Page 60 of Painted in Love

Finally, her voice washed over him. “San Holo’s name is attached to everything I do. I see the reviews. I get the criticism. Just because it’s a pseudonym doesn’t mean I don’t know what people say.”

Leaning close, he breathed in her sensual scent, remembered the taste of her lips, the sweetness of her skin. “Then why weren’t you honest with me?” Then, because the hurt was a living, breathing part of him, he said, “You led me on. Nothing we did meant anything to you.”

She reached out, and he automatically backed away, one step, two. Under the lamplight, even with the brim of her baseball cap, he saw the leap of anguish in her eyes.

He steeled himself against it. “After everything we’ve been to each other, why didn’t you tell me?”

She looked down at the sidewalk, shuffled her Doc Martens on the concrete, then met his gaze. “Hugo Lewis is my ex-boyfriend. He stole my art, and I couldn’t get it back. My parents burned me. My ex-boyfriend burned me. I have to admit to being a little gun-shy.” As she spoke, her voice got stronger. She grew taller, no longer the slumped figure he’d first seen huddled beneath the streetlight.

He felt for her. He remembered Gareth’s torment when he’d been trashed. He’d seen Dylan destroy his own work. To know that someone had stolen her art from her, her very soul from her, hell, yes, he felt for her.

But he wasn’t Hugo Lewis. “I hear all those reasons. I totally understand them.” He spread his hands as if he were giving her the world. “But I’ve been falling in love with you.”

She hugged herself, her shoulders rolling together as she curled in on herself again. But he couldn’t stop the flow of his feelings. “Every time I made love to you, I didn’t even know you. Now you’re implying I’m just like your ex-boyfriend, that I might harm you.”

Crazy that it didn’t even hurt to say he’d been falling in love with her. He’d never said that to any woman, ever. But he’d wanted to tell her, wanted her to know how special she was.

Yet her words had been like a knife, a betrayal of everything they’d done together. “You should know me better than that by now. I would never steal your art. Or hurt you in any way. Even if it’s only been little more than a week, you should know that.”

Maybe he should have grilled her for every single detail about Hugo Lewis. About her parents. Made her explain it all.

But he didn’t have another piece of his soul to give her.

His pain was written in his eyes, on his face, in the tense lines of his body.

His words gutted her in return.

I’ve been falling in love with you.

Now, when it mattered, she’d lost him. She wanted to fly into the night like a bat, to some dark place where she could wrap her arms around herself and hide. Her voice barely above a whisper, all she could say was, “I thought about telling you so many times.”

His eyes bored holes straight through her body.

More words rushed out of her. “I swear I was going to tell you today. Didn’t Dylan tell you I was looking for you? Didn’t you listen to my voicemail?”

He planted his feet firmly on the concrete. “Really?” The disdain in that word spiked through her. “Today? You were going to tell me today?”

She cringed, wanted to run, but she held her ground.

“Why were you going to tell me today?” he asked. “Because you got wind that your dick of an ex was going to out you?”

His words were an assault even worse than Hugo’s, because she deserved Clay’s anger. But she couldn’t let him think she’d planned any of this. “I had no idea Hugo would do that.” Her hands, her arms, her whole body wanted to reach out to him. “Fernsby already guessed. But I was going to tell you even before he talked to me.”

He barked a humorless laugh. “Oh, so Fernsby told you to come clean.”

She shook her head, her hair flying as the ball cap fell to the ground. “I promise I was coming here to tell you, but Fernsby found me before I found you.”

He stood as still as a tree trunk. The moment seemed to go on and on, his gaze like a laser beam scanning her. Finally, in a voice so soft she almost couldn’t hear it, he said, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Then he turned and walked away.

And took the broken pieces of her heart with him.

Clay sat alone in an all-night fifties diner filled with tourists, couples out for a late meal, and teenagers laughing and screeching at videos on their phones. He’d ordered a hamburger because he felt guilty taking up space and drinking only coffee. But he’d been unable to touch more than a bite of one French fry.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he dialed Adrian Fielding’s cell number.

Without allowing her even a hello, he spewed the words at her. “The deal is off. I don’t need Saskia—if that’s even her real name—to paint even one damned wall for me.”

---