Finally, they reached the part of the museum she’d been thinking of. She skidded to a stop in the center of the room and looked around. Landscapes and still lifes and even a portrait or two lined the walls, all created from thick, short brushstrokes on canvas. All portraying something she’d been trying to figure out but had never quite managed to pull off.
She turned her head to look at Rylan and found him eyeing her expectantly. A moment’s doubt rocked her, making her come up short before she could really launch into anything.
“You sure you want to hear me talk about this stuff?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
He had, but she couldn’t quite believe he really meant it. “Just, I get carried away.”
“If you do, I think I can manage to get a word in edgewise.”
Now that was something she did believe. Gathering up her confidence, she nodded to herself, then gestured around at the paintings on the walls. “How much do you know about any of this?”
He tipped his head side to side. “As much as anyone whose mother took them to the Louvre when they were a kid?” At the look she gave him for that, he shrugged. “A little. No formal education, but I know who Cézanne was.” His mouth pulled to the side. “Sort of.”
She chewed on her lip, considering. He really didn’t need a full-on history lesson here, but he had asked . . . “So, there were always schools of art, right?”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
She ignored that. “But for ages and ages, it was all basically realism. Lots of variation inside that, and different styles, but for the most part, people used art to capture what the world looked like. There weren’t cameras, so you needed some way to make your castle look pretty. Or to document things.”
“Makes sense.”
And wow, but it was a good thing he hadn’t asked for that full-on history lesson, because she was taking some serious liberties here.
“But then things changed,” she said. She glanced around at the rest of the room. None of this was based on her own formal education, which, truth be told, was a little lacking in the art history department. But she’d sat through enough lectures, looked at enough slides. Drawn enough studies of other people’s works. “It’s not really formally linked to the camera, but I like to imagine it was. When you don’t need these painstakingly done renderings just to remember someone lived or that something happened, why have them at all? Why make art?”
Rylan’s smile was low and wry. “To express the inner workings of your poor, tortured soul?”
She laughed, a little breathless with it. “Yeah. Basically. That’s what it finally became, when it wasn’t needed anymore just for documentation.” She lifted one shoulder up before setting it back down. “It didn’t make sense to pay a painter to take three months to do what a photographer could do in a day.” She connected her gaze with his again. “And it didn’t make sense to replicate something a lens could do, when as a person you were so much more.”
There was a warmth to the way he looked at her then, and she squeezed his hand before glancing away. “So people started mixing it up. Making it personal. Impressionism brought in all these crazy colors and left in all the brushstrokes the old masters would have blended in. They let you see the artist in the art.”
And that had always been the place where she’d struggled so much. She’d never known what to let people see.
She still had her father’s voice in her ear, telling her there wasn’t anything in her worth seeing.
Beside her, Rylan nodded. “So it’s more about the interpretation instead of just about what they saw.”
He’d said something similar before, hadn’t he? That one time she’d showed him her sketchbook?
“Yeah,” she said.
They stood there for a minute before he raised their joined hands and gestured at the images surrounding them. “What made you want me to look at these pieces in particular?”
It was hard to put her finger on. “I don’t know. This is technically Postimpressionism, and it’s just . . . it’s my favorite, I guess. Things started getting all blocky, and he was playing with . . .” She stumbled, looking for the right words to describe what it felt like Cézanne had been trying to do. “With the shapes of things. Deconstructing the forms. But it was all still real, you know? That’s clearly a rooftop”—she pointed at one picture and then another—“and that’s a man.”
“A funny-looking man.”
“But a more real man for all that he’s impossible.” The idea suddenly gripped her, fervent in a way she couldn’t quite explain. “You’re seeing what he looked like and getting this idea of who he was, or who the artist thought he was.” The thick strokes of paint split the man’s face into planes, hinting at where Cubism was heading without quite getting there. They broke him up. Disassembled him, and put him back together, more whole than he could have been if he’d been rendered any other way.
“I don’t know,” Rylan mused. “I see Cézanne’s style more than I see a personality. Am I seeing who the subject was or am I seeing who the man behind the easel wanted him to be?”
“Hard to tell, isn’t it?”
He let go of her hand, but it was only to shift to the side, moving to stand behind her and wrap his arms around her waist. With his lips beside her temple, he asked, “What do you want me to see?”
And she didn’t know if he meant as a tour guide, showing him the works that had moved her in the past. As an artist in her own right, or as a—whatever she was to him, sharing his days and his bed in this finite slice of time they had.
Something shaky fluttered inside of her, but she pushed it down, folding her hand over his. “I guess I’m still working on that.”
chapter THIRTEEN
Rylan set the key to their hotel room on the table beside the door with a heavy hand. The quiet slap of plastic on wood echoed more loudly than it had any right to. Kate had entered ahead of him, and she stood with her back to him, gazing out the window as she lifted her bag over her head, sending the loose tumble of her hair falling across her shoulders. His mouth went dry.
In the past wasted year, and in all the time before, he’d chosen his conquests for a variety of reasons. Most he’d liked the look of. Drawn to full breasts or sultry lips or legs that went on for miles, he’d introduced himself. Turned on the charm and flashed his credit card around.
And then there was this woman. She was beautiful enough, but she was smart and funny and she saw the world in a whole different way than he ever had—talking about art like it could save the world. She was trying to do something with her life, and if they’d met on another continent, in another universe, he would have run screaming from the way she made him feel.
Love was a weapon. People used it against you to get you to do things you didn’t want to do, to steal from you. They took it and they threw it away.
But this wasn’t love. This was a few days of connection. This was lust, for her mind as well as her body, but lust all the same.
He wanted her so much it hurt to breathe.
“Come here.”
She turned at the sound of his voice, and the low roughness of it took even him aback.
“Come here,” he repeated.
She quirked one eyebrow up, but as she twisted her hair between her fingers, she did as he’d asked, advancing on him. She’d taken off her shoes, and God, even her feet were dainty and lovely, and the lines of her legs from under that skirt made him even harder.
As soon as she was within reach, he struck, reeling her in and pulling her tight against his body. He’d been so patient with her the past two nights, and part of him was aching to take what he really wanted. He could bend her over the mattress the way he had so many girls before, and shove her skirt up and—