared at him over the rims. “It lives,” she pronounced.

Alex lifted his chin a fraction. “Justine. To what do I owe the horror?”

“To what do you owe the
honor
? I’m here to check you’re still breathing.”

He frowned. “Why does everyone expect me to drop dead? Gabe was here just last week.”

“Not last week, darling. That was two weeks ago.”

Alex swallowed the last of his coffee. Two weeks? “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Because you called me and said you’d be in San Francisco, and then you never showed.” She pointed at herself. “Do I look like the kind of woman who gets stood up? Let me answer. No. No, I do not. You know what else? Not the kind of woman who gets the runaround, either, and yet I’ve been calling and calling, and you don’t pick up.”

Alex ripped the tab on his cargo pants pocket and located his phone. He swiped at the screen a couple of times, then turned it to face Justine, who’d crossed to the house and stomped up the steps, her stiletto heels stabbing into the wood. “I’m not dead,” he told her, “but my phone is.”

“Keep your damn phone charged, Zacharov, and when it rings? Pick up. Or people stop calling.”

“Don’t tease.”

“I’m not teasing. I will stop calling you. The art world will stop caring.”

He knew that. He’d been counting on it. Until recently. Until Elle had set him on fire. “I’ve been busy.”

Justine straightened. “Well. Consider my frown upside down. You’ve been working?”

“I have.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s see it.”

Alex jerked his head toward the barn. Justine followed him, heels crunching on the gravel. He heard her steps falter and stutter to a stop, and glanced over his shoulder. She was staring at the backyard hellscape. She was trying, he could tell, to keep her face blank.

“Oh,” she said. “
No.
”

He reached back, caught her delicate wrist, and towed her after him. “Ignore that. It’s nothing, it’s…it’s my Kingdom of Despair. Ignore it.” He led her to the barn, feeling her apprehension rise as he drew her in then stood back, arms folded.

“Very Gothic in here.” Justine removed her sunglasses. “Can I have some light?”

Alex flipped the switch, and the barn flooded with the bright lights he’d installed first thing when he’d moved in. He shifted from one foot to the other. He needed the high wattage to work, but his pieces appeared to best advantage in natural light. Still, Justine was his agent, not a buyer, and she understood more about lighting than he did. Alex didn’t say anything, just watched her.

She circled his first piece, the one he’d started that night he’d wrestled Elle for ice cream and finished three days later. Three days of muscle-cracking, bone-aching work that had been one of the best experiences of his life, as the sculpture was dragged out of him, and all that he’d felt on seeing her again, touching her again, was manifest on the physical plane.

The first viewing was always the most painful. Once someone else had seen it, he could let go, but crossing that boundary never got any easier. He trusted Justine, her artistic eye and her bladed assessment, and didn’t say anything when she ran a hand down the long curve of the sculpture. Skimming her fingertips over the edge of it, she continued to circle around it, seemingly unable to keep her hands off it, then stepped back.

She bit her lip, took it in from a couple of feet away. “Shit, Alex,” she said in a low voice. “This is sexy stuff.”

“Yeah.”

She blew out a breath and moved on to the second piece. She gave it the same focused scrutiny, but it wasn’t until she was examining the third that he spoke up.

“That one’s not finished.”

“No,” she agreed, “but it’s almost there.” She tipped her head to one side, bent her knees to change her perspective, considered it from the new angle. Straightening, she said, “That what I think it is?”

“Yeah.”

“
Damn
sexy stuff. I
love
it. If I’d known you were going to go in such a bold new direction, I’d have backed the hell off and left you to work.”

Alex raised his brows. “Really?”

She stood before the first sculpture and grinned over at him. “Nah. If I knew you were coming out with stuff like this, I’d have been squeezing you like a freaking python.” She put her hands on her hips, was silent for a moment, then, “What happened, Alex? You’ve been sitting on all this and boom, it came out? What popped your cork?”

“I ran into my muse again.”

Justine’s eyes sparkled. “The legendary muse, huh? You have to introduce me.”

“No.”

“Okay. I’ll introduce myself. All I have to do is drive into town and find the girl with the biggest smile on her face. I’m guessing she’s local?”

“I’m not sleeping with her.”

Justine flicked her gaze to sculpture number three and back to him. “Uh-huh.”

“I can’t defile my muse, Justine.” He
could
. He just hadn’t. Yet. “And don’t go looking. It’s personal.”

“Personal? Is she shy?” Justine tipped her head back and laughed. “How shy can she be, letting you sculpt that?”

“It’s not from life. And she doesn’t know she’s my muse.” He’d love to do it from life. He thought about Elle posing for him, letting him draw her, or better yet letting him—

“Alex!” Justine snapped her fingers under his nose. “Stay with me.”

He scowled. She scowled back, tossed her waterfall of hair over her shoulders, and strode out into the daylight. Alex forced himself away from the half-finished piece, sighed, and followed her. He’d wanted to work on it after his coffee. It was burning inside him. The urgency, the vibrancy. The image of Elle Finley. She was in his head, and he couldn’t get her out. She was always in his head. With each breath he took, she shone brighter. Expressing her was the problem. It had always been his problem.

Until the ice cream and then, in a way it never had before, something had started to…rush. Something deep inside him had been unleashed.

Alex registered the curious twist to Justine’s mouth. Half a smile, half a pout. Had she been talking again? “Pardon?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh.”

Shrugging as if giving up on a fight, she swung her purse across her body and extracted a cigarette case. Alex watched in disapproval as she flicked it open, selected a cigarette, lit it, and blew a stream of smoke to the sky, her neck arched back.

He tracked the twist of smoke against the blue, and deliberately placed himself upwind.

Justine shook her head at him. “You’ve spent your entire adult life sucking down smoke and fumes, and this is an issue for you?”

“I don’t do it recreationally. And I try hard not to ingest. I’m trying—” he clenched and released his fists a couple of times, “—I’m trying to get it out.”

She poked him with a beautifully manicured nail. “You are one odd cookie, Zacharov.”

“Yeah.”

Justine laughed, inhaled a final lungful of cigarette smoke, and dropped the butt to the gravel. She ground it into oblivion under her red-soled shoe. “This is fabulous. This is the best thing to happen to you. So. Let’s get to it. When’s it going to be ready to show?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to show it. A lot of it feels personal.”

“I can tell, which is why it’s your absolute best stuff ever. No boundaries, no filter. Keep going. I’ll stay off your case. Promise. But at the end, you’re going to show it. That’s not an option. Whatever it is that’s working for you, this process, whatever, you protect it and you get this passion out, hear? Give me an idea of when to start blocking out my calendar. Are you slowing down yet?”

“No.” He frowned. “I’m speeding up. And it’s evolving. I don’t know where it’s going.”

“Listen, what do you think about a pre-show showing of your stuff?”

“That’s a show, Justine.”

“It’s a small one.”

“I’m not ready to show it yet. I don’t know where the story’s going.”

“There’s a story here?”

“There’s a narrative or something. I don’t
know
. I won’t know until I’ve done more. I need to do more. I need…” He thrust his hands into his hair and gripped it.

“All right, tortured artist. Cool your jets.” She held up a dramatic palm. “Hah, forgot who I was talking to for a moment. Don’t cool anything. Burn on, god of the forge!”

“I’m in the middle right now. Don’t fuck it up for me, okay? I’m circling something and I want to find out in my own time.”

“The art world won’t wait for you, Alex.”

One corner of his mouth kicked up. “Yes, they will. They’ll wait until I’m ready, and when I’m ready, it’s going to be spectacular.”

“Mmm. It’s a good job you’ve got your ego under control.”

“This isn’t ego. It’s fact.”

“No such thing as fact in art, darling. It’s subjective.”

“Not this,” he said with confidence, holding her gaze.

“A hard no on the pre-show, then?” He began to shake his head, and she interrupted, “Is that your phone?”

Alex patted his pocket, pulled out his cell. “Nope.”

“Not that one. The battery’s dead, remember? Your landline. How archaic. Aren’t you going to get it?”

Get the phone? Was she crazy? “No.”

“What if it’s important?”

“It won’t be.”

“All right then, what if it’s Gabe? You want him coming up here again?”

Alex grimaced. No. He really didn’t, not when he was on fire with creation. It was annoying enough that Justine had rocked up. Hanging out with Gabe, while he loved him like a brother, was going to douse that bubbling cauldron of fire inside him. It was acceptable to be part of life when he was taking in input, but his world was different when he was trying to output. He needed concentrated alone time. More than ever right now, when his output, instead of a slow build of images weaving together, came like a feral phoenix, screaming from the ashes.

He bolted for the house.

By the time he got there, the phone had stopped. Gargoyle trailed him back to the barn where Justine waited, tapping away at her cell. She watched Alex approach from the corner of her eye, then did a double take as Gargoyle bustled over to her with delight.

“What—” she started and froze when Gargoyle sat on her shoes and tipped his head back to lay his large jaws the length of her thigh and smile up at her. “Shit. Is it friendly?”

“That doesn’t look friendly to you?”

A string of drool escaped Gargoyle’s mouth, and he clapped his jaws together a couple of times to get a better grip on his bear. “I can’t tell. Is it eating something?”

“That’s his bear.”

Gargoyle shuffled his butt backward to drop the bear at Justine’s feet.

“I want to scream and kick that thing away,” she said in a conversational tone of voice, “but I’m afraid.”

His shoulders tightened.

“
That
thing—” she pointed at the wet bear, “—not your tatty wolf. Jeez, I’m not a monster.”

Alex bent down, scooped up Gargoyle’s beloved, and flung it across the drive. Gargoyle bellowed with joy, scrabbling after it. “He’s not a wolf, he’s a husky.” No denying that he was tatty.

“Are you sure?”

“They said ‘husky and stuff’ at the shelter. Does it matter?”

“Time for me to go, I think. This went better than I expected. But then, seeing as I expected to find you knitting, I didn’t have the highest of hopes.”

“
Knitting?
”

“Gabe said you were talking about becoming a yarn artist. I’ve had clients react worse to bad press.”

“Worse than becoming a yarn artist?”

“You don’t want to know. Best of all, I have what I need to straighten out that hideous article.” She opened her car door and shimmied in. Gargoyle came gamboling over with a happy yip. Justine quickly shut the door before he could leap in with her. Smart move. Because he would have cuddled right on her lap, given the chance. He was all about the ladies. Terrified of men. Lived to snuggle with women.

“If it’s still bothering you,” he said.

“It’s bothering me. Nobody says shit like that about my clients. I’m going to build some buzz for this new collection. No pressure. Few hints here, couple of hints there.” She started up the engine.

“Your time to waste, I guess.” Alex stepped back and pulled Gargoyle away from where he was licking the door panel. “I don’t even know if it’s going to evolve how I want it to yet.”

“It will.” Justine slipped her sunglasses down. “I know you. You’ll get it how you like it. It’s your talent. And I’d best be off so I can deploy my own special talents on your behalf. The next article isn’t going to be some wretched where-are-they-now retrospective of washed-up has-beens. It’s going to be, ‘He’s back! Brace yourself to be seduced by Alex Zacharov’s finest work.’”