Not even a day ago, she’d have come back with an equally quick rejoinder. This time, however, something held her back. For, it did not escape her notice that he’d proven deliberately evasive. Not for the first time since she’d met the enigmatic American, she wondered about who he was. What had shaped him into the hard, and even harder to read, man across from her now?
“My muse strikes at midnight,” she said softly. As an artist, he surely understood that. Why, it was likely even one more bond they’d struck up this ni—
“Then it’s not a real muse.”
She wrinkled her brow. So much for a kindred connection. The lummox. And here she’d thought they’d been sharing a moment. More the fool her for that thought. “It’s my muse. You can’t say that about my muse.”
“Oh, no, I can, and I did.”
He spoke with such an infuriating sureness that she slapped her pencil down. “All right, Mr. Gray. Out with it. I’m sure you, with all your infinite artist wisdom, are just dying to lecture me on how my muse operates.”
“A muse doesn’t schedule regular visits,” he said flatly, his words spoken with the same confidence of a fact-driven statement. “She comes to you when you are inspired.”
“Exactly. And I am personally inspired at midnight.”
He chuckled. “When nothing is happening to you.”
It was the robust laugh, droll and all-knowing, that set her teeth on edge. “When I’ve had time to think about the day.”
The floorboards groaned, and a moment later, he stood, crossing around the bed until he’d joined Claire on her side of the room, and he was still—she swallowed, or she tried to—bare-chested. Claire hurriedly closed her book and seated herself, her knees drawn to her chest.
She needn’t have worried about him looking through her drawings. As he’d sworn that long-ago day, he’d no intention of examining her works. Instead, he lowered himself onto the floor, his back to the fire and his enormous legs stretched out.
“You create in the moment. You don’t mull the day. You don’t let it simmer. When something grips you, you just give yourself over to it, Claire.”
With her sketch pad in hand, she scooched over until she sat facing him. “Let me ask you this, Caleb. If you know so very much about how muses should work and how I should interact with my muse, then mayhap you should be in the business of teaching after—”
“No,” he cut her off before she could even finish.
Claire smiled wryly. “Trust me. I’m not requesting your services.” Not now. Not ever, ever, or ever again. “I’m merely stating that you have strong opinions that you give out freely.”
He grinned, his pearl-white teeth gleaming in the dark. “That’s the American in me.”
“Yes, I suspected as much,” she muttered. Opening her book, she resumed her sketch.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
And yet, she felt him studying her movements and angling his head toward her page.
Claire whipped her head up.
Caleb immediately made a show of studying the room around them, the splash of color on his rugged cheeks indicating his embarrassment at having been caught staring.
Hmph.
She was of half a mind to tease him over it. This time, however, even while she moved her hand over the page, bringing the imagery to life, she was distracted by the feel of him studying her.
“What is so terrible about giving art lessons?” she asked, returning her attention to her sketch.
He grunted. “It’s not my place to tell people how to create.”
Claire drew her eyebrows together. “This from a man who’s never met an opinion he wasn’t comfortable sharing?”
“I created a handful of pieces the world thought was great. That was it,” he said, bitterness coating his deep baritone. “Everything else has eluded me since.”
Claire stilled her fingers, her grip slackening on her sketch pad.
For, with his stunning and bold invitation into his world, she understood Caleb Gray in a way she never had before. She’d believed his annoyance about the art instructions she’d pleaded for and the paintings she’d praised had been a product of his dislike of her.
Only to discover now that so much of it hadn’t a thing to do with her and everything to do with the artistic frustration of a man who’d no idea how very talented he, in fact, was.
Chapter 8
What in hell had Caleb said?
What in hell had he shared?
As his only friend in the world, Wade Harrison knew of the frustration that held Caleb in its grip these past years.
It wasn’t something they spoke about. Ever.
Because it scared the everlasting hell out of Caleb.
If he lost his ability to create, then what was there?
His work had represented the one constant when his own fiancée had left him, and to find that he’d lost that, too?
The loss had left him empty. Numb. Because art was his refuge. In those first days when he’d been sprung from the bowels of that British prison ship and found his way home, the horrors of what had been done to him, of what he’d seen and been forced to do, had ravaged his mind. So much that even the reality of his former fiancée’s marriage to his brother had barely been able to pierce the shell of horror that encased the remnants of his soul.
He’d sat, curled into a ball, in the corner of his bedchambers and painted. With the canvas sprawled on the floor, he’d added brushstrokes of colors that were vague, but had somehow in their composition and shading managed to capture the well of emotion inside, all the pain and bitterness and sorrow, with a hint of the hope that had been there. That work had saved him and salvaged his soul, and it had come to be the piece that the world associated with him.
Beyond the handful of canvases he’d captured in those first days, there’d been a void in his work.
Perhaps that was why he’d come to resent Claire Poplar so much, because with her unabashed zeal and love of art, she merely reminded him of himself from another time.
That was why he’d agreed to Wade’s harebrained scheme, to free himself of the stress and tumult that came from unsteady payments. Then, he’d be able to travel and try to find himself and whatever magic he’d created in those earliest days.
The little shuffle of her pencil striking that page only heightened that realization. It hammered home the reminder about how much she loved what he now saw as a beautiful chore, a task that simultaneously called to him and tortured him with his inability to harness it as he once had.
Restless and in a desperate bid to harness some of the energy humming through him, Caleb picked up the metal poker and jabbed at the logs, stoking the fire.
Her head was angled down as she fully attended that page, and Caleb used the moment to study her. The flames danced off her face. Those minky strands hung down in disarray about her shoulders. The light penetrated the fabric of her night shift, offering up the shadowy hint of her pale brown areolas and the pebbled peaks that crowned that perfect flesh.
And just like that, he was forced to revisit the second bit of madness he’d indulged in this night where this woman was concerned. “You gonna pretend like you didn’t hear me say that?”
Claire paused briefly and looked up. “I’m going to let you decide if it’s something you actually want to talk about, or whether it was something you let slip out that you wish you hadn’t.”