She had put the painting of the vendor in the closet. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, but neither could she bear to have it out where she could see it. She went to the closet, but instead of following her, Richard walked around the room, pausing before each of the canvases she had already completed. Tension suddenly knotted her shoulders. Candra’s opinion of her new work had been important to her career, but Richard’s opinion was important to her.
“You’ve changed,” he said abruptly, stopping before a particularly vivid landscape she had propped against the wall. He squatted down so he was at eye level with it.
“I didn’t know you knew anything about my work,” she said, surprised, and still uneasy. She stared at the long line of his tanned back, well-defined muscles delineating the furrow of his spine. Why hadn’t he put on his shirt? He should have put it on, for her peace of mind if nothing else.
“Sure. I met a lot of artists through Candra, but I paid attention to the ones I liked.”
That could be taken two ways. “Professionally or personally?” she asked, her tone wary.
He glanced over his shoulder at her, a smile in his dark eyes. “In your case, both.” He turned his attention back to the landscape, reaching out to run a fingertip over a stream of water swirling around a rock in its path. Running water was difficult to execute, because you had to convey motion and energy as well as capture the play of light on the surface. Water that wasn’t muddy took its color from its surroundings; it would look blue under a clear sky, green in the shadow of a mountain, dull on a gray day. She had spent years painting the St. Lawrence and never tired of it because the water was always different.
“How did you do this?” he murmured. “It looks three-dimensional. And the color ...” He fell silent, moving on to the next painting, a sunset in Manhattan with the dark, faceless buildings silhouetted against a brilliant sky. She had painted the sky a glowing pinkish orange, and what could have been an ordinary skyline was turned into something exuberant. It had taken her two days of experimentation to get that exact shade.
He didn’t say anything, and finally she couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “Well?” she demanded, the word tart with impatience.
He turned to face her, eyeing her taut stance. “You’ve always been good, and you know it. Now you’re better.”
Her shoulders relaxed and she ran a hand through her hair. “I can’t paint the way I used to,” she confessed. “Like everything else, my style changed a year ago. I look at what I’m doing now and it’s almost as if a stranger painted it.”
“You’ve changed, and that’s what changed your style. Maybe all of this is linked, maybe it isn’t, but I’m damn glad it happened.”
She gave him a curious look. “Why?”
“Because you never saw me before. Now you do.”
He was serious, his gaze intent and unwavering. He could probably hypnotize a cobra with that look, she thought. It was certainly working on her, because she couldn’t look away. She started to protest that of course she had seen him before, but then she realized what he meant. She hadn’t seen him as a man before. In her mind men had been desexed, neutralized, of no importance to her. She hadn’t wanted to deal with the messy complications of sex and emotional demands, so she had closed herself off from them. With her parents’ example of what not to do always before her, and her own desire to concentrate on her painting, she had turned herself into an emotional nun.
Whether the weird changes had something to do with the shift in her attitude or the simple passage of time had healed her fears, that phase of her life was over and she didn’t think it would ever be possible for her to return to it. Her eyes were open, and she would never again be oblivious to Richard’s sexual nature, to the male hunger in his eyes when he looked at her.
“Did you see me?” she asked. “Before, I mean. We met. . . what? Three times?”
“Four. Yes, I saw you.” He smiled. “I’ve always known you’re a woman.”
The way he looked at her then made her nipples tingle, and she suspected that if she glanced down, she would see they were nothing more than tight little points poking at her sweatshirt. She didn’t look. She didn’t want to draw his attention, in case he had missed it.
“Are you turned on, or cold?” he asked softly, and she knew he hadn’t missed a thing.
She cleared her throat. “I guess I’m turned on, because I’m sure not cold.”
He threw back his head and laughed. She wondered if she should have feigned ignorance, or maybe played it cute and flirted with him. She had a lot to learn about this come-hither stuff, but for the first time she realized the process could be fun.
But not now. Not yet. She cleared her throat again and turned to the closet behind her. “The painting’s in here.” She had to steel herself to open the door, reluctant to face the ugliness of death. She couldn’t avoid looking at it; because the paint hadn’t been dry when she put the canvas in the closet, it was turned facing out. The artist in her wouldn’t let her do anything to deface even this painting, though ordinarily she would never put anything in the closet to dry.
Hurriedly she reached in and got the canvas, then propped it on the wall next to the closet. Richard walked over and stared down at the painting, his expression hard and shielded. Sweeney went over to the window and stood looking out.
“You did this before you knew he was dead.” It was a statement, not a question, but then in any case, she had already said so. “Do you know what happened to him?”