Art-Crossed Love

  Can love be more than a four-letter word?

  Lissa Blanc is a painter on a mission. She filters the world through a lens of color, line, and form and hides her ambition behind a delicate smirk that lets her critics believe life comes easy. To her, art isn’t what she sees. It’s what she feels. Few know that behind the glitz of a prodigious upbringing, she’s driven to emerge from the shadow of painful memories that insist she’ll never be a renowned talent in her own right.

  Cole Rathlen is a photographer on the mend. A crippling grief has stifled his once-rising career and compromised his creative instincts. Knowing he can’t stagnate forever, he seeks a twisted absolution in the form of a woman whose paintings give life to the emotions he won’t let himself imagine, let alone feel.

  When the two partner for a prestigious project that will pull them from the mountains of Colorado to the palaces of India, Lissa quickly realizes that more than diverging ideals hinder their search for success and salvation. Was Cole’s life upended by a tragic but unavoidable choice or something more sinister? While Lissa can’t delve into the mystery but not the man, Cole can’t resist a tenacious soul that refuses to leave him chained. As the truth closes in on a project finally sprouting wings, will Lissa sacrifice her chance at success to set Cole free? Or will Cole shrug the chains of lingering regrets to prove that those who love the most, love again.

  Dedication

  For Tom, who proves all the good ones aren’t gone.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Thank you!

  Love Drunk: Excerpt

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Kintsukuroi

  “To repair with gold.” The art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

  Chapter 1

  February—Boulder, Colorado

  Cole set the prostitute’s money on the nightstand, wondering if his wife’s angel was laughing as hard as the living woman would have. Low light from an overhanging lamp highlighted Ben Franklin’s sagging jowls, and Cole flicked his gaze toward the cash. “We agreed on four hundred?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thanks.” Her voice held the cultured tones of the upper class. This wasn’t your average streetwalking hustler, but an expensive call girl living the good life. Boulder, Cole was learning, didn’t offer much variety in the way of hired sex. For cheap love, a guy drove to Denver.

  Ms. Jewel, or at least the woman who called herself that, reached across a foot of empty space separating their respective queen beds. The hotel might be respectable, but he hadn’t splashed out for a suite. Most of her customers didn’t, she’d told him, and he wanted the pictures to be representative of a normal gig.

  Long, tapered nails scratched lightly over his thigh in a less-than-subtle suggestion. In her mid-thirties, Ms. Jewel looked to be a willing—more like eager—twenty-five, but her caress didn’t stir anything but mild curiosity. No surprise there.

  Cole hadn’t come to fuck.

  He halted her progress with a gentle hold on her slim wrist. “Beautiful, definitely, but you know why we’re here.”

  “Close-ups and conversation,” she acknowledged with a sly smile, “but a girl can hope.” Drawing back with a languorous pull, Ms. Jewel stretched along the edge of the bed before propping her head up with one hand. With the other, she stroked along the curvaceous silhouette her pose presented to great advantage.

  Facing off against a preening whore, who looked ready to pounce, only added weight to the digital camera in Cole’s lap. God, the fall from regular contributions at Time to freelancing for Boulder’s local daily had been far. In slow increments, he raised his bulky equipment and snapped a candid shot of this evening’s companion, from the neck down, as agreed.

  The woman’s presence in his frame proved that pimping wasn’t nearly as rare in Mayberry-esqe Boulder as one might think. Five minutes on Craigslist could get a man—or a woman, for that matter—a wealth of by-the-hour entertainment. Yet paid or not, the camera couldn’t help but love Ms. Jewel’s creamy cleavage and healthy, smooth skin. While hookers might abound in this hotbed of high-tech employment, they were the consensual kind, not drug-addicted runaways or kidnap victims without other options. No, Boulder hookers drove fast cars and lived in sleek apartments, pandering to white, well-salaried, workaholic techies who paid the bill before the sex, cringed at physical force, and felt a desperate need for affection.

  All in all, Boulder made hooking look pretty good.

  Cole stood and began a series of photographs in rapid succession, almost like he was shooting the cover of Vogue, only he wouldn’t Photoshop or airbrush or taint the photos in any way. What he saw, readers would get. “Tell me how you started.”

  He didn’t have to ask the question. Cole was just the photographer. A journalist would write the words, while Cole would provide the pictures. But a talking subject relaxed, and a relaxed subject made for better shots.

  So talk he would.

  His model didn’t hesitate. “I enjoy sex.” There was that smile again. This time she rolled onto her back and cupped her breasts. They were covered—he’d managed to axe every one of her efforts to strip—but barely. A skimpy sundress skimmed the top of her areolas, and without a bra, her nipples might as well have been giving a dance recital on her chest.

  “I suppose that’s a good trait in your profession.” Probably too glib, but she didn’t notice.

  “Yes. I’m also attractive.” And humble. “School was never my thing, and after the fifth offer, I finally took the money and rode, so to speak.”

  Damn if she didn’t get a smile out of him with that one. “And?”

  Ms. Jewel didn’t spread her legs. She also didn’t clamp them together. The thin material of her dress made her lack of undergarments all the more obvious when she went limp and relaxed against the bed. “Since I liked the… physical aspects of the work, I let them make me rich. Lines of good-looking nerds at the door have secured my future.” Her teasing look said, want to be next?

  Cole took a picture of her long fingers. They thrummed her hardened nipples with no sign of fatigue. He really ought to put a stop to her little show, which hadn’t been on the agenda, but he couldn’t quell the curiosity she’d sparked with that touch to his thigh. How far would this sexpot have to go to turn him on? If she slid that hand down into her heat, would he finally get hard? If she moaned? What if she lifted the dress to her waist and went ahead with the spread she’d been threatening?

  “Enough,” he clipped. “Gorgeous as you are, this isn’t Playboy, and I’m not interested.” Because every last one of his wonderings had the same
answer: nothing. She could play and pant, even moan and masturbate for his eyes only, and he wouldn’t respond. Pleasure had died along with Kate. In its place, he felt nothing good, only a burning desire to be close to the woman he’d loved, only a visceral need to visit her grave, only an unswerving willingness to sacrifice a rising career to accomplish those goals.

  No matter how succulent the woman, a whore in a hotel room could never thaw the ice. Cole stuffed his camera and a few scribbled notes in his duffle. The evening couldn’t be called photojournalism at its finest, but he had several decent pictures and enough information to cobble together semi-informative captions. Ms. Jewel had her cash. The local paper would buy this shit and assemble a story that wouldn’t surprise anyone. Yes, the world’s oldest profession made its home on street corners and casinos and the Mustang Ranch. But prostitution had also infiltrated lily-white bastions of education and accumulated wealth, granola moms with thousand-dollar strollers be damned.

  When he touched the door handle, tasting escape, she posed a question with the barest hint of contempt in her voice. “And you, Mr. Rathlen? What are you doing here? You were one of Boulder’s best-loved sons, traveling the world, having your photos featured in all sorts of fancy publications. I swear I saw your Tsunami shots in National Geographic.”

  “I was,” he admitted. “You did.” But they both knew what she meant. Now you’re photographing a hometown hooker for the local daily.

  No longer. Thirteen months and seventeen days had passed without a care for the fact that Kate wouldn’t have chosen mediocre. Ms. Jewel, who sold her body for money, at least had the decency to excel at it. Perhaps she hadn’t been forced into this line of work, but few made her kind of choices without glimpses of pain.

  The woman mocking him from the bed hadn’t jumpstarted his cock, but she’d done a number on his head. Cole would be making some calls come morning.

  ******

  June—New York City

  “You don’t look like your headshots.”

  Cole paused his perusal of a painting that monopolized an entire wall of one of the Meatpacking District’s chicest galleries. Though the disembodied voice came from behind him, he knew the smooth tones interrupting his study belonged to Lissa Blanc. He drew out his response, glancing between the canvas and the nearby placard that described it. “And this painting doesn’t look like a park.”

  “Your pictures make you look friendlier. Smaller. Happier.”

  She didn’t wait for his rebuttal before circling around to tap the crimson drywall next to her work with a matching fingertip. “What do you feel when you look at it? Not like you’re in a park, but maybe you think of being young and carefree?” Her lips curled into a parody of a smile, like she was being forced into used-car sales at gunpoint. “Maybe you see something you want to purchase.”

  “You’re kidding.” Morning Park was more interesting for what it lacked. Chunks of the car-sized canvas had been left bare. Where she’d seen fit to add paint, serrated jags of black and green crawled out from the edges toward a thin seam of yellow that unevenly bisected the disarray. The mess had all the qualities—if you could call them that—of the prints his wife had framed.

  Kate had loved her “Blancs”—not that Lissa had reached that lofty, last-name-only level of acclaim—while Cole had wanted to use them as bonfire kindling. Where his wife had touted Lissa as an up-and-coming genius, mark her words, Cole had questioned the mental faculties, let alone the artistic integrity, behind paintings that could potentially be copied by a posse of well-trained five-year-olds.

  Lissa stiffened, all the welcome-to-the-big-tent theatrics draining away in an instant. “Unlike you, Mr. Rathlen, I don’t consider my work a joke.”

  He bit his tongue. She flushed when she got mad. The pinkening of the smooth skin rising above her black corset held his interest more than the paint she’d thrown at the canvas. “I’m critical, Ms. Blanc. I have not called you a joke.”

  Mostly because circumstances hadn’t thrown him the chance. He was a photographer, not an art critic, so other than becoming a bona fide Internet troll, he lacked a platform to rant about the “talent” his wife had so admired.

  “Sorry,” Lissa sneered, examining her nails. “I was having a gin and tonic in my mind just now and missed your point.” Slender arms wound across her chest. “What gives you the right to criticize work you can’t possibly understand?”

  “A mouth,” he said dryly, “and a rampant superiority complex.” Might as well be honest. Certainly less had allowed fools to masquerade as fine minds.

  Turning to the painting once again, he marveled at the blobs Kate would have called brilliant. “There,” she’d have informed him, “where the green prowls toward the black but can’t reach it for the yellow. That’s the essence of disrupted nature—a park.”

  “What’s interesting about you,” Cole told Lissa casually, “is what you don’t understand. Art is more than critical acclaim. If great, ordinary people connect with the work.”

  And pay for it. He let the undeniable thrust of his words hang between them. Lissa had wormed her way into a few of New York City’s most hallowed show spaces, but a big seller she was not.

  Her do-or-die smile receded. Inexplicably, Cole wanted that particular danger to return. But professional relationships, like all others, began best in honesty.

  “I hear the highway business is booming these days.” He paused, eyeing her famously philanthropic parents in the crowd. Together they ran one of the country’s largest construction companies. “Rumor has it these swank gallery showings have more to do with your family’s heavy machinery than your hand with a brush.”

  The red blooming on her chest darkened to an angry purple. He got his smile back, but only in the form of a tight stretch of lip set against clenched teeth. A shame, because apparently unlike him, Lissa Blanc was photogenic as hell. The pictures he’d seen had portrayed her looks with staggering accuracy. They’d highlighted the thick chestnut hair that now gleamed auburn in the light and revealed the dark eyes that assessed him with cool intensity, at odds with the delicacy of the surrounding bone structure. They’d even done justice to her skin, showcasing the exact shade of white tulips, at least when she wasn’t flushed with anger or frustration.

  Most of all, her pictures had hinted that Lissa Blanc would be magnificent were she to stretch those generous lips wide with the proper smile she withheld.

  “So that’s it. You don’t like it.” Lissa stated the obvious, probably still mentally sucking gin and tonics. “You sought me out for an appointment, then traveled to Manhattan, all to share your—with all due respect—less-than-worthy disdain.”

  “No.” Taking her in, he drifted closer and breathed deep. Notes of fruit and an unrecognizable spice hit like an apple orchard in August, one he badly wanted to explore. Kate had smelled like Chanel No 5.

  He froze, rejecting the thrall of long-denied senses rushing to life. Betrayal started small. First an innocuous observation, then… a crisis. Had Cole not believed in the power of temptation so ardently, he’d still have a wife.

  Shame lashed at the part of him he kept on lockdown, not for insulting Lissa’s painting or for tearing a chink in her armor, but for enjoying the tease and wondering what color she’d turn next.

  He cleared his throat. Yet Lissa’s the one I need, the one Kate would have chosen. Choosing Lissa himself—no matter how distracting the woman or how virulently he disagreed with his wife’s prematurely-silenced admiration—would pave a path to absolution.

  Without uttering a single superfluous syllable, he made his point. “I want you to paint for me.”

  ******

  Finally. Lissa couldn’t block the triumph she knew chased across her face. “So the insults have been code for ‘Love what you’ve done here’?”

  He made a show of visually inspecting the room. “We’d study the most intriguing places in the world, contrasted in ink—that would be me—and oil, which would be you. Not t
his drivel.”

  She could only stare. This was a helluva reach across the aisle—first the judgment and then an insult on the heels of an offer—all from the mouth of an apparent Gold Coast surfer turned beloved travel and journalistic photographer. Disheveled dark blond threaded through platinum strands that needed a healthy trim. He flaunted his irreverence in a pair of too-casual, but delectably low-slung jeans that magnified the leanness of his hips in contrast to breadth of his shoulders. The fine lines fanning from his blue eyes spoke of long outdoor photo shoots and a careless take on sunscreen. They made him look capable, experienced, disenchanted. Anything but old.

  Rolling stiff lips inward, Lissa released with a pop. Obviously he hated her work, and worse, she feared he might be right. Plus, someone else had heard his verbal slap. Her closest friend had been hovering nearby for long, embarrassing minutes. The soft gasp that sounded at Cole’s slight had labeled Scarlet for the eavesdropper she was, a taken-aback one at that.

  “You called my work drivel,” Lissa growled. Yet you own some of it. After Cole had requested this meeting with all the enthusiasm of a fashion designer locked in a Wal-Mart, she’d done her homework. He’d mostly worked freelance, selling to the likes of National Geographic and Time and Lonely Planet. Somewhere along the line, this producer of safe, aesthetically faithful images—whether of mountains or cathedrals or indigenous tribes—had purchased two of her most free-thinking examples of abstract expressionism. She had the sales receipts to prove it.

  “D-r-i-v-e-l,” she snarled over her shoulder. “Scarlet, tell me why I should hear this guy out.”

  Cole peered around her, looking unconcerned. Then, without warning, he jerked the conversation from Lissa and handed it to their unrepentant spy. “Yeah… Scarlet, is it? Let’s hear why your friend ought to listen.”

  Scarlet’s guileless answer came fast and way too sure. “He wants you from the Louboutins up, Liss. And every woman deserves that…”

  Lissa didn’t hear the rest. Her evening shattered. Through a haze of mortification, she watched Cole’s eyes shutter, then light with slow, cold fire. Apparently Scarlet hadn’t said something merely revealing or embarrassing, but very, very wrong.